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And on Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought that moment into clearer focus. The agency came out with its first set of guidance about what fully vaccinated people can now do.

My parents had a significant emotional burden lifted after they were vaccinated, because they are now approximately 95% protected against getting severely ill from Covid-19. But like the rest of the country, they are restless and want to do something with their newly vaccinated status. That is why they called me right after they saw the news report about new recommendations from the CDC to ask me what it all meant. I laid out the good news for them, and the caveats as well.

In a major step, the CDC said people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 can safely visit with other fully vaccinated people in private settings without masks, without social distancing and without having to be outdoors.

Additionally, however, the CDC guidance now allows for fully vaccinated people to visit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks or physical distancing, if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease. That last part is important.

This was starting to sound like it was going to work, and that my parents should be able to safely visit, even though my kids or wife haven't been vaccinated. They meet the age requirements and would be considered low risk, both in terms of health and their very limited exposures.

As I kept digging into the guidelines and speaking with members of the Biden administration's Covid-19 task force, it became increasingly clear that a visit was looking possible, but with a few strings attached.

And, perhaps most notably, fully vaccinated people are also still being discouraged from traveling, something that throws a monkey wrench into my fantasy of an imminent family reunion.

"I think the guidelines are in a good middle ground," she said. "We're starting to go back to normal now, but it's not going to be flipping a switch... We will make that journey towards normalcy, or at least a new normal, as more people get vaccinated."

At 10% vaccinations we have this guidance. At 20-30%, we will have new guidance," he said, noting that there's going to be a distinct shift in the messaging of what people can and cannot do -- moving away from more binary messaging to one that describes activities as a range of low, medium and high risk.

Even as Walensky delivered the hopeful new guidance, she also noted the country still stands at a seven-day average of about 59,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day -- a rate that has leveled off somewhat, instead of continuing to steadily decline. And there are close to 2,000 deaths per day. So, she and other experts warn, any easing of restrictions is going to have to be gradual.

So where does that leave my family reunion plan? Unless my parents make the long drive to see us, we are going to hold off on a visit for now. With more than 2 million people getting vaccinated a day, however, another 20% of the country could be vaccinated by the end of the month. And, that will probably lead to a further relaxing of CDC guidelines and maybe allow my parents a plane ride instead, which means a possible visit to celebrate their wedding anniversary this spring!

The reported incidents range from verbal harassments to physical altercations.

As a man in his late 20s, Kim is not the typical victim of anti-Asian attacks. Chung Joe said that most attacks target the more vulnerable members of the Asian American community.

"Women are targeted more than twice as often as men," she said, and "we are seeing a spate of hate and violence targeted at our seniors."

Nearly 44% of all incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate have come from California. Asian Americans account for roughly 15% of California's estimated 40 million people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"The Federal Government must recognize that it has played a role in furthering these xenophobic sentiments through the actions of political leaders, including references to the COVID-19 pandemic by the geographic location of its origin," Biden said. "Such statements have stoked unfounded fears and perpetuated stigma about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and have contributed to increasing rates of bullying, harassment, and hate crimes against AAPI persons."

Biden needs a way to begin bringing the country together. The past two administrations -- in different ways and for different reasons -- have left a door open for him to do so.

However, I have teenagers, one of whom has been slowly radicalized by sociopaths on YouTube (Ben Shapiro is a favorite.). At some point, my teen decided that COVID was overblown, masks were stupid, and it would all be over on election day.

We made it safely through Election Day, but COVID was still a thing. We made it safely through January 6th, but COVID was still a thing. The day after the inauguration, my teen’s lack of belief brought COVID into our house, and two weeks later, my mother died from it… after nearly a year of keeping her safe, two days before her vaccine appointment, and a week shy of her 89th birthday.

No one deliberately set out to kill their beloved grandmother or grandfather, but nonetheless they’re dead, and many families (thousands of families?) will be dealing with the guilt, shame, and intrafamily blame for years to come.

Here’s hoping for wisdom, perspective, and vaccines(!) in abundance, to help heal these wounds.

Consider that in Israel, more than 60 percent of the adult population had received the Pfizer vaccine by last month, and covid had been virtually eradicated. There was a 98 percent reduction of covid in all age groups, yet no child under age 16 had been vaccinated.

Much discussion has focused on the percentage of individuals needed to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity, with most estimates in the range of 60 to 70 percent. Instead, the focus should be on those who are the most likely to transmit the virus; in the United States, with much of the elderly population vaccinated, that means young adults.

The universal vaccination of healthy children 2 to 11 years old simply shouldn’t be a priority and may ultimately prove unnecessary.

The pandemic exposed society’s ageism and ableism, with many people in the beginning months arguing that only the sick and the elderly were at risk.

After a year of remote working, it’s clear that my privileged, overwhelmingly liberal corner of the world is able to accommodate the vulnerable and organize inclusive events.

Some have directly blamed the anti-China rhetoric of former President Donald Trump, who often made mention of the pandemic as the "China virus" or the "kung flu".

The coronavirus hit the state hard and early, grinding its bustling cities and businesses to a halt. The virus has already claimed over 50,000 Californian lives.From March to May 2020 alone, over 800 Covid-related hate incidents were reported from 34 counties in the state, according to a report released by the Asian Pacific Policy Planning Council.

Those numbers have since intensified in Orange County, where anti-Asian hate incidents are up by an estimated 1200%, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.In neighbouring Los Angeles County, hate crimes against Asian Americans are up 115%, CBS News reported.

The bill designates an official at the US Justice Department to expedite reviews of violence and hate crimes related to Covid-19. It also provides grants for state and local governments to improve their own reporting systems.

"We are in a moment of reckoning right now," Ms Nguyen adds. "We have been systematically erased on every single level and people can start to combat that by educating themselves about us.

A large test of the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine's effectiveness, conducted in tens of thousands of volunteers in the United States and Mexico, is about to wrap up. Dr. Gregory Glenn, president of research and development for Novavax, told an audience at a recent webinar hosted by the International Society for Vaccines that "we anticipate filing for authorization in the U.K., U.S. and Europe in the third quarter."

To make the virus protein, Novavax uses giant vats of cells grown in the lab. But there's another way to make the protein: Get plants in a greenhouse to do it.

"Especially in elderly individuals in that study, it was not as immunogenic as it should be," says Dr. Paul Goepfert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who was one of the researchers involved in those early studies. He says the issue turned out to be an incorrect calculation of the dose of vaccine being delivered."So instead of giving 10 micrograms of the dose, they were actually giving one microgram," Goepfert says.

Early studies suggest Medicago's candidate vaccine does just that, and the company is confident enough in those findings that it's already begun a large study in people that could involve as many as 30,000 volunteers in 11 countries.

Another latecomer that's coming is the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi. Its protein subunit vaccine against the coronavirus is also grown in cells in the lab.

Late last year the company was getting ready to mount a large study of the vaccine's effectiveness when the early results in a smaller group of people showed it did not seem to be inducing the immune response that would be protective.

The plants used are related to the tobacco plant, and have been modified to contain the genetic instructions to make the viral protein.The plants do something very valuable — they make a lipid shell that surrounds a bunch of the viral proteins, with the proteins sticking out.

Goepfert says it'll be a good thing if all these vaccines make it to consumers. But that alone isn't going to solve the problem of getting people vaccinated.Why? "Because the vaccines that we have now are just beyond our wildest dreams kind of effective," he says. "And I'm living in a state right now where it just frustrates me how slow our vaccine uptake is."

To some, it might sound harmless, even amusing. But it made me deeply uneasy. Although the #MeToo movement has helped to raise awareness of the lack of diversity in publishing, biography is a genre in which the voices of women and people of color are still starkly underrepresented. According to a study done by Slate in 2015, 71.7 percent of the biographies the magazine surveyed that year were written about a male subject, and 87 percent of those were by male authors. The study did not consider race, but in the last 20 years, only two books with a person of color as both author and subject have won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

The question of access — to materials, to family members and sometimes to the subject — has major repercussions for the work of scholars. Authorized biographers tend to be fiercely protective of their privileged status, which is often the basis for a book contract. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene’s authorized biographer, argued that a comma in his agreement with Greene allowed him sole access to Greene’s papers for more than a decade while he labored over his three-volume biography, delaying other researchers’ work in the process.

As critics pointed out even before the allegations surfaced, the biography’s accounts of some of Mr. Roth’s relationships contain biases and sexist characterizations that appear to parrot Mr. Roth’s opinions, including an uncomplimentary description of one woman’s genitalia. (Nearly five years ago, Mr. Bailey wrote a review of my own biography of Shirley Jackson that was perceived by many, including myself, as sexist.)

Critics like to speak of biographies as “definitive,” but in reality there’s no such thing. Biographers aren’t stenographers; we’re more akin to novelists, constructing a narrative of a person’s life and making editorial choices at every turn. An anecdote whose importance I might overlook could be seized on by someone else as a revealing detail.

Publishers should explicitly encourage a diversity of perspectives on a person worthy of biography, and biographers who care about improving representation would do well to rethink their own roles in the system. They might begin by pledging to keep the papers of subjects where they belong: in public archives, open to any scholar prepared to devote the time and energy to working with them.

The result would bring an infusion of new perspectives on literary giants, giving renewed relevance to an often conservative industry. It would also help to generate a more inclusive roster of authors considered worthy of chronicling, remaking and expanding the American literary canon.

Scientists have said that reinfections are likely to be asymptomatic or mild because the immune system will suppress the virus before it can do much damage.

“You can certainly not rely on a past infection as protecting you from being ill again, and possibly quite ill if you are in the elderly segment,” said Steen Ethelberg, an epidemiologist at Statens Serum Institut, Denmark’s public health agency.

Rigorous estimates of second infections have generally been rare because many people worldwide did not initially have access to testing, and laboratories require genetic sequences from both rounds of testing to confirm a reinfection.

The researchers looked at the results from 11,068 people who tested positive for the coronavirus during the first wave in Denmark between March and May 2020. During the second wave, from September to December, 72 of those people, or 0.65 percent, again tested positive, compared with 3.27 percent of people who became infected for the first time.

She and other experts noted that while 80 percent might not seem superb, protection from symptomatic illness was likely to be higher.

The findings indicate that people who have recovered from Covid-19 should get at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine to boost the level of protection, Dr. Krammer added.

“I wish it had actually been broken down into specific decades over 65,” Dr. Pepper said. “It would be nice to know whether the majority of people who were getting reinfected were over 80.”

“This really does emphasize the need to cover older people with the vaccine, even if they have had Covid first.”

any early childhood programs pay for themselves when aimed at the most disadvantaged, notes the Nobel-winning economist James Heckman, because they reduce spending on criminal justice, special education, health care and other services. One study by Heckman found that programs for vulnerable young children generated a 13 percent annual rate of return.

Professor Brian Levin, with the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, says preliminary data show hate crimes targeting people of Asian descent surged nearly 150% last year across 16 major cities, from 49 in 2019 to 122 in 2020.

Many who chose to attend the training said they had been on the receiving end of racism

"And my other hope is that Asian Americans around the country realize that, look, we can't live our lives in fear. We have to at least do something about it and stand up to it," Kim said.

And a non-profit called Stop AAPI Hate (AAPI stands for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) collected 3,795 reports of what it describes as hate incidents, from verbal harassment to physical assault, between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021.

Teddy Tong, a 64-year-old ophthalmologist, had never fired a gun before attending the training and has no plans to buy one. But he said he wanted to learn how to handle firearms "in case that need ever arises." "It seems like a very practical and useful lesson at this point," he said.

Nationwide, the increase in violence has fueled a conversation about the causes of anti-Asian racism, and how to address it. Three weeks ago, the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing on the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans.

Edward Chang, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside, said the hearing is a good start, because over the years Asian Americans "were either being ignored or not invited" to discussions about race. "Asian American communities have been invisible," Chang said.

One woman - a senior physician at one of the area's top hospitals - was rattled by the experience. She declined to be identified because she wasn't sure how her colleagues would react to her considering using guns.

"I think it's ridiculous... I can't believe that I'm living in America now at this day and age where I have to think about how I can fend for myself and my family. And it's taken me to acquiring firearms to do that," Chung said.

A few weeks ago, he took his 16-year-old daughter to a gun range to teach her how to shoot. "I feel like I'm equipping her with something that empowers her, and hopefully she would never have to use it," he said.

Another study, out of the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, showed the vaccine to be 98 percent effective among 102 medical workers who had received both shots and suggested that recipients of the double dose are unlikely to become carriers of the virus. “There is definitely reason for optimism,

But Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science found that a single dose of Pfizer’s vaccine was significantly less effective than had been indicated by the company’s clinical study.

epidemiologists said Israel might be able to achieve 80 percent immunity among its highest-risk groups by February and 95 percent of that population by March.

Netanyahu said Israel could be a “world laboratory for herd immunity.”

“When anti-vaccine citizens of other countries will look at us and say, all right, Israel has vaccinated and then started to have parties, to go back to life, they’ll want in, too. This will have a positive impact for all of humanity.”

Perhaps the most frightening of this year’s many apocalyptic books is The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. Its chapter titles read: Heat Death. Hunger. Drowning. Dying Oceans. Unbreathable Air. Wildfire. Plagues. Economic Collapse. Climate Conflict. It’s intended to be a forecast of the planet’s near future that will shock readers out of their complacency. But during the 2010s almost all the disasters that the book names have already started to happen.

As one of the New Optimists’ favourite sources, the website Our World in Data, had to admit this year: “In some aspects the data suggests the world is getting worse.”

the awareness that much of modern life – air travel, car travel, eating meat, shopping, using plastics – has malign consequences has grown from a minority preoccupation in the 1970s into an everyday topic.

Sometimes in the 2010s, it has felt as if the whole world we have made, from the tiniest exhaust particle to the most sprawling conurbation, is toxic.

Nowadays, the fear is almost universal. The creation of social media networks over the last decade and a half, starting with Twitter in 2006, and the conversion of traditional media into non-stop news services, have made awful events seem relentless and impossible to ignore. We have become perpetually anxious.

In a working world that requires quick switches between inactivity and activity, that values powers of endurance, caffeine is a vital drug. In many British town and city centres during the 2010s, otherwise emptied out by online commerce, cafes proliferated, replacing shops and pubs as the busiest indoor spaces.

When people say “It is what it is”, they are rarely challenged. Instead, they are usually heard in respectful silence. In a difficult world, fatalism and stoicism are useful qualities.

Another coping mechanism is escape. Possibly the most revealing leisure activity of the 2010s is shutting yourself away with a TV series: typically a drama set in another country or another era, with an addictive, slowly resolved plot, many characters, elaborate settings, and enough episodes to allow for watching in binges. In an age of squeezed incomes, TV dramas are worlds you can explore on the cheap.

During the decade, it became cooler than usual in Britain to eat comforting things: bread, cakes, pies, even grilled cheese sandwiches. The Great British Bake Off, first broadcast in 2010, made cooking with lots of carbs and sugar respectable again

Clothes have become more cocooning: enormous puffer jackets, scarves the size of small blankets, fleeces and woolly hats. In the 2000s, clothes and silhouettes were leaner and more formal – tight suits, skinny trousers – as if people expected to seize exciting new opportunities, or at least to work in offices. In the 2010s, social mobility has stalled, and many of the jobs being created – and often taken by middle-class graduates – involve zero-hours contracts and outdoor work

“It is what it is.” Usually, it means: “I’m learning to live with something negative” – a personal setback, a wider injustice, difficult circumstances. It’s a mantra for an age of diminishing expectations, when many people no longer assume – unlike their postwar predecessors – that they will become richer than their parents, and live in an ever more sophisticated or just society, on an ever more hospitable planet

Another way to cope with the 2010s has been to work obsessively on yourself. From the 1950s to the 1990s, being young in the west was often associated with lounging around, or rebelling, or living for the moment. But in the 2010s being young often means relentlessly working and studying, polishing your public persona, and keeping fit

Yoga, marathons, triathlons – it’s not hard to see their renewed popularity over the last decade as an effort by people, conscious or otherwise, to hone themselves for a tougher world.

this self-optimisation can be measured, and compared with the efforts of others, as never before. This process has created a new hierarchy, particularly within the American middle class, but increasingly in its European counterpart, too, which privileges the leanest people, the most punishing exercise classes, the most body-conscious brands of workout clothes.

finally, the harsher world of the 2010s has also prompted many people to undergo a more private, less visible toughenin

They have got used to walking past the decade’s casualties in the street, and not giving them much thought. In the 2010s, as in Victorian times, if you want an untroubled mind, it doesn’t pay to look at the world around you too hard.

the difficulties since 2010 of so many previously dominant value systems – capitalism, centrism, traditional conservatism, white male supremacy – have opened up space for new political movements, at a rate not seen since the 1960s.

the 2010s have reacquainted voters with the idea that politics can be about big promises and fundamental choices.

the 2010s have also brought a renewed realisation that culture is political – after decades when most creative people and cultural critics avoided that conclusion. Literary and art prizes now regularly go to people whose work is overtly political, such as Margaret Atwood

Although prizes are inherently elitist, they are now also increasingly expected to promote greater equality in society as a whole. It is a contradiction characteristic of the decade’s politics, where a greater awareness of the injustices suffered by many social groups, and sometimes a greater willingness to redress them, co-exists with an intensifying individualism – with a growing preference for letting people self-identify and respecting each person’s particular life experience

In 2012, Mark Fisher said that Britain was suffering from “depression economics and boomtime politics”: the disengagement prompted by the relatively comfortable 1990s and 2000s was lingering on, despite the reopening of so many economic issues by the financial crisis. Seven years later, apathy remains a habit for many Britons

digital technology, far from enabling more creativity, had actually made it both harder and less essential for artists. Instead of coming up with new ideas, they could now roam the internet’s infinite archives, and build careers out of clever hybrids and pastiches of previous forms.

Pop culture from the 1990s, in particular, such as the cosy TV series Friends, has become hugely popular again. In our often backward-looking society, “Time itself seem[s] to become sluggish,” wrote Reynolds, “like a river that starts to meander”

Under Japanese rule, many Koreans were brutalized, murdered and enslaved. It's still living memory for elderly Koreans and remains a highly emotive subject in both North and South Korea.

But Harris isn't Japanese, he's a US citizen. And calling him out for his Japanese ancestry would almost assuredly be considered racist in the United States.

South Korea is a homogenous society without racial diversity like the United States. The CIA World Factbook doesn't even list other ethnic groups living in South Korea on the country's page, instead just referring to the country as "homogenous." Mixed-race families are rare and xenophobia remains surprisingly common.

"I didn't grow a mustache because of my Japanese heritage, because of the independence movement of Korea or even because of my dad. I grew it because I could and I thought I would and I did," he said.

Second, China’s future growth prospects will dim with every year of below-replacement birthrates, because low fertility creates a self-reinforcing cycle — in which a less youthful society loses dynamism and growth, which reduces economic support for would-be parents, which reduces birthrates, which reduces growth …

Yes, in an age of stagnation, CO2 levels won’t grow as fast, delaying some of climate change’s effects — but at the same time a stagnant society will struggle to innovate enough to escape the climate crisis permanently.

in the worst-case, to cite a recent paper by the Stanford economist Charles Jones, it risks “an Empty Planet result: knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes.”

the human race is increasingly facing a “global fertility crisis,” not just a European or American or Japanese baby bust. It’s a crisis that threatens ever-slower growth in the best case

the Chinese case is also distinctive, because cruel policy choices made its demographic problems worse.

by targeting minority and religious populations, Beijing is attacking the country’s more fecund groups, in what amounts to a statement that if Han birthrates have fallen, minority birthrates must be cut to match.

there is Western guilt as well, because the one-child policy was linked to a project hatched by Western technocrats, funded by Western institutions, and egged on by Western intellectuals — a classist, sexist, racist, anti-religious program that sought to defuse a “population bomb” that, we know now, would have defused itself

The Western effort died away as the population bomb fizzled, and while its Malthusianism endures around the edges of environmentalism and in European anxieties about African migration, mostly the population control crusade is recalled as a mistaken extrapolation, a well-meaning mistake.

As we contemplate the demographic challenge of the future, we should reserve particular opprobrium for those who chose, in the arrogance of their supposed humanitarianism, to use coercive and foul means to make the great problem of the 21st century worse.

The existence of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer helps to establish the basis for a domestic network of suppliers.

countries could take a leaf from India’s book when it comes to manufacturing crucial items that might encounter massive demand surges, and where national priorities come to the fore

Doing so is unrealistic for every small and middle-size country, but production could be organized at the level of regional blocs such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The pandemic hit Latin America harder than many other parts of the world, but its limited vaccine production means most nations there have a long wait ahead of them.

the Serum Institute was founded as and remains a private company, though it cooperates closely with the government. Establishing similar capacity could be achieved by cooperation on health-care regulation to create large regional markets, and the right financial incentives.

Now, to the East, this behaviour is both jaw-dropping and bewildering. It goes beyond mere irresponsibility, and is considered something more like stupidity, ignorance, malice, deceit, or all four

That is what civilization is, and where it begins: the presence of the very first kind of enlightened mind, which can nourish, protect, and elevate another

What does Mead’s Femur have do with the West’s stunning failure that let Covid spiral out of control? As it turns out, everything.

These days, the tourists are gone, mostly. But — and here’s the point — the bars, restaurants, and clubs are still full. I pass by them on my daily walk to the park and wonder: what are these people doing? How are they sitting there so close to one another, with no social distancing in place, laughing, joking in the middle of a literal pandemic that’s exploding all around them? What the?

The people I pass by in the bars are made of two social groups, largely. Young people, and the working class. That’s the same group, in a sense, since most young people are working class, until they amass enough wealth to rise beyond it

They have made a choice. Their beer and burger or cocktail and steak matters more than stopping the spread of a deadly disease. What the?

This group is putting the most vulnerable in society at profound risk. Those who are already ill, and immunocompromised. Those even lower down the socioeconomic ladder than them — minorities, the underclass, and so forth, among whom death rates are astronomical. The elderly, the frail, the aged.

Certain groups in Western society have made the decision that the vulnerable’s lives matter less than their right to party, to have a beer and a burger, a cocktail and a steak, a laugh at the pub with friends. What the?

The groups who are now apparently completely indifferent to spreading Covid seem to have taken their cues from leaders. Young people and the working class seem to have no conscience or compunction left whatsoever about spreading Covid

To act in such a way as to put your elders, or the ill, especially, at risk, is something that is a grave violation of social norms. Easterners can’t understand why Westerners are behaving like…spoiled children. Are they right?

There is a kind of toxic indifference that seems to have spread through Western societies. Life itself is treated with a kind of shrugging fatalism — especially those of the vulnerable. It is literally valued less than a night out at the pub by much of society.

The attitude of toxic indifference is what the West seems to share in common now, and that is why it has been brought to its knees by Covid.

the West” is not monolithic. Certainly, toxic indifference is not at the same level across all of it

let me discuss the most extreme examples — America and Britain — to highlight where toxic indifference comes from: leadership.

In Britain and America, Covid cases have now exploded well past their first peak. America is approaching 100,000 cases per day — the point at which social breakdown will begin. Britain is hitting more than that, on a per capita basis. And yet neither of these societies has a national lockdown.

uccessful societies — New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and many more — deliberately crunched the curve. Their strategy was to eradicate Covid, through what’s now a global template of best practices — lock down, test, trace, quarantine, isolate, and so forth.

The approach of Western leaders, in other words, was reactive, hesitant, and cautious, not decisive, swift, and proactive:

Margaret Mead once said that the beginning of human civilisation was found in a healed femur. That that single, simple discovery meant that someone took the time to invest in healing someone else’s broken leg — without which they surely would have died

Western leaders, in other words, modelled toxic indifference for their societies. They gave people a license to be indifferent, by acting largely indifferent themselves.

Young people justify it by saying that “they need to have social lives” — as if they weren’t spending most of their social lives online before Covid, and the working class by saying they need to work. Both of those arguments are partially true. But it’s truer to say that these are groups which have become dangerously indifferent to preserving the value of the lives of the vulnerable.

The young and the working class are punching down, as American leftists would put it.

More formally, more accurately, Covid has made Western societies predatory ones. The young and working class are exploiting and abusing those more powerless than them

Neither group seems to consider the possibility much that society needs to come together to defeat the pandemic, once and for all, and the only way that can be done is to put the vulnerable first.

America treating Covid indifferently is no surprise, after all — it’s a nation where kids are gunned down in schools, diabetics are simply left to die, people beg strangers online for money to pay for crippling healthcare costs

But it’s more surprising to see Europe turning predatory due to Covid, or having Covid expose its vulnerability to becoming predatory

I don’t mean to single the young and working class out. That is missing my point. What I am saying is that toxic indifference is trickling down in the West. From elites, like leaders, to the bourgeois — that’s been the case for the last few decades

Indifference is trickling down from the elite and the bourgeois, to the working class and the young.

we know where a society of indifference ends. It ends in America. In stupidity, ignorance, violence, hate, racism, brutality, and the poverty and despair which underlies it all.

The indifferent cannot act collectively, therefore they cannot invest, transform, change, unite, come together, and therefore they cannot live in a modern, functioning society, with an expansive, sophisticated, supportive, generous social contract

So what about climate change? Mass extinction? Ecological collapse? The massive waves of depression and ruin those will unleash — in the next decade? How can societies that can’t unite, act wisely, behave responsibly to fight Covid come together to do much about even larger catastrophes?

Covid reveals the decivilizing of the West. As I mentioned, Margaret Mead said the fundamental test of civilization is the healed femur: that someone took the time and effort to heal someone else. It is the absence of indifference and the presence of care, in other words

What made the West special, once upon a time, was not its brutality, but its idea of civilization, as the elevation and nourishment of every life, with dignity, purpose, belonging, truth, justice, and, more crucially, the idea that freedom was a society that was able to act in a civilised way.

freedom became free-dumb: the idea that my right to be abusive, exploitative, ignorant, violent, selfish — to carry a gun to Starbucks or deny you healthcare and retirement — came to prevail

If the pattern of the West’s decaying attitudes, the spread of the foolish American idea of free-dumb as “freedom,” is what Covid has revealed — I punch down, on the person below me, I exploit and abuse the person even lower than me in the socioeconomic hierarchy, because that is what I must do to survive, or at least what I have been taught to do to feel good and worthy — then the simple fact is that the West has little future

Their failure teaches us something. Civilization matters. When a society gives up on the idea of being civilized, it collapses harder and faster than its most learned wise men often imagine. That is because no society can withstand a tidal wave of stupidity and violence. Is that where the West is headed?

In a simpler way, maybe the simplest, what I am talking about is a lack of simple human goodness. That is what Mead’s Femur points to — the presence of goodness — and it is what is missing in America and Britain. They are now societies with a massive, gaping, jaw-dropping lack of human goodness, and Covid is just the latest example. But that deficit spells real trouble — it isn’t some kind of abstract moral concern.

Covid is a cold wind, and it shows that the flame is flickering. If anything, it shows us the future of civilization — in Mead’s sense, as the absence of violence, and the presence of decency, dignity, care, nourishment, equality, of human goodness realized — may lie in the East.

In its final forecast in 2016, FiveThirtyEight gave Hillary Clinton a 71.4 percent chance of victory. (The digit after the decimal providing an aura of faux precision, as if we could distinguish 71.4 percent from 71.5 percent.) All that figure really said was that Mrs. Clinton had a roughly one-in-three chance of losing, something that did not get across to most people who saw a big number.

What do the unprecedented early voting numbers mean when polls don’t necessarily stop polling those who already voted? How do the early forecasts that run for many months before the election, and so are even more uncertain, affect those who vote early? Will the elderly, at great risk from the pandemic, avoid voting? How will voter suppression play out? Will Republicans end up flocking to the polls on Election Day? These are big unknowns that add great uncertainty to models, especially given the winner-takes-all setup in the Electoral College, where winning a state by as little as one-fourth of 1 percent can deliver all its electoral votes.

When probability models first came on the scene, I was hopeful that they would lessen the horse-race journalism that sometimes exaggerated the uncertainty (because what’s the thrill otherwise?) and the search for narrative turning points (Better than expected debate performance! It’s an underdog comeback!). I had hoped that we would instead get more substantive, policy-oriented coverage. Instead, modeling has been incorporated into the horse-race coverage.

these forecasts aren’t that useful, and may even be harmful if people take them too seriously.