Covid Public Health Emergencies to End May 11. Does it Matter?

President Joe Biden announced yesterday (30 Jan 2023) that he intends to end the Covid-19 national and public health emergencies on May 11. Biden's move comes only a few weeks after he last extended the emergency on Jan. 11. What's changed in 19 days? His move appears to have been prompted by bills introduced in the Republican-controlled Congress to force an end to the emergency. Though such bills were unlikely to become law— the Democrat-majority Senate likely wouldn't have approved them, and the president could veto them if they did— Biden's move is seen as giving cover to Democrats in Congress who wish to avoid being forced to make a "show" vote.

What actually changes as a result of ending the emergencies in May? Very little, it turns out. In terms of public health policy, masks and other public health restrictions have been off the table for well over a year at this point. In terms of posture, Biden already announced the pandemic is basically over a year ago, as well. In terms of public perception, most of the public already considered it over— largely ignoring public health recommendations such as wearing masks and minimizing time among indoors crowds— even before that.

What the general public will notice as a change after May 11 is that certain things won't be free anymore. The program providing free at-home Covid tests will end. Tests in clinics will no longer be free. Some Covid treatments, e.g. monoclonal antibodies, will no longer be free. At least Covid vaccines will still be free. Those are funded by a different federal law.

The end of these emergencies was announced while the death toll due to Covid is still 500/day. 500 seems like not such a large number, right? Certainly it's way lower than the 3,000 deaths per day we saw during the worse surges. But do the math.... 500/day is over 180,000/year. That's around 5x as many deaths as from influenza. 180k/year still puts Covid as the #4 overall cause of death among adults in the US. And those figures are without another huge spike like the Omicron surge we saw a year ago.

January Blogging

January has felt like a busy month on my blog. I've published 63 entries, averaging just over 2 a day. While that's not even in my top 5 busiest months it is close. What kept me busy this month? Here are my thoughts, organized as Five Things:

1. Did I know it was going to be a bloggy month at the start of January? Kind of. I knew I had a backlog of things I wanted to write about, in addition to whatever new stuff came along. I even wrote a blog about my blog backlog. It was a manifesto to myself about what I wanted to accomplish for the month. I updated it with annotations as the month progressed. Today on Jan. 31 I'm satisfied I've finished most of it.


2. There was no one main thing my blogs were about. Some months when my post rate is high, there's one topic driving 1/3 or more of my blogs. This month it was, "A bit of this, a bit of that....'


3. The thing I blogged about most this month was the HBO series Band of Brothers. It's from all the way back in 2001. I watched it in December 2022. While I ended up bingeing the 10 episodes in 3-4 days during the holiday break it took me the full month of January to get my thoughts into blogs. I ended up writing 15 blogs about it, not counting this mention here. That's quite a lot, especially considering before I started I thought I might wrap it up in just 2 or 3 blogs!


4. The second biggest topic in my blog this month (as measured by tag usage) was politics. I go back and forth on blogging about politics. There were lots of happenings I had opinions about, so that drove some of my political blogging. At the same time, writing about politics is an exercise in frustration because one of the two major US political parties has enshired rampant lying as one of its core values. That makes me want to stop after a while. I hate lies— and the lying liars who tell them.


5. Do I expect February to be as bloggy? At the moment, no. That backlog manifesto I wrote early in the month declared more than half the posts I'd ultimately write this month. I have a vastly shorter backlog going into February.

So, what's on tap for February? Like I said, not much. I've largely cleared out my backlog. I'll take it as it comes. And I may not exceed 1.5 posts per day, let alone surpass 2/day again as I've done in January.