Author: Nick Bergus

Good Riddance 2021

A review of a past future year in review:

To start with the obvious: this year was better than last year, mostly because coming out of deadly, mismanaged pandemic is better that going into one.

Spoiler alert: we didn’t come out.

I don’t want this review of the past year to get bogged down with schadenfreude, such as Trump’s ongoing criminal proceedings but it helped. The arc of justice blah blah blah. 

Nor do I wat to relive the horrific Iowa legislative session with its rightward push to move public dollars to private schools and reinstating the death penalty by folks who identify as pro-life.

There wasn’t nearly as much movement on any of these items as I expected, for good and for ill. The state government was pretty bad, though.

The first half of the year was very much 2020 2.0: excessive death caused by denial, entitlement and exceptionalism.

We saw more deaths from COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020, and we’ve let 1 in 100 of our seniors die from the disease.

But by summer that changed. Fewer dying people (good!), but with understandable pandemic fatigue, FOMO was on the rise. 

If 2020 was the year of the introverts, 2021 was the year of fighting off the extroverts.

And so, after my much-anticipated second vaccine dose, I was lured out by friends to enjoy my first meal at a restaurant in more than a year. 

This was kinda true. I ate in a restaurant in early July and felt pretty much OK! But: still lots of death.

Well, enjoyed is too strong of a word. 

I actually did enjoy it. I miss restaurants, but I like not being sick a lot, too.

But everyone else everywhere wanted to do everything in person. Meetings that had rightfully become emails or phone calls were, again, meetings. Everyone wanted to host a cocktail hour, lunch-and-learn or some sort of celebration. If it wasn’t celebrating this year’s birthday (Wait, we’re still eating cake after someone has blown all over it? Have we learned nothing?), it was re-celebrating last year’s missed anniversaries.

Everyone did want to switch to in-person events, though some were still hybrid through the fall. Feels like we’re in a real fuck-it mode right now as the year ends.

It’s not to say that I wasn’t glad to finally be able to see people in person. Thanksgiving and Christmas, my two favorite secular holidays, were better spent in my parents’ living room than spread across Iowa and Illinois, though I did miss the joy of the low-key aspects of the previous year’s pandemic holidays.

We actually traveled — on an airplane! — for Thanksgiving. And Christmas gathering was proceeded by rapid antigen and PCR tests. It was still pretty low key.

I’ve never been a fan of the pervasive “good riddance to [current year]” — the annual refrain suggests we have no real baseline — but 2021 was only marginally better than the year before, so good riddance.

This is 100 percent accurate. Good riddance, 2021.

Kamala Harris Says Administration Did Not Anticipate Omicron

Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris in an interview with the Los Angeles Times’ Noah Bierman:

“We didn’t see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not — upon whose advice and direction we have relied — didn’t see Delta coming,” she said. “We didn’t see Omicron coming. And that’s the nature of what this, this awful virus has been, which as it turns out, has mutations and variants.”

The crisis of Covid-19, which has killed 800,000 Americans, 1 in 100 seniors and more people in 2021 than 2020, has certainly been worsened by the politicization of vaccines, masks and other mitigation, but the failure is bipartisan.

When we closed schools and sent everyone to work from home in March 2020, we returned to a lot of plexiglass and not much else.

In December 2021, we still don’t have national testing capabilities or easy access to rapid tests at pharmacies and grocery stores. That’s on Joe Biden, and to hear his vice president say they didn’t anticipate these variants?

Fucking embarrassing.

 

2021 Letter

Last year, Laura and I started writing a brief letter to include with our donations (we focus on local organizations helping people and prefer those led by and serving people of color and women). This was our letter for 2021.

We hope this finds you well. 

Like many, we’ve found ourselves to be reflective as we near a second year of a pandemic that has killed more than five people million throughout the world and, officially as of this letter, 101 of our neighbors here in Johnson County.

While this has been difficult, know the unfortunate truth is that, for many, the struggle existed long before it was laid bare for us all to see. And while we’ve seen unprecedented resources made available during the pandemic, more people have been left behind as the gap widens between the affluent and the marginalized.

Building true community safety is possible here, and it will require making sure that the needs of the people who live here are met. We hope your work, and your collaboration with others across our community, can help provide the safety, security, and stability every human deserves.  

Thank you for all the incredible work you do in our community.

Local Press Covers Local Campaign Finance

You can learn a lot — or at least learn a lot about what questions you might have — looking through campaign disclosures, and local races are no different. Iowa makes it pretty easy to access the reports, which are due before Election Day, for candidates running for city, school and state offices.

The graph above comes from George Shillcock of the Press-Citizen, who put together a very nice breakdown of the financial reports for Iowa City candidates while his colleague Cleo Krejci has a breakdown for school board candidates. Meanwhile The Gazette is reporting on the Cedar Rapids races.

It’s nice to see coverage of this since the only way these reports matter are if voters are aware of the reports and digest the context they offer, and the best way for that to happen is, well, reporting on them.

A COVID Serenity Prayer

Lucy McBride in The Atlantic:

Human beings have always coexisted with threats to our health: violence, vehicular crashes, communicable diseases. And many of us have meandered through our perilous existence without thinking much about it. Sure, people may drive more cautiously at nighttime, use condoms with a new partner, and avoid walking through dark alleys alone. But before the pandemic, we didn’t lock down our lives to eliminate all risk. Schools didn’t close during flu season. Doctors didn’t preach abstinence for all in the face of herpes and HIV. We had accepted the inherent riskiness of being human, and we took reasonable precautions where possible.

But for many of us, the pandemic blew apart our complacency—at least when it came to the risk of contracting COVID. People rejiggered their lives with a singular goal in mind: Don’t get infected with the novel coronavirus.

The Kinnick Covid Wave

It’s hard to imagine something exemplifying the failure of Iowa’s leadership through the pandemic more than highlighting its college football stadium, just shy of its 69,250-person capacity, celebrating the end of the first quarter by waving at a full pediatric hospital with lots of immunocompromised kids who cannot yet be vaccinated against a disease that’s killed more than 648,106 people in the United States. 

Style over substance.

I wonder how many members of the crowd, waving in unison, believe that masks are about control and the vaccinated are just mindless followers.

Kim Reynolds Responds to ‘COVID Kim’ Nickname

Nikoel Hytrek at Iowa Starting Line:

Last year, Iowans unimpressed with Gov. Kim Reynolds’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic gave her a new moniker: “COVID Kim.”

Since then, the name has become common among Reynolds’ critics online. WHO 13’s Dave Price asked her about it in an interview that aired Sunday.

Name calling is cheap, even if it’s fitting. Let’s look at what she says.

“People never 100 percent agree with the decisions I make.”
This is true of every elected official, so it doesn’t actually mean anything.

“You know, I have to take a look at the data, surround myself with experts that give me feedback, we did that.”
Data was the free space on Reynolds-press-conference bingo last year. I don’t doubt she looked at data. I don’t doubt she had experts offer input. I just don’t believe she prioritized either.

“I’ve tried to be transparent with Iowans.”
Unlike with Utahns.

“I put my trust in people to do the right thing. They did the right thing.”
She trusts them unless they run any sort of school or work in local government. Some folks did the right thing and some carried on like nothing happened. About six out of 10 got vaccinated. Some spread lies online and in their social circles.

Poorly-drafted Law Opened Door to Iowa City Mask Order

Good analysis from Laura Belin at Bleeding Heartland:

Republican lawmakers intended to prohibit schools, cities, and counties from requiring masks when they amended an education bill on the final day of the legislature’s 2021 session. But House File 847, which Governor Kim Reynolds rushed to sign within hours of its passage, was not well crafted to accomplish that goal.

An apparent drafting error opened the door for the mask order Iowa City Mayor Bruce Teague announced on August 19, with the full support of the city council.

Most news organizations missed the care this order was crafted with and followed with stories focused on Iowa City defying state law.

Despite Gov. Kim Reynolds maintaining that cities cannot issue such orders, the question hasn’t actually been tested in court.

No Longer a Premonition

One of my very first go-into-a-store purchases once I was fully vaccinated was Michael Lewis’s The Premonition, a very Michael Lewis-y look at public health’s preparation for a big pandemic.

The book was supposed to be my coming-out-of-Covid reading. It was supposed to be something I could read and find amusement in, the same way I reflect on the time I almost died on the interstate heading to buy a stockpot for my mother for Christmas after an ice storm.

But, because I read books in fits and spurts, it’s turned into my rise-of-Delta reading. And instead of amusement, it fills me with apprehension.

There are plenty of moments, in the Bush- and Obama-era pandemic planning, when data led to a plan including steps with expected big prevention benefits at relatively little cost. Many of these steps, such as closing schools, were expected to be unpopular. They would require leaders to make decisions quickly in the face of public pressure to absolutely not do the thing that would save lives.

And here we are, facing a wave on an even more contagious variant of Covid, failing to act decisively. Failing to increase vaccinations. About to send millions of unvaccinated children back into school buildings.

Hold on tight. It’s going to get bumpy.