thanks to everyone who wrote last month to confirm that indeed only journalists care what happens to Twitter. As Elon Musk’s bizarre dance between buying the company and talking obscurity into obscurity continues, it’s a healthy reminder for us not to get too obsessed — though he may now be able to access the full fire hose of data from Twitter users, power worrying about what he’s going to do with it. Here’s the update.
We To do Know how to beat a pandemic – at least some of us
It’s Pride Month in the US, so I’m proud to be the first queer editor-in-chief of WIRED to present Maryn McKenna’s new story about an event that demonstrated the resilience of the LGBTQ community: the Covid-19 outbreak last July in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
You may remember (if you remember anything from a year ago in pandemic time) as when you learned the phrase “breakthrough infection.” Tens of thousands of people, mostly gay men, flooded the streets and filled nightclubs over the weekend of July 4, and while most had been vaccinated, Covid ripped through the city, eventually infecting some 1,100 people.
At the time, the outbreak seemed like a cautionary tale, and there were subtle echoes of the stigmatization of gay men in the wake of HIV/AIDS. But as Maryn’s reporting shows, it’s now clear that this was a success story. The wave in Provincetown could have led to hundreds of thousands of additional cases. Instead, it hissed. Although Delta ravaged the US that summer, genetic analysis revealed that almost none of the infections originated from Provincetown. Officials were able to monitor and contain the outbreak thanks to two things: Massachusetts’ unusually good public health and medical research infrastructure, and the gay community’s hard-learned habits of being transparent about infectious diseases. As a Centers for Disease Control specialist told Maryn, “It was great. Other CDC people will tell you: It was unlike any other group they’ve dealt with in terms of getting information.
But here’s the thing: As hopeful a story like Provincetown is, it only underscores how difficult it is to control Covid without those unusual circumstances. As we’ve reported, the US’s ability to detect and fend off future waves of the virus is indeed declining, but not improving as funding shrinks and testing data becomes more patchy. In the ongoing evolutionary war between humans and SARS-CoV-2, the virus is winning, at least in the sense that it has begun to evolve much faster than we can keep up with. We have embraced life with it and accepted that we will continue to catch it. It is true that the disease has not become more deadly with successive sub-variants of Omicron, but there is still no guarantee that the trend will continue. As our strategies for living with this disease evolve along with the virus, what public health measures, if any, do you want them to remain in place? What lessons do you worry the US and the world aren’t learning? Let me know what you think in the comments below.
