Nobody actually lives here

It's getting more difficult to hide the truth about this place.  

New Orleans and its suburbs have lost population at a faster rate than any other large metropolitan area in the country since 2020, according to new Census Bureau estimates released Thursday.

It's the second year in a row the New Orleans area has topped the list of fastest shrinking large metros.

The New Orleans area lost more than 39,000 people between 2020 and 2024, a decline off nearly 3.9%.

I suppose 2020 can be considered a turning point for many things. And it's fair to think of that as a transitional moment from a rapidly gentrifying Post-Katrina New Orleans, where the communities washed away by the flood were replaced by vacation rental amusements, to the Post-Covid ghost town where it just feels like the the wiring is being stripped out of everything. 

But, really, there is a consistent narrative flowing through both of these phases. As always, the root causes of the current hellscape trace back to what came before it. In our case, that's a long story about a city's ruling class and the deliberate choices it made in the wake of a disaster to change the city "demographically, geographically and politically," as one prominent member of the Rex Organization said at the time.  We've watched that process fairly closely over the years. The archives of this blog should show that farily well.  I have no idea if any of that mattered, though. 

In any case, the stated aim of the gentry, then, was to build a smaller, whiter, city with fewer poor people.  Congratulations to them on their success. 

 

Sorry, no, you have to keep writing it down

Every time I put up a new post here, I end up griping that I need to post here more often. I do mean that. 

Last week, as we read about these legislative hearings on the state's COVID response, we once again had to remind ourselves of the importance of taking notes as things happen. Otherwise, when the details of events come up later in a different context, you might miss the point.  See, between the time that COVID arrived in Louisiana and the time when this committee took up its investigation, the state government has been taken over entirely by a paranoid anti-vax faction so whatever facts are brought to light now about the emergency response will, unfortunately, pass through that lens.  Here, for example, is a representative taste of that atmosphere. 

Dozens of anti-vaccine bills have died in the Louisiana Legislature since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but ultra-conservative lawmakers are gearing up for another fight.

In the process, truth has become a major casualty. 

In two days of hearings last week on the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the House Select Committee on Homeland Security heard hours of testimony from doctors with fringe views on the COVID-19 virus. They included the state’s chief medical doctor, Surgeon General Ralph Abraham, who himself amplified misinformation. Abraham is a general practitioner who is also a veterinarian. 

“It’s been my observation that nearly every intervention attempted by government has been ineffective, counterproductive and antithetical to the core principles of a free society,” Abraham said last Thursday, citing mask use and vaccines as examples of ineffective measures. 

Abraham’s deputy surgeon general, ophthalmologist Dr. Wyche Coleman III, went a step further, touting the debunked theory that childhood vaccinations cause autism. 

“You could probably fill Tiger Stadium with moms who have kids that were normal one day, got a vaccine and were then autistic after,” Coleman told lawmakers. 

Experts agree the amplification and legitimization of COVID-19 misinformation by state officials can have a detrimental impact on public health. 

When asked if he was concerned the negative talk on vaccines could discourage people from getting vaccinated, committee chair Rep. Jay Gallé, R-Covington, replied, “So what if it does?”

So Baton Rouge is overrun with right wingers and this is the sort of thing we can expect to hear from them. It's interesting, though, that we get to hear a little bit of it from New Orleans Democrats like Alonzo Knox as well.

Knox is claiming no hospitals in Louisiana were overwhelmed during the pandemic, and said no media outlet reported that they were. Here’s a thread of reporting that disproves that. https://t.co/StC9FUFQZz

— Piper Hutchinson (@ByPiperHutch) September 26, 2024

Knox has become quite the character up there. Let's put a pin in that, actually. It's something we'll have to return to in more detail later.  For now, let's just note that he looks to be following the Neil Abramson playbook. Politics is never short on guys who will enable whatever atrocity they have to just so that they get to be "in the room" for a while with its perpetrators. 

But here is the thing. Just because the capitol is under the control of lunatics and the opportunists who flatter them, doesn't mean that these hearings won't stumble on a few unfortunate facts, in spite of all the nonsense drowning them out.  So let's return to this hearing now. It's a good example of what I'm talking about here.

Jacques Thibodeaux, director of Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, told a panel of state lawmakers Wednesday that the agency received “an inquiry” in March from the "major fraud investigation unit" of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

The inquiry was “in direct relation to the medical monitoring station” at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans that was originally set up in early 2020 as a 1,000-bed field hospital to treat patients with COVID-19 and relieve strain on hospitals.

Several lawmakers were gathered at the State Capitol Wednesday for a meeting of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security to gather information for a future report on the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The field hospital was set up through no-bid contracts under emergency circumstances.  Emergency circumstances tend to be closer to the norm in Louisiana than one would think is ideal.  Having seen first hand how that plays out a few times, I thought it prudent to mark some things out for future reference. COVID began to affect Louisiana in March of 2020. It wasn't until May that I had a chance to sort some things out.  This post is now a little bit of a time capsule, I guess.  

Here's what was going on then. 

Some local union leaders are angered that dozens of workers have been brought in from Texas to help convert the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center into a medical facility to deal with the coronavirus crisis, at a time when hundreds of their members are out of work.

The order to convert the convention center into a facility to provide up to 3,000 beds for spillover COVID-19 patients was made by Governor John Bel Edwards two weeks ago.

Two contracts for just over $76 million were quickly put out to bid. One for about $38 million, primarily to provide medical staff and services, went to BCFS Health and Human Services, a faith-based non-profit based in San Antonio, Texas that was formerly known as Baptist Child and Family Services.

According to an audit that December, BCFS ended up getting paid $89 million. We pointed out at the time that BCFS had recently taken in $179 million in federal contracts for its work on migrant detention facilities along the Texas-Mexico border. This was the so-called "kids in cages" operation. Remember when people cared about that? When the Trump Administration was spending money on contractors who put kids in cages?  Now we have a Democratic candidate for President promising to do a bigger and tougher kids in cages program so I guess that's all good money now. But at the time it seemed pretty bad! And our Governor was directing money to accomplices in that endeavor.

This is how fast the framing can change and it's why you have to remember to write everything down. Otherwise you might also forget the things, everyone else clearly has, or at least expects you to ignore.  Do we think, for example, that the current legislature in its pursuit of undiscovered fraud in the COVID resonpse is going to ask any questions about Mike Edmonson? 

Garner Environmental, a division of the Texas-based Ksolv group, counts former Louisiana State Police Superintendent Mike Edmonson as a consultant. Edmonson resigned from the State Police amid a series of controversies at the agency in 2017.

The state paid Garner $9 million to establish and run a quarantine facility adjacent to the Convention Center, a project that lasted about a month. Nine patients stayed at the facility in all, according to Mike Steele, a spokesman for the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

More about Edmonson's "series of controversies" here. The Advocate-Times-Pic should really link back to their own reporting when they reference it as context. There's a reason to write these things down, after all. In this case the reason is to remind ourselves that, while the political winds change, the essential corruption underlying it all remains universally intact. And unless you can see that for what it is, you're liable to get lost in the noise.

Maybe somebody should do something?

The public got too good a handle on what case numbers, hospitalizations, and percent positives meant so they had to shuffle the metrics around. Now they're doing this.  

The level of coronavirus found in two New Orleans wastewater sites rose nearly 700% over the last two weeks, according to data reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While virus levels in Louisiana remain low, the recent data has infectious disease experts on alert after weeks of declining cases and loosening restrictions. 

“We’re in a little bit of a fog right now, but certainly wastewater suggests SARS-CoV-2 is definitely here and it does seem to be – at best we can tell – increasing,” said Susan Hassig, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Tulane University.

700 percent sounds like a lot. But what does it mean, really? See the thing is you aren't used to it yet so you don't know. It's "a little bit of a fog."  One wonders if that isn't the point a little bit. 

Although wastewater sampling has been used since the early days of the pandemic, it has emerged as an early warning system relied on by the federal government as part as a pathway to a more normal life in recent months. Samples from the Sewerage and Water Board's two wastewater treatment sites on the east and west banks are collected daily and sent to the CDC. About 65% of the nearly 450 wastewater sites across the country have recorded an increase in COVID levels over the last two weeks. More collection sites from Louisiana are planned, according to officials from the Louisiana Department of Health.

"Has emerged as a pathway to a more normal life..." has to mean they chose this as a way to keep people from knowing what to think about COVID anymore, right? That's the "pathway" that was "emerged" on purpose. What does it mean? Well it "depends" on a bunch of stuff.

Not every increase recorded by the CDC can be interpreted as a certain sign of an upcoming surge, said Aaron Bivins, co-founder of the COVID-19 Wastewater-based Epidemiology Collaborative and assistant professor with LSU's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The significance of a percentage increase depends on the baseline from the prior week, and Louisiana’s increases still remain below the threshold of a 1,000% increase that Bivins would consider alarming when virus levels are low.

Still, “my antennae are up,” said Bivins. “This change in trend is definitely concerning.”

So... anybody's guess. It's "definitely concerning," though. Should someone do something?  Or just be concerned.   Although, probably not more than that until after the hotels and airbnbs make their Jazzfest money. Afterward, they will send the mayor out to yell at us or something.

Mild

 No, the virus is not getting "milder."

Before omicron came along, SARS-CoV-2 was actually evolving to be more severe, says Bhattacharyya, of Harvard Medical School. "We're looking at a virus that's gotten progressively more severe over time," he says.

A study from the U.K. found that alpha was about 40% more likely to kill a person than the original virus. And delta was about two times more likely to put you in the hospital than the alpha variant.

"Omicron may be a small step back in severity. But it's probably more severe on its own than the original version of the virus," Bhattacharyya says. Becoming "more mild" hasn't been the trend or evolutionary trajectory, he says.

In addition, omicron didn't evolve directly from delta. It evolved from an earlier version of the virus circulating in 2020. And so omicron could actually be more severe than its ancestral virus, and it could be progressing toward higher severity, Bhattacharyya says.

And thus, there's no guarantee that the next variant to emerge will be milder. It could be the most severe yet.

"I think we don't really know what direction this virus is taking," says evolutionary biologist Stephen Goldstein at the University of Utah. "We've learned that trying to predict the evolutionary trajectory of this virus is very, very difficult. If not impossible."

How did the "mildness" of Omicron evolve?  Well, America's bosses decided it was time to force people back to work regardless of the health hazard. America's political leaders, by and large, agreed with that. And America's news editors, by and large being of the same socio-economic class as America's bosses and political leaders decided they, too, were tired of being inconvenienced by worker safety concerns and that it was time to stop worrying so much about COVID.  So they started putting the word "mild" in headlines and the thing just mutated from there into conventional wisdom.

Can't go back now. Even if the next variant really is more severe, they've all figured out whose lives do and do not matter by this point.

Let's hope it's a good one

We begin 2022 in the middle of a great experiment. Policymaking deciders at all levels of government are attempting to find out what would happen if they just caved completely to the demands of the hooting death cult coalition of capitalist bosses and anti-vaxers who have been yelling at them this whole time to just let the virus do what it wants.

And, well, we're finding out.

"Omicron is truly everywhere," Dr. Megan Ranney, a professor of emergency medicine at Brown University's School of Public Health, told CNN on Friday night. "What I am so worried about over the next month or so is that our economy is going to shut down, not because of policies from the federal government or from the state governments, but rather because so many of us are ill."

The political calculus is obvious. Turns out there is a high tolerance for economic disruption, overloaded hospitals, and even people dying, as long as the politicians can say it isn't because of a thing they tried to do. In fact, every policy choice up to this point can be described as elected leaders desperately trying to get this bullshit off of their desk where it is someone else's problem. This stage of total inaction is only the latest, um, variant of that pathology to emerge. 

Schools are about to open next week. In New Orleans, where the response thus far has been to misreport case counts, and blame students and teachers who get sick for their individual "irresponsible" behavior, the plan now is apparently just to see how much more they can take.  

With the virus spreading, some staff and experts are expressing concern about what school reopenings could mean.

"There will be pediatric hospitalizations," Hotez said. "And what's going to be the other tough piece in the next weeks, keeping the schools open, because of this high transmissibility -- especially if you start seeing absences of school teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria staff."

Whatever happens, rest assured it will never be the fault of anyone in  charge. Their only real job has been to keep the workers from getting too uppity in their demands that their safety and well being be protected. And so far they've done that job perfectly. 

New heights

 Records are made to be broken. 

Louisiana reported the highest single-day increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.

There were 6,199 confirmed COVID cases and an additional 3,179 probable COVID cases reported in the Department of Health's noon update.

The 6,199 confirmed cases mark the largest single day increase ever in Louisiana.

Interestingly this is happening within a context of  under-reported data be it from increased use of at home tests or just flat out lying by local medical examiners. 

In Lafayette Parish, COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause of death in 134 fatalities in 2020, even though there were 419 “excess deaths” – the number of deaths that exceed a normal, pre-pandemic year. The gap between these two numbers means hundreds more people probably died of COVID-19, researchers said. 

Deaths attributed to diseases that are often tied to COVID-19 increased. Deaths at home from hypertensive heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s all increased 30% or more in 2020. Those deaths, especially those that weren’t properly investigated, make up at least some of Lafayette’s missing COVID-19 deaths, according to experts.

Especially concerning are deaths in the community attributed to nonspecific causes, known as “garbage codes.” For example, 40 people in the parish who died at home since 2020 were certified as dead of “heart failure, unspecified.”

Meanwhile it looks like we're back to just waiting to see if it all blows over as a policy response. I saw some city agencies are reimposing mask mandates and the councilmembers are back on Zoom.  Everyone else is basically at the mercy of their boss for direction going forward.  Hope you don't work for the schools....

 

Just spoke with a nurse on the Children's Hospital covid testing hotline and she said they are not doing return-to-school tests as they are currently overwhelmed, so don't waste your time trying to get an appt.

— Molly Rouxdolph 🦌 (@hashtagmolly) December 29, 2021

The boss will decide if you are too sick to work

They will say they are citing CDC guidance, of course. But one thing that has become abundantly clear over the course of the pandemic is who the CDC actually works for. 

A union for flight attendants is accusing the CDC of loosening rules for quarantine after Covid-19 exposure at the behest of the airline industry, as the Omicron variant continues to rage across the globe.

"We said we wanted to hear from medical professionals on the best guidance for quarantine, not from corporate America advocating for a shortened period due to staffing shortages,” said Association of Flight Attendants-CWA International President Sara Nelson following the CDC announcement shortening the recommended quarantine duration from 10 days to five days.

“The CDC gave a medical explanation about why the agency has decided to reduce the quarantine requirements from 10 to five days, but the fact that it aligns with the number of days pushed by corporate America is less than reassuring,” Nelson said.

It really isn't even a big secret. When pressed on the matter, CDC leadership openly admits they are considering factors besides the public health question. They are, instead, prioritizing an agenda pushed corporate lobbyists which insists that sick leave time is a threat to"societal function." 

The decision to cut the recommended isolation time in half, which was hailed by business groups and slammed by some union leaders and health experts, reflects the increasingly tough decisions health officials navigate as they seek to strike the right balance between vigilance and normalcy as the nation heads into the pandemic’s third year. Even with a surging variant, President Biden has said he is not looking at lockdowns and stressed that people who are vaccinated and boosted do not need to fundamentally change their lives as they did at the start of the pandemic.

The guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “was based on the anticipation of a large number of cases might impact societal function,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in an interview with The Post. “There were starting to be limitations in society, not just in our health-care workforce but in other parts of society. We were seeing infections in many places that we realized this could be a harbinger of many other essential workers we needed.”

"There were starting to be limitations in society." In other words, workers were demanding to be treated as though their lives actually meant something and we just can't have that.  

Starbucks' union drive comes amid much a broader national labor movement spanning multiple industries across the country. Last month, in a strike wave known as "Striketober," tens of thousands of workers at companies like John Deere, Frito-Lay, Nabisco, Kellogg, and McDonald's organized work stoppages over unethical working conditions and low pay. 

According to Cornell's Labor Action Tracker, the share of workers on strike last month jumped to 25,000 – a marked departure from the three months prior, which saw an average of 10,000. Many experts and labor advocates told Salon that strikes are being driven largely by a growing sense of dissatisfaction amongst essential workers as the pandemic wanes.  

Corrina A. Christensen, Director of Public Relations & Communications of the BCTGM International Union, which represents workers at Frito-Lay, Kellogg, and Nabisco, said that the strikes have "everything to do with workers being fed up with employers bent on disrespecting their work and demanding take-aways in wages, benefits, forcing overtime…after they were upheld as 'essential.'"

That is the line the CDC is trying to hold. The bosses who have the ears of policymakers have succeeded in defining 5 days of additional sick leave as a "societal threat" so large that it actually outweighs the threat of pandemic COVID. The article quoted above is primarily about the organizing effort at Starbucks in Buffalo. In this article, the workers involved in that campaign refer to the "fear culture" brought to bear against them by management. 

“Most of the workers I talk to are almost immediately on board,” Murray says. He joined the organizing effort two months ago, and has been talking to his coworkers ever since. He says that not only do organizers have to educate everyone on what a union is all about, they also face a latent level of fear among employees that they could be targeted for retaliation, particularly now that the union drive has gone public. 

“[Coworkers] were saying, ​‘I’m scared, can Starbucks do something to us?’ That broke my heart, because that fear culture has already been cultivated,” says Gianna Reeve, a shift supervisor who has been helping with the organizing effort. ​“It really hurts. This is an opportunity that we can be stronger.”

Fear of retaliation is the greatest weapon the bosses have against workers. And it permeates the atmosphere of most service industry jobs like Starbucks where the boss can demand not only compliance in deed but also in attitude. Standards in service jobs are subjective. Workers can be made accountable not only for the amount of work they produce but for arbitrarily defined perceptions of that work. Here is what that looks like in practice.

In case you would like to know what it’s like working at Starbucks https://t.co/ke1BhXegX2 pic.twitter.com/3lZ0qHSMg9

— Cory Doctorow MOSTLY AFK (@doctorow) December 24, 2021

Did you show up for that twelve hour shift on a holiday? Were you on your feet the whole time mixing hundreds of pumpkin spice lattes during the fall rush? Ahhh but see you weren't quite "WARM AND WELCOMING" enough as you went about that so we are going to have to punish you again. 

Service industry bosses are absolute tyrants. Workers organizing against that kind of intense intimidation need all the help and encouragement they can get. Which is why having a strong labor influence in the halls of power is so important. When a government agency has a chance to step in and put its thumb on the scale, it can make a big difference.  Joe Biden's CDC has chosen to intervene on behalf of the bosses. It even seems like they are rubbing it in the workers' faces by amplifying the bosses' intimidating rhetoric.  

'The government and your boss put you in harms way. We took away paid sick days and unemployment supplements. Better get vaccinated so you don't starve.'

I'm not a health comms person so I can't evaluate how effective this message is. pic.twitter.com/rHtsD4McYP

— Justin Feldman (@jfeldman_epi) December 29, 2021

 According to this CDC ad, workers have a clear choice. Their health or their job. If you are one of the good ones, the poster implies you will choose to work your shifts. If you are one of the good ones, in fact, you may not even "tolerate being at home."  At least that's what CDC says.

“Our guidance was conservative before. It had said 10 days of isolation,” Walensky told CNN. “But in the context of the fact that we were going to have so many more cases — many of those would be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic — people would feel well enough to be at work, they would not necessarily tolerate being home, and that they may not comply with being home, this was the moment that we needed to make that decision and those changes.”

Clearly these people care about your well being.