Employment, Unemployment, the Economy, and the Pandemic: Where We Are Now and Where We Are Headed, Beyond the Numbers

Per last week’s post, the May jobless numbers were favorable, but mainly because our Covid-19 progress was so good.  How are we doing otherwise, and where might we be going?

Before the month started, the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paper, “The Donut Effect of Covid-19 on Cities,” by Arjun Ramani and Nicholas Bloom.  It’s 12 printed pages and academic, but comes down to two ideas.  First, many people are leaving the centers of large cities but not small ones, but, second, they are staying in the same metropolitan areas.

Moving on to June 1^st, we learned “How the World Ran Out of Everything,” from Peter S. Goodman and Niraj Chokshi in The New York Times.  The authors accurately blame “Just In Time” inventory management, in which suppliers must provide parts or raw materials quickly when their customers need them.  That achieves its purpose of cutting carrying costs when everything moves smoothly, but in times such as the past year-plus, with a widespread set of pandemic-related problems as well as a ship blocking the Suez Canal, it has not.  From a customer’s standpoint I have long been grouchy about that system, as some places practiced it so aggressively that I might find what I wanted unavailable simply because another customer had just been there.  Two lessons for all participating in Just In Time:  Things do not always work smoothly, and business you lose from not having product may disappear forever.

Could it be that “U.S. labor market worse than it appears, Fed paper suggests” (Reuters, June 1^st)?  Yes, this article’s indication that statistics “suggesting labor market slack should be given more weight than those pointing to tightness,” seems right, as latent demand, as shown by the AJSN, is still pushing 20 million new positions, and we have the real possibility that applicants will return quicker than their opportunities.  On the other side, “Americans Don’t Want to Return to Lousy Low Wage Jobs,” as put by Daniel Alpert in The New York Times also on June 1^st.  That is the case now, but over the next few months the issues of Covid-19 safety, extra-high unemployment benefits (with “all extra federal supplements” over by September 6^th), and child-care availability will be resolved, and the bulk of laborers will have no choice, even if wages return to their 2019 levels.  It could well happen, also, that we get “a contraction in household incomes this autumn.”

In the meantime, “Companies struggling to hire workers, coping with rising prices, Fed says” (Megan Henney, Fox Business, June 2^nd).  That is also a temporary situation, and what is happening by about August should tell the true ongoing story.  There were some good scattered remarks in the June 4^th Lauren Bauer et al. Brookings Up Front blog post “Examining the uneven and hard-to-predict labor market recovery,” such as April’s 266,000 jobs gain hiding 6.6 million going “from being employed to unemployed or out of the labor force,” applications filed by startups “likely to employ people” rising from 2019’s 110,000 average to 150,000 even since July, and that some employees may be taking time off “after a very difficult year,” but we know we are recovering, with only the pace unknown.

In the June 4^th Times, Giovanni Russonello told us “Was the Jobs Report Good?  It’s in the Eye of the Beholder.”  It was an interview with frequent business reporter Ben Casselman, who said that “the report was exactly good enough to allow everyone to hold on to their existing beliefs, and for us all to get to do it again a month from now,” and “that things are getting better… just not as quickly as anyone would like.”  Casselman pointed out that between the mid-May data collection time and the article date, 12 million Americans have been fully vaccinated, and noted that inflation should not be a large concern since it was “tame” even with pre-pandemic 3.5% joblessness.  Then, in the same publication on the same date, we had former chief Department of Labor economist Betsey Stevenson’s “The Jobs Report Takeaway:  A Huge Reallocation of People and Work Is Underway.”  Her observations include “the unemployed aren’t leaving work, they are changing work, and change takes time” with “a giant mixer” between those looking and those hiring, and, like it or not, it will be a while to achieve movement of “workers into the jobs in which they can be most productive.”  We don’t know the extent or permanence of these coronavirus-caused shifts, but we know there will be some.

On June 6^th, also in the New York Times, Heidi Shierholz worked to get us together with “Republicans, Don’t Ignore the Evidence on ‘Labor Shortages.’”  She wrote that “the main problem in the U.S. labor market remains one of labor demand, not of labor supply,” that we are still 7.6 million positions down from February 2020, and that higher pay is a sign of “a healthy labor market.”  All true, but we don’t yet know ongoing significances.  Then, in the June 8^th Times, we had advice from Glenn Hubbard on “How to Keep the Economy Booming – And Meet the Demand for Workers,” including that “policy should support returning to work and matching workers to jobs by supporting re-employment and training for new skills, not just boosting demand.”  Indeed, it is clear to me that, now, all unemployment benefit recipients should be required, as pre-pandemic, to apply for jobs. 

Just how strong will the economy be late this summer?  The title of Neil Irwin’s “Hot Vax Summer Is Looking Lukewarm,” in the June 4^th New York Times, came out more pessimistic than the author may have intended – “lukewarm” is quite a bit cooler than “warm” – but by now it seems likely that we will not be completely back that soon.  With the share of Americans becoming fully vaccinated creeping along, to only 43% having that status as of yesterday, we are not going to have an easy “reopening spurred on by vaccination.”  As well, “at the job creation rate of the last three months, it would take 14 months to return to February 2020 employment levels.”  So let’s expect our July and August prosperity to be warm, like the weather, but hardly a heat wave.  And that is where we stand.

May: In Strong Employment Month, Latent Demand Increased with AJSN Showing We Could Fill 19.9 Million More Jobs

With last month’s issue causing concern about the intensity of the expected recovery, this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was a particularly important one.  Last time was superficially disappointing, but once we got under the surface, especially in conjunction with our pandemic results, it was generally good. 

This time, though, was better even at first glance.  Although the number of net new nonfarm payroll positions, at 559,000, did not reach the consensus 650,000 to 675,000 prediction, it was still a healthy gain.  Seasonally adjusted unemployment fell from 6.1% to 5.8%, with the unadjusted version off from 5.7% to 5.5%.  The count of those jobless dropped 500,000 to 9.3 million, with those on temporary layoff down 300,000 to 1.8 million and people out for 27 weeks or longer decreasing 400,000 to 3.8 million.  The two measures of how many Americans are either working or one step away, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, were mixed, with the former down 0.1% to 61.6% and the latter up the same amount to 58.0%.  The total of people working part-time for economic reasons, or holding on to part-time work while thus far unsuccessfully seeking full-time propositions, gained 100,000 to 5.3 million.  Average hourly private nonfarm payroll earnings increased substantially again, this time 16 cents higher to reach $30.33 – that continues to reflect higher wages as well as lower paying positions still unrestored.

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the measure showing how many new positions could be quickly filled if all knew they were easy and routine to get, increased 169,000, to reach the following:

    

The largest differences from April were the effect of those unemployed, reducing the AJSN by 351,000, along with people not looking for a year or more, adding 278,000 to the metric, and a jump in those non-civilian, institutionalized, or off the grid, which was in effect a correction since newly implemented census results showed about two million more Americans than previously projected, which added 201,000.  If the overall population were the same for both months, the AJSN would have been almost unchanged.  The AJSN’s share from official joblessness for May was 39.9%, down from April’s 42.0%.  The statistic may now be somewhat overstated, due to those getting unemployment compensation not being required to search for work, but that was nothing new in May, has already changed in some states, and will follow in more.   

The overall results here were only slightly positive, so how did we do at the same time with the coronavirus?  Per the New York Times, the 7-day average of new daily cases fell 53% from April 16^th to May 16^th, reaching 33,040.  The same average of deaths was off 18% to 611, and the number of people hospitalized, calculated the same way from the same dates, lost 25% and is now at 33,693.  The number of daily vaccinations, though, decreased 44% to 1,886,917, reflecting, with 41% of Americans now fully vaccinated, quickly dropping demand. 

It is simple, then to evaluate how we did with employment this time.  We did fine.  We can see that the increase in people going back to work, though not massive, did not interfere with national pandemic recovery.  While this month was not flawless, the turtle took another solid step forward.

The Past Seven Months for Uber and Lyft: Plenty Has Changed, But Their Prospects Haven’t

While Americans patronizing the country’s two largest unregulated cab companies may not have noticed much difference, the firms have dramatically shifted in three ways. 

The first happened when, as per “Uber and Lyft Drivers in California Will Remain Independent” by Kate Conger in the November 4^th New York Times, the state’s hotly contested “Proposition 22, a ballot measure that allows gig economy companies to continue treating drivers as independent contractors,” passed with 59% of voters agreeing, despite solid conceptual reasons why workers called by apps were true employees.  While only in one state, the result has taken the wind out of the sails of status-conferring efforts elsewhere, has damaged true taxicab providers, and was described by Conger as “a bitter loss for state and local officials who have long seen the ride-hailing companies as obstinate upstarts that shrugged off any effort to make them follow the rules.”  Following reactions were well summarized in the titles of two other articles, “Fight Over Gig Workers Persists Despite Win for Uber and Lyft” (Noam Scheiber and Kate Conger, The New York Times, November 11^th) and “New U.S. rule could boost ‘gig economy’ companies while costing American workers billions” (Levi Sumagaysay, MarketWatch, January 6^th).  Since then, though, we learned from Henry Grabar in the April 30^th Slate “What Uber and DoorDash’s Investors Are Suddenly Afraid Of,” that being a comment by Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh that “in a lot of cases gig workers should be classified as employees.”  Perhaps such a pronouncement, here applied to a local delivery service as well, will direct legal changes, but for now California’s decision is fully in effect.

The second change was in what Uber and Lyft are planning.  That was shown by three divestments of what these companies were developing to rescue them from indefinite money losses, as “Uber, After Years of Trying, Is Handing Off Its Self-Driving Car Project” by Cade Metz and Kate Conger in the December 7^th New York Times, “Uber Jettisons Flying Car Project” also by Metz in the December 8^th Times, and “Lyft sells self-driving unit to Toyota’s Woven Planet for $550M” by Kirsten Korosec on April 25^th in TechCrunch.  While it’s no surprise that after the past two years driverless vehicles have lost their immediate promise, it is noteworthy that Uber and Lyft, neither of which have ever been profitable as public companies despite billions in annual revenue, are seemingly staying the same. 

The final large ridesharing swerve, actually a winding road, was delivered by the coronavirus, as “COVID didn’t kill gig economy, the pandemic accelerated it” (Brian Straight, FreightWaves, February 5^th).  The previous calendar year was a good one for such positions, with a daVinci Payments survey showing that total payments for gigs were one-third more, or $1.6 trillion-plus, than in 2019.  However, USA Today reported on May 24^th that “Permanent jobs rise as employers sweeten pay, benefits for gig workers amid labor shortages” (by Paul Davidson).  That will last only as long as high numbers of candidates stay off the job, though, which will most likely end within a few months.  That will leave Uber and Lyft once again in doubtful territory.  As I said years ago and which still holds now, you can ride them to your heart’s content, but find better companies in which to invest. 

Effects of the Pandemic: Expected, Unexpected, and Unknown

Beyond the coronavirus case, hospitalization, and death statistics, all steadily improving, related things are happening in America.

One is a failure to understand how small the risks are once we are two weeks past our final shots, as shown in Linsey Marr, Juliet Morrison, and Caitlin Rivers’ “I Got My Covid Vaccine.  Now Can I Hug My Mom?,” in the March 19^th New York Times.  All three authors are professionals in pandemic-related fields, but two recommended meals, even between two fully vaccinated people, be taken outside of restaurants to stay away from “new variants circulating” and “lots of people” who “will be indoors and unmasked.”  They offered similar answers to related situations.  I trust that now, two months later, they have noticed that only microscopic shares of those immunized have either received or spread the virus, and that new variants have thus far shown no real ability to overcome existing vaccines.  We have done well thus far to be cautious, but, if we don’t need to be any longer, we should stop.

A month-plus later, was it true, though, that “America’s Workplaces Are Still Too Dangerous” (David Michaels, The New York Times, April 28^th).  This former OSHA leader bemoaned how small and recently ineffective that agency has become, and exemplified their lack of legal sanction by saying that “the maximum fine for a serous OSHA violation is $13,353 – petty cash to any large employer – and the criminal charge for the work-related death of an employee is a misdemeanor, not a felony.”  Now that vaccines have been available to all American adults for weeks, it is safer to be on the job, whether protected or not, but that is a recent development.

To little surprise, we learned from Edmund DeMarch in the May 3^rd Fox News that “’Herd Immunity’ looking unlikely in US, report says.”  That expression “means that a virus is no longer easily jumping from person to person,” as good a definition as any, and “nobody knows for sure what the herd immunity threshold is for the coronavirus, though many experts say it’s 70% or higher.”  According to The New York Times yesterday, we now have 38% fully inoculated, meaning it will be fall, later, or never to reach seven-tenths. 

Less expected, per Michael Wilson in the May 4^th Times, was that the “Sudden Decision to Reopen Leaves New Yorkers Dizzy and Divided.”  The announcement two days before that many, but hardly all, restrictions in the city would be lifted May 19^th got reactions such as “it’s too fast” and “seems a little hasty,” though also the likes of “it’s about time.”  Although restaurants, for example, are now allowed 100 percent capacity, they still need to keep patrons six feet apart, which in many means little change.  What has happened, though, appropriately most benefits those fully vaccinated.   

An emphatic David Brooks opinion piece, published May 6^th also in The New York Times, described “Our Pathetic Herd Immunity Failure.”   He asked something posed often in recent years, “Could today’s version of America have been able to win World War II?” and concluded that “it hardly seems possible,” decrying immunization refusal with “we’re not asking you to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima; we’re asking you to walk into a damn CVS.”  Perhaps we and our leaders have underplayed this civic-duty aspect, but Brooks didn’t, devoting this entire column to it.  I find it noteworthy that those in our political segment most likely to call themselves patriotic have here been, in general, the worst.

We have seen various pieces, usually premature, projecting how the truly post-pandemic United States will be affected by our shared experience, and we can all propose possibilities.  Two from my sphere of interest are American Contract Bridge League customers and management discovering the advantages and disadvantages of online tournaments, which will certainly continue after widespread in-person play resumes, and local public radio station WJFF learning how effective it was to hold a fundraising auction on Facebook.  More generally we have “Pandemic forces many to consider new jobs,” by Dee-Ann Durbin et al. in the May 19^th Times Herald-Record.  Not only additional labor opportunities have caused that, but “many workers don’t want to go back to the jobs they once had” for personal reasons.  Strong employment markets have always meant a lot of job-hopping, and this one clearly is no exception.

If there is an overall message here, it is the same as before.  Ending the pandemic is now, above all, a matter of personal choice.  If you want to do that, get vaccinated.

Eight Takes on Joblessness – What Do They Offer Us?

Not only is it a strange time for unemployment, with work coming back but weekly unemployment applications still way high, but there has been a lot of discussion. 

Going back to The New York Times on February 22^nd, Jeanna Smialek wrote on “Why Top Economists Are Citing a Higher-Than-Reported Jobless Rate.”  The “alternative statistic” she mentioned is more cumbersome and arbitrarily defined than the American Job Shortage Number, which I have been compiling for almost ten years.  To get to the core of how many additional positions we could quickly fill if getting one were as easy as going out for groceries, look in this blog at the first post of each month. 

A day later in the same publication, Giovanni Russonello answered the question “How Is the Fed Thinking About Unemployment?”  This secondhand report of a Senate hearing that day told us that chair Jerome Powell needed “full employment, 2 percent inflation, and an outlook for above-2 percent inflation” – all three – for higher interest rates, and he would only consider the first item fulfilled with a high-enough “employment-to-population rate,” possibly the same as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ ratio of almost identical name.  That is still well short of its pre-pandemic levels, so we, rightfully, will continue having interest rates close to zero.

Also in The New York Times, Ben Casselman worked to explain the mystery in the first paragraph, on March 18^th, with “Why Are Jobless Claims Still High?  For Some, It’s the Multiple Layoffs.”  That explains why we have over two million applications each month but half-million-range net new positions.  It is, per a policy director of an unemployment advocacy group, “oscillation of employed, unemployed, employed, unemployed.”  That should slow down, even if reopenings, such as next week’s scheduled one for New York City, precipitate overly optimistic and thus in-effect temporary job creation – I expect new weekly claims to be below 350,000 almost every week starting July. 

The fourth and final Times piece, by Neil Irwin on April 16^th, asked and answered “Unemployment Is High.  Why Are Businesses Struggling to Hire?”  We now have an “apparent labor shortage,” with “news articles” by the “dozens,” “in which businesses, especially in the restaurant and other service industries, say they face a potentially catastrophic inability to hire.”  It’s caused by five factors – high unemployment compensation causing people required to look for work be less diligent and sincere about it; many jobs, not coincidentally in service fields, still virally unsafe; general uncertainty, also shown by the employment churn, about what positions will last, making relocation in particular ill-advised; doubt about whether non-office opportunities will stay that way; and, more than anything else, insufficient pay offers.  I maintain that most employers not finding workers would get them with twenty percent higher compensation, which reflects true current market values.  Irwin also mentioned parents and other caregivers being needed at home, a valid sixth reason.

Is it shocking or expected that “Nearly half of 2020 college grads remain jobless” (Daniella Genovese, FOXBusiness, April 16^th)?  The author found a Monster survey showing 45%, in which “85% of new graduates say their goals have been pushed back by at least a month,” and “69% of recent and impending graduates expect lower salaries due to the pandemic and the subsequent economic downturn.”  All of these should improve within months, and people have long had to reduce their expectations when testing the market after getting degrees – expect stories like this one to read differently by November.

Another clear combination of facts, that “Businesses are hiring and layoffs are falling, but jobs aren’t returning all at once,” was written by Jeffry Bartash in the April 17^th MarketWatch.  It hurts companies to create positions prematurely, and they need not only legal sanction to continue in the way they would like but enough customers, which is more difficult to forecast.  Bartash also echoed points made elsewhere, including widespread skepticism that jobs would be safe.

Employers are responding in ways other than paying more, as Paul Davidson showed in USA Today’s April 19^th “Want a new job?  As fewer workers respond to ads in the COVID era, more firms are turning to aggressive hiring tactics.”  Those approaches include finding potential employees on LinkedIn, “poaching people” at lower organizational levels than before, allowing remote work for more positions, and speeding up the hiring process.  Accordingly, successful “truck drivers, nurses, software developers, and grocery store managers,” among others, have good chances of being offered career upgrades.

Finally, some advice from Brent Orrell and Matthew Leger, also in the April 19^th USA Today: “COVID-19 has reshaped our economy for the long haul.  Here’s how to help workers adapt.”  The authors, looking governmentally, recommended “flexibility in employment and workforce development financing and services,” including allowing “personal reemployment accounts,” along with improving websites and digital “enhancements to the nation’s American Job Centers.”  What they need more than any of this is closer ties between employers and candidates, who need to know that training will help them. 

Soon the employment situation may change drastically, with vaccination rates well higher, new coronavirus cases way down, and a boom clearly in progress.  Until then, though, we need to do what we can.  For applicants, that starts with getting vaccinated.  For hirers, it means improving salaries, wages, and benefits.  If the two sides can do these things, they will succeed sooner.

April Jobs Data: Nonfarm Payroll Employment Up 266,000 But 660,000 More Working Total – AJSN Latent Demand Down 700,000 to Less Than 19.8 Million

A confusing title perhaps, but this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was as well.  It started with 266,000 net new nonfarm payroll jobs, about 700,000 lower than the only projection I saw, but more broadly the report played like 660,000 or so more were on the job.  That was the difference between March’s and April’s “number employed,” meaning that we added about 400,000 net positions either on farms or not on payrolls.  Some of the other metrics reflected a strong month, with the labor force participation rate and employment-population ratio, now 61.7% and 57.9%, up 0.2% and 0.1% respectively, seasonally unadjusted unemployment off 0.4% to 5.7%, and the count of those working part-time for economic reasons, or holding short-hours positions while thus far unsuccessfully seeking longer ones, crashed almost 600,000 to 5.2 million.  The number of those out for 27 weeks or longer stayed at 4.2 million.  Figures getting worse included the adjusted unemployment rate up from 6.0% to 6.1%, the tally of those jobless up 100,000 to 9.8 million, and the number of people on temporary layoff increasing the same to 2.1 million.  The hardest to interpret was “average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls” up 21 cents to $30.17 – such gains have lately been bad, as they have reflected lower-paid people disproportionally losing their jobs, but this time it may mean higher pay in general. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the measure showing how many new positions could be quickly filled if all knew they were truly available, had a large decline to the following:

Almost 80% of the improvement from March came from lower official unemployment, but the count of people not searching for work for a year or more contributed over 100,000.  The year-over-year comparison, with the worst employment month of the pandemic, showed a 14.5 million improvement from 34.3 million, with over 2½ million of that from statuses other than straight joblessness.  The share of the AJSN from unemployment was 42.0 percent, down 1.9%. 

On the coronavirus side, numbers were also mixed.  The 7-day average of new daily American cases gained 28% to 70,075, and that of people hospitalized rose 8% to 44,950.  The average of daily deaths, though, plummeted 43% to 749, while the total of vaccine doses administered each day gained a robust 38% to 3,349,306. 

How can we sort all of this out?  For one thing, we are no longer improving across the board.  We’re reaching limits both on people accepting vaccinations and on employers’ willingness to pay more.  We are nowhere near herd immunity, however you define that, and will not get there until our share of fully vaccinated people, still only 33%, more than doubles.  Legal reopenings, such as the one authorized for later this month in New York City, will help, but only to the extent that customers return.  The rest of the year, then, is murkier than I thought it was a year ago, and does not look as spectacular.  For now, though, the turtle did take a real step forward.

The Pandemic: Where Are We Now, and How Can We End It?

On this topic, my objectivity is limited by the milestone I reached yesterday.  It’s now two weeks since my last coronavirus vaccination, so the chance of my getting infected is minimal.  Almost all other American adults can choose to join me. 

How encouraging are our recent Covid-19 statistics?  Looking at the charts of 7-day averages of new cases, deaths, and hospitalizations, on the New York Times website, we see different shapes.  The count of new cases stopped drastically declining on February 21^st with 66,439, wiggled around mostly downwards, and this past Wednesday reached 52,605.  Hospitalizations bottomed out on March 25^th with 39,903 and have been sloping up ever since, with the most recent figure, Tuesday’s, 44,015.  Deaths ended their steady decrease on April 12^th with 721, and have been slowly dropping since, to 712 on Wednesday.  Vaccination doses administered went up sort of a craggy mountain to summit April 13^th at 3,384,387, and have subsequently been falling, to reach 2,630,407 yesterday.  All of these numbers show a maturing, so to speak, of the recovery, with disease results down but not out and the tally of vaccinations, including the Times’s figures (conflicting with others who say it is higher, claiming 43% with at least one dose but 13% more needing another) indicating that we are beginning to run out of customers. 

Worldwide, we are only now reaching all-time highs in new daily cases, and are almost at that level with daily deaths.  As of yesterday, the map looked like this, with darker colors meaning higher new per-capita infections: 

As you can see, Europe and South America are generally doing the worst. We have read about India setting national records, but yesterday’s 349,378 all-time-high average daily new cases there is barely one-third of the highest United States percentage.  The American vaccination rate, even if it levels off, should assure that our country will continue to improve.

Otherwise, what’s in the coronavirus news?  Per Rebecca Robbins in the April 25^th New York Times, “Millions Are Skipping Their Second Doses of Covid Vaccines.”  A discouraging piece, with the major causes being concern about side effects, snags with places running out of specific products between doses, and decisions that the second shot was unnecessary.  The good part is that 92% of people having  one Pfizer or Moderna dose have returned for the second, but 8% not is still too high.

One idea to get vaccination rates higher was presented by Ben Mathis-Lilley in the April 23^rd Slate: “There Is a Glaringly Obvious Way to Get Everyone to Take the Vaccine.”  Per the subtitle, “it’s money.”  An Oxford professor and a Democratic presidential candidate endorsed payments of $1,000 and $1,500 respectively.  The author bounced around the idea, ultimately agreeing with it, but two of his counterpoints, that it would encourage people to wait for payments for such things in the future and that it could get them thinking it is riskier than it actually is, along with concern about stiffing or going through $100-$150 billion for each 100 million Americans already vaccinated, carry the day.

Now is the right time for “As Virus Rages Abroad, Biden Promises to Ship Millions of Vaccine Doses” (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, April 26^th.)  Already our production capability is way beyond the number of doses we need, so we can and should continue making them for free export.  We can’t be expected to provide all of the vaccine other countries need, appeals to guilt are inappropriate, and whining about sending less being like “showing up to a four-alarm fire with an eyedropper full of water” is grotesquely inaccurate, but we can make a massive difference, by saving possibly millions of lives, just by keeping the factories going. 

My clear answer to Aaron E. Carroll’s April 27^th New York Times question, “When Can We Declare the Pandemic Over?”, is that it will end for us individually.  Per Carroll, “normal has never meant “perfectly safe,”” “a safer world will likely still have Covid-19 in it,” and “if we can get the pandemic to a point that a vast majority of people who become sick get well, that the number of people who are hospitalized and dying is low and that this really isn’t any worse than your average seasonal respiratory virus, then it’s time to start seriously relaxing our restrictions.”  We should expect and encourage a falling-away of government regulations, with individual businesses choosing what rules to have and, of course, consumers doing what they think is right. 

And as for us?  In all, if you are not getting vaccinated because of religious beliefs, that is the price you pay for them.  If you are holding back because you believe some sort of conspiracy, such as a recurrence of the generations-ago Tuskegee abuses, you are a fool.  If you think one dose is enough, you are practicing medicine without a license.  If logistical problems have stopped you from getting your second shot, you need to aggressively overcome them.  If you fear general side effects, you have the cart in front of the horse.  If you are waiting for some kind of herd immunity, you are misguided.  If you think that because our last president did not take the pandemic seriously you do not need to be protected, you are worse than that.  If you have a true medical reason, you have my sympathy.  The pandemic is over for me – will it soon be over for you?