thank you to Everyone who wrote last month confirming that only journalists care about what’s going on at Twitter.As Elon Musk’s weird dance between buying the company and trash-talking it continues, it’s a healthy reminder for us not to get too obsessed — though now he may be accessing Twitter user data The complete fire hose for you possible Worried about what he would do with it. Here is the update.
us Do Know how to beat a pandemic – anyway, some of us
It’s Pride Month in America, so as Wired’s first queer editor-in-chief, I’m proud to present Maryn McKenna’s new story about the resilience of the LGBTQ community: The Covid-19 outbreak last July in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
When you learn the phrase “breakthrough infection”, you probably remember it (if you remember anything from a year ago during the pandemic). Tens of thousands of people, mostly gay men, flooded the streets and packed nightclubs on the weekend of July 4, and while most were vaccinated, the coronavirus swept across town, eventually infecting about 1,100 people .
At the time, the outbreak seemed like a cautionary tale, with subtle echoes of the stigma against gay men in the wake of HIV/AIDS. But as Marion’s report shows, it’s now clear that this is actually a success story. The Provincetown wave could lead to hundreds of thousands of new cases. Instead, it failed. Although Delta ravaged the United States that summer, genetic analysis showed that few infections came from Provincetown. Officials were able to track and contain the outbreak thanks to two things: Massachusetts’ exceptionally good public health and medical research infrastructure, and the gay community’s habit of being transparent about infectious diseases. As the CDC expert told Marion, “This is fantastic. Other CDC folks will tell you: This is unlike any other group they’ve dealt with in terms of getting information.”
Here’s the thing, though: a story as hopeful as Provincetown’s, if anything, just underscores how difficult it is to get Covid under control without these anomalies. In fact, as we’ve been reporting, as funding shrinks and testing data becomes more fragmented, America’s ability to track and defend against future waves of the virus is weakening, not improving. In the ongoing evolutionary war between humans and SARS-CoV-2, the virus is winning, at least in the sense that it is evolving much faster than we can keep up. We pretty much accepted living with it and accepting that we would continue to hold onto it. It’s true that the disease hasn’t gotten more deadly with successive sub-variants of Omicron, but there’s still no guarantee that this trend will continue. What public health measures, if any, would you like to see remain in place as our strategies for dealing with this disease evolve with the virus? What lessons do you worry America and the world have not learned? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
