https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwmUHcNdqP0

Dear Commons Community,

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics concluded last night with a dazzling array of sights, sounds and people (see video above).  Regardless of whether you watched any of the events or whether you thought the Olympics should not have been held because of COVID-19, the closing ceremonies were impressive and original.  I watched many of the Olympic events during the past two weeks and found the performances of the world’s best athletes most entertaining.  The closing ceremonies were a fitting end.

To Beijing in 2022 for the Winter Olympics!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In her last race as an Olympian, Allyson Felix ran the second leg of the U.S.’s  gold-medal winning 4×400-meter relay team, earning her 11th career Olympic medal. She passed Carl Lewis as the most decorated American track and field athlete of all time, and is the most decorated American woman ever in the sport.

The USA women ran 3 minutes, 16.85 seconds, the fourth-fastest time ever. Poland won the silver medal (3:20.53) and Jamaica won bronze (3:21.24).

“I just came out really at peace, and wanting to soak it all in,” Felix said. “Obviously complete confidence in this team. I think this is a really special team because we’re not 400-meter runners — I don’t consider myself a 400 specialist, we all do different things and it was really cool to come together and to get to close out the Olympic Games and for me, my Olympic career in this way.”

The talent and star power of the U.S. quartet was nearly unprecedented. Felix received the baton from 400 hurdles world record holder and gold medalist Sydney McLaughlin and handed off to Dalilah Muhammad, who had the 400 hurdles world record before McLaughlin and won the silver medal here. The anchor was 19-year-old Athing Mu, who won the 800 gold and in June had the fastest 400 leg in NCAA history, 48.85 seconds.

“It’s an amazing group of women right here,” McLaughlin said. “Once in a lifetime opportunity, so I think we all just knew going in it was going to be fast and just have fun with it.”

“I was just honored,” Muhammad said of the chance to be part of Felix’s last Olympic race. “Of course [Felix] earned it, but she’s so deserving of it too and so definitely inspired by her throughout my entire career and I’m truly just honored to have been part of this team with her. I think we’re going to look back at this and think about how special this moment really was.”

It was the seventh straight Olympics the U.S. women have won the 4×400. Felix was a member of each of the last four, though she acknowledged that her role was different this time — where in the past she would have been one of the legs counted on to be fastest and really pull the team to a win, this time she saw herself as the veteran bringing experience.

Given the four women who ran on Saturday night, it was easy to wonder if the 33-year-old world record was in play. The Soviet Union ran 3:15.17 at the 1988 Olympics to edge out the U.S. team for gold; the Americans ran 3:15.51 that year. Getting under that mark required the women to run an average of 48.78 seconds per leg; according to World Athletics their splits were: McLaughlin 49.96 seconds, Felix 49.58, Muhammad 48.97 and Mu 48.34.

It was still the fastest 4×400 since that ’88 Olympics.

The relay gold capped a stellar showing for the women of U.S. track and field. Of the 26 medals won by Americans during the meet, 15 were thanks to women, including five of the seven golds the U.S. claimed.

“I think it was awesome,” Felix said. “I think the women showed up; I think we’ve been showing up on the track, off the track, in all of the ways. To me, I loved it. I love seeing it.

“Sitting back and watching each woman perform, it was inspiring. It was like, ‘OK, who’s next?’ and it was kind of like a buzz.”

Standing on the podium, Felix said she closed her eyes and took a moment to take it all in.

“To be surrounded by these women in that moment was really special,” she said.

While Felix repeatedly said this was her last Olympics, when asked if it’s possible to see the same four women team up next year at the World Championships, which are being held in the United States for the first time, she didn’t say no. Instead, she said, “We’ll see.”

A champion for the ages!

Tony

This photo provided by NASA shows a proposal for the Mars Dune Alpha habitat on Mars.

Dear Commons Community,

To prepare for eventually sending astronauts to Mars, NASA began taking applications yesterday for four people to live for a year in Mars Dune Alpha. That’s a 1,700-square-foot Martian habitat (see above), created by a 3D-printer, and inside a building at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The paid volunteers will work a simulated Martian exploration mission complete with spacewalks, limited communications back home, restricted food and resources and equipment failures.

NASA is planning three of these experiments with the first one starting in the fall next year. Food will all be ready-to-eat space food and at the moment there are no windows planned. Some plants will be grown, but not potatoes like in the movie “The Martian.” Damon played stranded astronaut Mark Watney, who survived on spuds.

“We want to understand how humans perform in them,” said lead scientist Grace Douglas. “We are looking at Mars realistic situations.”

The application process opened Friday and they’re not seeking just anybody. The requirements are strict, including a master’s degree in a science, engineering or math field or pilot experience. Only American citizens or permanent U.S. residents are eligible. Applicants have to be between 30 and 55, in good physical health with no dietary issues and not prone to motion sickness.

That shows NASA is looking for people who are close to astronauts, said former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. And, he said. that’s a good thing because it is a better experiment if the participants are more similar to the people who will really go to Mars. Past Russian efforts at a pretend Mars mission called Mars 500 didn’t end well partly because the people were too much like everyday people, he said.

For the right person this could be great, said Hadfield, who spent five months in orbit in 2013 at the International Space Station, where he played guitar and sang a cover video of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”

“Just think how much you’re going to be able to catch up on Netflix,” he said. “If they have a musical instrument there, you could go into there knowing nothing and come out a concert musician, if you want.”

There could be “incredible freedom” in a “year away from the demands of your normal life.”

Attitude is key, said Hadfield, who has a novel “The Apollo Murders” coming out in the fall. He said the participants need to be like the Matt Damon character in the movie: “Super competent, resourceful and not relying on other people to feel comfortable.”

Interesting opportunity for the right persons!

Tony

Kevin Durant Celebrating Last Night’s Olympic Win

Dear Commons Community,

There have been many special moments during the Summer Olympics – Simone Biles, the US Women’s Soccer team bronze medal, and fourteen-year old Quan Hongchan’s perfect dives.  Last night, was another with the US Basketball Team beating France 87-82 for the gold medal. Kevin Durant was spectacular especially in the final seconds.  Coach Gregg Poppvich summed up his feelings:

“Every championship is special, and the group you’re with is special, but I can be honest and say this is the most responsibility I’ve ever felt,” said U.S. coach Gregg Popovich, who adds this gold to five NBA titles he’s won as coach in San Antonio. “You’re playing for so many people that are watching, and for a country, and other countries involved. The responsibility was awesome. I felt it every day for several years now.”

Congratulations Popovich, Durant and the rest of the team.

Below is a summary courtesy of the Associated Press.

Tony

——————————————————————————————–

The Associated Press

Golden, again: US beats France 87-82 for Tokyo title

By Tim Reynolds

SAITAMA, Japan (AP) — Nothing about the summer was easy for the U.S. men’s basketball team, and neither was the gold-medal game.

The Americans expected nothing less.

And in the end, their Olympic reign lives on.

Kevin Durant scored 29 points and joined Carmelo Anthony as the only three-time men’s gold medalists in Olympic history and the U.S. held off France 87-82 on Saturday to win the title at the Tokyo Games — ending a summer that started with sputters but closed with celebration.

“Every championship is special, and the group you’re with is special, but I can be honest and say this is the most responsibility I’ve ever felt,” said U.S. coach Gregg Popovich, who adds this gold to five NBA titles he’s won as coach in San Antonio. “You’re playing for so many people that are watching, and for a country, and other countries involved. The responsibility was awesome. I felt it every day for several years now. I’m feeling pretty light now and looking forward to getting back to the hotel.”

Wine was awaiting. Later Saturday night, after Slovenia and Australia play for bronze, Popovich and the team return to the arena one more time for their gold medals.

“Everybody was questioning us,” U.S. forward Draymond Green. “This is special.”

Durant sealed the win with two free throws with 8.8 seconds left, making the outcome academic. The lead was five, France’s final possession was irrelevant, and it was over. The U.S. players gathered for a hug at midcourt, Durant, Green and Bam Adebayo wrapped themselves in American flags, Popovich had a long hug with his assistants and the journey was complete.

“I’m so happy for Pop, the staff, the players, the country,” said a teary-eyed USA Basketball managing director Jerry Colangelo, who was overseeing the men’s program for a fourth and final Olympics and won gold in each one. “It’s a great way to finish.”

Jayson Tatum added 19 points, Damian Lillard and Jrue Holiday each scored 11 for the U.S. — which knew nothing but gold would make this trip a success.

“I think it’s more joy than relief, but definitely some relief,” Lillard said. “Because of the expectations that get placed on Team USA, obviously it’s going to be some relief.”

Evan Fournier and Rudy Gobert each scored 16 for France, which now has three silver medals — all coming after gold-medal-game losses to the U.S. Guerschon Yabusele scored 13, Nando de Colo had 12 and Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot scored 11 for France.

“They played better,” Fournier conceded, as Popovich stopped to hug him. “They played better.”

The mission was accomplished: Gold, again — the 16th time in 19 Olympic tries for the U.S. The Americans had a players-only meeting after the opening loss to France at these games, vowed to figure things out and never lost again.

“Each and every one of us put in that work every single day, from coaches to the trainers to the players,” Durant said. “We all came in with that goal of, ‘Let’s finish this thing off. Let’s build a family. Let’s build this team. Let’s grow this team every day.’ … Man, it’s just incredible to be a part of something so special, and I’m bonding with these guys for life, this family for life.”

For some, it adds to family legacies. Holiday now is an Olympic gold medalist, just like his wife Lauren was twice with the U.S. women’s national soccer team. JaVale McGee now has Olympic gold, just like his mother Pamela won with the U.S. women in basketball at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. They’re the first to do that in U.S. Olympic history; the only other known occurrence in Olympic history was a Russian mother-son combo who won medals in fencing and water polo in 1960 and 1980.

“It’s an amazing feeling, man,” said McGee, who adds gold to his three NBA titles. “I’ve got a gold medal. My mother has a gold medal. We’re the first to do it, mother-son duo. It’s an amazing feeling. You can’t really explain it. Just knowing you’re the best in the world, amazing, man.”

For Milwaukee Bucks teammates Holiday and Khris Middleton, it’s admission into a rare club: Before now, only Scottie Pippen (who did it twice), Michael Jordan, LeBron James and Kyrie Irving had won an NBA title and Olympic gold in the same year.

“Definitely a great summer,” Holiday said.

And for Popovich, it completes an Olympic journey that started a half-century ago. He was playing for the United States Air Force Academy, tried unsuccessfully to make the 1972 U.S. Olympic team — “the powers that be actually selected Doug Collins instead of me, it’s hard to believe,” Popovich joked earlier this summer — then accepted the task of replacing Mike Krzyzewski as the U.S. coach for this Olympic cycle.

“Being part of the Olympics has been a dream,” Popovich said.

Popovich insists this is not about his legacy, but his players and assistants might disagree.

“I’m just thrilled for Pop and for Jerry,” U.S. assistant coach Steve Kerr said. “Pop has been thinking about this for the last four or five years. Jerry is the one who turned USA Basketball around after the ’04 Olympic loss. … We wanted to send Jerry out with the gold medal.”

The U.S. missed its first eight 3-point tries before Durant got one to drop with 2:04 left in the opening quarter, starting what became a 21-8 run by the Americans on the way to a 39-26 lead midway through the second quarter.

Just as he did when the U.S. was down against Spain and Australia earlier in the knockout round, Durant stepped up at the biggest moments. He had 21 points by halftime, keeping the Americans afloat.

“He’s phenomenal,” Adebayo said.

France closed the half on a 13-5 spurt and got within 44-39 at the break, then within two early in the third quarter.

And after the U.S. briefly led by 14, Nicolas Batum — who saved his team with a last-second block to close out a win over Slovenia in the semifinals — beat the third-quarter buzzer with a 3-pointer that cut the U.S. lead to 71-63 entering the fourth. But the French never got the lead back.

This U.S. team was one that seemed vulnerable when the summer started with losses in its first two exhibitions, wasn’t even complete when the Olympics started because three players were in the NBA Finals, lost Bradley Beal to virus-related issues before the games began, and had lost its last two games against France.

Didn’t matter. Olympic champions, again.

“We’re thrilled and honored to be able to represent the country the way we did,” Popovich said. “The team progressed very rapidly in a very short period of time under some difficult circumstances, which I think made this win all the sweeter. We’re glad it’s over.”

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book,  The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War.  Gladwell is among my favorite authors, having previously read Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw.  However, I did not know what to expect in his latest book that focuses on air warfare during World War II.  Specifically, he looks at the conflict among American and Allied  leaders who propose precision bombing of industrial and transportation hubs versus those favoring large-scale area bombing of major cities.  The former focuses on destroying the means of producing war materials while the latter devastates major population centers and inflicts large numbers of civilian casualties. 

The term Bomber Mafia was the actually appellation given to the instructors at the Air Corps Tactical School in Langley, Virginia in the 1930s.  General Haywood Hansell was a major proponent of precision bombing using the latest technology, a Norden bombsight (a 50-pound analog computer) that would aid in dropping bombs from high altitudes on very precise targets such as factories, bridges, and aqueducts.   Unfortunately, many of the precision bombing missions failed to achieve their intended goals due to poor weather conditions, jet streams, and human error.  When the decision is made to bomb Japan, Haywood and his colleagues make a major push for precision bombing but eventually are overruled.  Haywood, who was in charge of the air war in the Pacific, is replaced by General Curtis LeMay who opts instead for a scorched-earth policy designed to kill as many Japanese as possible and to force them to sue for peace.  In total, sixty-seven Japanese cities including Tokyo were subjected to large-scale bombing and napalm, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.  LeMay justified his actions based on the alternative that a ground invasion of Japan would have had as many casualties including American soldiers.

Gladwell’s concluding sentence refers to present day precision drone attacks that can target and kill a single individual in a particular room of a house.  “Curtis LeMay won the battle.  Haywood won the war.”

Good read!

Below is the New York Times book review.

Tony

———————————————————————–

The New York Times Book Review

Malcolm Gladwell on the Hard Decisions of War

Thomas E. Ricks

April 25, 2021

THE BOMBER MAFIA
A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
By Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War” is a kind of love song to the United States Air Force, which is surprising, because it is the least romantic of our armed services, with leaders who focus on technology, not tradition. Also, the air arm tends to be regarded by the other services as suspiciously civilian-ish — as in the soldiers’ one-liner, “I have a lot of respect for the U.S. military, and also for the Air Force.” But in Gladwell’s deft hands, the Air Force generals of World War II come back to life as the stirring 20th-century equivalent of Adm. Horatio Nelson and his band of audacious captains from the age of fighting sail.

Here is Gladwell’s stunning description of a United States Air Force B-17 bomber being cut up on a run over Germany:

“One 20-millimeter cannon shell penetrated the right side of the airplane and exploded beneath the pilot, cutting one of the gunners in the leg. A second shell hit the radio compartment, cutting the legs of the radio operator off at the knees. He bled to death. A third hit the bombardier in the head and shoulder. A fourth shell hit the cockpit, taking out the plane’s hydraulic system. A fifth severed the rudder cables. A sixth hit the number 3 engine, setting it on fire. This was all in one plane. The pilot kept flying.”

The unexpected hero of Gladwell’s story is Curtis LeMay — yes, that one, the general who firebombed Tokyo and dozens of other Japanese cities and then, decades later, supposedly advocated bombing the Vietnamese back into the Stone Age. (Gladwell partly excuses this notorious phrase, saying it was likely the work of a ghostwriter.) The villain, or at least loser in this account, is another Air Force general, Haywood Hansell, who had tried to win the war in the Pacific through the precision-bombing of Japan. In Gladwell’s account, Hansell’s relatively more humane approach didn’t work. One historian tells the author that Hansell “was not the kind of man who was willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people. He just didn’t have it. Didn’t have it in his soul.” After a few months in command of the B-29 raids on Japan, Hansell was dismissed and replaced by LeMay, who was told to come up with a new plan.

What could be more American than the story of LeMay, a gruff, cigar-chewing Ohioan who made his way through the state university by working night shifts at a foundry? He was hardly a theorist, and especially not someone out to make war more humane. LeMay was instead, in the words of the military historian Conrad Crane, “the Air Force’s ultimate problem solver.” As Gladwell tells it, the practical problem was how to win the war as quickly as possible. LeMay’s solution was to saturate Tokyo with napalm bombs, killing as many as 100,000 people in about six hours, and then to go on and firebomb dozens of other Japanese cities, killing thousands upon thousands, sometimes when the target cities were of little or no military value. This ferocious approach may have helped end the war, but there is no question that it was horrible.

One of Gladwell’s skills is enabling us to see the world through the eyes of his subjects. To most people, a city park is a grace note, a green space that makes urban life more livable. To bombing experts, parks are nettlesome “firebreaks” that interfere with a target city’s combustibility. Randall Jarrell captured LeMay’s blithely brutal approach in two of the most memorable lines of 20th-century American poetry: “In bombers named for girls, we burned / The cities we had learned about in school.”

A novelty of this book is that Gladwell says it began as an audiobook and then became a written one, reversing the usual process. It is indeed a conversational work, almost garrulous at times, as when he reports that one psychologist “has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies — that some part of him or her has died along with the partner.” However, this chatty style also glides over some important historical questions.

Gladwell is a wonderful storyteller. When he is introducing characters and showing them in conflict, “The Bomber Mafia” is gripping. I enjoyed this short book thoroughly, and would have been happy if it had been twice as long. But when Gladwell leaps to provide superlative assessments, or draws broad lessons of history from isolated incidents, he makes me wary. Those large conclusions seemed unsubstantiated to me. Was Henry Stimson, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war, truly “responsible, more than anyone, for the extraordinary war machine that the United States built in the early years of the Second World War”? It certainly is arguable that others, like Gen. George C. Marshall, were just as important, but Gladwell simply tosses out the claim about Stimson and hurries on. Another example: Gladwell calls the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9 and 10, 1945, “the longest night of the war.” This unfortunate phrase, this unproven superlative, is repeated in the book’s unwieldy subtitle. I immediately thought, Oh yeah? What about the sailor whose ship is torpedoed and who hangs from debris in the water with no chance of rescue? Or the soldier in a minefield whose buddy is bleeding to death? What of the infinitely long nights of millions of concentration camp prisoners?

Gladwell argues that LeMay’s savage firebombing campaign succeeded, and that, combined with the two atomic bombs that followed, shortened the war. “Curtis LeMay’s approach brought everyone — Americans and Japanese — back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible,” he writes. Had the war gone on longer, into the winter of 1945-46, he suggests, millions of Japanese could have died of starvation.

Yet he also concludes that in the long run, in the years that followed, the idealistic Hansell was right to believe that an air campaign based on precision strikes was possible. So, he asserts, “Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.” The evidence for this, of course, is the ability of today’s “stealthy” radar-evading bombers to drop ordnance from great heights and have them guided to precise points on a given target — say, a hardened aircraft hangar or an enemy intelligence agency’s power system.

But I don’t think the ghost of LeMay can be put to rest so easily. The American military’s precise new way of information-based warfare so far has been tested only in relatively small and short bombing campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, the gunboat wars of our time. Precision-guided munitions are hugely expensive, and the stockpiles of them are surprisingly small. What would happen with bombing in a really big war remains to be seen. So it is probably too early, far too early, to believe that wide-area, city-destroying attacks that kill large numbers of civilians have become a horror only of the past.

Governor Asa Hutchinson Press Conference.  His comments regretting banning local face mask mandates comes at the 19:20 mark.

Dear Common Community,

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson  was asked at a press conference (see video above) on Tuesday why he signed a law banning local face mask mandates. He replied, “Our cases were at a low point. Everything has changed now, and yes, in hindsight, I wish that had not become law, but it is the law, and the only chance we have is either to amend it or for the courts to say that it has an unconstitutional foundation.”

The governor has called the state Legislature back for a special session in an attempt to change the law to allow local school districts to enact their own rules to protect younger students who are not yet eligible for the vaccine.

“The local school districts should make the call, and they should have more options to make sure that their school is a safe environment during a very challenging time for education,” Hutchinson said at the press conference.

Hutchinson added that he knew the Legislature would have overridden him if he didn’t sign the law, calling into doubt the appetite for the changes the governor requested. He allowed the state’s mask mandate to lapse in March.  As reported by several media outlets.

According to tracking from the New York Times, over the last 14 days Arkansas has seen a 69 percent increase in cases and a 52 percent increase in hospitalizations. According to the state’s health department tracking, 260 patients being treated for the virus were on ventilators, the most since the all-time high of 268 in early January.

Only 37 percent of Arkansas residents have been fully vaccinated, one of the lower rates in the country, but Hutchinson said Tuesday that demand was increasing. In April, he signed into law a bill preventing state and local governments from requiring proof of vaccination to access their services.

“I think we’ve seen a sea change in attitude, a sea [change] in action, more importantly, of people stepping up to the plate and recognizing it’s important for their health,” said Hutchinson of vaccinations in the state. “I think you’re also seeing more people trying to get accurate information.”

Dr. Jose Romero, Arkansas’s health secretary, said during the Tuesday press conference that cases had exploded among young residents, saying 19 percent of the current cases were among those under 18, and referring to the data as “sobering news.” Romero added that while there was no mask mandate for children, he “clearly” recommended it as students returned to class.

Two Arkansas parents have sued the state in an attempt to get a judge to temporarily block the rule, allowing schools to require masks. Other states have also passed legislation or signed executive orders banning masks in schools. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, said Sunday that students “can’t learn” when they wear masks. A Florida school district reversed its decision to mandate masks after GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened to withhold funding from schools that required face coverings.

On Tuesday, the White House was critical of DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as their states have contributed an outsized share of new COVID-19 cases. Press secretary Jen Psaki said, “If you aren’t going to help, if you aren’t going to abide by public health guidance, then get out of the way and let people do the right thing.” She later clarified that she meant: “That means don’t ban, don’t make it harder for people to put requirements on masks — or asking for vaccination status — into law.”

Despite the rise in cases, Hutchinson also asked the Legislature to affirm the state’s decision to end participation in federal unemployment and pandemic relief programs, saying, “It is more important that we reduce the number of unemployed and put more people to work than it is for the state to accept any federal relief programs related to unemployment.” A number of states began cutting the expanded benefits in June, but there is little evidence that the lack of support for the jobless has helped lower unemployment rates.

Better late than never!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

College leaders across the country have been debating for months whether or  not to require vaccinations for faculty, staff and students in an effort to mitigate COVID -19.

Ursinus College is warning that while vaccinations are critical, they won’t be enough by themselves to prevent the more-transmissible Delta variant from running loose. A mathematical model developed at Ursinus, a residential campus of 1,500 students outside of Philadelphia, shows that even though administrators expect more than 90 percent of students to get vaccinated — under a mandate that allows for exemptions — that’s not enough to prevent an outbreak too big for the college to handle. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The main takeaway that I want people on small campuses to be aware of is that a high level of vaccination is essential, but a high level of absolute vaccination alone is probably not enough to guarantee that you’re not going to have significant infections on campus,” said Mark B. Schneider, Ursinus’ vice president for academic affairs and the physicist who built the model.

Of course, many colleges are doing much less than what Schneider recommends. Of the nearly 4,000 degree-granting institutions in America, The Chronicle has identified fewer than 700 that have a vaccine mandate for students or employees. Many experts recommend requiring vaccines as a baseline policy for the fall.

The problem is that college is a more contagious environment than most. Students live, play, and learn closely together. Schneider guessed that the coronavirus’s reproduction rate — the average number of people an infected person infects — is twice as high on a typical residential college campus as it is among the general public. And the Delta variant’s reproduction rate is already higher than the same number for previous versions of the coronavirus.

Schneider estimated a reproduction rate of 10 for the Delta variant on a college campus that takes no mitigation measures and where everybody is vulnerable to infection (in reality, every college campus will have at least some protected, vaccinated people). That’s a much higher rate than some other estimates, such as one posted recently by a pair of Yale University researchers. But in principle scientists agree that many typical college activities push campuses’ reproduction rates up.

Still, Ursinus is planning for a fully in-person fall, with athletics and no online or hybrid class options. Schneider and other administrators believe they can bring the campus reproduction rate below 1 with a combination of vaccination and other measures, including entry testing, weekly surveillance testing for unvaccinated students, and a mask mandate. A rate below 1 is critical to keep an outbreak from spreading exponentially, Schneider said. He emphasized that Ursinus’s exact Covid-19 policy may change as administrators learn more over the coming weeks.

In sum, the Delta variant is causing many colleges to rethink their policies for dealing with COVID for the coming academic semester.

Tony

Jen Psaki’s comments about Governors DeSantis and Abbott comes at about the 38:40 mark.

Dear Commons Community,

As case counts are mount to staggering numbers, in Texas and Florida, the two states where one-third of all infections nationwide were recorded last week, the Republican leaders there have strenuously resisted public health advice, pushing back against mask mandates and vaccination requirements. That has led to mounting frustration within the White House with Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, and Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas.  Yesterday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the White House had offered help to both governors. She described the talks with Austin and Tallahassee as ongoing, suggesting that the offer from Washington had not yet been accepted. The standstill has plainly exasperated the White House, which wants to see the spike in the Delta variant subside. That will be impossible without curbing its spread across the Southeast.

“If you aren’t going to help, if you aren’t going to abide by public health guidance, then get out of the way and let people do the right thing,” Psaki said yesterday in response to a question from a Yahoo News reporter about DeSantis and Abbott in particular. 

Asked to clarify what she meant by having the two governors “get out of the way,” Psaki elaborated, “That means don’t ban, don’t make it harder for people to put requirements on masks — or asking for vaccination status — into law.”  As reported  by Yahoo News.

Psaki had also addressed the worsening situation in Florida and Texas on Monday, alluding to the political ambitions of both governors, who are widely believed to harbor presidential aspirations. “Leaders are going to have to choose whether they’re going to follow public health guidelines or they’re going to follow politics,” she said.

The DeSantis administration quickly punched back. “By dismissively ignoring Gov. DeSantis’ efforts to protect vulnerable Floridians, Psaki is the one playing politics with the pandemic,” his communications director, Christina Pushaw, told Fox News on Monday.

Abbott has denounced what he described as “draconian controls” related to the pandemic, arguing that undocumented migrants at the border with Mexico presented a greater problem than the spread of the Delta variant.

The friction between the White House and the two governors is not unlike what took place during the Trump administration, when President Donald Trump frequently fought with Democratic governors like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Andrew Cuomo of New York.

The difference today is that the end of the pandemic appeared to be at hand only weeks ago: President Biden went so far as to declare “independence” from the coronavirus during the Fourth of July holiday. No independence, however, can be possible without widespread vaccination, which the United States has not yet achieved. Last week, the European Union overtook the U.S. in vaccinations after lagging behind for the first half of 2021.

Since the arrival of Delta in the United States late in the spring, some Republican governors, such as Alabama’s Kay Ivey, Jim Justice of West Virginia and Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, have forcefully spoken about the need for people to get vaccinated. DeSantis and Abbott appear to be following a more ideological approach, one that dismisses new restrictions as unnecessary and oppressive.

On Tuesday, DeSantis said it was wrong to blame the unvaccinated, as Ivey has done. Closely echoing one of Trump’s favorite complaints, he chided the media for being “judgmental.”

To be sure, the Delta spike will not be nearly as severe as previous surges of the coronavirus, most experts agree. On Monday the White House announced that 70 percent of American adults are now vaccinated. Biden had hoped to reach that goal by Independence Day.

The White House has shown frustration with some reporting about the Delta variant, with one of Psaki’s deputies taking to Twitter to lambaste the Washington Post and the New York Times for their allegedly hyperbolic reporting on a recent Delta cluster in Provincetown, Mass. Although an epidemiological investigation of that cluster made clear that Delta is more transmissible than previous strains of the coronavirus, the vaccines are highly effective in preventing infection in the first place.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended renewed masking, including for vaccinated people, after studying the Provincetown outbreak. After the small vacation town — which swells with revelers in the summer months — reimposed a mask mandate of its own, infection rates there plummeted. Masks compensate for the vaccines’ lower efficacy in keeping down Delta’s transmission rate.

Parts of the Northeast and Pacific West rushed to reimpose mask mandates of their own, even though populations there — as in Provincetown — are highly vaccinated and therefore protected to begin with.

The situation is reversed in Florida, Texas and their neighbors, where vaccination rates are low and resistance to masking is high. There, and in other Republican enclaves, the notion of masking up again was met with strong resistance and vows of defiance. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a centrist Democrat, announced Monday that his state would be reimposing a mask mandate, providing a potential test case for stricter measures in the region.

DeSantis, in particular, has willingly assumed the role of White House foe, a role he appears to believe could help him politically, should he seek the presidency in 2024. He spent much of the spring and early summer celebrating his record in handling the pandemic. Critics say that record is exaggerated and inaccurate.

In recent days, DeSantis has fought the imposition of new mask mandates, including in schools. Before that, he fought the cruise industry in court for trying to impose vaccine mandates in Florida ports.

The frustration with Abbott and DeSantis is surely informed by the fact that both men appear as if they would like the office currently occupied by Biden. They have little political incentive to follow his administration’s guidelines, as the Republican base would almost certainly penalize them for doing so.

A reporter asked Psaki on Tuesday if the president had spoken to DeSantis about Florida’s spike. “If we thought it would make a difference,” she answered, “I’m sure he would.”

You got it right, Jen!

Tony