Eight days ago, Katelyn Jetelina, writing as Your Local Epidemiologist on Substack, published the column “New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529.” She’s published four updates since then.
It’s tempting to say that everyone should read them, but that’s not true. Anti-vax, anti-mask, virus libertarians who think they have a right to contract and spread a deadly disease will get little out of Jetelina’s writing. Adding it to the toxic soup in their minds would be like putting Bartlett pears in canned chili.
Everyone struggling with the crush of Omicron news should read them, probably twice.
I’m a pretty smart guy, if I do say so myself. I write good and got high marks in several post-graduate math classes. And I gotta say that trying to grasp the epidemiology of Omicron 8 days in is like trying to do calculus homework while hungover. It was 45 years ago, but I remember that it was hard.
So I read Jetelina’s columns twice and sometimes three times. That’s a holdover from newspaper editing. First time to see what the person is writing about. (If they don’t know, you won’t, so you can stop there.) Second is to move things around and reword them for clarity and sense, which is what most of editing is, as opposed to proofreading. Third time is proofreading, fixing the typos you missed or created in the second read.
With Jetelina’s columns, the first time is to read what she says and relate it to the charts and to her clearly stated conclusions. If all you’re after is the conclusions and you trust her expertise, you can stop after that. I’m not judging. The second time is to conceptualize what she’s saying, and to reread each paragraph now that you know why she wrote it. And the third time is just to enjoy a writer who knows her material and is good at expressing it and gives you the relief of understanding what some of the noises in the darkness are.
There simply aren’t that many good writers telling us about Covid. The New York Times is a good example of what’s wrong. They can tell us what Covid means for Biden’s approval ratings going into the midterms, but they fired their best Covid writer because he hurt the feelings of a handful of teenagers. (You could look it up, and you may not accept my characterization. Again, I’m not judging.)
There has also been some awful leadership on the topic, everything from Ralph’s maskless home-spinning to Trump apparently trying to give it to his cabinet. There hasn’t been a time in my lifetime when so great a crisis has felt like a few hundred million people having to try and go it alone.
Writers like Jetelina become the de facto leaders, and in that context, I’d welcome the names of other writers doing half so good a job at explaining the mechanics of Covid. Read her and be aware of what she’s getting out of it: First, the satisfaction of knowing a topic well, satisfaction that could border on joy if the topic were not so grim; and second, the sense of accomplishment at being able to share that knowledge in a way that can help her neighbors.
That said, her conclusions might be helpful in educating your friends or loved ones who are vax-resistant. I can write all day about how self-centered and ignorant they are – trust me on this – and it will neither help nor harm because they’re not reading this. Those susceptible to science and persuasion are already vaxed. The rest will have to be dealt with one-on-one by people they’ll listen to. Tell them what Jetelina wrote. Tell them you believe it. Tell them they’re not vaxing for themselves. Offer to go to CVS with them and monitor them for a day.
Tell them you don’t want them to die.