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Thursday, January 13, 2022

POLITICO NIGHTLY: The pandemic’s barriers to exit



 
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BY RENUKA RAYASAM

Bruce, a dog, looks on as his owner has his nose swabbed by a technician at a drive-through Covid-19 testing site at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky.

Bruce, a dog, looks on as his owner has his nose swabbed by a technician at a drive-through Covid-19 testing site at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky. | Jon Cherry/Getty Images

AN OMICRON NUDGE — Last week, when my husband and I were sidelined with fatigue, headaches, runny noses and coughs, I panicked. Not about having Covid — we’re both vaccinated and boosted and otherwise healthy — but about the prospect of having to keep our two toddlers, who are 3 and 2, home for two weeks under their day care guidelines for Covid exposures.

So I thought about doing something that elicits sympathy from parents of young kids right now: I contemplated not getting tested at all.

Two years into a pandemic whose spread depends on individual decision making — whether people choose to get vaccinated, to wear a mask or to get tested — political leaders, businesses, schools and day cares are struggling to find the right way to nudge people into making choices that benefit society broadly but sometimes come at steep personal cost.

And as the Biden administration prepares to send Covid tests to millions of homes and schools and requires insurance companies to cover their cost, the country faces another hurdle: getting people to take the tests and, should they test positive, follow guidance that helps limit the spread of the virus.

Covid cases have blown past previous peaks. Hospitalizations are as high as they were last winter and are set to rise further. About a quarter of the population has yet to receive a vaccine dose. But policymakers have given up on shutdowns. Instead they are relying more and more on Americans to navigate Covid guidance on their own by monitoring symptoms and testing and following quarantine guidance.

“More people are saying things like, ‘I am over it. I am calling it,’” said Elizabeth Levy Paluck, deputy director of the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton. “It’s relatable.”

Federal and local governments need to make testing, masking and getting a vaccine as easy as possible, said Raymond Niaura, a tobacco use expert at New York University. Ideally, people should be able to get tests and vaccines within a half mile of their homes with no waits or appointments, he said.

“There is always going to be a group of people who won’t budge,” he said. “The goal should be to make that group as small as possible.”

Decades of behavioral science research shows that the first step to getting people to do something is to make it easy, said Paluck, who studies social psychology and behavior change in the U.S. as well as in post-conflict countries like Rwanda.

“It is very hard to create motivation,” Paluck said. “The simple thing is to remove a barrier.”

Yet under the Biden administration’s testing plan, only a limited supply will actually be sent to people’s homes. Federal health officials are also still weighing whether to send people high quality masks to their homes. Instead, a big part of the testing plan involves what Paluck describes as a barrier: requiring people to go to participating pharmacies to get tests covered by their insurance.

Then there is a confusing patchwork of guidance from the CDC, schools and other businesses about when to test, what to do after being exposed or experiencing symptoms and how long to isolate.

To nudge people to report potential exposures and to test if they have no or mild symptoms, federal and local governments and businesses need to think more creatively, Paluck said. In post-conflict zones, Paluck found that the stories people tell shift their behavior. She suggested getting people to see testing and masking as the antidote to isolation. “One thing we could try to do is brand these late-arriving measures as our ticket to more connection,” she said.

Businesses, she said, could create a feeling of interdependence by making visible the names and stories of specific employees — janitors or cafeteria workers — who would be most affected by a workplace outbreak.

“We need to already have these mental maps,” Paluck said, “showing us that there are so many people this would affect and I know their names.”

My husband and I did take PCR tests in the end. It helped that the barriers were low: We were able to skip the hourslong testing lines because I taught a class at the University of Texas at El Paso.

We were also worried about his mom and co-workers and the other kids in our day care.

When we finally got our results nearly six days later, they were negative for Covid — but positive for the flu.

I had meant to get my flu shot when I got my Covid booster in December, but I worried about the side effects of getting both at once, even though the experts said it was safe. So I put it off. And then I never got around to going back to the pharmacy.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @RenuRayasam.

 

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WHAT'D I MISS?

— Schumer reveals endgame for clash over filibuster and voting reform: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will bring elections and voting legislation to the Senate floor in the coming days, using existing congressional rules to evade an initial GOP filibuster . The House will imminently pass a bill containing both sweeping federal elections reform and beefed up Voting Right Act provisions. Because the bill will be sent to the Senate as a “message” from the House, it will not be subject to an initial filibuster by the GOP and will be debated on the floor. The Senate will then confront its debate over the filibuster when Schumer moves to shut down debate.

— NATO, Russia in standoff after talks in Brussels: NATO allies and Russia ended nearly four hours of security talks in a standoff, with the West flatly rejecting Moscow’s demands for no further expansion of alliance membership and the withdrawal of NATO forces from Eastern Europe. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that allies were adamant they would not accede to Russia’s demand for a guarantee that Ukraine and Georgia never join the alliance, nor would they allow Moscow to dictate where allied countries choose to position their forces.

— Jan. 6 select panel to seek McCarthy’s testimony: The Jan. 6 select committee has requested House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s testimony about his interactions with Donald Trump as a mob swarmed the Capitol. It follows months of speculation about when the panel would seek the California Republican’s cooperation with their probe. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany appeared virtually today for an interview with the panel.

— U.S. consumer prices soared 7 percent in past year, most since 1982: Prices paid by U.S. consumers jumped 7 percent in December from a year earlier, the highest inflation rate since 1982 and the latest evidence that rising costs for food, rent and other necessities are heightening the financial pressures on America’s households.

— Biden team weighs killing Trump’s new nuclear weapons: The Biden administration is considering killing off several nuclear weapons programs that were greenlit by the Trump White House . According to nine current and former officials with knowledge of the deliberations, the Nuclear Posture Review, which is expected to be completed as early as next month, is not expected to make major changes to nuclear policy. Nor is it likely to recommend deep cuts to multibillion-dollar plans to build new intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear-armed submarines and stealth bombers, they said. But national security officials are debating whether to jettison a new nuclear-armed cruise missile now in the research phase, retire a Cold War-era thermonuclear bomb, and possibly even remove a new “low-yield” warhead that the previous administration deployed on submarines, the current and former officials said.

 

STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today.

 
 
AROUND THE WORLD

Protestors set up a mock rule-breaking garden party in Parliament Square as Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson prepares to leave for the weekly PMQ session in the House of Commons in London.

Protestors set up a mock rule-breaking garden party in Parliament Square as Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson prepares to leave for the weekly PMQ session in the House of Commons in London. | Leon Neal/Getty Images

BRITISH FRENCH LAUNDRY — It was easy to watch Boris Johnson’s baleful performance in the House of Commons today and conclude his days are numberedEsther Webber writes.

For weeks the British prime minister has faced sustained pressure following allegations that Downing Street staff — and Johnson, his wife and his top officials — held lockdown-busting parties during the height of the pandemic.

Anger directed at Johnson boiled over Monday after a leaked email showed one of his senior aides had invited more than 100 staff to a gathering and encouraged them to “bring your own booze” — as well as widespread reports Johnson himself had attended. One MP was reduced to tears the following day as he recounted how his mother-in-law died alone during the pandemic. Even normally supportive newspapers turned on the prime minister.

Just before facing questions from the opposition Labour leader at their weekly Prime Minister’s Questions session today, Johnson gave a short statement to the packed chamber in which he apologized for attending a drinks party in his Downing Street garden in May 2020, when everyone in the country was banned from meeting more than one other person outdoors. Johnson said he “believed implicitly it was a work event,” which Labour leader Keir Starmer instantly decried as “ridiculous.”

NIGHTLY NUMBER

0.5 percent

The increase in prices in December on a month-to-month basis. Much of the inflation reading is still focused on used cars , fueled by a semiconductor shortage that has made production of new cars more difficult. Rent and food — two of the items that ordinary Americans care the most about — also fed the December reading, although energy prices fell slightly.

PARTING WORDS

Red Square decorated for Christmas and New Year celebrations in Moscow.

Red Square decorated for Christmas and New Year celebrations in Moscow. | AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin

MOSCOW’S TAKE ON WAR — Moscow journalist Uliana Pavlova writes in POLITICO Magazine:

I went to Red Square on the last weekend of the New Year holiday to try to gauge how prepared ordinary Russians might be for yet another conflict in Ukraine. For months, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been massing troops, and Russian state television has been laying the groundwork for war. State-sponsored political talk shows warn that Ukraine is growing more nationalistic, spurred on by the West and Russophobia among some Ukrainians.

Russian television has broadcast footage of Ukrainians tearing down Soviet statues. It’s part of a new wave of statue-toplings in Ukraine; last summer, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv dismantled a monument celebrating the Soviet Army’s defeat of Nazi Germany, a victory considered sacred in Russia. “Everything that is somehow connected with the Soviet period in Russia is subject to either public desecration or destruction in Ukraine,” TV hosts said in one broadcast.

Then on the eve of Russia’s longest holiday of the year — New Year’s, which combined with Orthodox Christmas makes a nearly two-week long break at the start of January — Putin issued a set of demands that the West has interpreted as an ultimatum.

If Putin follows through on his threats, it would be the third major deployment of Russian soldiers in Ukraine (although the deployments weren’t always acknowledged by the Kremlin).

The first was in February 2014, when Putin sent troops to occupy Crimea, a scenic peninsula that most Russians know for its warm, rocky beaches and summer camps. The second big outbreak of hostilities came later that year when ethnic Russian separatists in the coal-mining region of Donbas seized control and proclaimed independent republics in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Russian-backed rebels with the support of Russia forced out Ukrainian troops.

The Crimean annexation saw Putin’s approval ratings surge above 80 percent. But it hasn’t yet been clear whether or to what extent ordinary Russians support Putin’s current actions in and around Ukraine; tens of thousands of Russian combat troops have massed in three areas on the Ukraine-Russia border.

According to a poll by the independent Levada Center published last month, almost 40 percent of Russians see war as either probable or certain. Almost the same number, 38 percent, consider a war between the two countries unlikely, and another 15 percent completely rule out the possibility. That means, in effect, that a majority of Russians are psychologically unprepared for war.


 

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