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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Enjoying this newsletter? Why not share it with a friend? Covid-19 six years later Katelyn Jetelina Mar 19 REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION READ IN APP Six years ago today, I put my baby in a camping carrier, strapped her on, opened my laptop on my dining room table, and started typing as fast as I could. I couldn’t believe how little communication existed that was timely, understandable, and actionable, with the humility and honesty the public deserved. So I tried to fill that gap, bringing my fellow faculty, staff, and students along for the Covid-19 journey in real time, signing every email the same way: Love, Your Local Epidemiologist. I told my husband I would only have to do this for six weeks. Surely someone would fill this gap… The rest is a blur (with many lessons learned along the way.) March 22, 2020 during the lockdown. Strapped the baby in order to work from home. The start of YLE. A lot has changed since then. I don’t do many deep dives on Covid-19 anymore because the landscape has dramatically changed for the better, but also because, honestly, it brings back some overwhelming emotions. But this anniversary matters not only so you can protect yourself from this virus that is still circulating, and not only to honor the 1.5 million people who died, but also because this moment deserves serious reflection. So, six years later, this is where we stand. A lot has changed, and continues to do so. Covid-19 is no longer the third leading cause of death. In fact, it now carries roughly the same severity as the flu. While flu is nothing to brush off, this virus not being a top killer is genuine relief. Data from CDC; Annotated by Your Local Epidemiologist. Even better news: Peaks are getting smaller and smaller. Each successive wave has been lower than the last, a pattern reflected in almost every metric, including hospitalizations (see below). This isn’t surprising: as our collective immunity builds, the virus has a harder time breaking through. SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve along the same narrow path, which is unusual but very helpful in reducing the number of people with the disease. The Covid-19 cousins we call coronaviruses are now responsible for the common cold, and there’s a hypothesis that this virus may eventually follow the same path. We are clearly not there yet, as hospitalization rates tell us, but the trajectory is meaningful. Covid-19 Hospitalizations per 100,000. Source: CDC; Annotated by Your Local Epidemiologist. Interestingly, seasonality has recently shifted. We now reliably see two waves each year: one in winter, one in summer. But nationally over the past two years, the summer wave has been larger than the winter wave (see above). We don’t know why. Unfortunately, vaccination rates continue to fall. Roughly 3.5 million fewer older Americans were vaccinated this year compared to last year. That means 3.5 million people in the highest-risk group are now less protected from a largely preventable disease. With all the federal vaccine confusion, I expect this to continue to decline. Some patterns haven’t changed, though. For example, those most at risk for severe disease remain the same: Adults over 65 and infants under one year old continue to be the most likely to be hospitalized. The vast majority (80%) of hospitalizations are still for Covid-19, not incidentally with it. Risk increases with the number of chronic conditions a person has. Long Covid (physical symptoms persisting weeks or months after infection) is also still a risk. Also, the vaccines continue to provide additional protection—about 50% against emergency room visits and hospitalization. Protection does still wane, dropping to roughly 18% at around four months. The decline is slower than before, particularly for hospitalization among adults aged 65 and older. Data: CDC; Annotated by Your Local Epidemiologist. There’s still a lot we don’t know. It’s striking how much remains unknown about this virus six years in. Long Covid is still poorly understood, with millions of people living with fatigue, cognitive impairment, and cardiovascular effects that medicine is only slowly grappling with. We know risk has decreased alongside the decline in severe acute disease, but we still lack reliable data on the extent of that decline, and we still have no effective treatments. Vaccine dosing for older adults is another gap. Current guidance recommends two updated vaccine doses per year for older adults: one in the fall and one in the spring. But robust data on whether two annual doses offer better protection than one is still extremely limited. In fact, I couldn’t find any data that are actually useful for guiding people, like my grandfather, to make evidence-based decisions about getting a second dose and when. (I’m still telling him to get two doses because the benefits outweigh the risks, but man, we need evidence.) We also still don’t have a clear, honest accounting of which interventions worked, which didn’t, and why during the biggest health emergency this country has faced in more than 100 years. For example, we still don’t know what works best to slow the spread of Covid-19. This is mind-boggling, given all we sacrificed as a society, let alone indicating how ill-prepared we are for next time. Today, what worries me most is deeper than the science. When researchers compared countries that fared well during Covid-19 to those that didn’t, they looked at health care infrastructure, population density, universal health care, age distribution, how many vaccines they got, and a ton of other factors. But the strongest predictors of Covid-19 infections weren’t any of these. It was trust: trust in government, trust in institutions, trust in each other. Countries where people broadly believed their neighbors and leaders were acting in good faith did measurably better. The United States ranked among the lowest among high-income countries. Six years later, it’s getting worse. Federal leadership has promised to restore trust. But the latest data show record-low levels of trust in government overall, and specifically in health agencies; trust is eroding further day by day. Lack of transparency, full-on destruction of systems and capabilities, partisan attacks, lack of accountability, performative acts without real change, and a failure to listen to the public are all contributing to it. First graph source: Pew; Second graph source: Annenberg Public Policy Institute Public health, on the outside, though, isn’t providing an alternative path forward either. Many institutions and leaders are stuck in defense mode, circling the wagons to preserve the status quo, or paralyzed, afraid to take even one step forward. Wishing we could return to 2019 is not a plan. Public health systems saved many people, but they also failed many. I’m finally starting to see some appetite for change peppered here and there, and it’s giving me hope that things might improve, but not at the pace that meets the urgency of the moment. The health of Americans and biosecurity depend on it. Bottom line Six years! Six years with a complicated data story of real progress alongside real stubbornness. This anniversary is striking to me for two reasons. The first is the virus itself: it continues to surprise us, and we remain humbled by how much we still don’t understand. The second is what has happened to us in its wake. Six years ago, I sat down at my dining room table because I deeply believed things needed to be done differently. I still believe that today. The question now is whether this country has the wherewithal to do it. I think we do (we need to), but it’s going to take all of us. Love, YLE P.S. A lot of you have Covid-19-related questions. My team pulled the top 7. Here are some answers for you! What do we know about long Covid in 2026? The risk of developing long Covid has decreased significantly compared to early pandemic years, but it’s not zero. Millions are still living with it, and we still have no proven treatments. Here is YLE’s last dive into long Covid. Will we still be able to get updated vaccines this fall? This is uncertain in a way it has never been before. The federal government’s vaccine policy is highly unstable. Are home rapid tests still reliable? Yes, but timing still matters. Tests are most accurate a few days into symptoms, not at the first sign of illness. So, a negative on day one is not a green light. Test again 24 to 48 hours later for a clearer picture. There are no longer free Covid-19 tests through the government, but you can get one at a pharmacy or online. Where do I find trustworthy data now? I still trust the CDC data (for these reasons), and they have a great respiratory dashboard that is updated weekly here. I don’t trust CDC’s guidance around vaccines from the past year. How much damage does Covid do to the heart, brain, and vascular system? Covid infection is associated with an elevated risk of heart attack, stroke, blood clots, and cognitive decline, even after mild cases. The elevated risk appears to diminish over time for most people, and vaccination reduces the likelihood of these outcomes. Who should take Paxlovid, and is it still effective? Paxlovid remains effective at reducing the risk of severe disease, particularly for people over 65 and those with underlying conditions. (It may also reduce the risk of long Covid, though if it does, the effect is probably small.) The $800 out-of-pocket cost for Medicare patients is a serious, largely unaddressed barrier that keeps it from those who need it most. Metformin has shown some promise in preventing long Covid, but the benefit for vaccinated people is less clear, probably because the vaccines already reduce the risk so much that it’s hard to see additional benefit on top of them. When are we getting a vaccine that prevents infection, not just severity? This is a complicated question, and scientists are still working on it. Right now, many researchers are excited about nasal spray vaccines. The idea is that if you can build up immunity right in your nose and throat (where the virus first enters), your body might be able to stop the infection before it even starts. But there are a few catches. If you’ve already had Covid-19, getting a regular vaccine already sends immune cells to your nose anyway, so a nasal vaccine might be less of a leap forward than we hope. On top of that, it likely wouldn’t protect you for long and would still require regular boosters as the virus mutates. The good news is that nasal and mucosal vaccines are being developed right now, and early results look promising. Scientists are also working on a universal coronavirus vaccine that could protect against many variants at once, but that’s a longer-term goal. The bottom line: better vaccines are coming, but a widely available next-generation option is probably still a few years away. Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) is founded and operated by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD—an epidemiologist, wife. YLE reaches over 320,000 people in over 132 countries with one goal: “Translate” the ever-evolving public health science so that people will be well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below: Subscribed

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Frank and Penny out for a drive (Christiane Bale and Jesse Buckley) America’s  VERY HOT Couple

WPCNR SHOCK THEATRE Review by Zacherle March 16, 2026:

JOHN ZACHERLE (ROLAND) GHOST HOST,  CURATOR, WPIX SHOCK THEATER

I rose out of my crypt in the twilight yesterday  just at dusk  to go back in time to the “gory days” of  1930s movies to see Warner Brothers The Bride.

My bride the spectral Vampiress Janeta whose beauty never fades you know (she is a vampiress and is eternal) had shown me the reviews of the movie, selected by the curators of The Jacob Burns Staff to be shown this past week.

The way the reviewers saw this movie convinced me that this was a movie badly made. LIke most critics who do not make movies let alone understand them or acknowledge the movies standing, meaning in life, suggested to me  it was confusing, silly and condemned it to a horrible opening weekend at the box office. ($17 Million)

Countess Janeta said “John  darling, you have to go and see it before you decide not to see it.”

So in my eternal rest I decided to see The Bride at the Burns

The critics consider superhero and heroine “franchises” great because they are profitable dismissed this movie,  not recognizing The Bride is an insightful homage to horror, and they havecreated  an expensive $93 Million bomb, a nail in the Warner Brothers coffin and sealed in a mausoleum in Forest Lawn with so many Warner Brothers stars created in the past.

Having been a curator of horror classics since my days choosing the horror classics on Shock Theater on WPIX TV, with my assistant, Gasport. I am an expert in horror.

Horror movies, the classics, taught us about fear, evil, and human nature. As a youth I saw the original Frankenstein and saw in the townspeople’s hatred of the monster, the human nature of not liking people they did not understand. The monster’s killing of the little girl was an accident, because the monster did not understand, and Dr. Frankenstein’s rejection of the monster his lack of responsibility. This was my view of what that movie said to me about life.

Later, I saw Bride of Frankenstein which found a lonely monster asking Dr. Frankenstein to make him a companion. Unfortunately Elsa Lancaster the actress who played the first bride, rejected the Frankenstein monster.

That movie taught the lesson that strong feelings and need for another may not be returned and you as a man or a woman have to deal with it with compassion. Not rejection.

(It was not until I found a vampiress, (the eternal Countess Janeta, who liked my blood type and that took centuries), that I resolved this situation for myself.

The original Bride of Frankenstein ran 1 hour 15 minutes and took 36 days to shoot.

The Bride runs 2 hours and 6 minutes and sweeps the story of the Bride of Frankenstein into modern times the 1930s and creates a horror classic:

Director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s over-the-top overwhelming, melodramatic,  horror romance that cannot die.

She has created  in fantastic color, sound, action ,spectacle. It is  the ultimate embellishment of horror’s appeal for those of us who appreciate  the horror genre power to suspend disbelief and create   buy-in acceptance of the impossible.

This movie is horror as inspiration, hope, happiness that all those who have fallen short crave.  The Gyllenhaaling of James Whale’s(the director the original “Bride”)  amps up the impact of the original, and brings out all horror’s powers to inspire

Right away it grabs us with Ms. Gyllenhaal  far better looking than Alfred Hitchock in her own film, playing the spirit of Mary Shelley from one step beyond,  saying she did not have time to write the sequel to Frankenstein because she died, but now she is back to say the things she,Shelley, wanted to say. I, horror aficionado, appreciates this. (We all leave undone things we wanted to do at the time we depart unless, unless you can come back, become a vampire or a monster that is invulnerable except for one thing: he is lonely.

Like the Frankenstein monster.

Gyllenhaal loops you in like a deranged talk show ghost host eerily discussing her new sequel she never got to write.

 

It begins  with her monster viewing a 1930s song dance movie in a theater, tearing up watching Gyllenhaal’s brother Jack do a song and dance romantic fairwell to one of the many stars appearing in this horror epic. Seeing this movie if not a horror fan, you will see portrayed through the monster’s tears and joy at the film within the film.  He has a broken heart. He is lonely.

A creature of the street– in a reach you can consider him a homeless person.

No other actor playing the monster—even the master, Boris Karloff—is as hunkie or as handsome and sensitive as Christian Bale’s “Frankie”  who is self-educated, he reads, exactly the kind of man of interest a woman falls for. He needs love.

Man does this hit home.

This is why people go  to movies. It seems to me critics have forgotten that. The movie fans seek ways to fill the loneliness and regrets of life and emotions they have never had. Horror movies make you feel more emotion than any genre, (except Shakespeare), (even those who empathize with the monster or two monsters as The Bride creates). The Mary Shelley ghost’s introduction is the framework of the movie lets you consider the impossible “what if” – the “hook” in horror that “hooks” you, dear movie goer.

Frank taking Ida to a Ronnie Read movie featuring his idol Read, whose movies he watches to experience feels of love.

The monster who has been roaming for years has now found love in watching Gyllenhall’s brother Jack playing a Fred Astaire type as he dances in 30s music style  in a glitzy jazz age Chicago of the gangster age. Gyllenhall’s brother Jack plays Ronnie Reed with various stars you know as Reed’s partner.

Frank (Bail) encountering  Jack Gyllenhaal playing Reed  as he professes how much Reed’s movies mean to him. It will bring tears to your eyes.

Jesse Buckley acting out at the nightclub resulting in her untimely death. And she really acts showing her range of insanity and athleticism.

After the monster  departs the movie crying, we are jazz-transported into a “hotsy-totsy” club with a table full of gangster types.Here Ida, Jessie Buckley a frizzy haired moll is acting out, slightly drunk and aggravates the table which ends with the gangster boss telling his cronies to get rid of her. Down the stairs she goes.

Fade to the monster hunched into his scarf walking to a tall building. He seeks out a scientist who wrote a book on resuscitating the dead.

She is a very scientific Dr. Euphronious played with arch evil, ambition and adventure by Annette Bening. She asks why Frank is seeking her out. His answer  got me laughing (and really vampires never laugh.)

Them she asks why should I help you:

Bale as “Frank,” says, “I am so lonely.”

They need a dead woman’s body, and a dead woman is dug up by Dr. Euphronious and Frank.

Ida the rubbed-out gangster moll and Frank “meet cute”  as she is on the table hooked up and in her spectacular laboratory Ida is goes from “corpse to cutie”—your body hums with electricity during this scene.

FRANK EXPERIENCES LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT AS IDA COMES BACK TO LIFE.  THE BALE-BUCKLEY TEAM DELIVER THE LOOKS AND TOUCHES  OF THINGS LOVERS DO. THEY ARE  BEYOND CUTE– GOOD AND PERFECT.

As Ida takes to the streets, rejecting Frank, he follows her but she encounters thugs who try and assault her. Frank takes care of them and the romance from there rolls like a Harlequin romance novel.  He cares consoles. She says  forgedaboutit. I loved this aspect. Great acting love-hate-care. Love unfolds. I love that, don’t you? You yourself watching two people humanize through love’s growth.

The movie inspires women of Chicago to revolt against male dominance, and riots erupt.

Frank continues to escort  Ida.

They are pursued by a police detective and state troopers, the entire police force of Chicago and New York. The couple is finally cornered will they survive?

You have to stay to the end like any romance. Happy ending? Will there be a sequel? No way. There are always tears for the monsters.

Horror movies never have a happy ending.

Mr Bale as Frank and Jessie Buckley as Ida whom Frank names Penelope are like Superman and Lois, always at odds, or Bogey and Bacall, tentative distant CRACKLING with electricity Tracy and Hepburn. Cary Grant and Laraine Day.

They hug with intensity. NEED grows.

 

You like romance. You like vast huge stagings of riots, chases and two people who don’t like each other cooperate, learn to agree and care for each other desperately.

This is a Horror movie classic.

Now Countess Janeta wants to see it.

The audience in the Burns Theater 5 which I playfully have nicknamed “The Crypt,” stayed rapt through the credits. No one left. They had to hear all of “Monster Mash” in the closing credits. They were transfixed. These two are monster heat.

Horror fans purists and Gen X’s go see. Learn. Feel the horror  the love the emotion Hollywood used to deliver.

Go see it in the theaters.

 

The Bride gives everybody a reason for living—never give up! Like the two monsters who turn into lovers they found their way.

 

The last time a horror movie was this good was my favorite mummy movie “The Mummy’s TOMB” (1944) when Kharis the Mummy carries his beloved Princess Annunka into a swamp as she ages.

Hollywood establishment has a new hyperbolic word:

Gayllenhaalesque!

This was a graveyard smash of a movie.

 

For the record from Wikkipedia:

Bride of Frankenstein premiered on April 19, 1935 at the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco,^[33][a] and went into general release the next day.^[34][35] The film was profitable for Universal, with a 1943 report showing that it had earned approximately $2 million, a profit of about $950,000.^[36]

The film was critically praised upon its release, although some reviewers did qualify their opinions based on the film’s being in the horror genre. The New York World-Telegram called the film “good entertainment of its kind”.^[37] The New York Post described it as “a grotesque, gruesome tale which, of its kind, is swell”.^[37] The Hollywood Reporter similarly called the film “a joy for those who can appreciate it”.^[37]

Variety did not so qualify its review: “[It is] one of those rare instances where none can review it, or talk about it, without mentioning the cameraman, art director, and score composer in the same breath as the actors and director”. Variety also praised the cast, writing that “Karloff manages to invest the character with some subtleties of emotion that are surprisingly real and touching … Thesiger as Dr. Pretorious [is] a diabolic characterization if ever there was one … Lanchester handles two assignments, being first in a preamble as author Mary Shelley and then the created woman. In latter assignment she impresses quite highly”.^[38]

In another unqualified review, Time wrote that the film had “a vitality that makes their efforts fully the equal of the original picture (Frankenstein)… Screenwriters Hurlbut & Balderston and Director James Whale have given it the macabre intensity proper to all good horror pieces, but have substituted a queer kind of mechanistic pathos for the sheer evil that was Frankenstein“.^[39] The Oakland Tribune concurred it was “a fantasy produced on a rather magnificent scale, with excellent stagecraft and fine photographic effects”.^[40] While the Winnipeg Free Press thought that the electrical equipment might have been better suited to Buck Rogers, nonetheless the reviewer praised the film as “exciting and sometimes morbidly gruesome”, declaring that “all who enjoyed Frankenstein will welcome his Bride as a worthy successor”.^[41] The New York Times called Karloff “so splendid in the role that all one can say is ‘he is the Monster'”.^[42] The Times praised the entire principal cast and Whale’s direction in concluding that Bride is “a first-rate horror film”,^[42] and presciently suggested that “the Monster should become an institution, like Charlie Chan“.^[42]

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