September 2020
Through the summer of the pandemic, the Town of Pagosa Springs and the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners thoughtfully distributed about $1.2 million to various local organizations and programs, to help folks deal with the new requirements and economic damage that had resulted from the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus across the US. That money had been provided to the Colorado Department of Local Affairs through the CARES Act passed by both houses of Congress in March, and was used to address community activities directly related to the pandemic. The Town and County governments used some of the money to reimburse their own in-house, virus-related activities.
The tourists who continued to flock to Pagosa in September where treated to various types of warning signs, concerning masks and social distancing. Neither the Town nor the County had put mask mandates in place, but the State of Colorado had issued public health orders requiring employees to wear masks. The public health orders provided no effective enforcement measures, and so relied on business owners and organization leaders to voluntarily follow the orders. I did not run across any businesses in Pagosa that were flouting the mask requirements.
Meanwhile, things continued to be weird in Washington DC, where the federal government had gone five months without any meaningful attempts to reduce the economic damage from the various state-mandated protection measures.
The followers of President Trump — politicians and ordinary citizens — continued to question the seriousness of the virus, and continued to point out the serious social, financial, and emotional distress caused by lock-downs and social distancing requirements. This large segment of the US population also tended to view international cooperation as a negative choice. On September 1, for example, the Trump administration announced that the US would not participate in an initiative by the World Health Organization to develop, produce, and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine. 172 other countries were participating in the COVAX program, which was aimed at distributing a future vaccine to poor and developing countries.
On September 14, Pfizer/BioNTech announced they would expand the Phase 3 trial of their COVID-19 vaccine to 44,000 test subjects. The goal of expanding the trial was to increase data on safety and efficacy and promote a more diverse population, including adolescents as young as 16 years and patients with HIV, hepatitis C, or hepatitis B. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was being tested as two shots administered three weeks apart. One unfortunate drawback to the vaccine was the requirement to store the doses at a temperature of –94 degrees Fahrenheit, a requirement that promised to make eventual distribution a challenge.
The following day, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published research purportedly showing that people who recently tested positive for COVID-19 were 2.4 times more likely to have dined out in a restaurant or bar. The study considered restaurant dining to include being seated at a patio, being seated outdoors, and being seated indoors. The odds jumped almost 4-fold for participants who had been to a bar or café. The majority of participants (71%) claimed to have worn masks in the two weeks before their diagnosis.
On September 23, September 23, a study conducted at Houston Methodist Hospital identified a more contagious strain of COVID-19 in a large portion of recent patient samples. Investigators analyzed samples from the earliest phase of the pandemic and a more recent infection wave, finding that nearly all strains from the more recent phase had a mutation that allows the virus to bind and infect more cells.
How the virus had managed to mutate during its travels around the globe was not immediately clear.
Also in September, President Trump was vehemently defending himself against allegations that he has privately disparaged veterans for their military service — specifically, that he’d privately referred to American Marines who died in World War I as “losers” and “suckers”. The accusation had appeared in an article in The Atlantic quoting anonymous sources. Other media outlets corroborated parts of The Atlantic article, which was written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief.
President Trump was also displeased with a New York Times exposé on his tax returns. The President announced that he might release financial statements revealing his “properties, assets and debts.” The President did not deny one of the key details of the report, however — that he paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017, and, thanks to reporting massive losses, no income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years. (As of January 2021, those financial statements have not been released.)
“The Fake News Media, just like Election time 2016, is bringing up my Taxes & all sorts of other nonsense with illegally obtained information & only bad intent,” Trump wrote on social media. “I paid many millions of dollars in taxes but was entitled, like everyone else, to depreciation & tax credits.”
The President also continued to push his claim that mail ballot voting, if allowed in the 2020 election, would result in massive fraud.
Colorado, meanwhile, had been conducting all of its elections by mail since 2013 — a system that consistently enjoyed broad support from both major political parties in Colorado. During the pandemic, most Americans appeared to be supportive of a mail ballot election, including 79% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans, according to a survey reported by Reuters.
Despite claims made by President Trump and his supporters — claims that mail voting unfairly benefited Democrats — it’s interesting to note that Republicans in Colorado flipped a US Senate seat, won a majority in the state senate, gained seats in the state house and won three out of four of the statewide offices in the first general election (2014) after the state made the switch to our current mail voting system. Additional reports and studies have similarly found no advantage to either party in vote-by-mail systems.
At the end of the month of September, The New York Times reported a global total of 1 million fatalities due to COVID-19, surpassing the number of deaths caused by HIV, dysentery, malaria, influenza, cholera, and measles combined in 2020. (By December 31, the global tally of COVID deaths would surpass 1.8 million, according to the Times of Israel.)
On September 28, President Trump announced that the US would have 100 million doses of vaccine available by January 1. “We’re all set to go, we’re all ready and logistically we have the military all lined up,” the President said.
As of January 6, 2020, it appears that 5.3 million Americans had been vaccinated.