When hours count, public health is only a year away.

NextDoor can be an emotional cauldron depending on the neighborhood but it is an interesting porthole outside one's own bubble.  Not infrequently there is information available far more immediately than from other sources.  And sometimes there is both interesting and humorous information.

As was the case this morning.  

Hey Folks, just an FYI that might save you a minute or two.  I just got a voicemail message from the "Georgia COVID-19 Vaccination Appointment Line" asking that I call them back.  Figuring it was probably spam, I checked online, and the number that they wanted me to call actually appeared on the Ga. Dept. Health website.  So I called, figuring that while it probably wouldn't be important, it might be useful. Nope! 

It turns out that, way back in January or February of 2021, when I was scrambling to get vaccinated, I signed up on the Dept. Health website to get notified when a vaccine appointment was available.  That voicemail was my notification--one year later, and months after being vaccinated and boosted.

When hours count, public health is only a year away.

I hold pretty strongly to the view that our Covid-19 public health response has been reasonably consistently disastrous.  Not so much in terms of deaths, though that case can be made and likely will be, but in terms of erosion in confidence in government institutions, experts, and in Social Trust.

All sorts of arguments can be mustered to support that argument but I sometimes wonder whether small, and patently absurd, experiences as above might be the more powerful force in changing people's views.

I have been mulling a similar consideration regarding the USPS.  Here in Atlanta, at least in the City proper, it is a notorious cesspit of inefficiency, bad service and corruption.  And I don't mean quotidian complaints.  I mean (real examples from people)

I haven't received mail in three weeks.  Anyone else having this problem?

I received a box and it had been run-over with a clear tire mark.

I found our street's mail discarded in a ravine when I was out walking this morning.  I'll deliver it when I get home from work.

USPS notified me of a registered mail delivery today.  I was working on the front porch all day and there was no mail delivery at all, much less the special delivery.

Any enterprise as big as the USPS, even with six-sigma, will have horror stories.  The problem is when the horror stories are both routine and the only stories.

In Atlanta, I sense a shifting mood in the city's residential neighborhoods.  While there are big ticket items where residents and politicians disagree (ex. defunding the police, increasing density in single family neighborhoods, etc.), and certainly plenty of major city service failures (policing, the school system as a whole, etc.), it seems to me that it is actually an aggregation of minor but daily dysfunctions which is driving that shifting mood.

Potholes of course

Petty crime such as porch pirates and car break-ins

Undelivered mail

Street-car racing in the small hours of the morning

Traffic delays which are preventable

Routine billing errors for city services

Big stuff like taxes and major crime make the headlines but I suspect it is the cumulation of the small things which really change minds.

Which is why you end up with tipping points and preference cascades.  Demand for city residences rise and rise and then plunge.