From mass.gov: Guide to whether you should join an anti-lockdown protest

by philg

Considering joining an anti-lockdown protest? The official Massachusetts coronaplague report is now in a new format that is much more helpful.

Although it is heretical Sweden that is featured in our media for having a “high” death rate, the Church of Shutdown Massachusetts death rate is yet higher (about 1.7X; see tracking post). This is unfortunate, but it gives us enough data to produce statistically interesting charts. The average age of a COVID-19 victim is 81. Just one (1) person in Massachusetts under the age of 30 has perished from COVID-19. Twenty one out of 1,809 have been under age 50:

You’ve heard that it is people who identify as “men” who are more likely to be killed? (I heard that too and have been identifying as a “woman” since mid-March.)

Wrong, then! There was no need for me to change my gender ID in order to survive this pandemic. Or was there? COVID-19 is primarily targeting Massachusetts residents age 70-100+. There are more elderly people who identify as women than who identify as men. So, in a pie chart of 50+ gender IDs, we would expect to see more “women” than “men” if the death rate is uniform among gender IDs.

The heart-wrenching U.S. media story of a young fit completely healthy person who failed to social distance and was dead from COVID-19 three days later? That story seems not to have come from Massachusetts:

So… should you have been persuaded by the Swedish infidels, call up Masterpiece Cakeshop to buy a T-shirt, put on your MAGA hat, and drive your planet-destroying negatively-priced-gasoline-burning Toyota Camry down to the State House for the next anti-lockdown event (as explicitly not seen on Facebook) iff you’re under age 50 with no underlying health conditions.

[Separately, the new report format shows hospital utilization. We had approximately 15,000 hospital beds before coronaplague descended on us. For the past week, roughly 3,800 of those beds have been occupied by COVID-19 patients.

In other words, locals shouldn’t worry about not finding a place in a hospital should one be required.]

Related:

  • “Two E.R. Workers Worry: If They Died, Who’d Take Care of Their Son?” (New York Times): A few nights ago, after their 18-month-old son, Nolan, went to sleep, Dr. Adam Hill and Neena Budhraja sat down on the living room couch in their apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Pen and paper in hand, they turned their attention to a pressing need: figuring out who would be Nolan’s legal guardian if the coronavirus swept them away. They aren’t just anxious parents. Adam, 37, is an emergency room doctor at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens. Neena, 39, is a physician assistant in the emergency room at Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center in Brooklyn. [Not-very-empathetic friend’s comment on the article: “They are not even fat. What’s the probability they both die from COVID-19? Should we plan now in case we win the Mega Millions lottery?” What would the probability be, you might ask (if you are similarly lacking empathy)? They fall into an age range with roughly 12 deaths per 100,000 people within NYC. They’re slender and health, which is in their favor, but they get more exposure to coronavirus than the typical New Yorker and, once one is infected the other would have exposure at home. Let’s assume these factors wash out. So we just divide 12 by 100,000 and square it. The chance that the child becomes an orphan due to COVID-19 is therefore 1 in 70 million. You’d have to buy roughly four Mega Millions tickets to get to the same probability event. Compare to the child’s 1 in 15,000 lifetime risk of being struck by lightning.]

31 thoughts on “From mass.gov: Guide to whether you should join an anti-lockdown protest”

  1. You go first. Sign a durable medical Power of Attorney rejecting all medical care related to COVID-19, “identify” (according to your ridiculous, bigoted, self-definition shared by no one of the concept) as whatever you want, and let us know how it turns out!

    • Sam: That is comforting! I like to live in a bubble! (But, since I’m over 50, the mass.gov report is suggesting that I let the Millennials lead the crowded protests.)

    • Bigot, much like fascist, has become one of those generic insults that doesn’t actually mean anything.

    • ScarletNumber: “bigot” does have a meaning! When I use the term, it means “someone who disagrees with me”.

  2. As well as the MAGA hat etc, don’t forget to take your cancer sticks and light up!

    “Conclusions and relevance: Our cross sectional study in both COVID-19 out- and inpatients strongly suggests that daily smokers have a very much lower probability of developing symptomatic or severe SARS-CoV-2 infection as compared to the general population.”

    There’s something else to stockpile for the next pandemic.

  4. The ones that have read my non-essential comments on this blog know by now that I am a Swede, or, as Phil puts it, of course with a twist, “an infidel”.
    But infidel or not – there is one thing I can’t understand (if it isn’t about reaching his core-voters and mainly screwing with Governors from the other party):
    How can Trump BOTH, in parts, defend a lock-down/shut-down AND at the same time stir up and support anti-lockdown protesters? Even if they carry signs like (from CNN or BBC) “Be like Sweden” – well first of all I doubt that the sign-holders knows anything about Sweden and second; Trump has at least twice used Sweden as the bad example “that is suffering hard”…
    Yes – I concider him an imbecill – but how can he get away with “double-talk” like that?

    • Logic is not required in the U.S. Today, for example, my Facebook friends are outraged that Donald Trump is trying to shut down immigration in the U.S. (I’m ignoring this because I am pretty sure that the lowest level of Federal court judge in California or Hawaii will just order it to start back up). They can’t survive another day on this planet without the assurance that millions of additional humans will migrate legally to the U.S. over the next few years.

      What were they hysterically posting about a month ago? That the U.S. health care system would be overwhelmed by coronavirus cases. We plainly did not have enough capacity to handle a population of 330 million people.

      So… they want more hospital beds per person and they want to drive up the population size to 400 million or so via immigration and children of immigrants.

      (If you’re going to call someone an imbecile in English, it is ideal to spell the word “imbecile” even when English isn’t your first language 🙂 )

    • Philg:
      Of course, imbecile.
      Anyway, my first language is Swedish and I change between four-five other languages (no use changing spelling-help) during the course of an hour. But my different teachers around the world (my parents were diplomats) had probably whipped me for a spelling-mistake like that, concidering the context, … Well, not Mr Moss at Langley High School, VA. A wonderful teacher…

      I did not mention Trumps “executive order” concerning immigration. (On that note I have an opinion, and that is that – just like many countries in Europe already done – IF/WHEN there is a time to limit travelling between regions/countries – it is now.)

      I asked why he uses a double-talk about BOTH shutting down and resisting shut-downs? And how can he get away with it? That was all…

    • Mattias –
      I’m not defending Trump per se, but are you really asking how a politician can get away with “double-talk”? Over here you wouldn’t get elected without being skilled in this type of bilingualism.

    • @Mattias: Trump, his supporters, the media and its supporters, and Trump’s enemies are engaged in a multi-front campaign of information trench warfare (and other types of warfare) and that has been the case since before he was inaugurated. He doesn’t make it any better – and neither do they – by continuing to fight the war this way, but he has some harebrained idea that it makes him stronger. And so do they. Or at least, he is not capable of communicating any other way. You really need a psychologist to answer the question of why he seems to be so intensely dedicated to it.

      If you’ve ever been involved with someone who does couples therapy for people whose relationships have fallen apart and whose personalities are constantly engaged in destructive mutual torture, you’ll recognize a lot of parallels. If you’ve ever studied narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and even schizophrenia, you’ll recognize other parallels.

      What all this really does, especially in a time of crisis, is make it much easier for our adversaries to conduct effective disinformation propaganda campaigns against us, using our own media and our own electronic communications networks. They amplify the divisions, add new twists of their own, and shoot them right back at us. They are the ones who are winning the war.

      Lying to the public, spinning stories, advancing one’s own version of the narrative on any subject, dirty tricks, attempting to advance arguments that directly contradict each other, spreading half-truths, and so forth have long been a staple of American politics but the information age has amplified those tactics by several orders of magnitude.

      It has done a great deal of damage to our country. The only people winning, as I say, are the Usual Suspects – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other adversaries who really do enjoy watching us tear ourselves apart. They have a strategy and they work it every day.

      https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-adversaries-are-accelerating-coordinating-coronavirus-disinformation-report-says-11587514724

    • Sam and Superbug:
      Thank you for your comments!
      Of course, I would like to say, I am not a total twart… (Others may judge….)
      I am fully aware of rethorics and the political use of it since “the Greeks” – many of the dialogues that you can study in Mathematics and “Philosophy”/Science of the day (then) is in its core, many times, a strife to rule out bigottery/double-talk… Plato/Aristoteles are two of many examples…

      But the reason I did put my question forth, is simple. There are. at least, two clashing perspectives on the “Swedish/Infidel-model”.
      1 The Trump-version (who, by the way, as I see it, spells worse than me, and has a vocabulary worse than mine – even if English is his mother-tongue and only language) where Sweden is “BAD” and “suffers hard” to “the Herd, the Herd they call it”.
      2 Trump-version of SUPPORTING anti-lockdowners that use Swedish (EXTREMELY simplified) methods as a sake of argument to stop lock-downs…

      I do not know if Swedish experts are right or not. Only time will tell. But I can NOT understand people that uses both positions – it is does not compute!

      And Phil answered my question about this, by a not questioned question on this matter by instead picking up the matter concerning immigration….

  5. Look at it this way: everyone under 30 is going to wish they were dead when they have to dig themselves out of the $20 trillion dollar hole this is going to blow in their future.

  6. I can’t take your common sense. I demand fear porn, give me my fear dammit. MA governor just canceled school for the year. If it was safe to go outside they wouldn’t do that right?

  8. Looking at these statistics, particularly the fatality totals for people 30-39, reminded me of something: Has there ever been any definitive explanation from Biogen (or anyone else) about why their 37 year old Chinese associate director of biostatistics, Jie Li (Ph.D. University of Iowa) decided to flee the US without telling her employer and smuggle herself, her husband (also 37 and originally from Chongquing) and their children back to Beijing after she realized she probably had COVID-19 (she took antipyretics to mask her fever)?

    Some of the news reports I read speculated they did it out of fear for their youngest child (age 2) should both parents die of COVID-19. It was pretty early in the outbreak when she pulled her vanishing act, so the relatively low risk of death for people in her age bracket hadn’t yet become apparent, at least in Massachusetts. Lying to the authorities to abscond with the virus back to Beijing seemed to me like an even bigger and more irresponsible risk to take, though. Did she think the treatment she’d get in China would be any better than the US?

    “Li is currently being treated in a Chinese hospital for COVID-19 and her husband has also tested positive. It is unknown if Li intends to return to the United States.”

    https://www.biospace.com/article/biogen-employee-terminated-after-fleeing-to-china-while-sick-with-covid-19/

  9. More women than men got it, in some parts of Calif*. Noticed more women getting pushed out of the house to get groceries than usual. Most food shoppers are normally men because they’re the ones with the long commutes, normally on the road. With the breadwinners now staying home, it was now cheaper to have the women go shopping while the men stayed at their computers. The home makers now faced an increased risk & gender equality was achieved.

    Identifying as a lion is far better than identifying as women or men. Lions get an extremely rare feline coronavirus unrelated to the chinese variant. If more Chinese identify as lions & buy bats from wet markets, we could have covid 19 jump to lions, though.

  10. The health care workers have reason to be concerned, even if they’re not fat or old. There is evidence the level of exposure has an impact on the severity of the disease.

    An ER doctor is very likely to get much higher exposure than somebody at a grocery store or protest rally. Like the 34-year old doctor in China who first sounded the alarm about the disease.

    • I would flip this around. The grocery store worker is more likely to get a high exposure because he/she/ze/they is not provided with PPE whereas a doctor in a NYC hospital right now is essentially in a hazmat suit. The NYC infection/death statistics include people who got very high exposures to the virus, e.g., caring for someone at home who was sick. Done without PPE, that has to be more exposure that an ER worker with PPE would get.

  11. Hill and Budhraja got married late in life and she had her son at an age when people used to be done having children.

    One wonders why it took him so long to take a wife, but looking at his picture I no longer wonder. In a less enlightened time Hill would have been referred to as “faggy”.

    Also, wouldn’t a doctor dating a PA be a #metoo violation? I guess it’s a situation where if she eventually marries him it’s ok. Also, I’m surprised Philip didn’t mention that Budhraja could make a nice income just by divorcing Hill.

    • ScarletNumber: Certainly if she decides that she needs to enjoy a richer Tinder lifestyle, the New York Family Courts are there to support her with up to $100,000/year in tax-free child support, some alimony, and a division of the value of her husband’s medical partnership (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/NewYork ). But if she going for straight-up child support profits, she would have done better by traveling to Massachusetts and having sex with a married radiologist or dermatologist! Either way, certainly she can profit more via family court litigation than by working in the ER!

  12. It might be confusing to americans but here in socialist Sweden there is a long tradition of not actually wanting to lock people up. Our more voluntary approach with recommendations might be working for us.

    We also consider handing out money wholesale, we are a modern society so we do not do checks, as communism. Communists are big on person cults also, as in having the name of the beloved leader on buildings, checks and stuff.

    We hear that you have massive problems with civil unrest. Demonstrators interfering with medical staff trying to save american lives.

    Have you used up all the teargas and water on the protesters protesting pipelines in Dakota? If not, a couple of teargas canisters in those big trucks should do the trick, no?

    If you are all out of teargas then perhaps you could use a drone or two. Those big trucks should not be to difficult to hit with a hellfire missile. Your operators have had plenty of target practice. One or two trucks hit ought to restore order.

    And as for our ‘not exactly state church anymore’ they are restricting service to 49 attendants as per our state issued rules.

    • It ain’t boomerfags protesting in the streets for the right to murder babies and remain children themselves forever. Violence from the gov’t wouldn’t go over well, for the gov’t.

    • GB: I know that you probably did not mean it as an attack on our LGBTQIA+ brothers/sisters/binary-resisters, but if you could refrain from using the term “fag” I would be grateful! (Although I am opposed to carving out additional legal victimhood categories, including for LGBTQIA+ and/or any subset, that position does not stem from animosity toward LGBTQIA+ inclinations or behavior. And, dare I say it, some of my best friends are fairly rich gay people! (nearly all of them pilots, so if I were a COVID-19 researcher, I would say that this shows that being gay is hugely helpful for earning a pilot certificate (or maybe that earning a pilot certificate is helpful for being gay?))

  13. No specific slight against sodomites intended, the slight was against all Boomers. But I understand your sentiment and will try to refrain from using slurs in the future.
    Are there any poor gay pilots? If not what is the LGBTQIA+ community doing to change that?

    • GB: Thank you! Since the housing welfare limit in our town is $130,000/year (family of four to stay in subsidized housing; closer to $100,000/year for getting into the new complex), if you consider “eligible for welfare” to be “poor” then I guess there are some. But mostly I would call the gay pilots I know “middle class” or “upper middle class” (i.e., typically renters of piston aircraft or professional pilots of turbine-powered aircraft).

    • -Dad, I have to tell you something, I am gay.
      -OK, my son, but where is your luxury car.
      -I do not have any.
      -Where is your expensive villa.
      -I do not own any.
      -Where is your yacht.
      -I do not have it.
      -Where are your rich friends.
      -I do not have any.
      -My son, you are not a gay, you are just a fag.

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