If at least 50 percent of us are Covid-righteous, how did hotels and flights fill up with leisure travelers?

by philg

From a reader:

Our usual Mexico hotels are sold out, so we decided on Florida instead. We are going to be [in Hollywood, Florida] Dec 20-27. If you are up for it we can grab coffee.

My response:

I don’t know how everything is sold out when 50 percent of the country says that they’re doing everything possible to avoid COVID-19. Why is there even a single Democrat on a by-definition-optional leisure flight?

Readers:

  1. We are informed by #Science that vaccines don’t prevent COVID-19 from spreading (not to be confused with the #Science that informed us that vaccines do prevent COVID-19 from spreading and would “end the global pandemic”).
  2. We are informed that, therefore, even a vaccinated group of people will generate new infections
  3. We are informed that more infections leads to more mutations
  4. We are informed by #Nature that, over an 8-week period, a group of people wearing masks and interacting has at least 89 percent of the chance of becoming infected with COVID-19 compared to an unmasked group (i.e., in the long run, both the unmasked group and masked group will both get infected)

In light of the above knowledge, why wouldn’t leisure trips, which inevitably mix humans and thus generate infections/mutations, be exclusively the province of the Deplorables? Deplorability afflicts less than half of the American public, according to our popular vote. Maybe airline flights can still be full if the airlines cut service. But how can the typical hotel be more than 50 percent occupied?

For Americans who follow science, COVID-19 is a serious enough problem that schools have to be closed, 3-year-olds must be forced to wear masks, etc. But the 50+ percent of us who follow science don’t think COVID-19 is a serious enough problem to refrain from crowding into a 100-percent-full flight to Mexico, crowding into airport lines on both ends, and crowding into a hotel restaurant for 7 nights?

[What happened with the coffee invitation? I scolded the reader for not following Fauci and reminded him/her/zir/them (the reader identified as a “man” the last time that we were together, but I don’t want to assume non-fluidity of gender ID) that every meeting between humans is another chance for SARS-CoV-2 to infect and mutate.]

“I’m vaccinated, boosted and have no health problems. I’m traveling for the holidays” (CNN, 12/21, by Jill Filipovic):

Now that vaccines are widely available in the United States, it’s especially frustrating that we are still held hostage to a pandemic fueled by the people who refuse to get vaccinated and by the policy choices of wealthy nations not to treat this pandemic like a global pandemic and vaccinate the world.

Like millions of people the world over, I’m taking a hard look at my own risk (including the risk I pose to others) and making careful choices about how and when to grab back some aspects of pre-Covid-19 life. Travel is often necessary for my job; it’s also one of my greatest joys and a requirement to see many of my loved ones, family members and closest friends.

I masked in the airport and on the plane and have avoided indoor gatherings and unmasked indoor activities since my arrival.

The top photo in the article shows people in a jammed airport. Most of them are wearing cloth masks, which CNN’s top medical expert (“former president of Planned Parenthood”) described as “little more than facial decorations” on 12/20. On 11/4, CNN reported that the righteously vaccinated are at least half as likely to get infected, and therefore support a mutation, as the vaccinated. As of 7/3/2021, it was “Unvaccinated people are ‘variant factories,’ infectious diseases expert says” (CNN), with the article pointing out that every infection (a phenomenon that we now know is common in the vaccinated) is an opportunity for the virus to have a mutation party: “‘All it takes is one mutation in one person,’ said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and immunologist at Boston College.”

So… if Mx. Filipovic has been reading CNN, he/she/ze/they should know that the only way for him/her/zir/them to #StopTheSpread is to #StayHomeSaveLives. Yet he/she/ze/they is traveling for leisure, thus inevitably incurring a dramatically higher risk of infection compared to if he/she/ze/they had stayed home.

Also, in Covid news, a Trump-hating friend in NYC just canceled his family’s luxury trip to the Caribbean. He felt moderately sick and, in any case, needed a negative PCR test result to enter the wife’s chosen beachy paradise. After $10 trillion in federal spending on coronapanic combined with the wise leadership of Cuomo and his girlfriends (New York State Department of Health budget comparable to Russia’s active duty military budget), the family’s best testing option was waiting in line in the cold for 3 hours on the Upper West Side. (His test came back positive, so that’s a ton of money down the drain. I still can’t figure out why so many people are willing to incur this kind of risk on both sides of an international trip.) As with Mx. Filipovic, though, I can’t figure out why he planned this trip in the first place. If he wants to support President Biden’s #science-driven approach to ending the global pandemic, why won’t he stay home?

Related:

From this week’s trip to Tampa and back, the Florida Air Museum’s catalog of terrible engineering ideas (Lockheed XFV, XF2Y Sea Dart supersonic seaplane):

The lifeboats on American Victory serve as a reminder that not every policy that appears effective will be effective:

Massive plastic Christmas Trees Of Color in Tampa:

8 thoughts on “If at least 50 percent of us are Covid-righteous, how did hotels and flights fill up with leisure travelers?”

  1. The delusion/rationalization is strong. This is a recent article in “Scientific” American, where a science journalist discovers that the vaccinated can transmit the virus only after her son got infected:

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-risk-of-vaccinated-covid-transmission-is-not-low/

    “I am a science journalist and I have followed COVID news closely to protect my family. Based on extensive reading of trusted sources, I judged the risk of COVID transmission from a vaccinated person to be “very limited,” or “rare.” I allowed my son to be around my vaccinated, unmasked friends indoors.”

    “All fall, I could not find a single news story showing that asymptomatic vaccinated people transmitted the virus.”

    So, in some cases the phenomenon of Democrats traveling is preaching water but drinking wine, in others it is genuine ignorance, perhaps the result of only reading party-approved sources.

    • Anon: Thanks for that article. I do love “During the time he was likely infected, he had only been around vaccinated people when indoors.” (i.e., the 2-year-old was not exposed to heretics and infidels, so how did he become defiled?) I also like “My son thankfully has recovered (although, as mentioned, we now have many other worries).” (there is nothing wrong with the child, but we can still worry 24/7). “I dug into the science myself.” might be the best quote from the article. Looking at a few simple statistics now counts as “science”! The sacred “peer review” process that gave us https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 (“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”) is celebrated.

  2. As followers of the ‘spun, the lion kingdom invested in airline stonks while avoiding the PSI-20 at all costs. Unfortunately, the rest of the world sold on the news of declining travel instead of the reality of travel returning to 2019 levels so airline stonks are down 33% for the year.

  3. “Unvaccinated people are ‘variant factories,’ infectious diseases expert says”

    Well, like practically all talking heads this “expert” is full of *it.

    Viruses mutate. RNA viruses mutate fast and every viral infection is, in fact, a swarm of viral strains (usually closely related). Interaction with natural immune system selects for strains which manage to evade it – usually by flying under the radar aka “causing mild or asymptomatic illness” and eventually becoming completely harmless or even symbiotic.

    Throw vaccine-generated very specific antibodies into the mix, and the selective pressure now becomes evasion of these antibodies, instead of getting adapted to human natural immune system. This reduces this selective pressure towards mildness and may even cause evolution towards more deadly strains (as happened in a very well documented case of Marek’s disease in farmed chicken).

    So, in fact, it is vaccinated who are factories of bad variants. Unvaccinated breed variants, but increasingly milder ones. It is no coincidence that common cold aka Omicron variant originated in Africa (notoriously lagging in vaccinations).

    As always, when it will become impossible to deny, the boffins will finally admit that infection with Omicron is both safer than vaccines (nobody ever died FROM Omicron, unlike thousands dead from myocarditis and clotting induced by vaccination) and confers better cross-immunity to novel strains, too. Not a single one of them will ever offer an apology for the carnage their “science” caused.

    • averros: How can we know whether people have died from Omicron? We can agree, I think, that at least some people die from Covid. Maybe it isn’t 1,000-2,000 per day currently as the official stats say, but it is not zero, right?

      I’m not sure how the criteria would be defined given that the typical person who dies “from Covid” also may have numerous additional health problems. But let’s say that we could define these criteria and get clean information from the dog’s breakfast of software that American health care uses. Now maybe we could have a precise and correct number for “Covid deaths”. Even with that number, how would we know whether a specific Covid variant had infected a deceased person? Hospitals don’t run a variant-determining test on every person who is tagged as a COVID-19 death, right?

      After $10 trillion spent and two years to practice, the U.S. struggles to gather the simplest statistics. See

      https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/20/cdc-covid-omicron-delta-tracking-525621

      ‘It is embarrassing’: CDC struggles to track Covid cases as Omicron looms

      Continuing gaps in the CDC’s data collection program, which almost two years into the pandemic still relies on state health departments who use a mix of often incompatible and outdated state systems to identify cases, impedes the nation’s understanding of where and how fast the virus is spreading, according to more than a dozen state and federal officials involved in tracking cases.

      The fact that the data gaps have been apparent since the start of the pandemic makes the lack of substantial improvement particularly galling to many infectious disease specialists.

      “I think we’ve done a horrible job from day one in data tracking for the pandemic,” said Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research and former advisory board member of the Covid Tracking Project, a team that worked to collect and synthesize local Covid-19 during the peak of the pandemic. “We’re not tracking all the things that we need to to get a handle on what’s going on. It is embarrassing.”

    • Philip, Israel keeps statistics by coronavirus strain: they had single case of death from Omicron, the deceased had three shots of pfizer I believe, but under more detailed research it was re-classified as a bad flu case, so none reported so far.
      However Israel plans to mandate fourth shot of “vaccine” so there is probability that next strain may mutate to be more deadly to not vaccinates. I even read that many countries in Africa are now mandating vaccines, after Omicron threatens to ease global emergency.

    • Philg: as always Soviet art of reading between the lines in the newspapers which gets to the rescue in cases when information is supposedly lacking.

      We know that media runs the fear porn operation and we know which narrtive they push. We also know that they will amplify any hint of reality which seems to support their narrative.

      The lack of specifics regarding Omicron deaths is quite telling. It’s a good red flag for flat-out lying, just like that “Omicron death” in Texas.

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