Category: Coronapanic

“WHO says Covid still a global public health emergency even as deaths fall to lowest level in two years” (CNBC):

“Far from being the time to drop our guard, this is the moment to work even harder to save lives,” Tedros said during a press briefing in Geneva. “Specifically, this means investing so that Covid-19 tools are equitably distributed, and we simultaneously strengthen health systems.”

Houssin said the committee is working on criteria, including epidemiological data and the level of international assistance to contain the virus, to determine when the WHO can declare that the global health emergency is over.

“Masks Stay On: C.D.C. Keeps the Mandate on Planes” (NYT):

Despite pressure from airlines and industry groups, the Biden administration extended the requirement to wear masks while traveling on public transportation through May 3.

Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the new White House Covid response coordinator, said in an interview that the additional time will allow the C.D.C. to assess whether BA.2, a subvariant of the coronavirus, is going to become a “ripple or a wave” in the United States. The C.D.C. will use that information to determine whether the mandate should be extended further, he said.

We’re still in a COVID emergency, which is why the rabble need to wear some sort of mask on buses, subways, and commercial airliners (the elites are unmasked in their private cars and private jets, of course!), but COVID is not a sufficiently serious risk to justify trying to keep COVID-infected migrants out (“CDC orders Title 42 to wind down, saying expulsions of migrants are no longer needed” (CBS, April 1)).

It’s a worldwide and nationwide emergency, but every American has the option to move to a state that matches his/her/zir/their desired level of panic. One useful tool is the WalletHub ranking of states by COVID-19 restrictions (the Florida Free State is #2 at the free end of the spectrum). A newly released multi-state comparison from the National Bureau of Economic Research is co-authored by Casey Mulligan (see Book Review: The Redistribution Recession). From “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19”:

For those who seek maximum panic and securely locked-down K-12ers, the best places to live are California, Maryland, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and D.C. (And, in fact, some friends who were supporters of lockdowns, masks, Joe Biden, etc. recently moved to Hawaii from a state that had only a middling level of passion for lockdowns and school closures.)

As the authors point out (above), school closures will surely kill a lot of Americans in the long run; they estimate that more life-years will be lost just from this than from COVID-19. But did school closures save lives in the short run? The authors look at COVID-tagged deaths per 100,000 population and adjust for age and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes. Hawaii is ranked #1 (lowest rate), but D.C. is ranked #48 despite similar enthusiasm for school closure. (schools-open Florida is mid-pack for death rate at #22.) On the “excess deaths” guestimation, California and Florida are right next to each other despite it being illegal to keep a school open in California and it being illegal to keep a school closed in Florida.

The authors are economists so they get into a lot of GDP data and operate from the assumption that richer is better than poorer. I personally disagree with this approach as I’ve noted before. Since Americans say that they don’t care how impoverished they become so long as they can preserve at least one human life, the relevant standard for looking at lockdown is life-years, adding up those saved from COVID-19 and subtracting those lost due to the side-effects of lockdown. Wealth (GDP) factors into this only to the extent that wealth is correlated with health and longevity.

The NBER paper concludes by noting that four of the states that they ranked last in a composite score (in-person school percentage, economic performance, and minimizing deaths) are the ones that have had the highest per-capita rates of out-migration. These are DC, NY, IL, and CA.

What about our family’s August 2021 move? Florida gets an A rating and a #6 rank in the composite score. Maskachusetts is lumped in with the D students and has a #41 rank. (If you like skiing, Utah is ranked #1!)

Related:

• Science: travelers from zero-COVID China need medical testing, but undocumented migrants do not
• “Mask mandates return as COVID-19 cases rise across U.S.” (CBS, April 11)
• Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children

The standard example of chutzpah has been “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”

I wonder if we can replace this with one from a U.S. government agency. “CDC Reports Warn of Teen ‘Mental Health Crisis’ During Pandemic” (MedPage Today, 3/31/2022):

In a nationwide survey, high school students reported experiencing poor mental health and life disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC researchers said.

Among a nationally representative sample of high school students in the U.S., 37% said that they experienced poor mental health, and 44% reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, reported Sherry Everett Jones, PhD, of the CDC, and colleagues.

Furthermore, about 20% of respondents said they seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9% had attempted suicide during the 12 months before the survey, they noted in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

“Our data make it clear that young people experienced significant disruptions during the pandemic, and are experiencing a mental health crisis,” said co-author Kathleen Ethier, PhD, of the CDC, during a conference call with the media. “It is clear right now that young people need all the support we can give them.”

In other words, the agency that enabled state and local school systems to shut down for more than a year (while still ladling out taxpayer-funded salaries at 100%!) under the guise of following Science now says that people should look to them for advice on how to restore the mental health of kids whose schools were thus closed.

Related:

• “Positive Drug Tests Among U.S. Workers Hit Two-Decade High” (Wall Street Journal, 3/30/2022)
• “Alcohol-Related Deaths Spiked During First Year of Pandemic: Study” (WebMD, 3/22/2022)
• NY Post: “For under-65s, booze was deadlier than COVID in 2020.”

Exactly two years ago (April 2, 2020), I asked If we could build renal dialysis capacity, why not COVID-19 treatment centers?

On the one hand, the U.S. health care system is kind of lame. It consumes a ton of money. New York State spends $88 billion per year on its Department of Health, $4,400/year for every resident, mostly just for people on welfare in New York; Mexico spends about $1,100/year across all citizens, including those with jobs. The U.S. health care system delivers feeble results. Life expectancy in Mexico is 77 versus 78 in the U.S. Despite this prodigious spending, New York has completely failed to protect its residents from something that isn’t truly new.

On the other hand, the U.S. managed to build enough renal dialysis capacity to keep 468,000 Americans with failed kidneys alive. This is a complex procedure that requires expensive machines, and one that did not exist on a commercial basis until the 1960s.

Should this success story give us some hope that the U.S. will, in fact, be able to deal with the surge of demand for ventilation and life support created by the evil non-Chinese coronavirus?

Of course, one issue is that we had decades to build up all of this renal dialysis capability while we have only about one more month to build COVID-19 treatment capacity. But once we have built it, can we sail through the inevitable next wave or two of COVID-19?

The idea turned out to have some medical merit. “COVID Patients Fared Better at Dedicated Hospitals for It” (MedPage Today, 3/3/2022):

At the two M Health Fairview hospitals converted to treat COVID-19 starting in March and November 2020, overall mortality with COVID-19 was higher than in the health system’s other nine Minnesota hospitals (11.6% vs 8.0%, P<0.001).

But after accounting for the generally sicker patients treated at the dedicated hospitals, in-hospital mortality was a relative 22% to 25% less likely, which was significant in both unmatched and propensity-matched comparisons.

Complications were a relative 19% less likely than at mixed-use hospitals, Elizabeth Lusczek, PhD, of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and colleagues reported in JAMA Network Open.

M Health Fairview converted two of its hospitals with building modifications to enhance remote telemetry, create negative airflow rooms with HEPA filters, and update interventional radiology and procedural suites and ensure that the healthcare workers there would have easy access to personal protective equipment (PPE) even in times of general shortage.

We’ve spent $10 trillion over two years in our fight against SARS-CoV-2? How many dedicated COVID-19 treatment centers did we get for this money? I’m thinking that the answer is close to zero, given that every time there is a bump in “cases”, we see media stories about non-specialized hospitals being overwhelmed.

Related:

• Florida implements my renal dialysis-inspired COVID care idea (sort of) (only for antibody therapy that quickly became worthless due to evolution)

We visited Madame Tussauds Orlando earlier this month and learned that Madonna might not be the best celebrity advocate for years of lockdowns, mask orders, and school closures: “It’s better to live one year as a tiger, than one hundred as a sheep.”

This inspired a search that turned up “Madonna’s Instagram account flagged for spreading misinformation” (BBC, July 2020):

Pop star Madonna has been censured by Instagram after sharing a video about a coronavirus conspiracy theory to her 15 million followers.

In her post, the singer claimed a vaccine for Covid-19 had already been found, but was being hidden to “let the rich get richer”.

Instagram blurred out the video with a caption saying: “False Information”.

It also directed users to a page debunking the claims in the video, noting there is no coronavirus vaccine.

Facebook and Twitter had previously removed the video, flagging it as misinformation; while Donald Trump Jr. was banned from tweeting for 12 hours as a penalty for sharing the clip.

What about the absurd “vaccine for Covid-19 had already been found” claim? From December 2020, “We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time” (New York Magazine):

You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13.

And the “let the rich get richer” calumny against Science? From October 2021, “The richest Americans became 40% richer during the pandemic” (Guardian):

The 400 richest Americans added $4.5tn to their wealth last year, a 40% rise, even as the pandemic shuttered large parts of the US, according to Forbes magazine’s latest tally of the country’s richest people.

“World’s richest become wealthier during Covid pandemic as inequality grows” (NBC, January 2021):

Almost every country in the world is likely to see an increase in inequality because of the pandemic, according to a new report.

“Wealth of world’s 10 richest men doubled in pandemic, Oxfam says” (BBC, January 2022):

Danny Sriskandarajah, Oxfam GB’s chief executive, said the charity timed the report each year to coincide with Davos to attract the attention of economic, business and political elites.

“This year, what’s happening is off the scale,” he said. “There’s been a new billionaire created almost every day during this pandemic, meanwhile 99% of the world’s population are worse off because of lockdowns, lower international trade, less international tourism, and as a result of that, 160 million more people have been pushed into poverty.”

“Something is deeply flawed with our economic system,” he added.

Separately, on the subject of inequality, Madame Tussauds invites visitors to compare their achievements to some Americans who were selected at random:

(Elvis, Oprah, and Dan Marino)

Regarding the rich trying to become richer, here’s child support plaintiff Angeline Jolie and the cash source that she has been tapping:

The best part of visiting Madame Tussauds was hearing our 8-year-old ask, after seeing a realistic sculpture of the King of Pop, “Was Michael Jackson a boy or a girl?”

Here’s an annotated chart from a tweet:

The CNN article cited seems to be “The Omicron surge hasn’t peaked nationwide, and ‘the next few weeks will be tough,’ US surgeon general says” (updated Jan 18). The February 23 interview with Dr. Biden’s colleague Dr. Fauci can be found on MSN.

(I’m not convinced that the above chart proves Dr. Fauci wrong, at least in the eyes of those who Follow Science. The masks won’t come off in Los Angeles until March 23 (ABC). For the Mask Believers (against the evidence), if there is another case surge this summer they could easily attribute it to the late March Unmasking.)

Two years ago (CBS):

The National Naval Aviation Museum is temporarily closing due to concerns over coronavirus.

The museum will be open this weekend, and then close on Monday, March 16.

According to the museum’s official web site, the museum is now technically open, but practically closed because the taxpayers who have been funding it for the past two years are not allowed on the base.