Category: Coronapanic

Coronascience charts

by philg

A reader sent me the following Trust in Science page: https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios

The Spectator folks track the predictions of Science against actual outcomes. This is enabled by the fact that the UK rejected Science’s advice to impose a lockdown and therefore we can see the predictions of a no-lockdown situation versus the reality of a no-lockdown situation. (I.e., the Scientists can’t say that their doomsday scenario would have materialized if the politicians hadn’t followed their lockdown advice.)

One thing that is interesting about Coronascience is how fragile it is and how dependent on suppression of criticism. Astronomers don’t need Facebook, Twitter, and Google to suppress speech from people who believe in astrology. Astronomy’s credibility comes from a track record of successful predictions, not from silencing dissent. After two years of what we are told is enormous progress in Coronascience, however, the predictive ability of those who call themselves “Scientists” is minimal and the public’s faith in “The Science” can be maintained only by banning from Twitter, Facebook, et al., those who point out apparent contradictions.

See “Twitter suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene for 7 days over vaccine misinformation” (NYT, August 2021), for example:

She said there were too many reports of infection and spread of the coronavirus among vaccinated people, and that the vaccines were “failing” and “do not reduce the spread of the virus & neither do masks.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current guidance states, “Covid-19 vaccines are effective at protecting you from getting sick.”

In a statement circulated online, Ms. Greene said: “I have vaccinated family who are sick with Covid. Studies and news reports show vaccinated people are still getting Covid and spreading Covid.”

Data from the C.D.C. shows that of the so-called breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated, serious cases are extremely rare.

It can’t be simply that Representative Greene was speaking on a medical topic and therefore misinformation cannot be tolerated. Ordinary medicine apparently has a sufficiently secure reputation that Facebook and Twitter allow people to talk about their beliefs in herbs, homeopathy, acupuncture and other “alternative” medicine. It is specifically Coronascience where respect for the field must be manufactured via suppression.

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How’s COVID test availability in your neighborhood?

by philg

From three weeks ago: Why is it still almost impossible to schedule a COVID-19 test? (at least in Maskachusetts)

How are things now? Here in the Palm Beach area, using the CVS web site, the earliest appointment that I was able to find was for next Friday, January 14, in the reasonably-nearby town of Hobe Sound (at a purpose-built “community test center”, not a CVS per se). The web site cautioned that it might take 3 days to get a result:

(How can anyone travel internationally? For most countries, we need a PCR test within 3 days prior to the trip but it will take 3 days to get a result?)

Adding together 7 days to wait for the test and 3 days to wait for the result, that’s 10 days to know whether or not one has been infected with deadly SARS-CoV-2 and therefore it is time to get monoclonal antibodies, emergency use-authorized pills, etc. There are free line-up-and-wait (usually in a car, since this is Florida and people love to idle in their SUVs) sites, but there are no guarantees regarding wait times (four hours last week in Tampa, but more recently maybe only 40 minutes).

For a Trump-hating, Biden-loving friend who is a professor at the University of California Berkeley, it is straightforward to maintain full confidence in the central planners who have devoted themselves (and a $10 trillion) for two years to the testing challenge. He simply denies that there is any shortage of tests or testing capacity. He asserted that anyone intelligent would have stocked up on at-home kits, as he did months ago, and that, in any case, it is straightforward to order kits via Instacart and have them delivered within hours. (NYT says the at-home kits won’t detect the Dreaded Omicron so maybe these will turn out to be the hand sanitizer of 2022? Consumers thought that Purell was critical to hoard, but it turned out to be useless.) He also pointed out that there are some walk-in test clinics and simply asserted that the waiting time wouldn’t be too long: “I don’t know what the line length is, but … there probably isn’t much of a line.” Anyone who can’t arrange a test within hours of feeling sick is “doing something stupid.” (Biden’s re-election seems secure!)

What would happen if he left the bubble of his multi-$million stocked-with-test-kits bunker? “Coveted COVID tests causing four-hour traffic jams as omicron explodes in Bay Area” (Mercury News):

Waits longer than a week for PCR tests. ‘A lot of people are frustrated’

“Getting vaxxed and boosted was fine — it’s the testing that’s been difficult,” Chandani said.

With California and the U.S. experiencing the worst COVID-19 case spike of the pandemic as the super-contagious omicron variant spreads, Bay Area residents are scrambling to get tested, and some are waiting for appointments more than a week away.

In the Bay Area Vaccine Hunters group on Facebook, set up last winter to help people find vaccine appointments, posts have shifted from where to find a booster shot to how to find a COVID-19 test, moderator Jessica Moore said.

And the antigen rapid tests that can be purchased at pharmacies remain scarce. Schools that were provided them by the state have been running out, and they disappear quickly from store shelves.

“Any time anyone posts on the Facebook site, if you click half an hour later, they’re gone,” Moore said.

Deemed-essential-by-Governor Newsom marijuana stores remain open in California, but “Bay Area schools close due to staff shortages, high case rates” (Mercury News).

Readers: What if you wanted a PCR COVID-19 test right now? How would you get one? How long would it take? (and say, in the comment, where you live)

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Karen visits a Florida theme park

by philg

This is a quote from a friend’s Facebook post, but I am not going to use the WordPress Quote style because it will be easier to read if not in italics. The names have been changed. The author is a professor who lives in a Biden- and Fauci-supporting town. Any similarities to Confessions are purely coincidental… (and let me just state for the record that the author is a far smarter and nicer person that I have ever been!)

I’ve made what might have been the single worst error of judgment in my 40 years of life. If any good will come of it, it’s only in the confession and warning that I now feel morally compelled to give my friends.

One month ago, my 8-year-old daughter [Alice], who just finished the Harry Potter series, begged to go to Universal Studios in Orlando over Christmas break to see their Harry Potter park. It seemed like a good time: Alice (and her 4-year-old brother [Robert]) hadn’t enjoyed any trip of this kind since before the pandemic, Alice at last would finally be vaccinated, [wife] and I had just gotten our booster shots, Delta was in retreat, and covid numbers were actually extremely low in Florida. Plus we figured it would be mainly outdoors, and we’d mask, and [wife] found a website claiming it wouldn’t be very crowded on the dates we wanted to visit.

So I plunked down a few grand for (non-refundable) tickets. And then, literally the next day, we learned about the Omicron variant from South Africa. And to my eternal shame, I didn’t cancel the trip, despite my understanding of exponential growth. I couldn’t bear to face my daughter and tell her she wasn’t going after all, nor could I bear to face my family and tell them the planning and money were all wasted.

So now we’re here. And the reality is: it’s crowded as hell — one of the most unpleasant, sardine-packed places I’ve ever experienced in my life, before or during covid. The majority of guests (and even many employees) are unmasked. It’s mostly indoors. For every single ride, you stand for more than an hour in cramped, enclosed waiting areas while hordes of unmasked people breathe on you. It’s obviously an Omicron superspreader site. Indeed, the chances that one or more of us caught it today are EXCEEDINGLY high. Plus … it’s not even fun, like Disney World is. It sucks. Just endless lines, crowds, ripoffs, and uninspired rides.

Many of the rides play jokey recorded audio messages about how the ride is so terrifying, how much danger you’re in, phew you survived it, etc. etc. All those messages now take on new, unapproved meanings.

From the minute we arrived, I started saying “we have to leave this place, we have to leave, WE HAVE TO LEAVE NOW” — and yet, I’m ashamed to say, it took us 5+ hours to do so. I kept deferring to the … err … majority vote among my family, that we shouldn’t make a TOTAL loss of this trip, and surely we can find something here that’s relatively covid-safe?

Our mistake did, at least, give me perhaps my first opportunity of this entire pandemic to stare directly into the heart of the half of the country for which the virus might as well not be real — and I found the view absolutely terrifying, and it’s given me a new, visceral understanding for how we managed to lose 800,000+ Americans, and that understanding will stay with me as long as I live.

I’m sorry to everyone for whom I was a bad example. I’m sorry to everyone who my family might have endangered. Please learn from our mistake.

In the meantime, do any of my friends have suggestions for what to do for the rest of this trip? (Where one possibility is, “take the next flight back to [cozy Deplorable-free university town] and never look back”?)

ADDED: [wife] wanted me to emphasize how Universal Studios is endangering lives for greed, by packing people way, WAY more densely than can possibly be safe.

Alice [the 8-year-old], alone among us, actually enjoyed the park (!) and wants to return to it tomorrow.

Thus endeth the Confessions of Karen. The Confessions of Greenspun begins here…

I’ve made what might have been the single worst error of judgment in what feels like nearly 100 years of life. If any good will come of it, it’s only in the confession and warning that I now feel morally compelled to give my friends. I purchased an annual pass to Legoland Florida (Winter Haven, just south of Orlando) and we decided to visit during the beginning of the two-week Florida Christmas school vacation.

The park is nowhere near as crowded as Disney (think suburban shopping mall on a Saturday versus Times Square on a Friday night), but we didn’t know what to expect so I paid up for the $90/day skip-the-lines band ($60/day during non-peak periods). Unlike Professor Karen’s experience at Universal, above, we found that we almost never needed to be indoors to enjoy Legoland. Most of the lines, which we skipped in any case, were outdoors. The park recommends masks when indoors, but the core customer base seems to be Floridians and therefore hardly any of the visitors were masked, indoors or out.

Our 6-year-old loved the water ski show so much that Senior Management needed to sit through two repeats.

If you thought that COVID-19 was bad, it is only because you haven’t been on Mia’s Riding Adventure. “Many of the rides play jokey recorded audio messages about how the ride is so terrifying, how much danger you’re in, phew you survived it, etc.,” said Professor Karen (above). If I could take over as dictator of the U.S. and thus were able to force Legoland to install such a message, it would start with “How much would you enjoy it if your first horse ride were as a jockey in the Kentucky Derby at 37 mph?” and then note that the ride was best suited for those who booked all of their coast-to-coast flights on the Vomit Comet. (Recommendation: Try the Dragon rollercoaster, which is not too violent and which starts with a flat slow tour through some fun LEGO scenery.)

The San Francisco miniature is not consistent with Reading list: San Fransicko. There wasn’t a single homeless encampment on any of the LEGO sidewalks. There was no open-air drug market.

Miami Beach without a traffic jam of Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces, and Ferraris?

If you split your time between 12th Street and Haulover beaches, this might be the souvenir to bring home:

(One of my worst days since moving to Florida was at clothing-optional Haulover beach. Everything was awesome until some wag called Marine Mammal Rescue and they showed up at my blanket with a whale sling.)

Not every visitor was Deplorable. Here is a fully masked family:

They’re walking by a bust of a notorious racist (also known for popularizing Mileva Marić‘s explanations of the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and conversion of matter into energy) made out of 500,000 Duplo bricks.

Short summary of my friend’s theme park experience and our own family’s: I’m not surprised that Floridians, who never entered the Covid Olympics and therefore don’t care which medal they win, show up to parks. But I am surprised that anyone who supported school closures, mask orders, and other Covid-related restrictions will show up (this is about half of Americans, so the parks should be at least half empty!). And I am truly shocked that the federal government allows the parks to remain open (also, the Super Bowl; why?). From Disney World during Code Orange coronapanic (September 2021):

(According to #Science, COVID-19 is a sufficiently serious public health issue that schools have been closed (for 1.5 years in our big cities) and/or children are made to wear masks 7 hours per day while also forgoing normal interaction (American kindergarten is now set up more like high school detention; kids must sit at their individual desks and not get close to other kids… while also wearing masks). If we are losing life years, contrary to Social Security and life insurance financials, the only sensible #Science-informed policy would be a presidential order shutting down all American theme parks. Pulling together 200,000+ people per day at Disney World (all four parks combined) means pulling together people in airliners (most of the folks we met had flown there), in restaurants, in hotels, etc. Even if they don’t get infected while on a roller coaster, they’re a lot more likely to get infected than if they’d stayed home, which remains the best demonstrated method of cutting one’s infection/transmission risk (our best vaccines can cut infection/transmission in half right now?). As a society we’ve determined that it makes sense to deny an education to millions of children if just one life can be saved. Shouldn’t the same logic apply to theme parks? If child can wait 1.5 years to learn, why can’t adults and children wait until the pandemic is over to ride a roller coaster?)

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Why doesn’t the raging plague in Maskachusetts cause doubt among the true believers in Faucism?

by philg

This post generally falls into the category of “Are humans in charge of SARS-CoV-2 infections or is the virus in charge?” One of the principal heresies of this blog, since March 2020, is the assertion that SARS-CoV-2 would be in charge of how many humans it infects. I’m wondering if Maskachusetts, which has proceeded under the assumption that humans are in charge, definitively answers the question.

Massachusetts has everything going for it in terms of COVID-19-protection. The population is untainted by Trump supporters, holds a lot of degrees (highly credentialed if not always educated), and is meekly compliant with whatever #Science tells them to do. 95 percent of the subjects, age 12+, have experienced the sacrament of vaccination. Almost any kind of indoor gathering, including attending what’s left of the public schools, requires that everyone wear a multi-layer mask (some private schools are now requiring N95 masks for all-day wear by those aged 2 and over, contrary to “expert” advice in August: “Kids do not need N95, KN95 masks at school amid COVID-19 surge, experts say” (Good Morning America)). Marijuana, which we are informed cures most diseases and is therefore “essential”, has by governor’s order been available at all times since March 2020. Colleges sent students home weeks ago and aren’t inviting them back until February. Unless Karen decides to go on vacation, therefore, Massachusetts is an island guided by Science (capitalized, like “God”).

What does “the curve” look like among this science-following stoned-as-necessary population? NYT:

An uneducated person who was not familiar with nor following The Science might think that the recent trend in cases actually has a steeper slope than prior to universal vaccination. In other words, vaccinating 95 percent of the eligible population has no effect on infection and transmission and, if anything, to the extent that it is causal, actually accelerates the spread. But the faith in forced vaccination remains as powerful as ever. Question for today: Why? Isn’t the example of Massachusetts sufficient to convince even those who put blind faith in Science that vaccines don’t prevent infection/transmission?

(Maybe we can blame the 5 percent? So far Maskachusetts has nearly 1.2 million “cases”. Those are lab-confirmed, so the total cases is probably closer to 2.5 million. Most of the cases seem to have occurred after the vaccines were authorized for emergency use. 5 percent of the population is 350,000. Unless the unvaccinated are getting COVID-19 over and over and over, there simply aren’t enough of these Yankee Deplorables to generate the case numbers reported in the NYT.)

From a reader comment recently, “Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid-19 despite strict measures”:

Two-thirds of the staff currently based in the Princess Elisabeth Polar Station in Antarctica have been infected with Covid-19, even though very strict health measures were put in place.

“All those present have received two doses of vaccine, and one person has even received a booster shot,” said Alain Hubert, the station’s executive operator and head of security measures.

All staff members preparing to depart to the station had to undergo a PCR test in Belgium two hours before leaving for South Africa, take a PCR test five days after their arrival in Cape Town, where they also had to quarantine for ten days. Another test was required when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica and another PCR test had to be undergone five days after arrival.

These are folks who follow the Science so closely that they actually have jobs in Science! And yet, despite not letting any Untouchables into their pristine vaccinated and PCR-tested environment, they are all plagued now.

This is not to say that the vaccines aren’t potentially useful for the old/vulnerable in terms of preventing hospitalization and/or death. But given the above examples, shouldn’t a person of ordinary intelligence doubt the idea that forced universal vaccination will reduce infection/transmission and therefore the breeding of mutations? My quick survey of righteous friends says that the answer is “no”. Their faith is stronger than ever. But none has a coherent explanation of the Maskachusetts “curve”.

Related:

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The unvaccinated can upgrade their image by consuming meth and heroin?

by philg

The self-described “progressive” who wrote San Fransicko thinks that one reason homelessness in California is so persistent is that individuals are not held accountable for their choices, e.g., to consume drugs.

Until the early 1980s, many people described the homeless as “bums,” “hobos,” and “vagrants” who chose their lifestyle and were undeserving of help. “It was advocates who coined the phrase, ‘homeless,’” said the University of Pennsylvania’s Dennis Culhane. “They’re the ones who thought ‘homeless’ would be a soft, fluffy term for the public to be sympathetic to.” The term was used as a way to advocate for public subsidies for housing. “The anti-homelessness movement chose the term ‘homelessness,’” wrote Gowan, “as opposed to ‘transient,’ ‘indigent,’ etc., for its implication that the biggest difference between the homeless and the housed was their lack of shelter.”

Words are powerful. The word “homeless” not only makes us think of housing, it also makes us not think of mental illness, drugs, and disaffiliation. The word directs our attention to things perceived as outside of a person’s control, such as the high cost of housing, and away from things perceived as in their control, such as working, parenting, and staying sober.

The news media have framed homelessness as poverty since the 1980s. “It hasn’t been this bad since the Great Depression,” claimed KQED, San Francisco’s main public broadcaster, in 1983. “Yet the stock market is booming. Venture capitalists are making millions of dollars overnight in Silicon Valley video games. For a few, it’s the best of times. For many more, it’s the worst.”

It was a grossly misleading statement. The poor farming families like the Okies who fled to the Bay Area in 1933 were utterly unlike the crack-, heroin-, and alcohol-abusing single homeless men of San Francisco in 1983. The two groups were homeless for completely different reasons and needed completely different things to improve their lives. As for unemployment, it declined dramatically, from nearly 10 percent in 1982, the year when the national news media started to heavily cover homelessness, to just over 5 percent in 1989.

Arresting and prosecuting the homeless for things like defecating in public, injecting fentanyl publicly, and living on the sidewalk is unethical, say a growing number of progressive political candidates and elected officials, because the people doing those things are victims of racism, poverty, and trauma. When he ran for office in 2018, San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin announced, “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes. Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted.”68 Enforcing the law contributes to further victimization, says Boudin. “Jails do nothing to treat the root cause of crime,” read his campaign platform. In early 2020 Boudin said, “There are people who are harmed by the addiction crisis in this city, by open-air drug use and drug sales.” But, he added, “those are technically victimless crimes.”

(Living and working in Berkeley, the author may be unfamiliar with the fact that the U.S. actually does have a political party out there for people who think as he does, i.e., that people who use a lot of meth and heroin may have made affirmative choices to use a lot of meth and heroin.)

Is there any class of individuals whose behavior is so outside of cultural norms that progressives are willing to blame them? Let’s look at the official newspaper of the progressive faith. “Doctors and Nurses Are ‘Living in a Constant Crisis’ as Covid Fills Hospitals and Omicron Looms” (New York Times, 12/17/2021). The article itself doesn’t contain anything new or interesting. The NYT reports that Covid is raging in the parts of the U.S. that have the highest vaccination rate. And the reader comments are consistent with this:

The urgent care center on my street has a line snaking around the entire block right now. In Manhattan, in a zip code with vaccination rates in the 85-ish percentile.

Summary of the core article: The folks who collect 20 percent of GDP aren’t happy about having to work extra hard for two Covid waves per year in any given state. What is important for today’s topic is the sentiment expressed in numerous comments. Examples:

I know it sounds cruel, but we need to have a discussion about denying the willfully unvaccinated medical care for Covid – they are keeping it around, helping it mutate and taking up valuable resources that can go to those in real need, to say nothing of destroying our medical systems.

Let the unvaccinated die.

If a person has refused vaccination and a booster, they should NOT be allowed to a hospital. Let Fox News set up Covid-19 hospitals to care for those it continues to mislead for its own profit.

The unvaccinated are destroying our health care system. Time for drastic and draconian steps. If you want to be admitted to a hospital, please provide proof of vaccination. Otherwise you can have a bed at a field hospital that has been set up an an old warehouse, where you will have a bed and a bedpan and no guarantee that anyone will be checking on you.

It may sound cruel, but in all absolute fairness to medical personnel here, people who refuse vaccination and who contract Covid should be treated as attempted suicides. They should be triaged separately and placed in heated tents in available fields or parking lots and treated there by a volunteer or military medical auxiliary, so that hospital personnel can go about their normal duties of handling sane ER cases, strokes, heart surgeries, able to heal those who want and need healing, allowing medical personnel to be preserved themselves from extreme PTSD. If the non-vaxxer patients complain of primitive conditions, they should be reminded of their own primitive behavior in refusing vaccination, when help was available all around them. The medical profession in this country should not be destroyed because of selfish, insane and deliberately suicidal people.

The time to stop accepting people that don’t believe in modern medicine, i.e. vaccines, was 6 months ago.

(from Boston!) Unvaccinated Covid patients can have tent hospitals with their family members taking care of them.

When doing triage, the unvaccinated should go to the bottom of the list! It’s time for insurance companies to refuse to cover treatment for unvaccinated Covid patients, (unless they have a real legitimate reason; not religious, which is almost nobody)

No vaccine should mean no hospital care, no insurance coverage for Covid, and no access to public places.

Stop treating the unvaccinated and send them home. They cannot be allowed to continue on this path of destruction.

Stop admitting the unvaccinated for covid-related care, with an obvious exception for those who couldn’t get the shot for true medical reasons.

(from California) in my world it would look like this: field hospitals in tents with bare bones amenities and treatments for the unvaxxed. Pay the doctors and nurses and facilities staffing these places an inflated rate to compensate for the horrors of it all. Allow hospitals to return to normal, and reserve in-hospital care, vents, etc. for those who are vaccinated.

(response to the above) I’d gladly tell their relatives why: Your husband [dad, son, uncle, brother, or whomever] is in this parking lot Covid facility — probably dying and responsible gif the full cost of treatment — away from responsible patients because he refused to behave like an adult, get vaccinated and wear a mask. This was your husband’s choice.

(Minneapolis) Hospitals need to require people to be vaccinated before entry. No vaccination, no hospital.

(Oregon) Why is it a “ choice “ to remain unvaccinated and be fully responsible the strain and toll on our health care workers , not to mention the financial strain and millions of dollars that have been spent in an effort to keep these people alive . … Why can’t we refuse to treat those who make that choice .

(Separately, some brave commenters pointed out that the hospital staff pictured taking care of COVID patients were not wearing PPE that might be effective against an aerosol virus:

It’s alarming to me that none of the staff pictured are wearing n95’s or eye wear while taking care of these patients.

)

How can the unvaccinated shield themselves from blame by progressives and, if present trends toward increased government power continue, internment in Protection Camps? What could an unvaccinated Deplorable do that would make him/her/zir/them immune to criticism and demands to live somewhere other than where he/she/ze/they has chosen to live? The unvaccinated must start taking meth and heroin!

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Protected by masks on a 100-percent full flight

by philg

Readers may recall that I’ve been an advocate for preventing airlines from selling middle seats during coronapanic, rather than relying on masks to block the spread of germs (see Coronavirus will breathe life into my two-thirds-full airline idea? (3/23/2020) and Science proves that I’m right: airlines should leave the middle seat empty (4/16/2021)).

As I type this, a friend is on a 100-percent packed flight back to Boston from a ski vacation. He’s never been especially concerned about COVID-19, so his voluntary leisure travel does not make him a hypocrite (see If at least 50 percent of us are Covid-righteous, how did hotels and flights fill up with leisure travelers?).

Here are his instant messages, enabled by Delta’s WiFi ($5 fee):

  • A woman next to me on the plane has been sneezing into her mask for 4 hours now. She takes it off, blows her nose profusely and puts it back on.
  • The man across from me is coughing all the time.
  • You can hear people sniffling.
  • I can identify at least four different people sniffling one after the other.
  • It is a COVID symphony
  • String quartet maybe
  • The cello just took off his mask and blew his nose
  • Somebody just sounded like he snorted a quart of snot and then coughed five times loudly
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Safe way to celebrate New Year’s Eve: watch Contagion

by philg

Contagion, by the brilliant director Steven Soderbergh, leaves HBO Max tonight. Most of the friends who scolded me for lack of coronapanic orthodoxy and weak adherence to Faucism are still in their crowded vacation destinations, often in foreign countries where they can harvest exotic variant SARS-CoV-2. I know that, by contrast, readers of this blog follow the science and therefore will be home, and certainly wouldn’t wish to participate in a New Year’s Eve superspreader event such as a party without adequate vaccine papers checks, let me suggest watching the movie!

(And, remember, that “Fauci says to cancel New Year’s Eve parties, as millions struggle for normalcy nearly two years into pandemic” (Fox, 12/27): “But when you’re talking about a New Year’s Eve party, we have 30, 40, 50 people celebrating. You do not know the status of their vaccination, I would recommend strongly stay away from that this year.”)

Though both are zoonotic, there are some differences in the movie disease compared to COVID-19. The movie disease doesn’t seem to spread as well as a pure aerosol, but rather is best transmitted via surface contact. The movie disease has a death rate of about 30% for previously healthy children and young adults, i.e., lining up pretty well with what my friends who read the New York Times and listen to NPR believe.

The movie should have been required viewing for all Americans in March 2020. People would have learned what #Science believed at the time about COVID-19, i.e., that it was spread by fomites and that it was critical to understand R0. The movie depicts shortages, mostly peaceful activities by citizens (i.e., looting) and, contrary to what happened with COVID-19, health care workers abandoning their jobs.

The movie also shows citizens resigning themselves to a yearlong lockdown in order to avoid the 30% chance of death.

The movie shows an alternative medicine fad, roughly analogous to what we saw with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. It misses the “often in error, never in doubt” phenomenon that we’ve seen from regular medicine with COVID-19. Doctors, especially CDC doctors, are essentially infallible and advice informed by #Science never has to be revised.

*** SPOILER ALERT *** There are some anachronisms from our point of view. The film was made in 2011, when identifying as Black or as a “woman” (as the term was understood then) was sufficient for being a brilliant scientist. There was no need to also be part of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. Despite not being 2SLGBTQQIA+ (and, in fact, although there are sexual relationships referred to, I don’t think that there are any 2SLGBTQQIA+ characters), the brilliant female scientist is sufficiently brilliant to develop a one-and-done vaccine. *** END OF SPOILER ***

To everyone who will be safely at home watching TV: Happy New Year!

To everyone who will be attending parties: We’ll see you in Hell!

Related…

“Delta and Omicron are coming to your party”: Authorities ask Illinois citizens to vaccinate and mask up” (Illinois News Live):

As New Year’s Eve approached, Ejike told everyone to expect uninvited guests from their gathering: Delta and Omicron, a variant of the virus that is currently prevalent in the state. The word Omicron seems less deadly, especially given that Delta is still a prevalent strain in Illinois, isn’t a reason for people to relax, Ezike said. ..

“Omicron and Delta are coming to your party, so you need to think twice,” said Governor JB Pritzker. “People obviously should pay special attention.

What does the expert on a disease that attacks the obese look like? Here’s Governor Pritzker:

A view from the front:

Let’s check “the curve” for Illinois:

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Covid epidemic among air traffic controllers in Orlando

by philg

Numerous COVID-righteous friends have reported problems getting to vacation destinations this year. Dr. Fauci apparently told them to cram themselves onto 100-percent-full airliners and then congregate with others in hotels, restaurants, ski lifts, etc. Many of these plans for #StoppingTheSpread were thwarted when airlines canceled Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Christmas-New Year’s Week flights. The airlines’ explanations were generally centered around pilots and flight attendants being sick with COVID-19 and my friends accepted these explanations uncritically.

It did not occur to them, in other words, that a junior airline pilot who had been scheduled to work on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day would instead find it convenient to say “I have been in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19” or “I tested positive for COVID-19 using a home kit” and then be home for the holidays rather than alone in a far-away Hilton Garden Inn.

Today I happened to be flying around Florida. Orlando Approach was refusing to provide any services to VFR (visual flight rules), saying that they were understaffed due to people being out with Covid. IFR flights, other than flights to MCO and other airports within the Orlando Class B airspace, were being routed down the west coast of Florida. Jacksonville Center, Daytona Approach, Palm Beach Approach, Miami Center, et al. were up and running normally.

What’s different about Orlando, I wondered, that, compared to anywhere else in Florida, there should be so many more controllers felled by mighty SARS-CoV-2? Pravda shows that the “case rate” is actually higher in parts of Florida where ATC was up and running normally:

Then I reflected that kids are out of school this week while Disney World, Universal, SeaWorld, LEGOLAND, et al. are open. I wonder if we would find that holding an annual pass to a theme park, with no blackout dates, turned out to be a risk factor for calling in disabled from COVID-19 during the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

A couple of photos from our destination, beautiful Gainesville, Florida (well, the campus is beautiful anyway!):

It was 80 degrees and sunny. Three of the Navy guys were coming out of the FBO in full flight suits with all kinds of gear attached, preparing to get into their T-45 Goshawks. I was walking in from the Cirrus SR20 in gym shorts and a T shirt (don’t over-dress if your plane lacks A/C!). I asked “Why do you need more than this [indicating T shirt] to fly a plane?”

Related:

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Merry Christmas from the Central Planners

by philg

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Loyal readers will know that I love central planning (seen “Citizens for a Planned Economy,” the political group that I formed after watching the 2012 Presidential debate in which candidates from both parties promised federal intervention) and bureaucratically-managed coronapanic. Today, we celebrate the Christmas gifts of the Maskachusetts Pharaohs to the people, in particular the distribution of COVID-19 tests to “more than 100 municipalities with a larger proportion of families facing financial hardship”. These are characterized as “free” so, presumably, the people themselves will not have to pay for them via taxation.

My favorite part of the mass.gov page is the list of the impoverished towns that will receive “free” tests. Weston, Massachusetts is on the list. Back in 2019, the town had a median household income of $207,702 per year (Census; using pre-Biden dollars). What will the good burghers of Weston do with the test kits? After the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency and Massachusetts National Guard drive away,

Each city or town will determine how best to distribute tests within their community, with an emphasis on increasing access for individuals and families who are facing financial hardship.

“Hospitals Scramble as Antibody Treatments Fail Against Omicron” (NYT, 12/21):

In New York, hospital administrators at NewYork-Presbyterian, N.Y.U. Langone and Mount Sinai all said in recent days that they would stop giving patients the two most commonly used antibody treatments, made by Eli Lilly and Regeneron, according to memos obtained by The Times and officials at the health systems.

Federal health officials plan to assess at the end of this week whether to pause shipments of the Eli Lilly and Regeneron products to individual states, based on how dominant Omicron becomes in different regions of the country, according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Already in high demand even before Omicron arose, the supply of sotrovimab is very limited for now. But the situation is likely to improve somewhat in the coming weeks. The Biden administration is in talks with GlaxoSmithKline about securing more doses to be delivered by early next year, the administration official said.

The central planners are getting you antibodies for Christmas, but it might be Christmas 2022…

Related:

  • Trouble in public health paradise… “Mass. Medical Society calls for statewide mask mandate for all indoor public settings” (Boston.com, 12/14): The president of the Massachusetts Medical Society is recommending that state officials require the use of masks in all indoor public settings, regardless of vaccination status, in the face of worrying COVID-19 trends in the commonwealth. The call to bring back an indoor mask mandate came a day after Gov. Charlie Baker said he has “no plans to bring back the statewide mask mandate,” despite the urging of health experts to do so. In recent weeks, Massachusetts has seen a sharp increase in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations to levels that have not been seen since the surge last winter, prompting state officials to order hospitals facing capacity constraints to cut elective procedures by 50 percent. Some municipalities, including Boston, have since brought back indoor mask mandates in response to the COVID-19 trends seen in their local communities. Starting Monday, Salem is also requiring all individuals entering a public or municipal building to wear a face covering, regardless of their vaccination status.
  • Merry Christmas to Israelis who celebrate this holiday… “For a growing number of Jews in Israel, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” (Times of Israel): You ask Yaeli Amir, a seven-year-old Jewish girl growing up in a rural town in Israel, what her favorite holiday is, and she won’t name any of the almost countless Jewish ones. Instead, she’ll say, without hesitation, “Christmas!” (Tisha B’Av is a tougher sell to 7-year-olds?)
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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:

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