Category: Coronapanic

Adults used to compete in trying to give as much as possible to children, bragging about sacrifices of time, effort, and money to ensure that children had a wonderful time and a bright future.

At least in Maskachusetts, things shifted in 2020. The state was a wide-open playground for adults, with “essential” liquor and marijuana stores open to record-breaking sales and Tinder receiving record usage. The bureaucratic grinches, however, came up with almost daily schemes for taking things away from children: schools (closed for over a year in Boston), playing with friends, after-school sports, playgrounds, freedom to breathe during sports (mask requirements both indoors and out), birthday parties with more than a handful of guests (illegal home gathering), etc.

Is it fair to say that adults are still competing in the Grinch Olympics? From “As Young Kids Get Vaccines, a ‘Huge Weight’ Is Lifted for Families” (NYT, 11/25/2021):

When the pandemic came for Georgia, Lauren Rymer had to make a snap choice: her mother’s safety or what she believed was best for her young child.

She locked down her family for the better part of last year, living with her mother, Sharon Mooneyhan, who has multiple sclerosis, and protecting her by keeping her son Jack, 5, out of kindergarten to avoid routine household exposure to Covid. “I didn’t want my mom to miss out on being with her only grandchild,” Ms. Rymer said.

So school was scrapped for mushroom hunts in the forest between her work Zoom calls, Legos and an intergenerational exploration of a backyard chicken coop. The upside was that she and her mother would not have to live in fear of a life-ending snuggle at bedtime.

But grandma had multiple sclerosis and that means instant death if infected with SARS-CoV-2, right? From the National MS Society:

Current evidence shows that simply having MS does not make you more likely to develop COVID-19 or to become severely ill or die from the infection than the general population.

Every parent claims to be altruistic, which conflicts with the conclusions of labor economist Claudia Goldin in “Parental Altruism and Self-Interest: Child Labor Among Late Nineteenth-Century American Families”:

Nonaltruistic behavior by parents was pervasive. Even among families with positive assets, child labor was common…

The labor market evidence suggests that parents were willing to accept large reductions in their own wages to secure employment in areas having abundant child labor opportunities. They were implicitly willing to sell the labor services of their children very cheaply, indeed at a rate that suggest they placed very little value on the foregone schooling (and future income) of their children. … Neither did they permit children to retain their earnings for future use. The children were simply worse off…

The empirical results suggest that parents did not have strong (economic) altruistic concerns for their children. … the family provided little in the way of offsetting physical asset transfers (in the form of gifts and bequests) to compensate children for their lost schooling and future earnings. The increased family income was apparently absorbed in higher current family consumption.

I.e., the parents wanted money to spend on themselves. (Modern edition: family court entrepreneurs will never accept money to be placed in trust for a child’s adult use, but instead want cash that the adult plaintiff can spend right now (in West Virginia, however, child support of more than $24,000 per year per child generally will go into a trust).)

Is it fair to say that the first two years of 14 days to flatten the curve have brought out the most Grinch-like behavior among American adults for at least the past 100 years?

Separately, Merry Christmas! Floridians go all-out decorating with winter-themed China-made outdoor items. Icicles, North Pole signs, snowflakes, snowmen, etc. are all on display as one walks around in shorts and a T-shirt in the 78-degree sunshine. Below is a rare example of a geographically appropriate Christmas display (the alligator), juxtaposed with what is typical (note You Know Who in the background behind the polar bear).

Today is the day that my friend, who woke up with a fever on Thursday, December 16, would have been tested for COVID-19 had he been willing to drive to Lynn (about a one-hour round trip).

Here’s a screen shot from last week when I logged into the Project Beacon site to see what was available at what is advertised as the highest capacity testing facility in Massachusetts (state-funded and organized by the best and brightest):

Results aren’t ready for 1-2 days, which means if he’d gotten his test today at 2:10 pm, he would have gone a full week from having symptoms to getting a test result.

(The beauty of Massachusetts is that people can go from spending hours in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles to days waiting for an appointment at the government-organized COVID-19 testing facility and conclude “Our lives would be much better off if the size and role of government were expanded.”)

How’s the impatient patient doing? (instead of waiting for what would have been his test appointment today, he drove one hour round trip and to the closest CVS that had an at-home test kit in stock; he got a positive result the evening of 12/16)

From a previous post:

• Day 1 of COVID for my friend: fever of 102 (chronicled in Why is it still almost impossible to schedule a COVID-19 test? (at least in Maskachusetts) Note that he had been feeling less than 100% for a few days prior, so this technically could have been considered Day 3)
• Day 1, evening: temperature down to 100. [discussion about Regeneron]
• Day 2, morning: Right now about 100F in each ear. Throat doesn’t hurt as much, coughing subsided. Although now that i wrote that it subsided i needed to cough. I can feel the vaccine working.
• Day 2, afternoon: Gone. It was pretty much gone this morning.

To this we can add the following:

• Day 3, morning: I am perfectly fine – just some snot in the nose. No temperature.
• Me: Denial is one of the classic symptoms of Long COVID
• Day 4, morning: A little congestion in the nose. Temperature completely normal: 98.4 in both ears.
• Through today: still some lingering congestion, thus proving my Long Covid theory

• Day 1 of COVID for my friend: fever of 102 (chronicled in Why is it still almost impossible to schedule a COVID-19 test? (at least in Maskachusetts) Note that he had been feeling less than 100% for a few days prior, so this technically could have been considered Day 3)
• Day 1, evening: temperature down to 100. Friend in our chat group recommends monoclonal antibody treatment, available to anyone in Florida and to a subpopulation identified by technocrats in Massachusetts. The enthusiast for this emergency use authorized IV drug: “Make up a condition if you need to. Don’t risk dying.” I chime in: “I don’t think an IV drug is the right thing to do. Not unless it seems like it is getting worse. Most new medicines work a lot less well than initially claimed and have more risks than initially claimed.” Our mutual friend: “You have to get it right away! Don’t wait for it to get worse. Tomorrow!” We seek advice from a cardiologist mutual friend in a separate chat: “Nope. [Regeneron is] overused in Florida. No hard core data but people favor 30 days of aspirin. At least 81 mg. It’s thought to cause pro inflammatory, pro coagulatrice [?] state.”
• Day 2, morning: Right now about 100F in each ear. Throat doesn’t hurt as much, coughing subsided. Although now that i wrote that it subsided i needed to cough. I can feel the vaccine working.
• Day 2, afternoon: Gone. It was pretty much gone this morning.

One thing I learned: at least in Massachusetts, it is essentially impossible to figure out what to do with a K-12 child when a parent is sick. I visited the web site of the $25,000-per-student-per-year public school that my diseased friend’s kids attend. You’d have to spend at least 45 minutes pulling down disparate documents and reading through them to get a high-level understanding of the policies. At the end of this, however, you’d still be uncertain regarding what to do with children whose parents are on track for death via COVID. You’d think they would have a little web form asking “Are you vaccinated? Is the young scholar vaccinated? Is the young scholar symptomatic? …” and then a red or green answer appears via the miracle of JavaScript.

(It turns out that Day 2 of my friend’s Inexorable March Toward Death coincided with a TikTok panic regarding violence on 12/17 (see “Schools across US cancel classes over unconfirmed TikTok threats”) and, thus, kids all around the country spent the day learning from Professor Xbox.)

Since we all, I hope, #TrustScience and #ListenToDoctors, how about asking a doctor whether children of a COVID-positive parent should go to school? A physician friend copied/pasted this from one of her all-doc discussion groups:

I have had three pfizer doses, booster was in mid-September. My three kids were 14 days post pfizer #2 on Saturday. Today I watched one of my daughters compete at the state gymnastics championships, and I was wearing a kn95 the entire time, cursing all those around me who were blatantly disregarding the mask requirement. As we left the gym, I felt slightly sneezy. I thought it was just from wearing a tight mask for over three hours. I went to pick up one of my other kids who had spent the night with my mom and stepdad. We ate pizza together. Later in the evening, I felt a little sniffly, so I did a binax now and it was instantly positive🤬 My husband is also vaxxed and boosted, binax negative, and plans to go to work tomorrow. What do I do with my fully vaxxed kids this week? Must they quarantine if asymptomatic? I will get us all pcr tested tomorrow and plan on testing the kids/husband again in five days if negative. Can anyone give me any assurance that my mom and stepdad (both fully vaxxed and boosted with pfizer) will be okay if they get this from me? I am freaking out at the thought of them getting sick.

Note that this physician implies that the incubation time from exposure to symptoms is only a few hours. And the doc sends the husband out from the plague-infested house into the workplace where he/she/ze/they can infected dozens of others after what could easily be a false negative test. And the doc is just as confused as the rest of us regarding what should be done with the kids.

Speaking of COVID and symptoms such as brain fog, we removed the front license plate from our Honda minivan yesterday and discovered that the dealer had made two attempts to screw it into the plastic bumper, thus leaving six ugly holes. I had an email exchange with a company that specializes in paint-matched plugs for just this application. I sent the following photo:

The expert’s response: “Is the dealer tech who did this still alive? That’s insane.” But perhaps it was long COVID brain fog that can be blamed, rather than insanity? I could reinstall the bracket (a third set of holes?) to cover this ugliness. I asked The Google for “decorative front license plate”. Here’s the first non-ad result:

(How is it legal to sell a hate-filled license plate with inflammatory language, as shown above (i.e., shouldn’t that last one read “Boy Birthing Person”?))

I’m thinking a custom photo-printed plate with an image of Mindy the Crippler. Now that my friend’s brush with death seems to be over (until the next variant emerges), what do readers suggest for the nose of the minivan?

In light of the two recent situations in which fully vaccinated friends have gotten COVID-19 (see Maybe it is time for that booster shot? and Why is it still almost impossible to schedule a COVID-19 test? (at least in Maskachusetts)), I think it is time to look at what #Science said six months ago. “One year or 5? Doctors and drug companies increasingly disagree about when we’ll need COVID-19 booster shots” (Business Insider, June 16, 2021):

Insider spoke with nine leading experts, who took their best guesses about how long vaccine protection may last. Those predictions were quite a bit longer than what pharmaceutical companies suggest: Some experts said boosters probably won’t be necessary for another one to five years, while others questioned whether the general public will ever need another round of shots.

Early studies also suggest that the mRNA shots from Pfizer and Moderna offer more robust protection than natural immunity from an infection.

“Vaccines, actually, at least with regard to SARS-CoV-2, can do better than nature,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US’s leading infectious-disease expert, said in May.

“If I had to look at my crystal ball, it’s probably not sooner, hopefully, than a year after being vaccinated, for the average adult,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s biologics center, said during a recent webinar.

Other experts think protection may last far longer. Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, estimates it could be three to five years. “I would predict that protection will last for a few years — protection as I define it, which is protection against severe to critical disease,” Offit told Insider last month.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla estimated in April that people would likely need booster shots within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated. That’d be as early as December for some in the US.

From University of Colorado, February 24, 2021, quoting the director of epidemiology for the Pandemic Response Office at CU Boulder:

… we know that the vaccine efficacy lasts at least eight to 10 months. But immune cell—called T-lymphocytes as well as B-lymphocytes—can stick around in the body for years, breaking into action quickly if the body ever encounters the same virus again. So, it’s likely that protection from severe disease and hospitalization could last for many years.

Two months after the vaccines were authorized for emergency use, in other words, scientists actually knew for certain that protection would last for 8-10 months.

“Underselling the Vaccine” (NYT, January 18, 2021):

Although no rigorous study has yet analyzed whether vaccinated people can spread the virus, it would be surprising if they did. “If there is an example of a vaccine in widespread clinical use that has this selective effect — prevents disease but not infection — I can’t think of one!” Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard has written in The New England Journal of Medicine. (And, no, exclamation points are not common in medical journals.) On Twitter, Dr. Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco, argued: “Please be assured that YOU ARE SAFE after vaccine from what matters — disease and spreading.”

Readers: Any favorite predictions from earlier in 2021 that you can find? One of the most interesting things about coronaplague is that Americans consider a discipline that is unable to make accurate predictions to be a “science”.

Loyal readers will remember that, ever since January 2021, I’ve considered the Vietnam War to be the best analogy to American efforts in the fight against SARS-CoV-2 (see Lockdown is our Vietnam War so it will end gradually? and Vietnam War analogy for COVID-19 holding up?). As bad an idea as the Vietnam War might have been, from an economic point of view, this comparison is unfair to the folks who supported the Vietnam War for 15 years because coronapanic spending in the U.S. has been roughly 2X the cost of all U.S. wars combined and vastly more than what the U.S. spent on the Vietnam War (the spending on which was blamed for the massive inflation of the 1970s).

“COVID booster gap traps millions of Americans” (Axios) brings in something that I haven’t seen before: Cold War language. From Wikipedia:

In the United States, during the Cold War, the missile gap was the perceived superiority of the number and power of the USSR’s missiles in comparison with those of the U.S. (a lack of military parity). The gap in the ballistic missile arsenals did not exist except in exaggerated estimates, made by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and in United States Air Force (USAF) figures. Even the contradictory CIA figures for the USSR’s weaponry, which showed a clear advantage for the US, were far above the actual count. Like the bomber gap of only a few years earlier, it was soon demonstrated that the gap was entirely fictional.

John F. Kennedy is credited with inventing the term in 1958 as part of the ongoing election campaign in which a primary plank of his rhetoric was that the Eisenhower administration was weak on defense. It was later learned that Kennedy was apprised of the actual situation during the campaign, which has led scholars to question what Kennedy knew and when he knew it. There has been some speculation that he was aware of the illusory nature of the missile gap from the start and that he was using it solely as a political tool, an example of policy by press release.

Look at the suffering reflected in the chart below. Fully 58 million of our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters have had two vaccine shots, but are not eligible for the emergency use authorized sacrament of boosting.

The Axios article quotes someone who seems unsuited to leadership in the American public health priesthood:

“The question is, what is the goal of this vaccine?” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.