Category: Coronapanic

Masketology down the East Coast

by philg

What happens when a society that is so organized and detail-oriented that it needs to buy all of its integrated circuits from Taiwan, China, Japan, and Korea (and stop making cars when those countries can’t meet demand) tries to use facemasks to stop a deadly respiratory virus? Here’s a report on a trip by small plane from Maine to Florida at the end of August 2021.

(Note that cloth facemasks worn by the general public completely failed in a randomized controlled trial and surgical mask usage achieved only an 11-percent reduction in coronaplague levels (hailed as a huge success by #Science!).)

The trip began with a JetBlue flight from PBI to BOS. For maximum COVID-19 safety, every seat was occupied. The atmosphere was similar to a Hollywood portrayal of a prison galley, with flight attendants constantly hassling passengers regarding (1) where they stood while waiting for the bathroom, and (2) the extent to which they were wearing a mask. All masks came off at roughly the same time, naturally, when the same flight attendants served drinks and snacks to everyone at the same time.

Maskachusetts towns and cities were just in the process of reimposing mask orders (“In Fauci and vaccines we trust, but not enough to de-mask.”)

Despite the sign, mask usage was about 50 percent among customers and staff at a tire shop where I was trying to nurse our 2007 Infiniti far enough to be sold. In a tightly packed diner, none of the customers wore masks #BecauseEatingAndDrinking

In addition to masks, the USPS in Watertown was relying on the Plexi barriers that #Science now says are worthless:

While waiting in line, I observed that most customers and postal workers would lean around the partition in order to communicate clearly.

To avoid the remains of Hurricane Ida and general areas of thunderstorms down the coast, I started south by heading north, to Bar Harbor, Maine. Hancock County is now under an indoor mask order, but the local businesses are not necessarily complying. One shop door says “Your mask, your decision.” (fighting words to a California voter!) Other shops had out of date signs, e.g., one regarding a May 24, 2021 mask order rescission.

Acadia National Park told people to wash hands with soap and water, but despite the $6 trillion annual federal budget, there are no bathrooms available (sometimes outhouses) where these instructions could be followed. (Florida, by contrast, seems to have government-run usually-clean bathrooms everywhere that tourists might visit.) I like the primary focus on government employee welfare: “Help keep rangers and other visitors healthy.” Visitor health is important, but ranger health is #1. Except for a few Asians, I didn’t see anyone on the (crowded) trails wearing masks.

Eventually a high pressure system moved in and it was time to depart from my friend’s oceanfront quarantine facility. President Biden has ordered that all airports enforce mask usage. At least the national FBO chains have interpreted this to include facilities for private aircraft. I don’t want to rat out specific FBOs for fear that the Federal Virtue Enforcement Agency will come after them, but at small airports the effect of this order is nil. At the biggest airports, the corporate overlords’ influence is stronger, especially on the behind-the-desk customer service reps. There are expensively-printed banners reminding everyone to follow Biden’s orders. Here’s a picture cropped to hide the FBO chain’s name:

The “line guys” (almost always it is people identifying as “men” who wish to work outdoors in temps ranging from -10 F to +105 F and winds up to 50 knots) don’t bother with masks indoors or out. If you’re driving a truck filled with 2,000 gallons of jet fuel, maybe you don’t spend a lot of time worrying about a virus?

What actually happens, though, when the corporate overlords follow Dr. Joe Biden, M.D. and impose a mask requirement? At the biggest FBO where I stopped (name withheld to protect the guilty from the U.S. Marshalls), all of the non-line employees sported masks… under the chin or under the nose. To be fair, there was one employee, perhaps age 40 and looking slender/healthy, who wore a mask properly over her nose and mouth. She was training a new hire at a distance of about 1.5′ (feet, not meters). Every time that she spoke, in order to make sure that the new hire understood, she would pull the mask away from her face.

How about at Great Falls, Virginia? Population growth via immigration plus the growth of government spending pushing the D.C.-area population higher has resulted in 30-minute lines to get into the parking lot (except when the park is entirely closed due to the parking lot being full). Out of an abundance of caution, the taxpayer-funded visitor center has been closed for 1.5 years. People will need to get their COVID-19 at the retail stores that are open all around the park, rather than in the park itself.

How about President Biden’s order that masks be worn whenever people are outdoors in federal parks, but not well-spaced? Is there more respect for this than what we found in the Everglades back in April? At Great Falls, the order was ignored by roughly 90 percent of visitors (who numbered 1000+). See below for some of the Mask Righteous. One is unmasked, but has put a mask on his toddler (see Wright Brothers on the science of COVID-19 for a discussion of how it can make sense for one household member to wear a mask when on an excursion, but not everyone). The slender young person has ventured beyond the fence to the edge of the gorge, swollen to near-historic levels by Hurricane Ida. He/she/ze/they will be coronavirus-free before joining the dozens who have drowned in the past 20 years at Great Falls:

At a coffee shop in North Carolina, only about 1 in 25 customers were masked. My friend has been a righteous Facebook denouncer of Trump and a supporter of Biden, masks, and lockdowns, but he did not voluntarily wear a mask inside the crowded counter service shop.

At an FBO in Georgia, still fighting the transmission-via-surfaces war (#SalvationViaLysol):

This is walking distance to Southern Soul Barbeque, where I defended against COVID-19 in the traditional American manner, i.e., consuming plenty of fried okra and hush puppies. Why bother to lose weight when confronted with a virus that kills the obese when instead one can rely on government orders to don cloth face coverings?

Here’s the Shuttle Landing Facility to prove that I made it to Florida:

Biden mask order compliance was actually higher in Florida than in the other states, with one indoor FBO employee wearing a mask at my destination (“1 out of 20 ain’t bad”!). Mask usage outside the airport, e.g., at supermarkets, was much higher than in other states, despite not being required. Of course, this could be partly due to the fact that Florida was just getting over a COVID-19 hospitalization surge:

The peak was towards the end of August. Now that I look at this chart, one thing that is interesting is how easy it is to convince Americans to panic. Florida was portrayed as a disaster area by the media and I was cautioned by multiple friends and family members not to go near this Land of Death in which they were running out of places to stack the dead bodies. At the very height of the recent plague, roughly 17,000 people were in the hospital in Florida with a COVID-19 positive PCR test. The state is home to nearly 22 million people, however. So a person who had 150 friends still had a 90 percent probability of not knowing anyone who was in the hospital for/with COVID-19. (Take the probability that a friend is not in the hospital and then multiply that by itself 150 times):

type “(1-17000/22e6)^150” into Wolfram Alpha if you want to check.)

A country that spends 20 percent of GDP on health care, in other words, purportedly can’t cope with 1 in 1,300 people needing hospital care for a respiratory virus (actually perhaps closer to 1 in 2,000 since “COVID-19 hospitalizations” in the U.S. include people who are there for some other reason and test positive for an asymptomatic coronavirus infection). Maybe this is true, in which case we might want to ask what we’re getting for our $4 trillion per year (Bloomberg does). But more likely it is false, especially in light of the fact that hospital care for COVID-19 is probably not any better than home care (nytimes).

I stopped in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Virginia (Dulles and Roanoke), North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In not a single place did I see a group of Americans wearing masks consistently and correctly, despite, at least at the airports, presidential orders that they do so and, in many cases, local orders that masks be worn.

(How about the flying, you might ask? An instrument approach was required to get into BHB (Maine). I needed to climb to 11,500′ to get over some bumpy clouds in Florida. Steering around heavy rain cells was required to make the final approach into SUA (Stuart, Florida). Otherwise, it was good VFR weather and a student pilot could easily have made the trip. Lesson: If you’re willing to be flexible on timing, a Cirrus can be a useful mode of transportation, but flexibility needs to be measured in days, not hours!)

Why write all of the above, you might ask? I’m thinking this will be a useful data point for historians 50 or 100 years from now who want to know what Americans actually did in 2021. They’ll have ready access to the rulers’ orders, but won’t know how these were implemented by the subjects.

Full post, including comments

U.S. promotion of shutdowns and coronapanic results in migration boom

by philg

From today’s Wall Street Journal: “Latin American Migration, Once Limited to a Few Countries, Turns Into a Mass Exodus; Haitian standoff in Texas reflects broader mix of nationalities fleeing pandemic-hobbled economies from around the hemisphere.” (worth a look just for the photos)

Let’s roll back the clock to March 2020. The first country hit by SARS-CoV-2 infection was China, a country and society obsessed with protecting human life at all costs (where else do you see signs all over the subway system on how to avoid injury on escalators, etc.?). Ignoring established WHO advice on pandemics, the Chinese decided to attack the respiratory virus with strict lockdowns. The typical U.S. state governor copied this idea with about the same level of success that you see in the documentary American Factory, where an attempt is made in Ohio to produce automotive glass with the same quality and attention to detail that has been achieved in China. The U.S. states that were the most aggressive with lockdowns, mask orders, and other disruptions nearly all ended up with higher COVID-19-tagged death rates than give-the-finger-to-the-virus-sweep-up-and-move-on Sweden. Maybe nobody got infected in the shut-for-a-year K-12 schools, but adults could meet and mingle at bars, on Tinder, and while shopping for “essential” alcohol and marijuana in Massachusetts (there was no Chinese model for how to run a marijuana store during a respiratory virus pandemic because marijuana is illegal in China).

At the end of March 2020, I asked here ““For every saved American [via shutdown], though, aren’t we guaranteed to cause more than one death in a poor country?” Without the U.S. as a trade, tourism, and travel partner for Latin America, during the first 18 months (so far) of 14 days to flatten the curve, what actually happened? WSJ:

The broad wave includes single mothers from Ecuador, Nicaraguan teenagers and farm laborers in Chile. Many cite the same reasons for uprooting their lives and heading north: economic hits from the pandemic that cost jobs and income, the allure of a booming U.S. economy and the belief that President Biden’s administration would welcome them.

Struggling to put food on the table after the pandemic closed her small coffee business, Mayra Aguilar sold her car and left her home in Ecuador’s southern Andes last month, hoping for a better life in the United States.

Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole suffered the world’s steepest economic contraction last year, and the region’s biggest decline since the Great Depression, according to the International Monetary Fund. The pandemic cost some 26 million jobs.

Earlier this year, Yanisleidys Diaz began her trek to the U.S. after she was told she had to leave Chile in 180 days. The 39-year-old single mother from Cuba arrived in Chile in 2019 with her two sons, seeking informal work because they lacked a work permit. Her oldest boy, 17-year-old Leodan Riveros, worked construction and as a fruit picker at a farm, earning less than minimum wage.

They struggled to make ends meet even before the pandemic. Then Ms. Diaz said she was notified by the government that they could no longer stay without residency. They sold their furniture and clothes to pay for five bus rides to cross Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.

The U.S. is not entirely to blame for other countries failing to follow the Swedish “experiment” (doing what humans have been doing for millions of years is an “experiment” while trying something that has never been tried before and for which no data exist is “following the science”), of course, but I think it is fair to say that we’re reaping what we sowed. As with our wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we went into lockdowns with no exit strategy and it didn’t occur to us that other nations might not have the ability to print money indefinitely while people cowered in place rather than work and study.

We are continuing our economic war against neighbors in this hemisphere, e.g., via telling Americans not to travel and/or making travel onerous (testing requirements, prison ship atmosphere on commercial airliners (mask orders, threats of fines if mask order is not complied with strictly and completely, etc.)). Is there any number of desperate migrants who show up on our border that would convince us that this isn’t a war worth fighting? (If we have 150,000 daily positive PCR tests (“cases”), that means we have roughly 1 million Americans who are infected and contagious at any one time, right? (not everyone who is infected will get tested and people who are infected will be contagious for several days) Why do we then require Americans to get a COVID-19 test as a condition of returning from a vacation in the Caribbean? Our theory is that 1 million coronaplagued people is bad, but 1,000,002 coronaplagued people is an out-of-control situation? Same question for European visitors! If we have 1 million residents incubating SARS-CoV-2, why does it matter if 6 more show up on Lufthansa?)

Related:

  • If All Lives Have Equal Value, why does Bill Gates support shutting down the U.S. economy? (March 28, 2020), in which I asked “For every saved American [via shutdown], though, aren’t we guaranteed to cause more than one death in a poor country? The U.S. is 15 percent of the world economy. Our shutdown is going to make us poorer so we’ll buy less from the world’s poorest countries. People in those poorest of countries who were at a subsistence standard of living in 2019 are going to be without sufficient funds for food, shelter, and medicine in 2020. Even citizens of medium-income countries, e.g., those who work in industries that are tied to trade with the U.S., might be unable to afford previously affordable life-saving medical interventions. … It has proven to be an interesting window into the logic of the American Righteous. Planet Earth is exquisitely interconnected such that bringing a reusable shopping bag to the Columbus Circle Whole Foods will stop global warming and thus keep the seas from inundating Jakarta. On the other hand, we can stop trading with a country where people are living on $2/day and there will be no adverse consequences for those people.”
Full post, including comments

Don’t take health advice from the ignorant

by philg

“Why So Many Tennis Players Don’t Want the Covid Vaccine” (NYT, August 30) describes a heretic and a suspected marrano:

Third-ranked Stefanos Tsitsipas caused an uproar in his native Greece this month after he said he would get vaccinated only if it were required to continue competing.

“I don’t see any reason for someone of my age to do it,” said Tsitsipas, 23. “It hasn’t been tested enough and it has side effects. As long as it’s not mandatory, everyone can decide for themselves.”

Giannis Oikonomou, a spokesman for the Greek government, said Tsitsipas “has neither the knowledge nor the studies nor the research work that would allow him to form an opinion” about the necessity for vaccination, and added that people like athletes who are widely admired should be “doubly careful in expressing such views.”

Top-ranked Novak Djokovic has drawn scrutiny for his approach to health issues throughout the pandemic, and has declined to disclose his own vaccination status. Djokovic said it was a “personal decision” when asked about vaccine protocols on Friday. “Whether someone wants to get a vaccine or not, that’s completely up to them,” Djokovic said. “I hope that it stays that way.”

My favorite part of the above is the idea that nobody should listen to the 23-year-old Tsitsipas on the topic of maximizing personal health. From ATP:

(Having chosen to live in tax-free Monte Carlo (Greece, like nearly all of the world’s countries besides the U.S., doesn’t tax non-resident citizens), is it possible that Mr. Tsitsipas could obtain a New York Times stamp of approval as an expert on minimizing tax liability?)

From whom should we take health advice, if not Messrs. Tsitsipas and Djokovic? How about Assistant Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services? Here’s Dr. Rachel Levine:

Except in South Dakota and Florida, state governors have held themselves out as experts on public health, confident that muscular government action can, for the first time in human history and contrary to W.H.O. guidance through 2019, stop a respiratory virus. Let’s look at JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois? He’s issued nearly 100 executive orders so far regarding health in the time of COVID-19. My favorite, of course, is Executive Order #3 (March 12, 2020):

WHEREAS, in late 2019, a new and significant outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged; and,

WHEREAS, it is necessary and appropriate for the State of Illinois to immediately take measures to protect the public’s health in response to this COVID-19 outbreak;

THEREFORE, by the powers vested in me as the Governor of the State of Illinois, pursuant to Sections 7(1) and 7(12) of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency Act, 20 ILCS 3305, I hereby order the following:

Section 1. The application submission deadlines in the Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act and implementing regulations for submitting in-person applications by March 16, 2020, are suspended as follows:

(summary from the index page: “CANNABIS APPLICATIONS — The deadline for cannabis grower, infuser and transporter license applications is extended, and applicants are now allowed to mail completed applications, rather than submitting in person.”)

Can we see a photo of the heroic health expert governor who protected Illinois residents from a potential shortage of health-promoting marijuana during the global pandemic?

(Perhaps Governor Pritzker is an expert who contributed to CNN’s “Why does smoking pot give you the munchies?”)

Full post, including comments

Humans and dogs no longer so different

by philg

Coronapanic in the U.S. has enabled humans and dogs to share more experiences. #CovidBringsUsCloser From Palm Beach Gardens, Florida:

(“Dogs are required to be vaccinated and display current licenses.”; compare to “San Francisco’s new rule: Proof of vaccine or no dining in” (AP) and “De Blasio sending workers to see if restaurants follow vaccine mandate” (New York Post))

Separately, is “All Dogs Welcome” hate speech in the same way that “All Lives Matter” is?

Regarding the digging, my Samoyed breeder said “They dig in the winter to stay warm. They dig in the summer to get cool. They dig in the fall and spring to keep in practice.”

Finally, check out the adjacent playground for kids, almost entirely covered by shade structures:

One thing that I have noticed about Florida is the investment in public leisure facilities: parks, bathrooms, playgrounds, water parks, etc. All of these are vastly superior to and better-maintained than their counterparts in Maskachusetts despite the higher percentage of residents’ income consumed by taxes in MA (Tax Foundation). Also, as long as we’re talking infrastructure, the electricity grid here is remarkably robust. Every day or two it sounds like the world is ending via a thunderstorm and yet we have yet to observe even a momentary power glitch.

Related:

Full post, including comments

Righteous versus Wicked (Israel v. Sweden) in the COVID Olympics

by philg

“Why Does No One Ever Talk About Sweden Anymore?” (substack, 9/16/2021) has some interesting charts, all adjusted for population size. The virtuous and vaccinated Israelis are being mowed down by the coronavirus that they tried so desperately to hide from while the virus that raged among the never-locked-down, never-masked party-on Swedes is not a major cause of mortality:

What if we look at “cases” from our friendly neighborhood PCR machines?

Another interesting chart, comparing masked-and-periodically-shut Germany and off-the-scientific-reservation never-masked never-shut Sweden:

Excerpts from the author’s commentary:

One of the most consistently repeated trends of COVID has been the premature declarations of victory from areas with a perceived level of “success” in “controlling” the pandemic.

It’s happened in countries all over the world — Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Mongolia — just to name a few examples. They all have been praised for their ability to “control” the virus with masks and public health measures, only to then see cases invariably skyrocket.

“Experts” and the media declared Sweden was the world’s cautionary tale, a dangerous outlier who shunned The New Science™ of masks and lockdowns and stuck to established public health principles and pre-pandemic planning.

… It’s not about the actual results, it’s about following The Science™. Does it matter if The Science™ leads to more deaths? A higher “cost in lives?” Of course not! It only matters that the media approves or disapproves of what you decide to do.

The media’s depiction of Sweden’s results is an excellent illustration of their desire not to inform, but to coerce. They’re not functioning as simply messengers of information but activists, thoroughly consumed by a desire to force others to conform to their opinions.

They refuse to present information that counters the endless dictatorial mandates, instead promoting unquestioning compliance. Listen to us, do what you’re told and wear a mask, or it’s your fault if you get COVID and die. Listen to us and do what you’re told, or you’ll be labeled an “anti” and shunned from the acceptable society that “journalism” polices.

There will never be a reckoning or acceptance of fault on the part of the media, because they are incapable of correcting their preconceptions and admitting that The Science™ was wrong. They placed their unquestioning faith in experts having a level of competence that they simply do not possess.

The last point was made in the spring of 2020 by a medical school professor friend. He thought that the confident physicians and public health “scientists” going on TV and being quoted by the media were going to permanently damage the reputations of doctors and academics. My friend wasn’t sure what would happen with COVID-19, but he was 100 percent sure that the media-favorite and government-favorite figureheads for #Science were simply guessing (since the virus was new, general public mask orders were new, and lockdowns were new).

A recent example of confident explanation, “Oregon’s Covid-19 Wave Is at Its Worst Despite High Vaccination Rate” (WSJ, 9/3/2021):

Oregon has the 12th highest vaccination rate in the U.S., with 58% of all residents fully vaccinated, according to data compiled by the Mayo Clinic—but the intensive care units in Asante’s three hospitals are overflowing with Covid-19 patients. They can’t transfer elsewhere in the state because most Oregon hospitals are in a similar situation.

Health authorities in Oregon say the current Covid-19 wave—during which infection and hospitalization rates have hit new highs—is the result of uneven vaccination rates between urban and more-rural areas.

In Multnomah County, home to Portland, 67% of residents are fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, in Jackson County, home to Medford, 51% of residents are fully vaccinated, and in the adjoining counties of Josephine and Douglas the rates are 46% and 43%, respectively.

In response, Gov. Kate Brown has ordered some of the strictest statewide restrictions currently in effect in the U.S. Residents must wear masks in most public settings, indoors or outdoors, and vaccines are mandatory for healthcare workers and teachers. The National Guard has been deployed to hospitals statewide. The state is hiring nurses and other medical professionals and sending them to hard hit areas like southern Oregon.

(The last point is consistent with what our Medical School 2020 author told me recently. The hospital where he is training is short-staffed because nurses can quit and make $100,000 in three months as “travelers”. The hospital is packed with COVID-19 patients currently, most of whom would likely do just as well at home with an oxygen bottle.)

Why is Oregon having a surge right now? It could simply be because the coronavirus didn’t thrive in the state before, leaving Oregon near the lowest on a list of states ranked by COVID-19 death rate and therefore there is less natural immunity in the population (for the same reason, no matter how boneheaded the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Maskachusetts are, there aren’t too many more people left in those states who can be killed by COVID-19). Why are these rural counties in Oregon suffering more than the righteous urban dwellers? It could be due to the difference in vaccination rate, as the state health experts confidently say, but it could also be because folks in the city were more likely to have been previously exposed. Apparently, it is difficult for reporters to find a “scientist” willing to say “I don’t know why.”

Full post, including comments

Waddling back to school: how much did we fatten up our kids via lockdown?

by philg

Lockdowns and school closures were advertised as being for the protection of children (as are the current measures limiting kids’ activities). How did Americans do in terms of protecting children from a virus that attacks the fat? “Steep BMI Increase for Kids, Teens During the Pandemic — Largest increases were among children with overweight/obesity” (MedPage Today, 9/16/2021):

Kids and teens’ rate of body mass index (BMI) increase almost doubled during the pandemic compared with prior years, and the percentage with obesity also increased, researchers found.

Among those ages 2 to 19 years, the monthly BMI increase rose from 0.052 (January 2018-February 2020) to 0.100 (March 2020-November 2020), reported Samantha Lange, MPH, of the CDC, and colleagues.

Moreover, the estimated proportion of those with obesity rose from 19.3% in August 2019 to 22.4% in August 2020, the authors wrote in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Do the credentialed geniuses at the CDC recommend fully reopening activities for children, encouraging them to participate by not requiring masks, etc.? Of course not!

“These efforts could include screening for BMI, food security, and other social determinants of health by health care providers; increased access to evidence-based pediatric weight management programs and food assistance resources; and state, community, and school efforts to facilitate healthy eating, physical activity, and chronic disease prevention,” Lange and co-authors wrote.

Why let kids in the frozen Northeast do indoor sports without masks this winter when instead they could be encouraged to consume more services from “health care providers”?

Related:

Full post, including comments

Ring cameras sold out; collapse of civilization expected?

by philg

We wanted to get a Ring camera for our apartment in Florida. The crime rate in this neighborhood is low, but we have our golden retriever to protect! How worried about crime are Americans? The Ring indoor cam is back-ordered 7-9 weeks:

No problem then. Just pay extra for the indoor/outdoor version:

Unless the apocalypse is nigh, why are security cameras sold out?

Related:

Full post, including comments

California governor recall results: Now we know how many Americans love to be locked down?

by philg

When friends who don’t follow #Science (most have MDs and/or PhDs) ask why U.S. state governors (except for the infidels in South Dakota and Florida) have generally ordered lockdowns, masks, and other measures that were considered useless against respiratory viruses through 2019, my standard answer is “They’re politicians so the best answer is that they’re doing what voters want them to do. If governors order people to wrap a saliva-soaked bandana around their mouths as a disease preventive, we can infer that the majority of Americans want governors to order bandanas.” (A European friend: “The sheep demand a shepherd.”)

Is it fair to say that the result of the referendum on keeping lock-down-the-peasants-while-dining-with-friends Gavin Newsom (66 percent in favor) tells us the percentage of Americans who want and/or need governor-directed lockdowns?

To extrapolate these numbers to the U.S., of course, we’d have to adjust for Democrat/Republican percentages. Presidents Biden and Harris won 63.5 percent of Californians’ votes in 2020. So we can presume that, in any given state, the percentage of people who want to be locked down is roughly 3 percentage points more than the percentage who voted for Biden/Harris.

(What have been the effects of California’s 1.5 years of lockdown, school closure, mask orders, etc.? On the leaderboard of states by COVID-19-tagged death rate, California has turned in a middling performance, with about 1,700 deaths per million (170). That’s a worse performance than “do almost nothing because the virus won’t care” Sweden (1,429 per million). Beach-closed schools-closed California has a 25 percent lower unadjusted-for-age death rate than no-mask-order, bars-open, indoor everything open, schools-open Florida, portrayed currently in the media as the Land of Certain COVID-19 Death (12/50 in the state-by-state ranking, with roughly 2,270 deaths per million). That’s success, right, since we’re measuring overall success of a society by a single number (COVID-19 death rate) and 1,700 is less than 2,270? Actually, if we look at the over-65 population that COVID-19 tends to kill, California has a higher death rate than Florida’s. California is one of the youngest states in the country, with just 14 percent of its population over 65. Florida is the second oldest (not in our Abacoa neighborhood though!), with 20.5 percent of the population over 65. But neither the governor nor the media is not going to perform this adjustment (nor adjust for opioid addiction, alcoholism, weight gain in quarantine, reduced life expectancy from reduced education, reduced life expectancy from long-term unemployment, etc.) and therefore Californians will continue to believe that their governor’s suspension of what had been their rights (e.g., to gather, to have children educated, to walk outside without a mask, to go to the beach or the park) “saved lives”.)

Los Angeles, end of February 2020, almost the last day when Californians were free to walk outside their apartments, unmasked, and go to school or work without checking to see what the governor might have ordered. This homeless encampment is across from the lavish new Federal courthouse. The prediction on February 28, 2020? “Good Things Are Coming!” (schools for city children closed on March 16, 2020 and didn’t full reopen until August 16, 2021).

And let’s not forget, in the Land of Big Hearts (TM), the homeless encampment across the street from the homeless encampment:

Readers: Can we agree that a vote for Newsom was a vote for lockdown?

Full post, including comments

Coronalogic in Palm Beach County

by philg

Mostly-Democrat Palm Beach County was one of the local governments ready to fight the governor’s “no mask orders in schools” order (a.k.a. “parental choice order”) with every last dollar of residents’ money. See “Palm Beach County public schools set to hire elite law firm to defend mask mandate” (Palm Beach Post, August 31, 2021), for example:

With the legal battle over masks in schools heating up, Palm Beach County public schools are hiring a high-profile law firm to advise them on their mask mandate and, if needed, defend it in court.

School board members are expected Wednesday to approve spending up to $50,000 for advice and legal representation from the national law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.

The vote comes five days a Tallahassee judge ruled Gov. Ron DeSantis exceeded his authority by ordering school boards last month not to impose mask mandates on campus. DeSantis said he will appeal the decision.

Where else on this blog might you have seen mention of Boies Schiller Flexner? They were the law firm that enabled Elizabeth Holmes to silence potential whistleblowers. From Evaluating trustworthiness; lessons from Theranos (based on reading the fascinating book Bad Blood):

Background: Roger Parloff, legal affairs reporter for Fortune, was intrigued by a story about Theranos hiring David Boies to sue a guy who had a patent that they would have needed to license if the blood testing machines had actually worked. Boies was given a fat slice of Theranos equity and a board seat in exchange for doing the company’s legal bidding. The author describes the lawsuit as entirely meritless, alleging that the inventor had somehow gotten hold of proprietary Theranos info because his son was a partner at the same huge law firm that had filed some patents for Theranos. The inventor spent $2 million on legal defense before caving in. (The big multi-office law firm’s records manager investigated the allegation and couldn’t find anything to suggest that the son/partner had ever accessed any Theranos-related information or even knew at the relevant time that the company was a client.)

So… the county is prepared to lose state funding (but they’ll get it all back from Uncle Joe: “Biden Administration Says Federal Funds Can Cover Florida School Board Salaries If DeSantis Defunds Them Over Mask Mandates” (Forbes); how are Presidents Biden and Harris able to write checks for this without Congressional funding?). And the county will happily hire a law firm that enabled one of of America’s most prominent criminal defendants, with its lead name partner actually serving on her corporate board and the firm hoping to benefit from the fraud by holding shares. All of this to ensure that when children sit together in a classroom, kept separated by however many feet the CDC recommends, they are wearing some sort of mask.

Suppose that the kids in the class decide to go to an after-school basketball program run by a different branch of the same enterprise (Palm Beach County). They will then meet on an indoor court and be close enough to actually touch each other, without any masks on. They’ll be breathing much more forcefully, of course, on the basketball court than in the classroom.

I would expect variation in coronapanic level and faith in masks from state to state and from county to county, but I didn’t expect to find this much variation in coronascience between two departments of the same county government!

(Separately, our neighborhood is packed with kids. As soon as they’re out of school, the masks come off and they play with each other outdoors in direct physical contact with no masks. They are also observed to visit each other’s homes and socialize without masks. So even if the county itself didn’t run mask-free kid gatherings, the young people and their parents would do this. Thus, it is a mystery to me how the masks-in-school plan was supposed to be effective.)

Related:

Full post, including comments

Vaccine-resisting idiots

by philg

Before departing from Maskachusetts last month in the Cirrus SR20 (ferry trip to her new home in the Florida Free State), I mentioned to a woman in the old neighborhood that I’d be visiting a family at their oceanfront house as my first stop. “The dad is my friend and he’s the only one who is vaccinated,” I volunteered. “The kids are slender, healthy and in their late 20s so I can understand their point of course, but the wife is around 60 and could perhaps benefit, though she also is slender and fit.”

Neighbor: “They’re idiots.”

Me: “As it happens, they’re Black.”

Neighbor: “Oh, well, ….” (the “idiot” statement was walked back to a discourse regarding why it wouldn’t make sense for Black people to listen to anything that scientists say)

The neighbor’s car (Chevy Bolt with Bernie bumper sticker):

(Bernie wanted her to live in a town where a vacant buildable lot costs $1 million (minimum 2-acre zoning).)

On arrival, I learned that when you have an oceanfront house it seems that you’re going to be quite popular all summer. The unvaccinated kids (late 20s) had about 6 similar-age friends visiting. All of them, as it turned out, were unvaccinated and resented the government’s attempts to coerce them into getting stuck with a medicine that is extremely unlikely to help them unless the mass vaccination campaign breeds a super deadly version of the coronavirus (see Marek’s Disease). I comforted them at dinner (out on the screen porch and following the CDC guidelines that coronavirus cannot spread when unmasked people sit at restaurant tables): “It probably won’t do you more harm than a week of binge drinking.”

(One of the young people had the idea of running a restaurant where students received music lessons and other kinds of education. “If they’re sitting at a table being served food, they don’t need to wear masks, even if the governor orders students in schools to wear masks.”)

My favorite recent Apple News screen, in which a confused grandfather (of a child who yielded $2.5 million tax-free for the smart plaintiff) has lost patience and scapegoats responsible for all of our woes have been identified:

Separately, it seems that the current crop of vaccines may be worthless from a public health point of view (could still be useful for an at-risk individual who stays in his/her/zir/their bunker 99 percent of the time). “Benefit of COVID-19 vaccination accounting for potential risk compensation” (Nature, August 11, 2021):

With very high vaccine efficacy (E = 0.95), substantial benefit is maintained except in situations where there is a very low probability of infection in the population. If the vaccine efficacy decreases to 0.8, the benefit gets eroded easily with modest risk compensation.

Risk compensation needs to be factored carefully when appraising COVID-19 vaccination strategies. The simplified model used here suggests that even negligible risk compensation can eliminate the benefit of a vaccine of low efficacy, and it also takes only 2.5-fold increase in exposures for the benefit of a vaccine of moderate efficacy (E = 0.6) to disappear unless the probability of infection in the population of interest is very high.

(The most familiar example of risk compensation is a person driving 75 mph in a pavement-melting SUV. He/she/ze/they feels invulnerable due to seatbelts, 17 airbags, and 6,000 lbs. of steel. He/she/ze/they would drive only 50 mph, perhaps, in a lighter car without seatbelts or airbags. Since kinetic energy rises as the square of velocity, the risk of death in an accident might end up being roughly the same as if the driver were in a less thoroughly armored vehicle. See “Condoms and seat belts: the parallels and the lessons” (Lancet) for some references.)

In other words, a less-than-perfect vaccine slows down an epidemic only if people don’t change their behavior as a result of being vaccinated. A person who decides that it is okay to travel on commercial airliners once again, for example, is risk compensating. I’ve observed this behavior in New England. The (mostly) vaccinated population ceased wearing masks on the day that the government stopped ordering them to do so (a couple of months later, of course, it was “Simon Says Masks On” and they all complied with that too!). Fauci-following Democrats who refused to meet me outdoors for coffee pre-vaccination would step in for hugs after they’d received the magic elixir.

Let’s combine the above with July 2021 data (i.e., regarding the delta variant) on breakthrough infections. “Resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in a Highly Vaccinated Health System Workforce” (NEJM), Table 1:

Vaccine effectiveness was only 65 percent in July 2021 and therefore risk compensation by those who’ve been told by Drs. Fauci and Biden that vaccines are valuable will wipe out the benefit of the vaccines.

I was on a Zoom meeting with some folks from grad school. A friend’s wife is a Ph.D. biologist. She has gone back into her bunker, despite being vaccinated. “The reason that people think vaccines are helpful,” she said, “is that they’re combining data from pre-Delta and Delta. With Delta, the infection and fatality rates aren’t that different for the vaccinated and unvaccinated.”

Israel and the Delta variant:

In a country that has vaccinated 80 percent of those eligible, deaths are about 3/4 of where they were in the fall of 2020, when nobody in Israel was vaccinated.

Related:

  • “It may take ‘many, many’ more vaccine mandates to end the Covid-19 pandemic, Fauci says” (CNN, 9/13): “I believe that’s going to turn this around because I don’t think people are going to want to not go to work or not go to college … They’re going to do it,” Fauci told CNN’s Jen Christensen during an interview at the NLGJA, the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, convention Sunday. “You’d like to have them do it on a totally voluntary basis, but if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to go to the alternatives.”
  • “Fauci says he supports a vaccine mandate for air travel.” (NYT, 9/13): Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, said … that he would support a vaccine mandate for air travelers. “I would support that if you want to get on a plane and travel with other people, that you should be vaccinated,” Dr. Fauci [said]
Full post, including comments