Category: Coronapanic

Build downdraft paint booths for K-12 schools? (July 2020, here on this blog):

The technology for downdraft paint booths is highly advanced … Why not a system for schools in which (a) each classroom has its own HVAC system, (b) there are 8-12 outlets in the ceiling, and (c) there are 8-12 exhaust outlets in the floor? For maximum safety, the system would have no recirculation.

More than a year later, in Atlantic, “The Plan to Stop Every Respiratory Virus at Once” (9/7/2021):

The original dogma, you might remember, was that the novel coronavirus spread like the flu, through droplets that quickly fell out of the air.

A virus that lingers in the air is an uncomfortable and inconvenient revelation. Scientists who had pushed the WHO to recognize airborne transmission of COVID-19 last year told me they were baffled by the resistance they encountered, but they could see why their ideas were unwelcome. In those early days when masks were scarce, admitting that a virus was airborne meant admitting that our antivirus measures were not very effective. “We want to feel we’re in control. If something is transmitted through your contaminated hands touching your face, you control that,” Noakes said. “But if something’s transmitted through breathing the same air, that is very, very hard for an individual to manage.”

The WHO took until July 2020 to acknowledge that the coronavirus could spread through aerosols in the air. Even now, Morawska says, many public-health guidelines are stuck in a pre-airborne world. Where she lives in Australia, people are wearing face masks to walk down the street and then taking them off as soon as they sit down at restaurants, which are operating at full capacity. It’s like some kind of medieval ritual, she says, with no regard for how the virus actually spreads. In the restaurants, “there’s no ventilation,” she adds, which she knows because she’s the type of scientist who takes an air-quality meter to the restaurant.

(See “Australia has almost eliminated the coronavirus — by putting faith in science” (Washington Post, 11/5/2020)_

I guess Professor Morawska wouldn’t like the simplest science-based way to get schools back to normal operations:

I think they should replace the kids desks at school with restaurant tables
that way when they sit down they can takeoff their mask

— 𓋜𝕂 𝕀 𝕄 𝔹 𝔼 ℝ 𝕃 𝕐™✰✰ (@__Kimberly1) August 25, 2021

(some responses to the above:

• “If they hold classes in a Walmart then schools can stay open”
• “The hardest part of 14 days to flatten the curve is the first 18 months.”
• “Possibly have the teacher come to their table to collect homework , so they can ask “menu ” questions….”

; Why is Kimberly’s idea “science-based”? The orders from governors that have reshaped U.S. society are purportedly science-based, including orders that restaurants can reopen at up to full capacity so long as masks are worn between the front door and the table. Therefore, by transitivity, Kimberly’s proposal for schools is equally science-based.)

If we have $trillions to spend fighting COVID-19, which we apparently do (though it is unclear why we wouldn’t instead spend the money on CO2 vacuums to deal with what our leading intellectual has called a “code red” threat to all of humanity from climate change), why wouldn’t we invest in ventilation?

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COVID-19 is the world’s greatest source of cognitive dissonance. We are informed by the CDC that roughly 640,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. The same agency tells us that deaths are concentrated among those who are old enough to be collecting Social Security:

Roughly 80 percent of the deaths are 65+.

We are informed by our brightest science-following minds in the media that COVID-19 has been killing people whose best years were ahead of them. Maybe the median age of a death in Maskachusetts was 82, but, absent coronavirus, those 82-year-olds being killed would have lived to 92 and, thus, collected an additional 10 more years of Social Security checks.

What happens to a financial enterprise when the obligation to send 10 years of month checks to hundreds of thousands of people goes away? “Social Security trust funds now projected to run out of money sooner than expected due to Covid, Treasury says” (CNBC, August 31, 2021):

The Social Security trust fund most Americans rely on for their retirement will run out of money in 12 years, one year sooner than expected, according to an annual government report.

The circumstances, which were exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, threaten to shrink retirement payments and increase health-care costs for Americans in old age sooner than expected.

So… our minds are supposed to simultaneously hold the following truths:

1. COVID-19 kills mostly people old enough to be entitled to Social Security.
2. The average old person killed by COVID-19 was healthy enough to live for at least another 5-10 years.
3. Social Security will become insolvent as a result of not having to send checks to those killed by COVID-19.

Unless I am missing something obvious, the human mind is a wonderfully supple device!

Related:

• Sweden will have a lower death rate in 2020 than it had in 2010 (COVID-19 in Sweden, portrayed as a society-ending disaster by our media (including journalists in states such as MA and NY with much higher COVID-19 death rates than Sweden), apparently killed quite a few people who were on track to die in the near term from some other cause)
• COVID-19 is sure to kill you, but life insurance rates haven’t changed (COVID-19 in the U.S. has apparently killed hardly anyone who was healthy enough to pass a life insurance physical exam)

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“Are We Jumping the Gun on COVID Boosters?” (MedPage Today, August 24, 2021):

Diminishing vaccine effectiveness supposedly makes the case for boosters. But there are two big questions here: First, what is current vaccine effectiveness? And second, what justifies boosters? Let’s consider these in turn.

We have to be honest, many vaccine effectiveness studies are poorly done. All studies compare the rate of getting a breakthrough infection among vaccinated people against the rate of infection in unvaccinated people. But there are some issues with this approach. First, as time goes on, more unvaccinated people have had and recovered from COVID-19 (and these individuals may be less likely to go on to get a shot). This means that their risk of getting COVID-19 a second time is far less than the typical unvaccinated person who has never been sick. Even if vaccines “work” as well as before, this factor alone will result in the appearance of diminishing vaccine effectiveness.

Second, the order of vaccination in all nations is non-random. The folks who got vaccinated first are often the oldest and most vulnerable people with frailty and senescent immune systems. Vaccine effectiveness after 6 months, 8 months, and 12 months increasingly compares older, frailer people who got vaccinated first against unvaccinated people. These older people may always have a slightly higher risk of breakthrough infections. This bias will also give the false appearance of diminishing vaccine effectiveness.

Humans are terrible at reasoning from statistics. Will our booster shot mania prove to be another example of this phenomenon?

Separately, I do wish someone would explain to me the mania for trying to coerce all of the unvaccinated into #AcceptingScience. We know that the vaccines we have don’t prevent infection or transmission. Our hospitals have plenty of capacity if we’re willing to do a little geographic load-balancing. Maybe an individual should care whether he/she/ze/they gets vaccinated. But why do his/her/zir/their neighbors care if he/she/ze/they gets vaccinated? We now know that the pandemic would not end even if 100 percent of humans were vaccinated.

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Department of “Surely coronavirus won’t be waiting for us after we emerge from our bunkers”. From Twitter:

Best headline: “Australia Almost Eliminated the Coronavirus by Putting Faith in Science” (Washington Post, November 5, 2020). From that article:

… unlike the Trump administration, which has criticized its primary infectious-disease adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, Hunt relied heavily on health experts from the start.

And for a time, it appeared Australia’s early success was imperiled, after lax security at hotels in Melbourne that were housing returned travelers led to a second outbreak in July. By August, more than 700 cases a day were diagnosed. It looked like Australia could lose control of the virus.

Almost all public life in Melbourne ended. After 111 days of lockdown, the number of average daily cases fell below five. On Oct. 28, state officials allowed residents to leave their homes for any reason.

Australia currently bans its citizens and residents from overseas travel, a decision that has been particularly tough on its 7.5 million immigrants.

Note that prevailing pandemic scientific wisdom prior to 2020 actually did support the idea that an isolated island with tight border controls might be able to delay or prevent infections via closing borders. See WHO guidance on pandemics then and now.

Readers: Will Australia and New Zealand be interesting case studies of what happens to countries where the plague arrives after nearly all of the old/vulnerable people are vaccinated?

Related:

• “Covid in Sydney: Military deployed to help enforce lockdown” (BBC, July 30): “The lockdown – in place until at least 28 August – bars people from leaving their home except for essential exercise, shopping, caregiving and other reasons. Despite five weeks of lockdown, infections in the nation’s largest city continue to spread. Officials recorded 170 new cases on Friday.”

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