Category: Coronapanic

Now that we have real leadership from the White House, are Americans better at fighting the COVID War?

by philg

We were informed by the media that a principal reason the U.S. was unequal to the task of fighting the COVID War was poor leadership from the White House. Donald Trump was anti-science and refused to believe that shutdowns and masks for the general public would have a significant impact on the coronavirus. See “Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus” (NYT, July 2020), for example.

The roots of the nation’s current inability to control the pandemic can be traced to mid-April, when the White House embraced overly rosy projections to proclaim victory and move on.

Donald Trump has been gone for 7 months now. President Biden is providing fantastic science-guided leadership from the White House. Are Americans responding to this improvement by behaving better? The CDC recommends indoor masking, for example. Have you seen more people wearing masks indoors this month compared to in early January 2021? More people washing hands and using sanitizer? Fewer gatherings? In your direct experience, are more people or fewer people traveling (and therefore spreading variant COVID!) compared to when the hated dictator was in power? (data point: our hotel in Niagara Falls said that they’d been 100 percent full for months)

One place that was following the science, in our recent travels, was the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Masks are required in an outdoor garden/zoo, in order to protect the animals from contracting plague. Masks are, of course, required indoors, so that child visitors are protected.

The scientists at the museum want to remind you that when non-natives move into a country, the natives will have a tough time affording “food or other resources”, that the non-natives may bring disease, and that, once the non-natives arrive, the natives may stop reproducing.

What about at the art museum next door, where the median age of a visitor is probably 40 years older than at the natural history museum? Masks are optional, indoors and out.

Overall, our experience has been that, despite great leadership from the White House, Americans are not #FollowingTheLeader. Unless the vaccination rate is near 100 percent, mask usage indoors doesn’t match the old CDC’s recommendation that only the vaccinated can shed the hijab. Signs and practices certainly do not line up with the CDC’s latest guidance that everyone, including the vaccinated, should wear a mask indoors. From a McDonald’s near the Syracuse, NY airport, August 3:

The sign regarding the “newly released” science was already out of date and none of the customers inside was wearing a mask.

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Wright Brothers on the science of COVID-19

by philg

From Greenfield Village, to which Henry Ford moved the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop:

The sign:

“Thousands of pages had been written on the so-called science of flying, but for the most part, the ideas set forth, like the designs for the machines, were mere speculations and probably ninety percent were false.” — Wilbur Wright

As with coronaplague, there was a credentialed elite to which those interested in heavier-than-air flying were supposed to defer. Professor Samuel Langley, for example. As with coronaplague, the only things that these scientists couldn’t do were make accurate predictions or design systems that functioned as they desired.

Aside from the Wienermobile, my favorite part of the Henry Ford Museum visit was seeing family groups in which one or two members were unmasked while the rest were following science by wearing simple non-N95 paper or cloth masks. Despite fine science-guided leadership from the White House and nearly 70 percent of folks in Wayne County being Democrats, only 1 in 50 of the visitors wore a mask indoors. How could a saliva-soaked cloth or paper mask protect the handful of wearers from contagion? And, if that was the goal, what was the point? In the group below, for example, Adult 1 and Teenager would be protected, but Adult 2 would spread whatever germs acquired during the museum visit once back in the car or home (unless they also use masks within the car/house?).

Here’s another example. The older couple in the back of the Model T walked around Greenfield Village, one masked and one not masked:

Readers: What is the rationale of family groups in which one person regularly uses a mask in public while the others do not? How does the masked person hope to escape coronaplague under those circumstances? (Or maybe the answer is “he/she/ze/they doesn’t, but wishes to protect others” but, in that case, why does he/she/ze/they stay in the family? Why not take advantage of Michigan’s no-fault divorce system and move away from the thoughtless science-deniers?)

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Euthanize the unvaccinated?

by philg

“Unvaccinated Covid-19 patients are filling up hospitals, putting the care of others at risk, doctors say” (CNN):

Hospitals are surging with unvaccinated patients infected with the Delta variant — which could affect car accident victims and other non-Covid-19 patients who need hospital care, doctors say.

“None of these patients thought they would get the virus, but the Delta variant has proven to be so highly contagious that even the young and the healthy, including pregnant patients, are now starting to fill up our hospitals,” said Dr. Neil Finkler, chief clinical officer for AdventHealth Central Florida.

(Note that it is not “women” who become pregnant, but “patients” in a beautiful rainbow of gender ID)

Here’s how it looked on my phone (Apple News):

Why haven’t the technocrats come up with the obvious modest proposal? If the unvaccinated are euthanized they won’t clog up the hospital beds to which the righteous are entitled.

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Why are masks required for public transit riders when nobody rides public transit?

by philg

If you want to be by yourself in the U.S., one sure way is to get on a public transit bus outside of rush hour. Pre-coronapanic occupancy of a city bus, including during rush hours, was about 6 (U.S. DOT, 2019):

If it used to be, outside of rush hour, 3 people on a bus with a capacity of 75 prior to coronapanic, what do we think it is today? Anecdotally, I would say that 0, 1, or 2 passengers are the most common occupancies. At 7:37 pm on a Monday evening in Detroit, the articulated bus in the picture below had two passengers and the standard bus had none.

Both buses had “face masks required” signs on the front. The question today: Why? Under no circumstances will these buses become more crowded than an average retail store, in which masks are not required. Why a categorical rule that a solo passenger in the back of an otherwise empty huge bus must wear a mask?

Separately, here’s the web page for the QLINE, a 3.3-mile streetcar system that cost $140 million to build:

More than a year of shutdown waiting for coronapanic to end. Empty cars seemed to run every hour or so with “not in service” signs on the front.

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What is the point of city- and state-level lockdowns in a borderless nation with mass gatherings?

by philg

I wasn’t invited to Barack Obama’s 700-person mass gathering and I haven’t followed the example set by the former President by hosting my own. However, I did recently attend my first big in-person gathering since March 2020, i.e., EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”). One thing that I wondered about at Oshkosh, while surrounded at most times by 100,000+ people, roughly 1 in 200 of whom were masked indoors (closer to 1 in 500 or 1 in 1,000 outdoors), was what the point of city- and state-level COVID-19 restrictions are in a country where there are no internal border controls (or any external ones either, assuming that the person wishing to cross is willing to say that he/she/ze/they have suffered from domestic violence, gang attention, etc.?). A relatively quiet moment inside the Garmin pavilion (zooming in, I can find one guy in a non-N95 mask; what’s his rationale I wonder?):

First, let’s assume that, contrary to the lived experienced of folks in the Czech Republic and Peru, masks and police-/military-enforced lockdowns actually are effective. #Science proves that masks and shutdowns save lives, no matter how high on the COVID-19 death rate leaderboard a masked-and-shut country is. Wrapping a population in saliva-soaked bandanas will stop an aerosol virus.

Second, let’s assume that people can travel freely from an irresponsible unmasked un-shut part of the country to a virtuously masked-and-shut part.

Under these two assumptions, is the masking and partial shutting of Los Angeles, for example, effective when people can leave LA, attend an unmasked mass gathering, and return to LA?

Here’s a scene that has been repeated more or less every weekend in St. Petersburg, Florida, for example:

(Phone video of 10,000+ people gathering in various bars along one street. Fortunately the local public health authorities ordered children to wear masks for 7 hours/day in the nearby schools!)

I don’t like to say that everything needs to be directed by the central planners in Washington, D.C., but I’m having difficulty understanding why we ever thought that this state-by-state, county-by-country, and city-by-city policy-setting could be effective, even if we started from the assumption that humans are in charge of coronavirus.

(The 1,000+ government employees, e.g., USAF flight crews, Army helicopter crews, U.S. Navy pilots, FAA controllers, NOAA scientists, police officers, etc. were entirely unmasked at the event, even, for example, when officially hosting the Delta-variant-infected public inside poorly ventilated aircraft or hangars. It seems that scientifically-guided leadership from the White House is not sufficient to convince even those on the government payroll.)

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Our current economic situation highlights the disconnect between GDP and well-being?

by philg

The world economy is reasonably healthy, as measured by GDP. From the OECD:

This is small comfort to the poor, of course, who were predictably devastated when rich countries shut down (see If All Lives Have Equal Value, why does Bill Gates support shutting down the U.S. economy? (March 2020)).

But let’s focus on the comfortable. GDP per capita has taken only a minor hit, but maybe that just shows the limitations of using GDP per capita as a measure of well-being. After being deprived of the ability to travel, spend time with friends and relatives, play sports, go outside without wearing a mask, send children to school, etc., adults in rich countries still managed to produce, like prisoners eligible for daily work release.

Is life in the Age of Lockdown (except in Sweden, Florida, and South Dakota!) proof that GDP isn’t a good measure of well-being and overall quality of life?

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One-percenters irresponsibly gather in Sturgis starting today

by philg

“Despite delta, Sturgis Motorcycle Rally poised to ride again” (ABC):

South Dakota’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which begins Friday and runs through Aug. 15, is expected to draw upwards of 700,000 attendees. Last year’s rally, which took place during the height of the United States’ summer surge, had more than 400,000 estimated attendees, many of whom didn’t wear masks as they patronized bars, restaurants and concerts.

The downstream effect was tangible: At least 649 COVID-19 cases were linked to Sturgis, including secondary and third-degree contacts.

Republican Gov. Kristi Noem supports the rally, a major economic driver in the state.

“There’s a risk associated with everything that we do in life,” Noem wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “Bikers get that better than anyone.”

So… the 400,000 Fauci-deniers in 2020 were responsible for 649 out of the 35,392,284 total cases thus far reported out of PCR toaster ovens in the U.S. Reprehensible! (see this Bill Burr video at 6:40 for the correct way to say “reprehensible”)

See also “Oxford study: 2020 Sturgis Rally tied to more than 400 COVID-19 cases across 30 states, 1 death”:

More than 463 COVID-19 cases across 30 states were directly connected to the Sturgis Rally in August and September 2020. Seventeen patients were hospitalized and one person died, according the report by the Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

The #Science-informed righteous condemned the Sturgis gathering in 2020 and they are condemning it this year as well.

Let’s look at a smaller mass gathering that is not condemned and for which there have been no calls for shutdown. Provincetown, Massachusetts has a population of about 3,000, which expands with tens of thousands of additional visitors during summer weekend (certainly not to 400,000; the town has essentially just two streets). From Slate:

According to a report the agency released on Friday, the CDC’s latest findings were based on a July 4 COVID-19 outbreak in queer mecca Provincetown, Massachusetts, where among a cluster of 469 (with no deaths) at the time of study, an astonishing three-quarters of the infected had been fully vaccinated. As of July 31, the P-Town outbreak had ballooned to 965 cases.

It was about halfway through our weeklong stay when one vaccinated friend from New York City began to report not feeling well. Unable to stop coughing, he and his boyfriend drove to Outer Cape Health Services, where he tested positive for COVID and immediately fled the cape. Soon after that, I began to hear whisperings—whether at the Mussel Beach gym or traditional “high tea” gatherings by the pool at the Boatslip Resort—of a “gay cough” circulating among some out-of-towners.

The gathering in Provincetown caused 2X as many cases as Sturgis 2020, despite being only about 1/10th the size (could there be a behavioral difference comparing Harley riders to P-town visitors?). Shouldn’t we expect public health experts to demand a governor’s order to shut down the P-town scene? Why is it irresponsible for motorcycle enthusiasts to gather in South Dakota and responsible for New Yorkers and Bostonians to gather in Provincetown?

Addressing the national lifeguard shortage (July 2018):

View of the harbor from the public library:

A P-town shop in which all genders are welcome, but only one gender ID has a future (July 2018):

The featured Young Adult Non-Fiction section at the public library (March 2019):

What if we try to merge the rainbow of Provincetown with the value system of Sturgis? We get “Better a Sister in a Whorehouse than a Brother on a Honda” T-shirts in a rainbow of colors!

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Free money isn’t free (Maskachusetts unemployment insurance rates going up for employers)

by philg

Suppose that you can convince an American worker to get off the couch, stop cashing checks from Joe Biden, and don a mask for the CDC-required 8 hours per day? If you’re an employer in Maskachusetts, in addition to paying higher wages you’ll be paying a higher percentage of those wages in unemployment insurance premium.

Email from the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance, July 15, 2021:

Dear Massachusetts Employer,

… As part of the Commonwealth’s plan to manageably spread over time the cost of benefits paid by the UI Trust Fund in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 crisis, experience-rated employers will be charged a quarterly COVID-19 Recovery Assessment. The 2021 COVID-19 Recovery Assessment Rate Schedule on page 6 shows the assigned COVID-19 Recovery Assessment rate for each UI rate, equal to 10.50% of an employer’s corresponding UI rate. The COVID-19 Recovery Assessment will be retroactive to January 1, 2021. …

Thank you,

DUA Rate Setting Team

Another great reason to use contractors rather than employees whenever possible!

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Recycle Chinese and Soviet anti-landlord propaganda to bolster support for Rochelle Walensky’s rent moratorium order?

by philg

“CDC Issues Eviction Order in Areas of Substantial and High Transmission” (cdc.gov):

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky today signed an order determining the evictions of tenants for failure to make rent or housing payments could be detrimental to public health control measures to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This order will expire on October 3, 2021 and applies in United States counties experiencing substantial and high levels of community transmission levels of SARS-CoV-2.

As the U.S. is roughly #20 in the COVID Olympics, “substantial and high levels of community transmission levels” exist for 90 percent of American renters (National Fair Housing Alliance, in which “fair” means $0/month).

Some Americans may object to this, feeling sorry for small landlords, e.g., the owner of a Boston-area triple-decker in which the owner’s family occupies one flat while the other two were rented (until March 2020, when the system switched to a Burning Man-style gift economy).

I wonder if we can recycle anti-landlord propaganda developed by smarter people in China and Soviet Russia so that Americans (at least the ones who aren’t landlords) can all get behind Dr. Walensky.

From Wikipedia:

The Land Reform Movement, also known by the Chinese abbreviation Tǔgǎi (土改), was a campaign by the Communist Party leader Mao Zedong during the late phase of the Chinese Civil War and the early People’s Republic of China.[1] The campaign involved mass killings of landlords by tenants and land redistribution to the peasantry.[2] The estimated number of casualties of the movement ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions.[3][4][5] In terms of the communist party’s evaluation Zhou Enlai estimated 830,000 had been killed and Mao Zedong estimated as many as 2 to 3 million were killed.[6]

Those who were killed were targeted on the basis of their social class rather than their ethnicity; the neologism “classicide” is used to describe the killings.[7] Class-motivated mass killings continued almost throughout the 30 years of social and economic transformation in Maoist China, and by the end of reforms, the landlord class had been largely eliminated from Mainland China or had fled to Taiwan.[8] By 1953, land reform in most parts of mainland China was completed except in Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, and Sichuan. From 1953 onwards, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to implement collective ownership of expropriated land through the creation of “Agricultural Production Cooperatives” transferring property rights from the former landlord class to the Chinese state.

We can probably get some appropriate posters from the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre (I loved it there in November 2019!).

Comrade Lenin sweeps away the capitalists after the Decree on Land:

Readers: What are some ideas for good posters? How about landlords trying to block access to vaccine clinics and your state’s governor flattening them with a dump truck full of freshly printed executive orders?

(Note that the above should not be interpreted as a suggestion that the U.S. has adopted “Socialism” or “Communism”. A distinguishing characteristic of Socialism, at least Chinese- and Soviet-style, was that every able-bodied adult worked. The principal distinguishing characteristic of the current American system is idleness. Americans can get married and live off a spouse. Americans can divorce that spouse and continue to live off him/her/zir/them via alimony. Americans can have sex with a high-income already-married person and harvest the child support. Americans can sit in public housing for three generations and watch TV or play Xbox in between appointments to get more Medicaid-funded opioids. All of the above would have been considered criminal parasitism in the Soviet Union. The current U.S. system, therefore, is almost the polar opposite of Socialism, at least from the perspective of the individual citizen.)

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No vaccine clinic at Oshkosh

by philg

The government had approximately 50 years of warning that hundreds of thousands of people would be gathering at the Oshkosh airport last week (608,000 through the gates (but the same person could be counted twice if showing up on multiple days, I think); 10,000 aircraft landing KOSH). The same government says that it will pay any price (with printed money?), bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe to get life-saving vaccines into the arms of those too stupid to realize that they need salvation. From July 28, 2021, state-level: “‘Get vaccinated’ is the united message Wisconsin health officials say amidst COVID-19 spike”. From July 29, federal: “Biden announces measures to incentivize Covid-19 vaccinations, including a requirement for federal employees”.

You don’t have to be a marketing genius to see the opportunity to reach the general public at EAA AirVenture. Ford runs a big pavilion promoting its SUVs and pickups. Cookware, mattress, knife, and massage chair companies rent small booths. You can check out a new concrete truck or military vehicle from the local defense contractor. You can order an AC Cobra replica. The majority of the attendees aren’t pilots and many attendees aren’t even interested in aviation specifically, but merely show up as companions with someone who is. Some Mennonite farm kids, below, for example, just waiting for a technocrat to inject them for their own good:

Why wouldn’t the multi-billion dollar government vaccine bureaucracy not set up a booth at Oshkosh and offer people one-shot J&J or their first or second shot of the other vaccines? EAA probably would have given the government worthies space for free, given that the COVID-19 mandarins have the power to shut down gatherings such as EAA AirVenture. It can’t be a shortage of personnel. At any one time there were probably hundreds of government workers on site for various reasons (police, U.S. military recruiters in their recruiting booths, U.S. military crews that had come with aircraft, FAA administrators and educators, Border Patrol folks showing off their gear, etc.). [Exactly 0 of these folks were observed to be following President Biden’s example by wearing masks!]

Here’s a sampling of non-aviation enterprises that decided a gathering of hundreds of thousands was worth showing up for:

The excuse is that vaccine injections are too complex to deliver without a permanent building? The government actually has several permanent buildings at its disposal during “Oshkosh”. One is an FAA Safety building and one is half of a huge hangar in which various agencies explain their operations (“International Federal Pavilion”). Even without a permanent building, Chick-fil-A was delivering 20+ sandwiches per minute out of a trailer and tent:

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