Category: Coronapanic

Shopping in Concord, Massachusetts: Bring your Mask

by philg

“In consideration of the health and safety of our employees and guests who have not been fully vaccinated, Masks are Required AT ALL TIMES Inside the Cheese Shop.”

Vaccinations have been widely available for two months here in Maskachusetts. There will always be those who aren’t vaccinated, however, either because they #DenyScience, have an unusual medical situation, are infants (though maybe the vaccine can be given right as a baby is coming out?), etc. Therefore, doesn’t this sign translate to “masks now, masks tomorrow, masks forever”?

#AbundanceOfCaution was the general rule for the shopping district. Although the governor’s 69 orders no longer require masks, the merchants have stepped in with their own unconditional mask requirements:

The ultimate expression of caution is to close the retail store altogether:

All photos from June 8.

A few sights on the way to/from this shopping experience… a group of preschool children, age 2 and 3, marching outdoors in masks. It was 93 degrees out. A neighbor with a zoning-minimum 2-acre lot (welcome the undocumented so long as they can afford a $1 million vacant lot on which to build a $1 million structure) riding a lawnmower… in a surgical mask.

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Coronalogic: Obamacare saved lives by expanding Medicaid; the hospital shutdown of 2020 did not kill anyone

by philg

“Expanding Medicaid to low-income adults leads to improved health, fewer deaths” (Harvard School of Public Health, July 2012):

“The recent Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act ruled that states could decide whether or not they wanted to participate in the health care law’s Medicaid expansion. Our study provides evidence suggesting that expanding Medicaid has a major positive effect on people’s health,” said [[Benjamin Sommers]], assistant professor of health policy and economics at HSPH and the study’s lead author.

The results showed that Medicaid expansions in three states were associated with a significant reduction in mortality of 6.1% compared with neighboring states that did not expand Medicaid, which corresponds to 2,840 deaths prevented per year for each 500,000 adults gaining Medicaid coverage.

Each year in which low-income Americans had better access to office visits with physicians (not just the emergency departments of hospitals, which, of course, always had to take them in) resulted in saving the lives of 0.57 percent.

What about shutting down health care, including most hospital services, for 330 million Americans (or 350 million, depending on how many undocumented are among us)? Could that result in 0.57 percent of 330 million people dying? That would be 1.88 million or 157,000 per month of shutdown. I’m going to guess that the expert scientific consensus will be “no” and that, in fact, there were only minimal effects from shutting down the U.S. healthcare system that had previously been so important to prop up with $trillions of tax dollars.

So… opening up some doctors’ offices to more people saved lives bigly. Shutting down the nation’s entire hospital system, except for procedures considered to be emergencies, did not cost any lives.

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Small business autopsy

by philg

Looking for a place to rest in between practice helicopter instrument approaches last month, I stumbled on Mike’s Runway Diner at the Auburn/Lewiston Airport (Maine). From the restaurant’s Facebook page….

We are a family owned business that offers Americana comfort food at a reasonable price. Our portions are huge and everything is prepared fresh and you can sit along the runway and watch the planes. (318 Likes; 334 followers; 230 check-ins)

March 8, 2020: Happy Sunday. Come out and enjoy this great day at Mike’s Runway Diner. Sit along side the runway and watch the Planes take off and land while enjoying a great meal.

March 18, 2020: As many of you have heard we had to close the Restaurant due to the Coronavirus pandemic. We will be open tomorrow Thursday from 7am to 11am for to go orders only. We will keep the page updated as to when restaurants can open again. Remember to isolate and wash your hands

April 17, 2020: Mike and I are still unable to get certain provisions to run the restaurant. We will keep every one updated on when we will be able to open back up. Stay safe and indoors.

May 14, 2020: Good morning. As of now Mike’s Runway Diner is on track for opening at the beginning of June. We will keep our page updated . Thank you for all the support we have received during the closure. Mike and I look forward to seeing our favorite people (our customers). See you soon 🙂 Mike and Heather

July 5, 2020: We are still working on trying to open back up. Waiting on the restrictions to lift. We look forward to seeing everyone again soon. Mike and Heather

July 29, 2020: Well the time has come to say good by. Corona got the best of our restaurant and we were not able to move forward. Mike and I thank everyone for your business, love and support. We will cherish everyone and the memories for ever. Thank you and we will miss you all. Mike and Heather

(Minor corrections made to the above for readability.)

A partial screenshot:

Related:

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Sacrament of Masks preserved at the Apple Store

by philg

The Church of Shutdown abandoned the Sacrament of Masks, at least for the vaccinated, here in Massachusetts at the end of May. The ritual is kept alive at the Apple Store, however. From the Burlington Mall, today:

Things are quieter at the Microsoft Store and Lord & Taylor (both closed):

Adjacent parking lot (Burlington, MA is 3.3 percent Black, so Black Lives Matter… mostly in other towns):

Although masks are now merely “advised” (only for the unvaccinated) rather than required by governor’s order, more than half of the folks in the mall and at a nearby supermarket were masked.

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Maskachusetts unmasked

by philg

We risked death-by-variant-COVID-19 today at the Watertown Mall, meeting friends for dim sum. Although the Massachusetts state of emergency persists at least until June 15, a combination of 69 governor’s orders as of yesterday boiled down to “masks are no longer required indoors”. (Or at least, “you can’t be arrested or fined under state law for not wearing a mask indoors”; maybe a city or town could order you to wear a mask.)

I would have expected an enterprise that makes money from inviting the public to share an indoor space to deemphasize the risk of sharing an indoor space as soon as that deemphasis was legal. To the contrary, however, the shopping mall operator and some individual stores had kept up their sign barrage. We walked by at least 40 COVID-related signs between the door to the small mall and the restaurant itself (waitstaff still fully masked). How does this help their business? Wouldn’t an intelligent person who believed all of these signs decide to stay home and order everything from Amazon rather than take the risk of in-person shopping?

A sampling:

The mall includes a Target and 100 percent of the shoppers whom I observed were masked, both in the Target and in the rest of the mall.

I asked two of our (adult) friends how many COVID signs they’d walked past in getting from their respective cars to the restaurant. Both answered “none”. One was sufficiently mindful of COVID-19 that he arrived in a double-mask (fabric over N95) while the other sported a plain N95 mask. Yet their minds hadn’t registered the signs.

Note that the public health experts who have technocratically managed the Massachusetts plague such that our COVID-19 death rate, adjusted for population over 65, is only 3X that of Florida’s (a Robert S. McNamara-style victory?), still advise subjects to wear masks, especially for those who are not vaccinated.

(A few days ago we went on a bicycle ride with the kids in a quiet exurb. Slender apparently health people aged 10-20 would jump off the sidewalk in order to maintain at least 10′ of distance and if they weren’t already masked would rush to raise up their chin diapers.)

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Intelligent #Science-following Germans versus Swedish Covidiots

by philg

From Twitter, a chart of intensive care utilization by COVID-19 patients in Stockholm versus Hamburg:

Related:

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Government says employers can require experimental vaccines

by philg

“U.S. agency says employers can mandate COVID-19 vaccination” (Reuters):

U.S. companies can mandate that employees in a workplace must be vaccinated against COVID-19, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said on Friday.

The EEOC, in a statement posted on its website explaining its updated guidance, said employees can be required to be vaccinated as long as employers comply with the reasonable accommodation provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other laws.

In other words, a healthy 25-year-old does not have to agree to take an “investigational” non-FDA-approved vaccine designed to prevent deaths among the unhealthy elderly, but he/she/ze/they will not be receiving a paycheck if he/she/ze/they refuses.

For anyone whose earning potential is near the median, this is another great argument in favor of choosing the welfare lifestyle. The is no vaccine requirement to continue occupying means-tested public housing. There is no vaccine requirement to continue receiving free health insurance via Medicaid. There is no vaccine requirement to continue purchasing food via SNAP/EBT. There is no vaccine requirement to continue chatting on an Obamaphone. Employers can mandate random drug and alcohol tests and transportation-related employers are required to conduct random drug and alcohol tests, but, at least here in Maskachusetts, a resident of public housing can enjoy “essential” alcohol and marijuana every day. In other words, an American with a job is not free to decide what drugs to take and what drugs not to take while an American on welfare is free to choose what drugs and medical treatments to accept and what recreational drugs to consume.

(The American on welfare is, of course, much better situated for avoiding coronavirus infection than the American who goes to work. The American on welfare need not leave his/her/zir/their apartment when variant COVID is raging. The American on welfare need not commute in a bus or subway. The American on welfare need never be in a public indoor environment.)

How about the spending power? From back in 2013, before all of the coronapanic-related enhancements to government programs, The Work versus Welfare Trade-Off (CATO):

Let’s also consider freedom of speech. The First Amendment isn’t useful if your employer disagrees with what you say or write. A recent story from Massachusetts, “An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer” (HuffPost):

But “Sinclair Jenkins,” HuffPost has now confirmed, is really a pseudonym for Benjamin Welton, a 33-year-old Boston University history PhD candidate who, until this week, taught English, social studies and computer science at Star Academy, an elementary school in Massachusetts. When HuffPost contacted the school for comment, Welton was put on leave, and was fired shortly before this article was published.

Like many conservatives, Welton has expressed anger about the teaching of “critical race theory” in American schools. Last August, shortly before he began teaching at the Star Academy, he tweeted under a pseudonym that a return to American greatness “requires defunding critical race theory.” It’s clear from his pseudonymous writings where his real objection lies: criticism of white people.

A group of anti-fascist researchers, the Anonymous Comrades Collective, figured out Welton’s double life and shared the details with HuffPost.

Regardless of the content of his thought, speech, and writing, Mr. Welton (unlikely to become “Dr. Welton” given that his Ph.D. program at Boston University is right next to a Center for Antiracist Research) would have enjoyed a secure spending power and standard of living if he’d chosen welfare rather than work.

Related:

  • “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” (Real World Divorce); the American who has sex with two already-married dentists and harvests the resulting child support can enjoy the same spending power as a dentist without the need to accept non-FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, interact with the COVID-plagued public, or worry about the reaction to what is said or written (alimony also works since family court profits are not conditional on medical decisions or thought/speech/writing content, but collecting alimony requires persuading a future divorce lawsuit defendant to agree to get married rather than a future slam-dunk child support lawsuit defendant to agree to have sex for one night or one hour (see Hunter Biden, for example))
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Real-world N95 mask test

by philg

As part of our move from Maskachusetts to the Florida Free State I had to spend some time cleaning out a shed attached to the back of our garage. Under the no-squirrel-is-illegal principle, rodents had occupied the fiberglass-insulated attic of said garage, which resulted in a shower of fiberglass fragments and dust into the shed.

To protect my lungs against the fiberglass dust and years of ordinary dust, I donned an N95 mask (March 2020 value: $100!) given to me by a dentist friend (she buys them 3,000 at a time). Ready to enter the variant COVID-19 clinic, right? Within a minute, I began sneezing from the dust that had apparently slipped around the edges of the mask.

Hospitals employ professional mask fitters and make at least 6 different sizes and shapes of N95 masks available to patient-facing staff. Now I know why!

Related:

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Saudi Arabia banned anyone from leaving for 14 months

by philg

I was chatting with a petroleum engineer who has lived for much of his career in Saudi Arabia (and sent three children to the Aramco school there, then on to boarding school in the U.S.). He mentioned that, as an expat, he was allowed to exit the kingdom, but Saudis were not free to leave for fear that they would return with coronaplague. His return to Saudi Arabia won’t be simple. He must spend two weeks in a country that the Saudis consider safe (i.e., not the U.S.!) and then transit only through airline hubs in countries that the Saudis consider safe. Once home in Saudi Arabia he must quarantine for two weeks with COVID-19 tests every five days.

See also “Saudi Arabia Eases Travel Ban for Vaccinated Citizens” (AP in USA Today):

Vaccinated Saudis are being allowed to leave the kingdom for the first time in more than a year as the country eases a ban on international travel aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus and its new variants.

For the past 14 months, Saudi citizens have mostly been banned from traveling abroad out of concerns that international travel could fuel the outbreak of the virus within the country of more than 30 million people. The ban, in place since March 2020, has impacted Saudi students who were studying abroad, among others.

With limited exception, foreigners from 20 countries, including the U.S., U.K, UAE and France, remain banned from directly entering the kingdom.

I mentioned that a friend had been similarly restricted from leaving the U.S. He lost his passport shortly before coronashutdown (a First World Problem… he has three houses and they’re all huge so the passport could be hiding anywhere within about 20,000 square feet). Getting a replacement passport requires an in-person interview, but the federal government shut down all in-person interviews except for family emergencies. As of this month, it looks as though the government has still not developed an alternative procedure (e.g., via videoconference) and appointments are “extremely limited” for “urgent travel” and “limited” for “LIfe-or-death emergencies” (like Ted Cruz going to Cancun?):

Related:

  • “Passports Were a “Temporary” War Measure” (FEE): “In 1914, warring states of France, Germany, and Italy were the first to make passports mandatory, a measure rapidly followed by others, including the neutral states of Spain, Denmark, and Switzerland.”
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97 percent of Maskachusetts school districts shut down for at least part of 2020-2021

by philg

Headline from a rich white town’s “school committee update”:

We are among only 3% of MA school districts to hold in-person classes all year 5-days-per-week!

Of course one would not want to imagine that the government could lie to us, but, as part of his 68 (so far) orders, Governor Baker delayed the start of school here in Maskachusetts until mid-September. Therefore, the “all year” part of the above should be “almost all year” (also, the school day was shorted to end at 1:45 pm instead of 2:50 pm, except on the days when teachers already were entitled to a free afternoon (Wednesday), in which case school ended around 12:30 pm).

Flipping this around, we learned that 97 percent of school districts (and the bigger ones were in this group so it would be more than 97 percent of students) denied children at least some of what previously would have been considered their right to an education.

The same newsletter, prepared by white people who administer a school in a nearly all-white town, contains a section titled “Facing dual traumas of racism and inequity” and we learn that “School Committee members have committed to our own anti-bias training,…” and “Middle school students organized a Black Lives Matter group.” Nowhere is it mentioned that the probability of a young Black life being educated in a school in Massachusetts has been extremely low for the 2020-2021 year.

Related:

  • states ranked by COVID-19 death rate (compare to countries ranked and see that science+masks+shutdown would have landed Massachusetts near the very top of the world’s countries in COVID-19 death rate, if MA were its own country)
  • “Wellesley School District Faces Civil Rights Complaint From Parents Group” (WGBH, an NPR affiliate): In March, the [almost-all-white] Wellesley schools hosted a Zoom session described as a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian-American students” and other students of color in grades six through twelve. Attached to the complaint was a screenshot of the invitation, which stated: “*Note: This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.” .. “If you identify as White, and need help to process recent events, please know I’m here for you as well as your guidance counselors,” the invitation read. “If you need to know why this is not for White students, please ask me!” … “The goal was to provide a safe space in which students and staff could reflect, share, and be supported as members of our school district,” the email said. “At the same time, we can also understand the discomfort that some members of our community have shared when learning of a practice that they perceive to be discriminatory. It’s important to note that affinity spaces are not discriminatory.”
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