Category: Coronapanic

Facebook fact check

by philg

A Floridian’s Facebook post today, updated for her by Facebook’s team of scientific experts:

(Disclaimer: I was not one of the Deplorables who “liked” this post!)

Facebook implies that COVID-19 vaccines are “approved“. As noted in We love our children so much we will give them an investigational vaccine, the manufacturers themselves are careful to disclose that their products are not approved. Moderna, for example, says “The Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine has not been approved or licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) … There is no FDA-approved vaccine to prevent COVID‑19.” and that the vaccine is “investigational”:

What does Johnson and Johnson say? “The Janssen COVID-19 vaccine has not been approved or licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), … There is no FDA-approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19.”

How about Pfizer? “The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has not been approved or licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but has been authorized for emergency use by FDA under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) for use in individuals 16 years of age and older. The emergency use of this product is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of the medical product under Section 564(b)(1) of the FD&C Act unless the declaration is terminated or authorization revoked sooner.”

Related:

  • “Fact Check: Did India Ban the Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine?” (Newsweek): Conspiracy theory website Infowars claimed on February 14, 2021, that India had banned the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine due to safety concerns. … On February 3, 2021, India’s Subject Expert Committee (SEC), a panel that advises the nation’s Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), a national regulatory body focused on pharmaceuticals and devices, ruled that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine should not be recommended for an EUA in the country “at this stage.” … India has not banned the Pfizer vaccine. However, it has turned down its request for an emergency use authorization “at this stage.” … The Ruling: Mostly False. [I.e., the vaccine is not “banned” in India; it is simply illegal to inject]
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Should we take kidneys and partial livers from young people to help older people?

by philg

We’re now at the one-year anniversary of when the governor here in Maskachusetts declared a state of emergency and began to tell healthy young people that they needed to give up what turned out to be at least a year of their lives (education, social activity, building work experience, maintaining fitness via sports/gym, etc.) in hopes of extending the lives of folks with a median age of 82.

The logic of lockdown is that young people are required by law to sacrifice if there is an old person whose life could possibly be extended via that sacrifice.

What if we applied the same logic to organ harvesting? No young person actually needs two kidneys nor a full-size liver. Removing a kidney or part of a liver from a young person wouldn’t cost the young person a full year of life expectancy and it could save the life of an older person.

We were comfortable with taking what has turned out to be a year of life away from the young. Why aren’t we comfortable imposing on them a slight inconvenience (only 4 to 6 days in the hospital) in order to get organs that they don’t need and that could help save lives among the old/sick?

Related (Department of Old v. Young):

  • “Hundreds of rowdy revelers throw out-of-control street party near University of Colorado, Boulder, campus” (ABC): … up to 800 people, most appearing to be college-aged, prompting violent clashes with SWAT police who deployed at least one armored vehicle to disperse the crowd, according to authorities. … Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty released a statement on Sunday, saying his office is working with police detectives to identify suspects who “should be held fully responsible for their outrageous actions.” “Our community was put at risk last night by the individuals involved in the incident in the Hill area. Their callous disregard for our community’s safety and well-being is shameful,” Dougherty’s statement said. “There is no excuse for this conduct, especially while the people of this community endure the pandemic.”
  • a tale of a kidney transplant flight (2010); photo above is from that trip
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Commercial flights during Coronapanic: a mostly mask-free experience

by philg

A tale of a recent trip from Boston to Washington-Dulles on United Airlines… (my first on an airliner since the BC epoch (“Before Coronapanic”))

The good news is that all of our post-9/11 security fears have been resolved. I don’t remember hearing any announcements about “if you see something, say something”, leaving cars unattended at the curb, or calling the authorities after spotting unattended bags.

The not-so-good news is that our security fears have been replaced by COVID-19 fears. The best news, though, as anyone in California or Spain can attest, is coronavirus can never succeed amongst masked humans, no matter how primitive the mask technology. Combining these two, the airport authorities and the airlines have cooperated to bombard passengers with literally hundreds of signs and announcements regarding masks: (1) wear them, (2) don’t wear them under your nose, (3) don’t worry about COVID-19 if you’re masked, etc. I stopped counting at 200 exposures (signs+audio) after less than 30 minutes in Logan airport.

After being educated literally hundreds of time on this topic, did I wear a mask in the terminal? No. I sat down at a Legal Sea Foods restaurant across from the gate, ordered a salad and an ice tea, and timed the completion of my meal to coincide with the final boarding call.

One improvement is that the gate agents no longer do “hurry up so that you can wait in the jet bridge.” I was handed a disinfecting wipe as soon as I walked onto the plane. But if I were worried enough about getting COVID-19 from surface contamination to use the wipe, why would I have been on the plane to begin with? (see Does disinfectant theater contribute to coronaplague?)

Unlike Delta, United does not block the middle seats. They’ve cut so many flights that, despite the minimal demand, most people on my BOS-IAD leg were jammed into completely occupied rows. I’m a “Silver” member so I ended up towards the front in a row with an empty middle seat between myself and a slender young guy who seemed completely uninterested in the Festival of Corona.

The United app delivers this message if you open it up in flight:

The lead flight attendant on the plane delivered the same message multiple times over the PA as well. He took care to say that he’d seen passengers wearing masks improperly and that this would not be tolerated.

As soon as we took off, though, the Cart of Demaskification was brought out. People like me who hadn’t asked for a drink were offered one. I responded to the offer with “Coke please” and was given an entire can… which takes about as long to drink as the flight time from Boston to D.C. The fine print above says that people are supposed to put on a mask “between bites and sips”, but I didn’t see anyone doing that. So masks are like face seatbelts: required for takeoff and landing.

On arrival at Dulles, the messaging regarding masks resumed. Here’s a big electronic sign that presumably used to promote all of the great things going on in Virginia. Now it is “Mask Up Virginia” over a Dunkin’ Donuts sign:

(see also Public health, American-style: Donuts at the vaccine clinic and “90 percent of COVID deaths occur in countries with high obesity levels: study” (New York Post, March 5, 2021))

The only other message that the airport authorities seemed interested in delivering was a hearty rainbow flag welcome:

The return trip was similar, right down to the full can of soda served shortly after takeoff (45-minute cruise segment). Although the flight was not crowded, the terminal was jammed. Perhaps large sections have been shut down, which means passengers are now on top of each other near the gates that remain in use. The sit-down restaurants are, as at Logan, highly sought-after locations for those who want to relax unmasked, and there were (socially distanced) lines forming in front of some.

I joined the connoisseurs at the forbidden-in-Boston Chick-fil-A, which meant that I was unmasked for almost my entire wait. (One doesn’t want to wolf down a delicious meal that is denied to most residents of Maskachusetts.)

If anyone in the gate area actually did have coronavirus, there was a sufficiently dense crowd for spreading it:

I wouldn’t recommended the experience for those who are anxious about COVID-19. While you’re constantly being reminded about how hazardous COVID-19 is, there isn’t enough room in the airport to be truly distant from those who are potentially infected. People sit glumly with their masks on, waiting to see how the Russian roulette game that they’ve chosen to play will turn out. Unless you believe in the effectiveness of crude non-N95 masks, it’s the same risk level as being in a crowded Miami club, but a lot less fun.

Update 3/18: “Climate czar John Kerry caught going maskless on flight” (New York Post); Kerry’s response on Twitter: “If I dropped my mask to one ear on a flight, it was momentary. I wear my mask because it saves lives and stops the spread. It’s what the science tells us to do.“

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Is coronavirus reading my blog and trying to make me look stupid?

by philg

From February 16, 2021, Is it double-masking or Joe Biden’s presidency that has beaten coronavirus?, which contained the following chart:

I felt confident enough that this strong trend would continue that I wrote:

As promised, Joe Biden has shut down the coronavirus. And, not only has he shut down coronavirus in the U.S., he’s defeated this pathogen on a planetary scale.

How about the same New York Times page today? The global chart:

What if we look locally instead of globally? Cases have continued to fall in the U.S., but at a slower rate of decline than in mid-February.

Other than “Philip is stupid,” how do we explain the recent slight upward trend worldwide?

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A 7-year-old contemplates the government’s $1.9 trillion gift to the American People

by philg

A bedtime scene:

  • 7-year-old: Joe Biden is going to send us money.
  • Mom: No. Joe Biden is going to take money from us and send it to other people. Our income is too high to qualify for the money that Joe Biden is sending out.
  • 7-year-old: You and Dad should stop working then, so that you can get the money instead of paying the money.

Which reminds me… what is actually in this bill? It is supposedly about $1,400 checks for most Americans (do children, retirees, and those already on welfare get checks?)? But if we divide $1.9 trillion by 308 million (Census-estimated population of 330 million minus the 22 million undocumented who presumably won’t qualify for a federal program organized by Social Security number), we get $6,169 per documented American. Plainly, the majority of this $1.9 trillion is going somewhere other than into average Americans’ pockets.

(Does it make sense to pay the same amount to a government worker who has been paid in full to stay home and work a few hours per day as it does to a self-employed Uber driver whose income has been reduced and whose job requires leaving the house and being exposed to COVID-19?)

From the New York Times:

It would inject vast amounts of federal resources into the economy, including one-time direct payments of up to $1,400 for hundreds of millions of Americans, jobless aid of $300 a week to last through the summer, money for distributing coronavirus vaccines and relief for states, cities, schools and small businesses struggling during the pandemic.

Beyond the immediate aid, the bill, titled the American Rescue Plan, is estimated to cut poverty by a third this year and would plant the seeds for what Democrats hope will become an income guarantee for children. It would potentially cut child poverty in half, through a generous expansion of tax credits for Americans with children — which Democrats hope to make permanent — increases in subsidies for child care, a broadening of eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, and an expansion of food stamps and rental assistance.

The last part sounds like a continuation of the trend discussed in When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children? (2015). Going forward, the childless will be mined out even more thoroughly and made to work even longer hours to take over what would have been the costs of rearing children. I also wonder if this will make being a family court entrepreneur more lucrative relative to working. State child support formulae won’t change. Having sex with a dentist, for example, should still yield $1-2 million in Massachusetts. But the plaintiff who collects child support and works a few hours per week will now also be entitled to additional tax credits and taxpayer-funded child care. Instead of building the spending power of a dentist by having sex with three dentists, it might be possible to obtain the spending power of a dentist by having sex with two dentists (especially if income tax rates also go up; remember that child support is not taxable). Going to dental school may not look so smart anymore.

How does this spending compare to the Collapse of 2008?

Its eye-popping cost is just shy of the $2.2 trillion stimulus measure that became law last March … Even with changes, the bill remained more than than double the size of the roughly $800 billion stimulus package that Congress approved in 2009, when Mr. Biden was vice president, to counter the toll of the Great Recession.

So Americans are spending more than 4X at the federal level on coronapanic compared to what we spent cleaning up after our unwise enthusiasm for subprime mortgages.

What about the only enterprise in the U.S. that couldn’t figure out how to reopen?

$130 billion to primary and secondary schools

Rewarding public schools’ lack of effort with $130 billion will certainly not encourage them to repeat their performance during the next wave of coronavariants! (Alternatively, why not give the $130 billion to the schools that actually reopened no later than, say, September 1, 2020?)

Fair to say that this $1.9 trillion spending package will address every bumper sticker on the back of this car? (from January 2020)

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Fauci: not everyone in the military is a hero

by philg

There are more than 2 million members of the U.S. military.

Let’s start out with the heroes… a transient A-10 at our local Air Force base, back in October:

And let’s hope that the pilot has been triply heroic now by agreeing to two vaccine shots!

An inconvenient truth from America’s top scientist: just as not everyone in the military can be a combat pilot, it seems that not everyone in the military can be a hero, contrary to what we’ve been told. “Fauci Says Military Who Refuse Covid-19 Vaccine Are ‘Part Of The Problem’ After High Rate Of Service Members Refuse Jab” (Forbes🙂

… the U.S. military is one of a number of frontline professions reporting startlingly high rates of vaccine refusal, despite clear evidence that the vaccines are safe and effective.

“You’ve got to think of your own health, which is really very important, but you got to think about your societal obligation,” Fauci said at a virtual town hall for Blue Star Families, a non-profit focused on helping military families.

Out of 2 million, how many have been felled by what science tells us is a pathogen that requires the most dramatic adjustments to human society since the Black Death of 1348?

The U.S. military, which has been deployed around the country to assist with the pandemic response, has struggled with Covid-19 outbreaks, recording 163,574 cases and 24 deaths throughout the pandemic.

(For comparison, NHTSA says that several hundred U.S. military personnel die in traffic accidents each year, an example of the general rule that I articulated a year ago: Why do we care about COVID-19 deaths more than driving-related deaths?)

If U.S. military personnel could cut their driving by 10 percent, therefore, they could save more lives than by taking a vaccine that was 100 percent effective against COVID-19. So maybe the “you’ve got to think of your own health” advice from Dr. Fauci is medically unsound (i.e., better to spend an afternoon coming up with ways to cut driving miles per year than to drive to a vaccine clinic). Fauci adds, however, that it is each service member’s “societal obligation.” Contrary to Dr. Fauci’s own previous statement, COVID-19 isn’t actually dangerous to a healthy 35-year-old enlisted soldier, but, without a vaccine, he/she/ze/they could be a carrier:

Vaccines are the “best and most important intervention we have” to stop the pandemic, he said, together with public health measures like masking and social distancing.

“Because by getting infected, even though you may not know it, you may be inadvertently transmitting the infection to someone else, even though you have no symptoms,” Fauci said, adding: “in reality, like it or not, you’re propagating this outbreak.”

So… vaccines reduce infection and transmission to the point that everyone has a societal obligation to test out an “investigational” pharmaceutical?

I.e., from the same doctor/government official: (a) the vaccine is so effective at preventing transmission that those who face almost no personal risk from the virus must take it, (b) the vaccine is so ineffective at preventing transmission (absent a nasopharynx removal), that Americans should continue to keep their lives on hold until the PCR machines stop giving us numbers that we don’t want to hear.

And don’t forget to wear a mask after you’ve dead… (from our neighborhood, October 25, 2020):

Related:

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Traveling to scold the COVID sinners

by philg

A Maskachusetts resident who has achieved Super Karen status when it comes to advocacy of masks and shutdown (daily Facebook postings for our full year (so far) of “14 days to flatten the curve”) went down to Wicked Florida for the February school break that we have here. He hung his phone out of a car window and made a video of people mixing in various open-to-the-street venues on the beach in Ft. Lauderdale, captioned

Wonder what happens if you party like it’s 1999…you get the highest virus transmission rate in the country. Looks like fun though I think I’ll just keep on driving!

Among the various comments, one from a Floridian:

in your statement above, “because these folks ignore the rules they are going to cause a problem and creat a backlash that will cause shutdowns and restrictions”. Aren’t you also doing that by out of state travel?

My answer to her:

I think [he] is working in an established literary tradition. Devout Christians, for example, used to go to whorehouses, strip clubs, and gay bars so that they could then write about the awful sins that were taking place.

Now that Christianity is on the wane here in the U.S., are posts like this guy’s evidence that Shutdown Karenhood is one of the replacements?

From a club in Miami, end of January:

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The emergency continues on two fronts: insurrection and coronaplague

by philg

The 2,200 members of the Capitol Police and 3,800 officers of the D.C. Police and the FBI and the Secret Service are not sufficient to protect our nation from an ongoing insurrectionmergency. “Capitol Police Call For Extension Of National Guard Help” (NPR):

U.S. Capitol Police requested a 60-day extension for a portion of the National Guard troops currently in Washington, D.C., Thursday as the threat of a possible attack from militia groups looms over the city.

How are we doing in Year 2 of “14 Days to Flatten the Curve”? “It’s Too Soon to Lift COVID Restrictions: Fauci” (U.S. News):

Coronavirus restrictions should not be lifted until the daily toll of new U.S. cases falls below 10,000, “and maybe even considerably less than that,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday.

The last time the United States saw that low a number was almost a year ago. The daily case count hasn’t fallen below 50,000 since mid-October, and the seven-day average on Wednesday was more than 64,000, CNN reported.

Who wants to make a prediction as to when positive PCR tests (“cases”) will fall below 10,000 per day? (let’s say that it needs to be a 7-day moving average of 10,000/day so that we exclude reporting glitches)

Given that Americans love to run PCR tests, even on those who have zero symptoms, my guess is “never”. Example: friends in NYC are trying to sort out a cancer question regarding the mom. A coronaplague test was required before she could get a follow-up cancer test. She tested positive and therefore her cancer appointments were canceled. One of her two children tested positive. (The husband is vaccinated so he refused to participate in the festival of testing.) She never had any Covid-19 symptoms, but the family remembered that both kids had slight sore throats a week or two before the test. As long as we have a lot of checkpoints at state borders (the Maskachusetts travel order, for example), national borders, schools (can’t return without a Covid test), hospitals (can’t get treatment without a Covid test), etc., if we’re still running PCR at the same number of cycles we should still have at least 10,000 positives per day forever.

(Separately, consider this NYC family. They’ve endured a year of lockdown in an apartment. Their kids haven’t seen the inside of a school since March 2020. They’ve avoided gatherings with friends and family. Now the mom and the kids have exactly the same medical status that they would have had if there had never been any kind of shutdown or masquerade. Aside from wars, in all of U.S. history, has there ever been a sacrifice more meaningless and useless?)

From December, approaching the Hudson River Corridor from Teterboro (a VFR interlude in an instrument practice flight in a Cirrus):

Related:

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Proof that you can make money using my blog as an investment guide…

by philg

… just do the opposite of whatever I’m bullish about.

Me: Two-thirds full airline idea (12/23/2019)

Me: Coronavirus will breathe life into my two-thirds-full airline idea? (3/23/2020)

“What Delta’s Big Bet on Blocking Middle Seats Means for Flying” (Wall Street Journal, 2/10/2021):

The last U.S. airline with this policy has lost fliers to carriers with looser rules—here’s why Delta is holding out for now

The grand experiment of blocking the middle seat on airplanes has proved what we have known all along about air travel: More people care about a cheap fare than comfort, or even pandemic safety.

The bottom line for Delta during the pandemic has been bigger losses than rival airlines selling all their seats. Delta was the most profitable U.S. airline in the final six months of 2019. That flipped during the pandemic. In the last six months of 2020, Delta had the biggest losses, with a net loss of more than $6 billion, greater than United and Southwest combined.

Even with state governors telling people that coronavirus was so dangerous that we should close schools and have children stay home to get fat and stupid, close society and have adults stay home to get fat, drunk, opioid-addicted, and stupid, and imprison/fine people for breaking a variety of rules that were apparently in conflict with the First Amendment right to assemble, consumers decided that coronavirus was not dangerous enough to be avoided by paying a little more for an airline ticket (and getting a much more luxurious experience as well).

One of the harbors in Hilton Head, South Carolina where you can keep the yacht that you buy after acting (after reversing the sign) on my advice:

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Revisiting my COVID-19 death estimate

by philg

In the comments to “Why do we care about COVID-19 deaths more than driving-related deaths?” (March 26, 2020), a reader asked a great question:

How good of an estimate today can you make of traffic-related deaths in the US in the next year? This estimate is quite uncertain given that miles driven will likely plummet and depend on the duration of various shutdowns. You can still probably guesstimate the total miles driven will be some fraction of the previous year and be within 0.25X to 4X. You won’t be wrong by 100X.

Now predict today the number of coronavirus deaths in the next year in the US. Your estimate could very easily be off by 100X or more.

This was just a few days after New York went into shutdown (March 22) and before the typical U.S. hospital had seen even one Covid-19 patient. Here was my prediction:

why can’t we extrapolate from Lombardy to get a reasonable estimate? Out of 10 million people, COVID-19 has killed 5,000 to date. Assume that becomes 10,000 by the end of the year. That’s 1 in 1,000 people. Applying that to the U.S. we get 330,000. Horrific, of course, but about the same as the driving deaths expected for next 10 years (which didn’t seriously concern the nation). I don’t think this can be off by 100X. 33 million is too much. 3300 is, sadly, likely to be exceeded (1,301 as of right now). Maybe we can do 4X better than Italy due to advances in knowledge and drug therapies that are available. That brings us down to 82,500 deaths, not too different from what the Imperial College folks are predicting per capita for the UK. We’re not as competent as other countries when it comes to health care, so estimate 150,000 COVID-caused deaths through February 2021? Let’s come back to this post on March 1, 2021 and see if the mortality was, in fact, within 0.25X to 4X of 150,000.

Our heroic anonymous reader gave me some wide error bars (0.25-4X), there, but not nearly as wide as what the IHME prophets gave themselves regarding Sweden (“They’re fairly confident that on May 23, Sweden will have between 11 deaths and… 2,789 deaths”).

So… my proposed method back in March was to extrapolate from Lombardy to the entire U.S., reduce for the worldwide effort to develop treatments and add back in for American incompetence at organizing health care. This boiled down to 45 percent of whatever the Lombardy death rate was. And then there was an additional guess that, as of March 26, Lombardy was halfway through its total COVID-19 deaths.

So… let’s put two questions to the readers.

How did my guess that Lombardy was halfway through its total COVID-19 suffering hold up? As of February 27, the Google said that 28,275 people in Lombardy had died with a COVID-19 tag (Italy had a big second wave of deaths tagged to COVID-19 starting in the fall of 2020). I’m having a bit of trouble finding the death rate through December 31, 2020 (maybe a reader can help out). My guess that 10,000 would be the death toll in Lombardy “by the end of the year [2020]” seems to have been a little over 0.5X of the actual.

How did my guess that the U.S. toll would be “45 percent of Lombardy” hold up? As of February 27, 2020, the Google said that 510,000 Americans had suffered “COVID-19 death” (keep in mind that, with a median age of 80-82 for “COVID-19 death”, we are saying that a 92-year-old with cancer, diabetes, and COPD “died of COVID-19” so long as a positive PCR test can be obtained).

Through February 27, 2020, Lombardy has had a COVID-tagged death rate of 0.28 percent (28,275 divided by 10 million). The U.S. has had a death rate of 0.155 percent (510,000 divided by 330 million, but perhaps the divisor should be 350 million?).

The guess was 45 percent and, as of February 27, the statistic was 55 percent (0.155 divided by 0.28).

What about the 150,000 number that I tossed out? That is 0.29X of the 510,000 number that we’re being fed. So, unlike our heroes at IMHE and other epidemiology institutions, the reality was within the error bars that I set up.

(One reason that my estimate came out on the low side, I think, is that I underestimated the extent to which Americans would want to wallow in coronasadness and maximize the count of very old, very frail people who purportedly died “of COVID-19”. This can be seen on Facebook as people claim that the impact of coronavirus has been worse than all of the wars that the U.S. has ever fought, except maybe the War of Northern Aggression. At least some subset of Americans wants to equate a healthy 18-year-old marching off and never returning with an 82-year-old who was expected to die within 1-2 years meeting his/her/zir/their final end within a few weeks of a positive PCR test. Admittedly this method of counting is not unique to the U.S. For example, the Swedes have a computer system automatically tag “COVID-19” to anyone who dies within 30 days of a positive test, even if the person dies in a traffic accident.)

From my Italy photos, a square in Burano, 1996:

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