Category: Coronapanic

Lockdown is our Vietnam War so it will end gradually?

by philg

A Facebook user posted “Canadian expert’s research finds lockdown harms are 10 times greater than benefits” (Toronto Sun) regarding an academic paper by Dr. Ari Joffe, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at University of Alberta (i.e., a colleague of Dr. Jill Biden, MD).

I’m not that interested in the paper because, even in March I expected that the shutdowns would kill far more people than they might save, What was interesting to me was the gloss added by the Facebooker:

Of course, we can’t actually do this reassessment because doing so would admit that the last year was madness. The lockdowns are like Vietnam, the political and media establishment have so much invested in them, only a gradual drawdown will be permitted, regardless of the “science.”

Readers: What do you think of this analogy? We decided that the Vietnam War was unwinnable in 1968, but we didn’t get out until 1975 (timeline).

MLK Memorial:

MLK’s thoughts from 1967:

I oppose the war in Viet Nam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. There can be no great disappointment where there is no great love … Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks. As they spread the propaganda of war we must spread the propaganda of peace.

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Department of Homeland Security is reading academic papers

by philg

A medical school professor friend was denied Global Entry at Logan Airport when returning to Boston from a Christmas holiday in his native European homeland (remember to listen to public health advice from the MD/PhDs regarding the covid-spreading potential of travel; don’t follow their examples!). His luggage was taken apart piece by piece, scrutinized, and repeatedly X-rayed. He presumed that the unprecedented (for him) examination was due to all of the European food that he’d packed. The agents explained, however, that he and another passenger on the same flight had been flagged due to having published journal papers on the subject of COVID-19. Someone at DHS had read these and flagged the two academics as potential carriers of forbidden “human biological samples” (Customs and Border Protection page).

My literary foray into the area of what the government might be monitoring (a few commenters seemed to think that I was serious):

We still have some of the brisket in the freezer…

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Sell COVID-brand cigarettes?

by philg

“Smokers in N.J. Are Eligible for Vaccine. No Proof Needed.” (New York Times):

Faced with soaring rates of coronavirus infection and more doses of vaccine in freezers than in arms, New Jersey officials made a calculated choice.

They opened the floodgates of vaccine eligibility on Thursday to about 4.5 million additional residents: those 65 and older and younger people with underlying health problems, including cancer, heart conditions and diabetes — diseases that can lead to severe complications from Covid-19.

As part of the expansion, New Jersey also became only the second state in the country to open vaccinations to another high-risk group — smokers. As is true for all Covid-19 vaccinations in New Jersey, no documentation of an underlying health condition is required.

Could we make a few $$ by selling COVID-brand cigarettes to folks in New Jersey who want to buy their first pack ever and check the “smoker” box when getting a vaccine?

Readers: What should the package look like? A picture of Dr. Fauci on the front and Dr. Jill Biden, MD on the back?

From a state fair in New Jersey, 1995:

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Why didn’t coronapanic and shutdown push virtual reality over the hump?

by philg

In Virtual reality and augmented reality: the technologies of the future (March 2019) I asked

Is it fair to say that “VR/AR is the technology of the future, and always will be”?

The future arrived in March 2020, with governments around the world making it illegal to interact face to face, illegal to travel, etc. If VR were ever going to catch on, shouldn’t coronapanic and associated lockdowns have been the catalyst?

If there were complete VR experiences at most of the world’s art museums, I would buy a VR headset right now, but museum web sites don’t seem to offer more than conventional image galleries. Maybe there are a handful of museum experiences available, but certainly it is not like the freedom that we had in the physical world when the physical world (beyond South Dakota and Sweden) included freedom.

VR could also be great for mass (virtual) gatherings. Wander around in VR and form small conversation groups (but maybe this wouldn’t be as good as Zoom because you’d have to interact with avatars unless you wanted to see pictures of people with VR goggles attached to their heads.

Who has tried the Oculus Quest 2? One of my cousins loves this, but maybe that is because he has been locked into his house with wife and two (mostly grown) children (i.e., perhaps coronapanic did push him into the VR fold). No cumbersome cables (and therefore limited to two hours of battery-based usage). No need to configure a PC. No privacy issues because it is tied to Facebook, which already knows everything about you.

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Our hero’s hospital is full (but not with patients who should be there)

by philg

From May 2020, A typical American hospital during coronapanic:

The author of Medical School 2020 gave me an update on his training hospital. They have roughly 1,100 beds. They have admitted 24 Covid-19 patients since the plague began. There are currently 7 Covid-19 patients in the hospital. Residents have been working week-on/week-off due to the shortage of cases from which they might learn. “We’re allowed to do elective surgeries as of this week,” he said, “and I thought there would be a huge backlog, but there isn’t. We’re still not busy.”

How about now? “Every bed is full. The ICU is full. The ED has 55 patients waiting for rooms [in the rest of the hospital].” Is COVID-19 that prevalent? “No,” he responded, “but we have to test every patient before discharge even if we have no reason to suspect Covid. If someone tests positive, he or she can’t go back to the nursing home for three weeks. People who would have been in the hospital for 4 days in 2019 are staying 6 weeks. We will have to shut down elective surgeries soon if we can’t do better at placing discharged patients.”

What about the COVID-19 patients per se? “Most of them are on 1 liter of oxygen [per minute], which is nothing,” he said. “They might not notice if it were stopped. People can be at home on 5 liters.” In his opinion, the ones who were on ventilators had to be in the hospital because they needed to be managed by nurses, but none of the other Covid-19 or Covid-19-positive patients had any medical need to be in the hospital. They were there because no infrastructure had been built to accommodate patients who didn’t need to be in the hospital, but who could be sent back into nursing homes for fear that they would infect others (enter the hero Governor Cuomo!).

Essentially, the hospital is packed because, even with nearly a year to prepare, state and local health departments that regulate hospitals and track hospital capacity couldn’t get organized to turn empty hotels into Covid-19 halfway houses.

Department of Nobody Listens to Me… from April 2, 2020… If we could build renal dialysis capacity, why not COVID-19 treatment centers?: treat COVID-19 patients in strip malls.

Update: A medical school professor who read the above… “It’s all true. But one big additional reason is that discharging all those patients would be a loss of $$$$$.” (I’m disappointed in myself for not immediately realizing that a 100-percent full hospital, and a ready excuse in the form of hysterical headlines for why it is 100-percent full, is not the end of the world from the hospital CEO’s perspective.)

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Competitive white suburban parents quite happy about school shutdown

by philg

One of the scarcest commodities during coronaplague is honesty. Rich white Americans love to say that they are advocating the lockdown of poor Black Americans and the closure of schools for Black children for the benefit of poor Black Americans.

One of our Boston-area Deplorables refuses to be cast into this mold. He says that he is happy that Shutdown Karens are denying an education to children of color throughout the U.S. and also denying urban children the opportunity to train athletically. His primary goal right now is getting his white children, currently in high school, into elite universities (both parents are Ivy League grads), and where the New York Times sees deprivation (caused by the policies for which the New York Times has advocated) he sees reduced competition. Unlike their urban counterparts, his children have not had any interruption or slowdown in their learning . His children have not had any interruption in their elite athletic training (since dad was an elite college athlete and can train them himself whenever organized sports are canceled; plenty of space in their massive suburban house with fully equipped gym and multi-acre yard).

(In fairness to this Deplorable, he was not himself in favor of shutting down any schools. But now that the say-gooders have crippled millions of his children’s competitors, he is not shedding crocodile tears.)

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Norway tests the novel mRNA vaccines on the old/sick

by philg

Readers may recall If COVID-19 vaccines weren’t tested on likely COVID-19 victims, how do we know that they will reduce COVID-19 deaths? (December 27, 2020) in which I pointed out that the vaccines weren’t tested on the old/sick people whom COVID-19 has been primarily killing.

This just in… “Deaths spur Norway concern at Covid vaccine safety for vulnerable elderly” (Bloomberg via Irish Times):

Norway has expressed increasing concern about the safety of the Pfizer Inc vaccine for elderly people with serious underlying health conditions after raising their estimate of the number who died after receiving inoculations to 29.

“There are 13 deaths that have been assessed, and we are aware of another 16 deaths that are currently being assessed,” the agency said. All the reported deaths related to “elderly people with serious basic disorders”, it said. “Most people have experienced the expected side-effects of the vaccine, such as nausea and vomiting, fever, local reactions at the injection site, and worsening of their underlying condition.”

The findings have prompted Norway to suggest that Covid-19 vaccines may be too risky for the very old and terminally ill – the most cautious statement yet from a European health authority.

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health judges that “for those with the most severe frailty, even relatively mild vaccine side-effects can have serious consequences. For those who have a very short remaining life span anyway, the benefit of the vaccine may be marginal or irrelevant.”

(These folks could never get jobs working for Medicare or any enterprise that bills Medicare!)

On the other hand…

“The Norwegian Medicines Agency has communicated, prior to the vaccination, that when vaccinating the oldest and sickest, it is expected that deaths will occur in a time-related context with vaccination. This does not mean that there is a causal link between vaccination and death,” it added.

On the third hand….

“We have also, in connection with the reported deaths, conveyed that it is possible that common and known side effects of the vaccines may have been a contributing factor to a serious course or fatal outcome,” the agency said.

Vaguely related, my visit to Norway…

Let’s see if anyone can guess which part of Norway based on the photos below:

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Human RFID chips for coronaplague contact tracing can also sense temperature

by philg

Readers may recall that I’ve been talking about fighting COVID via dog-style RFID chips in the necks of American humans (see RFID chips in the necks of college students for example and #Science proves that I was right (about the need for RFID chips in humans for COVID-19 surveillance) )

A friend who is expecting to adopt a puppy told me about a recent advance in the RFID chip world: Merck’s Home Again TempScan ($12 or $40 installed; the reader is $67) and competitors.

This would be perfect for a cower-in-place population that has happily surrendered its freedoms for what it hopes will be a slightly lower and/or slower COVID-19 death rate! Inexpensive sensors all over our built infrastructure can not only monitor who is getting near whom, but also whether anyone has a fever!

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The more that you sacrifice in the COVID-19 fight, the more you believe the fight was worthwhile?

by philg

Part of a holiday letter from a friend in the UK:

The British are, on the whole, law abiding. The stringent measures [against COVID-19] have worked quite well, and it reminds me of what the British historian A.J. P. Taylor said about British discipline. It is a little-known fact that during the war Britain evolved, voluntarily, a far more comprehensive state-directed society than was the case in Hitler’s Germany, or anywhere else for that matter.

The old Romans chose a dictator for a limited time when the country faced a crisis. The British chose Churchill. The dictator was given unlimited powers but could at any time be deposed by Parliament. Every aspect of life was state-directed: manpower, the economy, use of housing, agriculture, industry, compulsory female conscription, public health services, welfare – everything, everything within the life of the community. Even my mother, a concert pianist, had to join the WAAF – Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. And all the nation’s town-dwelling children sent off to the country.

No country in the industrialised world had ever seen the likes of this total war mobilisation. Hitler quite simply could not risk imposing such restrictions on the German people, the restrictions, duties and self-denials which the British willingly accepted. When peace came this entire state-run apparatus was dismantled and the so-called full mobilisation left no lasting impression on society.

I am not sure we have all been dutiful and self-denying, but the results are there.

She has given up much of what formerly gave her life value and meaning. We’d met on a Northwest Passage cruise in 2019, for example. and she is a champion skier within her age group. She never married, has no children, and lives alone; quarantine/lockdown means solitary confinement. What is it that convinces her that the sacrifice was effective? It can’t be the numbers. The UK is near the top of countries ranked by COVID-19-tagged deaths (though masked-and-shut-for-10-months Massachusetts has a yet higher death rate).

Could it be the sacrifice itself that makes her think that the sacrifice was worthwhile?

From 2007:

and Oliver Cromwell, who never met an epidemiologist: “A few honest men are better than numbers”. But maybe he predicted American politics: “No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.”

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Governor Cuomo runs out of Grey Poupon at his mansion

by philg

After a year of shutdown, the costs of coronapanic finally seem significant to a mansion-dweller:

How to explain this apparent 180-degree turn? He ran out of Grey Poupon at his mansion?

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