Category: Coronapanic

Should we invest in internment camps for New Yorkers and those who quote Hitler?

by philg

Assembly Bill A416 was recently introduced in the lower house of New York State’s legislature. The bill lets the governor remove and detain any “suspected case, contact, or carrier of a contagious disease”. This can be used any time “the governor declares a state of health emergency due to an epidemic of any communicable disease.” (so it would work for flu season or systemic racism? (racism is contagious according to the United Nations))

As written, I think the law would allow the state government to round up anyone who’d been at a 50-person party if 1 out of those 50 tested positive (with a PCR machine cranked up to the max?) for COVID-19. Masks or no masks, they’ve now become “suspected cases”.

How about an unmasked individual caught on camera walking through Times Square? Based on a scientific consensus around masks, it would make sense to regard the unmasked person, after walking through a crowd of hundreds, as a “suspected case”.

How about an unvaccinated person who leaves the house and enters a grocery store? He/she/ze/they is at risk and therefore can be detained as a “suspected case.”

A similar bill was presciently introduced in 2015, 2017, and 2019. Maybe it has a good chance of passing this year, though, now that COVID-19 has changed folks’ minds regarding the proper limits of government. Would it make sense to think, from the safety of a free state, about investing in the construction of internment camps that can be leased to New York State? The bill says “such person or group of persons shall be detained in a medical facility or other appropriate facility or premises designated by the governor…” But if there is a real epidemic going on, the medical facilities will be at least reasonably full.

Separately, will there be demand for interning anyone who quotes Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump (now unpersoned by Facebook and Twitter? Where will people find the archives to know what hate looks like?)? For example, “Congresswoman Apologizes for Making an Approving Reference to Hitler” (NYT):

Representative Mary Miller, an Illinois Republican, had faced condemnation and calls to resign for declaring at a rally: “Hitler was right on one thing: He said, ‘Whoever has the youth, has the future.’”

“Each generation has the responsibility to teach and train the next generation,” Ms. Miller said at the rally. “You know, if we win a few elections, we’re still going to be losing, unless we win the hearts and minds of our children. This is the battle. Hitler was right on one thing: He said, ‘Whoever has the youth, has the future.’ Our children are being propagandized.”

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was among the groups that had roundly criticized Ms. Miller’s remarks. The museum said it “unequivocally condemns any leader trying to advance a position by claiming Adolf Hitler was ‘right.’”

“Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and their collaborators murdered almost every member of my family, destroyed my entire community, and ended a centuries-old culture,” Irene Weiss, an Auschwitz survivor, said in a statement released by the museum. “I implore our leaders and all Americans not to misuse this history — my history.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, called Ms. Miller’s remarks “unfathomable and disgusting,” and urged her to visit the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center “to learn just how wrong Hitler was.”

Several Illinois Democrats went further and demanded that Ms. Miller resign. They included Senator Tammy Duckworth, Representative Jan Schakowsky and Representative Marie Newman.

Why condemn when we can intern and reeducate?

Hitler, of course, has been proved completely wrong, and definitely not right about anything ever in his life, by COVID-19. Why does Dr. Fauci have such a tough time persuading Trump voters to wear masks?

“It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge.”

If you want to shut down schools for years, would it be helpful to convince people that healthy children face a substantial risk from COVID-19?

“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”

“What luck for rulers that men do not think.”

(but, of course, those who identify as “women” do think!)

If you want to do a one-year shutdown and outdoor mask order, does it make sense to start with a one-month shutdown and indoor mask suggestion?

“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.”

Use a traditional vaccine or stick people with mRNA so that their bodies actually produce what would have been in the vaccine?

“As in everything, nature is the best instructor.”

Should healthy 20-year-olds be required to get vaccinated?

“Society’s needs come before the individuals needs”

If you’re issuing executive orders, does it make sense to call anyone who questions one “anti-science”?

“The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.”

Are exploitation of Blacks and inequality problems important enough to worry about even as the COVID-19-tagged bodies stack up?

“I don’t see much future for the Americans … it’s a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities … How can one expect a State like that to hold together?”

Could Trump have won in 2020 if he’d donned a Speedo for a dip in the Atlantic opposite Mar-a-Lago?

“No politician should ever let himself be photographed in a bathing suit.”

Is the Oval Office the World Center of Peace and Harmony?

The American president increasingly used his influence to create conflicts, intensify existing conflicts, and, above all, to keep conflicts from being resolved peacefully.

On first-time office holders…

“There is a better chance of seeing a camel pass through the eye of a needle than of seeing a really great man ‘discovered’ through an election.”

On estate tax avoidance:

“The amount of money that is in your bank at the time of your death is the extra work you did which wasn’t necessary”

Bad advice if you love having friends over ..

“don’t let what other people think, stop you from doing the things you love”

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View from Holland: The core innovation of lockdown

by philg

From a Dutch university professor: “The Nazis got tired of digging graves for people they’d shot, so they figured out that they should make them dig their own graves first. It’s the same strategy governments have pursued with lockdown. Make people work to pay for their own cells. It’s not Arbeit macht frei, but Lockdown macht frei.” From my 1999 trip to Dachau:

IMG0044.PCD

Governors and public health officials in the U.S. work together in the same ways as the medieval prince and priest: “You keep them stupid and I’ll keep them poor.”

Aside from politicians and the billionaires, who has done well in West’s Year of Lockdown? “It’s been a Godsend to the sad and lonely. The West has been the center of family disintegration and there are more people living alone than at any other time or place in history. The sad and lonely are not any better off, but everyone else has been dragged down to their level.” [Divorce lawsuits are more lucrative in the U.S. than in Europe and, perhaps not coincidentally, the U.S. is statistically more disintegrated than any of the European countries.]

How about the college students? Are they rioting? “They’re used to having a world imposed on them by Baby Boomers, so it doesn’t occur to them that they can object. They’re having parties in basements and trying not to get caught.”

Unlike Maskachusetts, the Netherlands allows residents to roam outdoors without masks. My friend goes to a private riding club in which the government cannot require masks. “If it were a public for-profit club, they would be subject to the mask law,” he said. Executives generally cannot issue orders that eliminate citizens’ rights, but the parliament can meet expeditiously and change the law, which it has done.

What has muscular government action in the Netherlands accomplished? A similar-shaped profile to masked-and-shut UK or US and also similar to unmasked and un-shut Sweden:

“About half of the older people still believe that masks and lockdown can save us,” he said, “but the other half are disillusioned by the continued epidemic.”

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Why aren’t Arizona and California vaccinating people at midnight?

by philg

The CDC map currently shows Arizona and California right at the top of the current plague level chart:

Former media whipping state South Dakota (unmasked and un-shut, with a heretical governor who says that government cannot stop a respiratory virus) is way down the list at 48 daily infections per 100,000 people, half the AZ/CA level. Yet South Dakota is #1 in “Percentage of distributed vaccines that have been administered” at 69% (Becker’s Hospital Review). Arizona is #49, behind only Georgia, at 18%. California at #47 with less than 24% administered.

California and Arizona would seemingly have more motivation than almost all of the other states to move vaccines out of warehouses and into bodies. Why wouldn’t they be doing clinics at midnight if that’s what it takes to use up the vaccine as soon as it arrives? Shouldn’t we see dramatic TV footage of coffee-and-donut-fueled late night shot clinics in hospitals, nursing homes, etc.?

(It does not seem to be the case that California and Arizona received extra vaccine. They’re also near the bottom of states ranked by percentage of population that has been vaccinated. 1.3 percent for California and 1.2 percent for Arizona (NYT))

Admittedly it is tougher to get organized to administer shots when the same personnel are needed to give COVID-19 tests, etc., but New Jersey and Rhode Island are near the top of the infection chart and are managing to administer vaccine shots at the same time. And Israel, which has its own raging plague, has managed to vaccinate over 18 percent of its population so far over roughly the same time period.

Related:

  • TIME vaccine page
  • percent population vaccinated by country (U.S. is #5 at 1.8 percent; the infrastructure and manufacturing champs in China on whom I would have bet are at just 0.31 percent)
  • “Why 300 Doses of Vaccine Sat Unused in Freezers for 2 Weeks” (NYT): Dr. Peter Meacher expected to receive just a small supply of Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine to inoculate his staff at a network of clinics that he oversees in New York City. Instead, 600 doses arrived late last month, far more than he needed. … Dr. Meacher said he would like to give the extra vaccine to high-risk patients, but had not for fear of violating strict eligibility rules from the state and city about who can receive it. … “It’s stressful and frustrating to have vaccine and to be unable to start giving it to our patients as quickly as we would like,” said Dr. Meacher, chief medical officer for the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center in Manhattan, which serves some 18,000 L.G.B.T.Q. New Yorkers.
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Is it ethical for a physician to vaccinate a healthy 20-year-old against COVID-19?

by philg

Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath, in which they promise, depending on the version, to “do no harm”, do what will benefit their patients, and avoid “overtreatment.”

Suppose that a healthy slender 20-year-old calls up to a doctor’s office and says “By governor’s order, I am not allowed to leave my house unless you stick me with a COVID-19 vaccine.” Is it ethical for the doc to vaccinate him/her/zir/them?

A healthy slender 20-year-old is more likely to be killed in a car accident driving to/from the doctor’s office than he/she/ze/they is to be killed by COVID-19. Can the doctor ethically and consistently with the Hippocratic Oath intervene in this person’s body? Even if we had years of data proving these brand-new vaccines safe, they are unnecessary for a 20-year-old with no health conditions that would render him/her/zir/them vulnerable to COVID-19. A doctor isn’t supposed to do unnecessary things to patients.

How about the argument that sticking Patient A with a vaccine with help Patients B, C, D, and E? That’s a fine public health argument, and maybe a technician working for the state could do it, but it doesn’t seem consistent with the physician’s oath.

I asked a medical school professor friend for his thoughts on this. He couldn’t think of any other situation in which doctors apply procedures to patients for whom there is no medical benefit with the justification that others will benefit. He did not believe that vaccinating the young/healthy against COVID-19 was consistent with the Hippocratic Oath.

Readers: Are we breaking new ethical ground here? Is there an ethical problem? (If the answer is that there isn’t an ethical problem, can we start harvesting organs out of young people in order to keep old people alive? Common sense organ control tells us that young people don’t need two kidneys and a full-size liver, right?)

Ethical question #2: Is it ethical to throw out vaccine doses because you’re too lazy to post on Facebook or Twitter or call a few friends? From “CEO of Health Center Explains Why COVID Vaccine Doses Had to Be Thrown Out” (NBC Boston):

The CEO of the Brockton [Maskachusetts] Neighborhood Health Center says doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were thrown away on Christmas Eve while they were vaccinating health care workers, due to some of those workers not showing up for their inoculations.

“Since the vial is only good for six hours after we start using it, there was no way we could put it in your fridge like we do the other vaccines and just use it in the morning,” Joss said. “There was just no way to salvage the remaining doses.”

“For our staff, that vaccine is just like gold. They’re protecting it like nothing else,” said Joss. “And yet, I think, at the same time, just by the fragility of the vaccine, I think it’s probably, it’s probably going to happen here and there.”

It’s like gold, but sometimes we need to throw gold away because it is too tough to find additional humans in thinly settled eastern Maskachusetts (Brockton itself has a population of roughly 100,000 and a continuously raging coronaplague among its low-skill immigrants). (Of course, in New York “providers who knowingly administer the vaccine to individuals outside of the state’s prioritization protocols may face penalties up to $1 million, as well as revocation of all state licenses” by governor’s order, but our governor hasn’t issued any new orders since #59 on December 22 (the “emergency” declared nearly a year ago continues, but we’ve had no new orders for two weeks).)

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Travel to get an adenovirus-based COVID-19 vaccine?

by philg

One of my instrument flying students recently traveled back to his native Russia and got the Sputnik V vaccine (his wife had it too and the result was two days of fever for her, no significant negative effect for him). Although the U.S.-approved Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are supposedly quite effective, they’re also brand new technology that has never previously been tried in humans (see, from 2018 Nature, “mRNA vaccines — a new era in vaccinology”).

What about the idea of traveling to a country where a vaccine based on more conventional adenovirus technology is available? In addition to the Russian vaccine, the Oxford/AstraZeneca product meets this definition (explanation of function in NYT).

Why not take a trip to a Mexican beach resort, for example, and pay a private clinic for a dose of the AstraZeneca product? (produced and/or packaged in Mexico) Then go back a month or two later for some more poolside margaritas, a stop at a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the second dose?

(Why not get one of these vaccines here in the U.S.? The FDA might not approve it before 100 percent of Americans are infected (roughly half are already if we use the 8X multiplier that the CDC suggests). Even if the FDA does approve it, the centrally planned distribution strategy might make a adenovirus-based vaccine impossible to obtain as a practical matter.)

Readers: Which would you rather have? A leading-edge mRNA vaccine or a slightly-more-conventional adenovirus vaccine? (or no vaccine at all?)

[A medical school professor friend: “The adenovirus vaccine is more likely to have a known side effect than the mRNA vaccine. The mRNA is much more likely to have an unknown side effect.” Why did he prefer? “I don’t want to feel bad for a day or two and the probability of a significant negative effect from the mRNA vaccine is small, so I’d rather have the mRNA vaccine. In reality, it doesn’t matter because so many Americans will have been immunized by a COVID infection by the time I get my vaccine that my actual protection will come from herd immunity.” He does work in a hospital, but seldom sees patients and therefore is not likely to get a vaccine before March.]

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We ran but could not hide: more than half of Americans have now had COVID-19

by philg

The CDC says that multiplying the laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 “cases” by approximately 8 is the best estimate of the actual number of Americans who’ve been infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus (i.e., “had Covid,” though if there were no symptoms, this is not the medically accurate term). See “Government Model Suggests U.S. COVID-19 Cases Could Be Approaching 100 Million” (NPR) and the academic journal paper on which it reports, “Estimated incidence of COVID-19 illness and hospitalization — United States, February–September, 2020”.

As of today, the CDC says that the U.S. has had 20,732,404 “cases” of COVID-19. Multiplying by 8, that’s 165,859,232 (important to have 9 digits of precision when guessing wildly for #Science). The Census Bureau’s pop clock says that the U.S. has 330.8 million residents (though Yale says that the error bars on undocumented migrants are in the millions).

I’m not sure that we’ll ever get a better estimate so it is reasonable, in my view, to say that today was the day when the majority of Americans had been infected, at least to some extent, by the virus we call “COVID-19.”

Related:

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CVS, the Pfizer vaccine, and a retirement home

by philg

From my moles in the retirement-industrial complex (a.k.a. “Mom and Dad”)… Two CVS technicians showed up to their “independent living” retirement apartment building in Bethesda, Maryland yesterday with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. They started at 9:00 am. Each of the 250 residents came downstairs and proceeded through a waiting room, then to get stuck, then to a rest area with juice and cupcakes (because it is like giving blood?) for 15 minutes. CVS packed up and left at 1:00 pm (31 shots per hour per technician).

Mom and Dad report no side effects of any kind, not even soreness at the injection site.

There does not seem to be any effort made to track who is vaccinated. Maybe that’s impossible in a country without a national ID card system, as is conventional in Europe and Asia. My parents were supplied with paper cards inscribed with pencil and instructed to bring the cards back for the second shot (my Dad already lost his or maybe was never given one). (I am inferring that if there were some sort of tracking database that my parents wouldn’t have to bring the physical card to the second shot appointment.)

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Sweden will have a lower death rate in 2020 than it had in 2010

by philg

This Statista bar chart has been suggesting for months that the all-cause death rate in Sweden for 2020, a year in which the country gave the finger to the deadliest virus within the memory of Humankind, will be lower than the death rate in 2010, an unremarkable year from a disease point of view.

90,487 residents of Sweden died in 2010, when the population was 9.34 million (Google). The population today is 10.4 million (Statistics Sweden, a government agency).

The 2010 death rate applied to the 2020 population would be consistent with approximately 100,750 deaths.

The Statistics Sweden folks make fine-grained death data available for download. The latest iteration, released today, shows 95,022 deaths for all of 2020. However, it seems that the data are incomplete starting on December 21. If we normalize Dec 21-31 with averages from 2015-2019, we would expect Sweden to experience an additional 1,846 deaths in 2020, for a total of 96,868 (i.e., well below the 100,750 who would have died if the 2010 death rate occurred).

[Update: The January 18, 2021 version of the spreadsheet shows 97,941 deaths for all of 2020. More than the above guess, but still occurring at a lower rate than in 2010. It seems that the 2022 versions of the big official spreadsheet describe 98,124 deaths (sum Column G in Table 1), which is still a lower number than the 2010 death rate applied to the 2020 Swedish population size (as noted above, the result would have been 100,750.).]

It will be worth checking back in a couple of weeks for the near-final 2020 number. (The Swedes will publish their final number for 2020 on February 22, 2021, seven weeks after the end of 2020. Their U.S. counterparts at the CDC, published their final numbers for 2018 in January 2020, 13 months after the end of 2018.)

Summary: the Swedes sent their unmasked children to school, sent their unmasked selves to work, sent their unmasked selves to the gym and social events, and generally went right into November before losing their nerve (adopting masks on public transport and cutting “public events” (not private house parties) back to 8 people max). They’ve emerged from what in most countries was the Year of Coronapanic with their psyches, civil liberties (freedom to gather, freedom to travel), education, and work skills intact. They’ve suffered more deaths than in some previous years (but maybe partly this was due to having fewer-than-expected deaths in the most recent years), but have had a lower death rate than they had in 2010 and they’re not even on the first page of countries ranked by COVID-19-tagged death rate.

(What does a moderately northern place with a big city look like when the Church of Shutdown is worshipped and the Ritual of the Mask is observed? The Maskachusetts COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 people is 182 (CDC). Sweden’s rate is 86.)

Separately, for those who are interested in questions of government efficiency, particularly in a declared time of crisis/emergency .. I sent a question to the Statistics Sweden public email address using the World’s Greatest Language (i.e., not Swedish). It was the middle of the night there. I received an English-language answer at 9:47 am Swedish time the next day, also in the world’s greatest language. The answer, from Tova Holm, addressed the apparent discrepancy between the Statista numbers and the spreadsheet numbers (Statista’s chart was correct, but based on an earlier version of the spreadsheet), pointed me to specific sheets within the Excel file, etc.

Readers: If you emailed a U.S. government agency with a random question, how long would you expect to wait before receiving an answer? (Probably not worth asking what would happen if we turned the languages around and queried the U.S. government in Swedish!)

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COVID-19 testing is required in Maskachusetts, but unavailable

by philg

We have been barraged by emails from our kids’ schools during the Christmas vacation week. If we traveled, the public school administrators want to know where and when and they want to see medical records of a PCR test (required under the governors’ travel orders, though at this point most other U.S. states have a lower rate of COVID-19 cases within 7 days compared to MA). Example:

We will be strictly enforcing the Governor’s Travel Orders and sending students home when we learn about travel and have not received notification and verification of required test results.

The school actually requires additional testing and quarantine days (14) beyond the referenced travel order, which requires 10-day quarantines and testing for those 10 and older:

Children who are 10 years or younger are not required to have a test. However, without a test, they must quarantine before returning to school. So, families will need to choose to either have their children tested and provide the result of the test to the school nurse so that they can return to school immediately if the results are negative or they will need to keep their child home in quarantine for 14 days if a negative test is not provided.

(i.e., if children can keep quiet about that trip to Disney World, they can continue to receive an education!)

The kicker to all of this is that COVID-19 tests aren’t available, except to the mostly-imprisoned college students who don’t need them (they get tested twice/week). Here’s one self-pay $80/test service (recommended by a private school administrator) that you might think would have slots because they don’t take insurance and don’t provide the taxpayer-funded testing that was supposed to be Americans’ right:

As of Sunday morning, it would be possible to get a test on Friday evening in the Cambridge location:

So the result would come back on Monday? That’s 8 days later and the governor’s travel order requires a 10-day quarantine. So the effort and $$ for the test shortens the quarantine period by only 1-2 days.

Separately, one thing that is great about Americans is that we won’t give up our passion for bureaucracy and paperwork even after we declare an “emergency”. For example, although a non-physician (the governor) orders subjects to get tested after travel, a subject can’t actually be tested without paying a physician in addition to paying the lab. From the CIC Health site, regarding pricing for organizations:

To cover the physician who provides the legally-required referral, the clinician to oversee the test, the software for ordering and reviewing results, and logistics support. This fee ranges considerably based on the components required, and range from $5-$35.

As there is no medical treatment for COVID-19 (remdesivir is approved by the FDA, but considered useless by the WHO) and the vast majority of folks who test positive for COVID-19 have no symptoms and the person getting the test probably isn’t sick to begin with, what is the point of paying a physician?

Finally, let me note that rich white people seem to be ignoring the travel order. Friends with vacation houses in other states go to and from freely. A friend recently met up with us for a dog walk in the woods. He talked about having just returned from a ski trip to another state. I asked “Unless you were skiing in Hawaii, didn’t you have to get a Covid test to comply with the governor’s travel orders?” He responded that he hadn’t bothered and wasn’t going to bother. What’s his day job? Physician.

Related:

  • Turboprop coast to coast to coast with youngsters (we managed to get a test, but in Kentucky where they’re apparently better organized)
  • beacontesting.com, a massive project; on January 3, the site showed “no upcoming times are currently available” at any of the Boston-area locations, but a 2.5-hour round-trip drive to New Bedford, MA would have enabled a test on January 4

Update: Patrick, below, asked whether the situation was better in Western, Maskachusetts, e.g., Pittsfield. The answer seems to be “no”. As of January 3 at 2 pm:

Update from a friend who is considering a brief trip from his all-white COVID-free exurb of COVID-plagued Boston (he’s locked down in a 12,000 square foot house on 10 acres) to rural Maine:

I see. So if I leave MA, go to Maine, and come back – I must quarantine for 10 days. But if I go to Boston and back, I don’t need to. Got it.

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People who don’t believe in evolution are idiots, but the coronavirus cannot evolve

by philg

One evergreen fun activity for American Democrats is saying that Republicans are idiots because they purportedly don’t believe in the theory of evolution. (As Democrats generally live in cities that are devoid of Republicans, it is unclear how Democrats would know what Republicans actually do and don’t believe.)

The same folks are also saying that forcing every American to be injected with a COVID-19 vaccine will end the frightening coronaplague that has lead to coronapanic and shutdown.

Are these points of view consistent?

Why can’t the coronavirus evolve its way around the vaccine, in the same way that influenza evolves to defy our vaccination attempts? And why can’t it evolve to spread even among a mostly masked-and-cowering-Clorox-armed population?

In the early months of coronascience, we were told that the virus was mutating more gradually than influenza. And presumably the most successful mutations will be less deadly (killing one’s host is a suboptimal strategy for a virus).

(Why does this matter? Shutdowns, mask wars, school closures, etc. make sense only if you think coronavirus is a temporary one-and-done phenomenon. If coronavirus will be an influenza-style permanent companion to the 8 billion humans on Planet Earth then it doesn’t make sense to do anything now that we aren’t willing and able to do for the next 50 years.)

Should we schedule a reminder to look at this in February 2022? What’s a threshold of cases and/or COVID-19-tagged deaths that we should use from, say, September 2022-February 2022 in the U.S. to declare vaccine victory or vaccine disappointment?

Update: A Facebook friend updated his profile picture to say “When It’s My Turn, I’m Getting Vaccinated! Goodbye COVID”:

In other words, he’s denying the possibility of the virus evolving its way around the vaccine, as well as assuming that the vaccine prevents transmission (as yet unknown) and that the vaccine will prevent deaths among the old/sick (also as yet unknown because never tested). His tagline is “Yes: Facts,Equality,Justice,Freedom, Intelligence,Confidence. No: Ignorance,Intolerance,Corruption.” so presumably this is an “intelligent” perspective. (My Facebook tagline: “I like to do everything in the dumbest way imaginable.”)

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