Category: Coronapanic

Text message exchange with a couple of 24-year-olds:

• Me: We can come over now.
• Them: We are at the gym!
• Me: You’re always there. I am amazed you haven’t gotten coronaplague yet!
• Them: Hahaha I know! The gym we go to is super clean.

Surface contamination has been ruled out as a significant source of coronavirus infection, right? (see below, however, for how cleaning can cut flu risk by 2 percent) Everyone agrees that it is now mostly about aerosols and therefore a gym is a perfect environment for spreading, yes? (People breathing hard and relying on non-N95 masks and/or bandanas as PPE.)

Masks make people complacent and prone to ignoring instructions to keep a 6′ distance. I wonder if the sight of workers with spray bottles and paper towels has the same effect. These 24-year-olds feel that they are significantly less likely to get infected because they’ve seen every surface being wiped, despite the fact that wiped surfaces are irrelevant when faced with an aerosol enemy.

Related:

• “Transmission of Influenza A in a Student Office Based on Realistic Person-to-Person Contact and Surface Touch Behaviour” (2018): “Regular cleaning of high-touch surfaces, which can reduce the infection risk by 2.14%, is recommended and is much more efficient than hand-washing.”

… does this mean coronapanic is over? Some items that haven’t been seen for 8+ months were simultaneously in stock on December 2:

What happened?

What about my May 2020 dream Plague-proof Florida and Texas with shaded outdoor classrooms?

“Classrooms Without Walls, and Hopefully Covid” (NYT) says that it is vaguely alive, but the examples are mostly in the frozen north. The efforts at physical infrastructure have been feeble. And, instead of simply teaching the regular curriculum, the schools are trying to reinvent teaching at the same time as reinventing the teaching environment.

“Government Model Suggests U.S. COVID-19 Cases Could Be Approaching 100 Million” (NPR):

The actual number of coronavirus infections in the U.S. reached nearly 53 million at the end of September and could be approaching 100 million now, according to a model developed by government researchers.

Since [September], the CDC’s tally of confirmed infections has increased to 12.5 million. So if the model’s ratio still holds, the estimated total would now be greater than 95 million, leaving about 71% of the population uninfected.

The model, created by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, calculated that the true number of infections is about eight times the reported number, which includes only the cases confirmed by a laboratory test. … Some of these antibody studies have suggested that only about one in 10 coronavirus infections is reported.

Cases are currently “spiking” all over the U.S.:

We yearned for ventilators and, by the time they were available, realized that we didn’t need or want them (since they actually harm the typical COVID-19 patient). Currently we yearn for vaccines, but perhaps we won’t need or want them by the time they’re available in significant quantity. (Though perhaps a vaccine could be useful to boost the immunity of someone who’d had COVID-19 the natural way a year earlier.)

We’re more than a year into coronaplague. Saliva-based tests were developed back in the spring of 2020. At least here in Maskachusetts, children need COVID-19 tests before they can return to school following the sniffles and/or a trip to the cousins’ house (nearly every state in the U.S. is considered hazardous, even those with lower coronavirus infection rates than Massachusetts itself). Why isn’t is possible for children and adults to go to the local strip mall, spit, and have Kary Mullis‘s magic PCR machine give a thumbs up or thumbs down answer a few hours later?

(Is it the same answer as why we can’t buy Bounty or Formula 409? The U.S. managed to ramp up production of sophisticated aircraft during World War II (partial list). Why can’t we ramp up production of the tests that our governors and school bureaucrats are demanding? (separate issue as to whether there is any medical value to these tests! Last I checked with an MGH doctor, hospital care for COVID-19 patients still consisted primarily of “monitoring” and the care would be the same regardless of test result))

From the CVS MyChart site (November 26):

• there were five FDA-approved saliva-based tests as of mid-August
• BBC report on an Oxford study: “Most people are infectious only for about a week, but could test positive weeks afterwards.” (not great news for American enthusiasts of testing, since it now takes about a week of phoning/surfing to get a test and then another few days to get a result!)

South Dakota’s governor Kristi Noem is infamous for failing to #FollowScience and order her subjects to wear masks (though she might argue that she was merely following World Health Organization’s science from January-June 2020 (“don’t wear a mask”)). Her “government can’t protect you from a respiratory virus” attitude is shocking to those who have faith in technocratic “leadership.”

We stopped overnight in Rapid City in mid-November, en route to Bend, Oregon. Compared to Massachusetts or Oregon, it turns out that the observed mask rituals on the ground are not that different in practice. Oregon has huge signs, for example, ordering people to wear masks when on trails. Only about 30 percent of folks out walking obey the order. South Dakota has no order, but about 30 percent of folks choose to wear masks.

Just as residents of South Dakota are free to live unmasked, businesses in South Dakota are free to require masks. Our hotel, for example, required masks in the lobby. A lot of shops had “masks required” signs out front. In a bagel shop that had no signs regarding mask use, nearly all of the customers came in wearing masks and did not remove them until seated at a table.

Just as in Maskachusetts, folks would rather use their limited budget for human interaction on adults in restaurants rather than children in schools. The Rapid City schools, for example, are on a “hybrid” schedule currently. (Contrast to Ireland, where everything is closed except schools!)

A few snapshots. Note that our Maximum Macho president Jimmy Carter is parked right in front of a bridal boutique. (Downtown Rapid City has statues of all of the legitimate presidents (i.e., everyone except Donald Trump).)