Category: Coronapanic

States ranked by coronashutdown level

by philg

Where can Americans find what had been regarded as their traditional liberties? Never-shut, never-masked Sweden, of course, but somehow it is tough to imagine them welcoming 330 million undocumented migrants.

Wallethub has put together a ranking of states by how aggressive their governors have been in restricting residents’ activities. Maskachusetts, with more than 50 governor’s orders so far, is 49/51 in freedom. Only California and Hawaii rank lower. Where can Americans enjoy what had been their Constitutional rights?

Intersecting the above with states that have no state personal income tax… the standouts are South Dakota, Wyoming, Florida, and Alaska.

A few photos from a late September excursion to Pittsfield, MA… The state government effectively closed the Appalachian Trail. People who had spent years preparing to be alone in the woods for months were thus prohibited from spreading coronaplague to squirrels and chipmunks.

At the mostly-empty Hilton Garden Inn:

Just going to have water?

At a closer-to-Boston state park. When handwashing and superior hygiene in general are the keys to controlling a virus, one great strategy is to close most of the public restrooms. This sign directs patrons to bathrooms that are a 20-minute round-trip walk away.

How about California, one of the two states more restricted than Maskachusetts? A tweet from the governor:

The text says to do the opposite of what health care workers are trained to do. “Never touch your mask” becomes “Touch your mask to install/deinstall it between every bite of food.” The image, however, says to minimizing touching the mask. #ScienceIsComplex ?

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American physicians: The healthiest people live in police states

by philg

The New England Journal of Medicine has endorsed Joe Biden (without mentioning him by name) in “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum”. Once we get over the shock that a group of physicians support the political party that made it illegal for Americans to refrain from purchasing insurance policies that make payments to physicians, what are these doctors/editors actually saying?

the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000.

We know that we could have done better. China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay.

This is consistent with what the Swedish MD/PhDs said, i.e., that lockdowns could work in a police state. But how was Donald Trump supposed to arrogate police state powers to himself? Supposedly, only state governors had the ability to terminate Americans’ First Amendment rights to assemble, terminate children’s rights to go to school, etc.

(Why cite Vietnam? Laos and Cambodia have had zero deaths! See “Vietnam miracle escape from Covid may be down to ‘natural immunity'” (Telegraph) for a report on Oxford professors poking into this question)

The unkindest cut of all:

Yet our leaders have largely chosen to ignore and even denigrate experts.

(But Trump can just say that he wants to follow the 15,000ish doctors and MD/PhDs who say that shutdown is the wrong policy. Sunetra Gupta, Oxford professor, doesn’t qualify as an “expert”? Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard, is not an “expert”?)

To minimize COVID-19 deaths, therefore, what we really need is a police state that can take dramatic muscular action unfettered by a written constitution. This reminds me of Looking at Covid-19 death rate is like the old saying “An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”?

Is asking an epidemiologist whether to keep schools and playgrounds open like asking your accountant whether you should buy a dog? Yes, the expert can give you a bit of insight (“my other clients with dogs spend $4,000 per year on vet, food, and grooming”), but not a life-optimizing answer.

In this, the NEJM simply ignores its own content, e.g., “The Untold Toll — The Pandemic’s Effects on Patients without Covid-19” Shutting down every other part of society in order to focus on COVID-19 necessarily results in a lot of deaths. “The COVID-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life” (The Hill) takes a stab at calculating the cost.

Maybe this is a good window into what would have happened if technocrats had been allowed to run the White House!

(Separately, if you work at a hospital or medical school, one fun thing to do is listen for when a physician criticizes Donald Trump for trying to stem the tide of undocumented low-skill migrants. Most of these folks eventually end up on Medicaid and/or have children who are on Medicaid, thus becoming revenue sources for physicians. Then ask “Should a Swiss, German, French, English, or Taiwanese doctor who is fluent in English be able to come over here and practice?”)

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COVID-19 in the school that shut down to avoid COVID-19

by philg

From September 23: Teachers at our local high school may go into work soon:

I am very disappointed to share that I learned this morning that there was a crowded indoor and outdoor student party Friday evening that involved alcohol and complete lack of safety precautions to protect against the spread of COVID. Police were called to the scene. An estimated number of 15 students ran into the woods. They collected names from 32 other individuals. 13 of those turned out to be made up names. That means at least 13 plus 15 (28) known to be on site are unaccounted for. If these students had been identified they could be requested to be isolated from school, monitored and tested.

The Sudbury Board of Health is stating that we must start school in remote learning for 14 days from the known incident. On the assumption that students involved are more likely juniors or seniors I asked if we could bring in just 9th and 10th graders. The answer is no, because we don’t know that no younger students were involved or that students involved were not siblings of younger students. … We plan to return to in-person hybrid on Tuesday, September 29th.

Email to parents today:

We were notified before noon today that one of our students tested positive for COVID. Per our protocol we trace all possible contacts up to two days prior to the onset of symptoms and let those people know as soon as possible. The contact tracing connected to L-S school related contacts has been completed. All so close contacts have been informed.

The student has a sibling who is a student and has shared rides with another student. The student who tested positive was also in close contact with another different student. The sibling and these other two students are all deemed close contacts and will need to be quarantined a minimum of 14 days. A close contact is someone who has been within 6 feet of the person who tested positive for more than 15 minutes.

The student also rode to school on a bus in the mornings. The bus driver and other riders confirm that assigned seating and mask protocols were not adhered to on this bus. A letter to remind riders of the importance of such protocols was sent to families at the start of this week. Because a rider has tested positive during the time protocols were not adhered to the entire bus of students is deemed to be close contacts and will need to be quarantined for 14 days.

All students who need to stay at home and quarantine have been notified. As in any case where an extended student absence is anticipated all teachers of that student will be notified through the house offices.

School is open… half the day for each child two days per week, except for those students who are now in forced quarantine.

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Why didn’t we adjust the school calendar to avoid cold/flu season?

by philg

The good news is that everyone here in Maskachusetts is wearing a mask in nearly all indoor and most outdoor venues. Thanks to 52+ governor’s orders, much remains shut down and/or capacity-restricted. We have an endless river of Chlorox for sanitizing and those schools that are vaguely open, for example, discharge students early so that the sanitizing process can begin at 12 or 1 pm.

The better news, for the viruses that cause common colds, is that none of this has prevented the common cold from thriving and hopping from human to human. The Boston area seems to be in the grip of a full-scale cold epidemic (of course, because colds are not COVID-19, nobody is bothering to gather statistics).

Half of the parents whom I meet when out walking Mindy the Crippler or interacting with folks at the airport, etc., have now been presented with the task of keeping children home for 14 days following the sniffles, an upset stomach, a headache, or any other symptom that might conceivably be COVID-19. An alternative is to get a child tested for coronaplague, but that turns out not to be simple. The state, with its infinite river of IT $$, has a web site that shows testing centers near a given zip code. But it is not integrated with availability from those centers. So the hapless parent then gets to work a web browser and telephone for several hours trying to find an available test slot. This is nearly impossible because every other parent whose child had a symptom is also trying to do this.

I’m wondering now why we didn’t start the school year in June, at which point the coronavirus was mostly burned out here in Massachusetts (restaurants reopened then, for example) and set things up with outdoor classes under shade structures and a break from November through February, the prime cold/flu season.

(How am I doing? After consuming more Sudafed than a meth lab, my congestion is mostly resolved.)

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More than 5,000 scientists to whom Joe Biden won’t be listening…

by philg

“Biden Vows to Lock Down Country to Curb the Coronavirus if Scientists Say It Is Needed” (Slate):

Former Vice President Joe Biden said he would not hesitate to issue a nationwide stay-at-home order if scientists said it was necessary. In his first interview since officially becoming the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Biden was asked about what he would do if, as some are warning, there is a surge of COVID-19 infections in January alongside the regular flu season. “I would shut it down,” Biden told ABC’s David Muir in a joint interview with Sen. Kamala Harris. “I would listen to the scientists.”

Welcome news for Science Karens across the nation, certainly. By working through the Harris-Biden administration, the nerds can decide which Americans can leave their houses, who can work, who can learn, etc. Where can Joe Biden and President Harris find a list of scientists who should not be listened to? The signers of the Great Barrington Declaration:

As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.

The true crazy talk:

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

Who are the non-scientists behind this unscientific approach to COVID-19?

  • Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.
  • Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.
  • Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.

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Stronger teacher union leads to a closed school

by philg

“Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?” (SSRN):

The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures affecting millions of K-12 students in the United States in the spring of 2020. Groups representing teachers have pushed to reopen public schools virtually in the fall because of concerns about the health risks associated with reopening in person. In theory, stronger teachers’ unions may more successfully influence public school districts to reopen without in-person instruction. Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States, we find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semi-parametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, and a further disaggregation to the county level. We also do not find evidence to suggest that measures of COVID-19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions.

If there is a strong teacher union, does that mean parents are out of luck when it comes to free government-run babysitting? No!

“Schools Reopen to In-Person Learning, but Teachers Work From Home” (Wall Street Journal, September 28) describes a world in which teachers can stay home in their PJs while a newly hired “proctor” risks death or maiming from Covid-19.

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Karen is stoned

by philg

From the country’s loudest advocates of shutting down schools… “Mother’s Little Helper Is Back, and Daddy’s Partaking Too” (NYT):

After the kids go to bed, the grown-ups are drinking and smoking pot to distract themselves from the hellscape that is pandemic parenting.

The increase of substance use among parents is “just kind of understandable,” said Jonathan Metzl, the director of the department of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University. “This is an incredible, once-in-an-epoch stressful situation, and the kinds of outlets people usually have in their lives are just not available.” We can’t go to the office, we can’t go to the gym, we can’t really see friends or family, and we never get a break.”

(No mention that parents in Sweden can go to the office, to the gym, and can see friends and family!)

What’s up with the drug that went from illegal to “essential” within a few years?

Many states where marijuana is legal have seen a big increase in sales since the virus began; for example, in Washington State, “cannabis revenue spiked at the height of the pandemic,” according to budget analysis from a local news radio station, KXLY. And some data from earlier in the pandemic showed that prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications were on the rise. Prescriptions for Klonopin and other similar drugs rose 10.2 percent in March 2020 from March 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing statistics from IQVIA, a health research firm.

But for some parents, getting just a little stoned is the only way they can eke out a small measure of joy in an otherwise fairly hopeless time. Deborah Stein, 43, said her nightly pot gummy is the one thing allowing her to get a good night’s sleep on a regular basis.

She’s the mother of a 21-month-old in Los Angeles and works in the theater industry, which has been “completely decimated” by the virus, and she and her husband are worried for their future livelihood, along with the health of their families, the air quality, the election and about a million other things.

After dinner, the couple splits a “chill” gummy containing 1.8 milligrams of THC. “It’s a way of carving out this hour or 90 minutes we get to spend together, before we have to walk the dog,” Ms. Stein said. For at least that brief window, “we get to be peaceful.”

So the newspaper that, in response to a virus that kills unhealthy people with a median age of 80+, wanted schools and society shut down now complains that parenting healthy children isn’t as much as it used to be because schools and society are shut down.

Very loosely related… our young neighbor’s new puppy. Why get stoned every night when you can instead be occupied with housetraining?

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How is Africa doing with COVID-19?

by philg

We’re just coming out of what would be the Southern Hemisphere’s winter. How is Africa doing with coronaplague?

A European friend offered a theory that the countries with the highest death rates from coronavirus are those that were keeping the largest population of frail elderly people alive via high-tech health care. If you’re dependent on machines to live, he reasoned, you’re an easy target for flu or COVID-19 or any other virus.

This kind of analysis was used by some economics professors in “16 Possible Factors for Sweden’s High COVID Death Rate among the Nordics” (PDF download available for free; layperson’s summary by one of the authors). Sweden had been rather fortunate for a few years relative to its neighbors in terms of deaths among its frail and elderly. In addition to its larger low-skill immigrant population, this supersized frail/elderly population provided easy targets for the virus and may have accounted for about half of Sweden’s extra COVID-19 deaths.

Where the analysis would seem to break down is Peru. The country isn’t notable for a huge population of people on advanced life support and yet it has had a very high COVID-19 death rate (also one of the earliest and strictest lockdowns plus universal masks).

The WHO dashboard shows a lot of African countries with low death rates, even lower than one might expect given the low median age within those countries (Nigeria’s median age is 18, for example, compare to about 38 here in the U.S. (varies by ethnicity/race), 41 in Sweden, and 27 in Peru).

From my Africa pictures:

(That’s Cape Town from the sCessna 210 that my friend flew there from North Carolina. Crossing multiple oceans and mountain ranges in a 1970s single-engine piston airplane with a gasoline-filled ferry tank in the back seat is just as safe as ever, but the trip would be illegal today so as to protect everyone from the hazards of coronavirus.)

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Melania and Donald testing positive reveals that Americans believe themselves to be firmly in control of the coronavirus

by philg

My Facebook feed is alive with gleeful Democrats posting about (a) their hopes that Donald Trump will die, (b) their satisfaction that Trump’s actions have led to his downfall (i.e., infection), and (c) how events comport with religious beliefs, e.g., in a just God and/or karma.

[Democrat 1] So the fuckface in the White House has Covid. It couldn’t have happened to a bigger piece of human shit. … With any luck–or, as some would have it, any God–the shitbird-in-chief will be confirmed for Hell before the election. Godspeed, you treasonous piece of trash.

[Democrat 2] i just tested asympathetic.

[Democrat 3] I don’t understand how Trump could get Covid. He’s an idiot but the Secret Service is not. Trump probably overrode the SS.

I.e., humans can control whether or not infection occurs. The Great Father in Washington could have protected His children from this virus. The Secret Service, in turn, could protect the Great Orange Father and Slovenian Mother (not a lot of fun compared to the Secret Service lifestyle during the Obama administration).

I’m not sure I believe it. It may be a way for him to avoid the debates, and hide in his twitter bunker for two weeks, and then come out “looking strong” because he beat this thing that only kills the weak. Ya know: “It isn’t so bad.” It knocks his support for white supremacists and his debate performance off the news cycle, and once again he controls the narrative.

Trump is an idiot, except when he is a mastermind!

From an aircraft mechanic:

Trump finally passed a test without cheating

From the bête noire himself:

Responses to the above reproduction of Trump’s tweet:

Finally a Donald Trump tweet that warms the heart.

Tell me this is real. I wish no one to die or be ill… But…

Whoo Hoo!! The Cheeto just tested positive! Maybe now his dumbass followers will believe it!

How did Melania catch it given that she barely looks in his direction? Or maybe she gave it to him. On purpose??

RBG protects us, even from among the shades.

Looks like RBG successfully argued her first case before God

Melania has been an awesome First Lady due to her more or less public acknowledgment of the absurdity of the position and refusal to engage with the U.S. media, so I’m praying to our most recent god (RBG) for Melania’s swift recovery. If 50+ years of fast food haven’t killed The Donald, I’m not going to worry about him.

Readers: Are you seeing the same thing? People who think that Trump and Melania could easily have avoided coronavirus if they’d behaved in some different way? (and therefore the rest of us get to choose whether or not we become infected)

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Tesla is actually a Swedish company?

by philg

“Elon Musk says he won’t take coronavirus vaccine, calls Bill Gates a ‘knucklehead’” (New York Post) would warm the heart of any Swedish MD/PhD:

SpaceX founder Elon Musk stirred the pot yet again after claiming that neither he nor his family would take a COVID-19 vaccine even if it was readily available.

During the bizarre exchange, the Tesla CEO decried the nationwide lockdown as a “no-win situation” that has “diminished my faith in humanity.” Musk previously called widespread quarantines “unethical” and “de facto house arrest,” RT reports.

Instead of the current sweeping measures, the Boring Company boss suggested a more targeted lockdown where “anyone who is at risk” be “quarantined until the storm passes.”

Swisher criticized his suggestion, adding that humans could potentially die in the process.

“Everybody dies,” quipped Musk.

When you add the above to Dog Mode, it might be time for us to break down and buy a Tesla (a financially irrational decision in Maskachusetts where electricity per mile in a Tesla actually costs more than gasoline per mile in a Camry or Accord).

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