Category: Coronapanic

Let’s see what is left of the rights in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a world shut down by old rich people anxious to avoid their date with coronadestiny.

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

This is gone, unless you’re protesting Black Lives Matter.

Everyone has the right to education. … Elementary education shall be compulsory.

Gone! Unless a Black Lives Matter School of Protest can be started?

Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

If “full development” means “sitting at the computer” and “respect for fundamental freedoms” means learning how to be a Mask Karen, I guess kids still have these rights. (My friends’ middle schoolers have not left their house/yard since mid-March. They say that they haven’t learned anything from the local public school.)

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

This is gone, unless the License Raj thinks you should be allowed to work.

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

This is gone!

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution

Also gone? Or can asylum-seekers still walk across the U.S. border and sign up as customers for the welfare state?

No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

What if your property was a daycare business? Given the lack of evidence that young children spread coronavirus, haven’t you been arbitrarily deprived of it?

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Is it “liberty” for a healthy young person, whose life is not at risk, to be locked down in an apartment?

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

What’s the “community” if everyone is stuck at home connected only by Internet?

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Religion in “community with others” is gone, right? Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, and other enforcers of coronaplague orthodoxy have eliminated “freedom of thought”, right?

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

As noted above, you still have freedom of expression, but just not on any platform that contains an audience. (Maybe some Virtue-brand toilet paper will help keep the censors at bay? (from a Target near Portsmouth, New Hampshire).)

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Hmm… coronashutdown hit the working class like a ton of bricks: unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, opioids, strife with other household members in tiny apartments. For a lot of upper-middle-class Americans, especially government workers, it meant continued paychecks, a reduced workload, zero commute time, and going for jogs in low density suburbs before turning to the spacious single family house. That’s not “discrimination”?

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Why isn’t being locked into a small apartment “detention”?

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Given the lack of scientific agreement on whether young children can spread the coronavirus, whether Western government lockdowns are effective at reducing the total number of infections and deaths, etc., would it be fair to say that the shutdowns are “arbitrary interference”?

In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

Maybe this is the escape clause. A state governor can say “I think there will be more public order and general welfare if everyone is locked down in apartments and houses, except for those whom I specifically let out.”

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Masketologists have declared victory against coronaplague. If a population of humans is ordered to wear masks, coronavirus will pack up and go home. Example: “Identifying airborne transmission as the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19” (PNAS) and one of the less hysterical popular media summaries.

[6/18 update from the Department of Coronascience is Settled: researchers from Stanford, John Hopkins, and University of Colorado say that the above PNAS paper should be retracted. “While we agree that mask-wearing plays an important role in slowing the spread of COVID-19, the claims in this study were based on easily falsifiable claims and methodological design flaws”]

I was fully prepared to believe this, since it is consistent with my idea that whatever people are doing in Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan is probably the right thing to be doing. However… the governor of Massachusetts imposed a strict mask law that was effective on May 6. Faith in the Church of Shutdown’s Ritual of the Mask becomes a little tougher to sustain when looking at stats from the New York Times:

If masks are the way to slay the Covid-19 dragon, why isn’t there an observable discontinuity in these curves as a result of the restrictions imposed on May 6? If anything, it looks like there was a bump in cases followed by a bump in deaths roughly correlated to a change on the May 6 date.

Maybe the answer is that masks do work, but the state reopened in early May and therefore the viral spread from reopening canceled out the viral suppression from masks? Definitely not! From the License Raj:

Construction and manufacturing were allowed to reopen, “with restrictions, some capacity limitations, and a staggered start”, beginning on May 18. There was no significant change until May 25 (hair salons) and June 8 (hotels, some childcare (with masks on children older than 2; see the happy preschooler below), retail with occupancy limits).

The anti-Karen wrote:

What I don’t get: If masks work, why aren’t we back at work? If masks don’t work, why are we being asked to wear them?

This mask-loving Karen wonders:

If masks work, why don’t we see a collapse in “the curve”?

Readers: Should we believe “science” or our own eyes looking at the NYT graphs? I picked Massachusetts because that’s where I live (unwisely, it seems). Is there another state that adopted a mask law and in which the coronavirus waved a white flag and packed up?

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/06/06/karens-mask-law-compliance-update-boston-to-minneapolis-and-back/

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Anecdotal evidence that my cherished hope of summertime relief from coronaplague is illusory: a friend in Austin, Texas has developed Covid-19. If the virus can survive not only summer, but the Texas summer, that is indeed sobering.

His Facebook post:

I had a 100ish fever last Thursday night/Friday, with none of the other effects I’ve read about. Got tested just in case so I didn’t increase anyone else’s risk.

No fever or anything else since then except occasional headache and maybe some fatigue. My primary care doc thinks I may have gotten a very small exposure and fought it off quickly – we’ll see. He may have me do an antibody test in a week or two to rule out a false positive.

Be safe – remember that even being very careful, wearing a KN95 mask and gloves at the grocery store with plenty of hand sanitizer, social distancing, etc are not 100%.

UPDATE 6/17: Low grade fever early this morning (100.1) but responded to ibuprofen and now I feel pretty normal. Still no other symptoms.

UPDATE 6/16 – Q from the comments: Do you have a feel for where/how you got it?

A: Not sure. I’ve mostly stayed put since early March since I work from home.

Could have been at the store – KN95 is still 5% failure rate, and even though I bought the masks at Staples, it’s hard to know the quality of the Chinese manufacturing.

We’ve seen a small number of people while socially distancing in recent weeks – that would be my bet, but none of those people (already notified) have reported symptoms so far.

My guess is I’ll never really know.

He’s in his 50s so he is not statistically invulnerable to the plague, but he is otherwise healthy as far as I know, so I am not heading down there to dig a grave for him.

A friend recently traveled on JetBlue (empty middle seats, unlike on American) and was surprised to see a fellow passenger in full Ebola doctor PPE: respirator mask plus face shield. Maybe this is the way to dress for the next 2-3 years!

Alternatively, could we be (very slowly) proving the Bishops of the Church of Sweden correct? They said that the virus would wait for us to come out of bunkers. The U.S. right now has a Covid-19 death rate roughly 30 percent lower than Sweden’s, but we have years to catch up. (And don’t forget we have all of the shutdown-related deaths, e.g., from delayed health care, from unemployment and poverty, etc., that nobody is bothering to tally.)

[Update: his fever went away by Wednesday. So it was a one-week fever with “occasional headache, fatigue, and tight chest but really nothing else.” Both children, age 6 and 11, got it (“mild” and/or “brief” fever), but not the wife. Maybe that tells us something about the typical amount of physical intimacy in an American household with children…]

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/02/25/austin-and-lockhart-texas-10-barbecue-restaurants-in-72-hours/ (too bad that brisket does not prevent coronaplague!)

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“Can Coronavirus Contact Tracing Survive Reopening?” (New Yorker, June 12) could be the poster child for “TL:DR”. Some high points:

Massachusetts created a pioneering program to track COVID-19 cases. Its challenges are multiplying as the state reopens

The marginal position of the Brazilian immigrants in Massachusetts represented a potential hole in the monitoring system that the C.T.C. was trying to build. Welch had come up with a characteristically P.I.H. solution, which was to fill that hole not with a protocol but with a person, Comin, whose life experience meant he might be trusted by the people he interviewed. Comin had arrived in the United States at the age of nineteen, a punk-rock enthusiast who came to Massachusetts because his aunt lived there; after his tourist visa expired, he was grateful for the older immigrants who had explained the rules of a new country to him—how, for example, when you stopped at a stop sign, you really had to stop, in order to avoid being arrested. To Comin, teaching people how to isolate at home during a pandemic, when they might not be here legally or have health insurance, was something like explaining the full and complete stop.

Throughout the spring, the Massachusetts contact-tracing program got faster. It took between three and four days for the C.T.C. to learn of a positive test, but after investigators had that information they were able to reach seventy per cent of cases, and contact tracers were then able to speak to seventy-four per cent of those cases’ contacts. This still meant that nearly half of potential contacts never spoke with anyone working for the tracing program.

But, until June, Massachusetts remained under lockdown—a temporary and highly artificial situation in which each case had, on average, about two contacts. That changed with the George Floyd protests, when crowds returned to the state’s public spaces. … Wroe, the C.T.C.’s director of implementation and design, had her eye on the protests but said that they were simply too difficult to trace. When contagious people told investigators that they had travelled on a bus, or visited a nursing home, the C.T.C.’s protocol was to alert the local Board of Health and move on. Wroe also believed that Massachusettsans did not want a program that would find ways to track their public movements. She said, “I don’t think there’s much epidemiological advantage in chasing people down in public places, versus the very real risk of losing trust.”

The core of the problem is that we don’t have enough welfare for low-skill immigrants:

The social safety net for immigrants in Boston can seem so porous that it might as well be all holes. Baez has been trying to make it airtight. “What people really want is to feel secure,” he told me when I called him one evening in May, just after his shift had ended. He began to talk through the cases he’d worked that day. All of the adults in a household had tested positive for the coronavirus, and they wanted to know how they could safely share one and a half bathrooms without infecting the children, or re-infecting one another. Another call came from a pregnant woman—who, Baez said, was “the most nervous person I spoke with today.” She and her husband, who both work at McDonald’s, had tested positive and had to stay home for two weeks. She was worried about eviction, and money for the baby, if they lost their jobs. A call came from a woman who worked as a nursing assistant at an assisted-living facility, who had just tested positive, along with many of her colleagues. “Everyone on my floor got it,” she told Baez. She was isolating at home and needed a nebulizer for her asthma, but didn’t have a hundred dollars to pay for it, so she had to figure out a way to purchase the device and then find a volunteer to pick it up at the pharmacy and drop it off on her doorstep. Baez said that this work reminded him of the challenges he has had trying to respond to emergencies overseas: “If there was equity, period, there wouldn’t be a need for us to fill these gaps.”

Fortunately, we still have a good supply of taxpayer-funded opioids:

A thousand tracers, in the middle of a pandemic, gets you somewhere, but maybe only partway. In the evenings, when Baez walks around his parents’ neighborhood, he often passes Boston Medical Center, which runs a large opioid-addiction program, and where he can see clusters of addicts on the street corners. They’ve still been getting their methadone, but their presence reminds Baez of all the vectors for transmission that might still be beyond his compass, and the gaps in care he can’t cover. Baez told me, “Obviously, we can’t promise the world.”

So… the official story back in March was that we would lock down to “flatten the curve” (same number of infections, spread out a bit). This morphed by April into a “shutdown until contact tracing is ready” plan (nytimes). By May this was no longer sufficient. We needed a long shutdown, to hire more contact tracers, and to turn the state into “Maskachusetts” (i.e., don masks at least a month after the infection had peaked).

Now it seems that, because (1) we don’t ladle out enough welfare to low-skill immigrants (who are, after all, our greatest source of economic prosperity and per-capita GDP growth!), and (2) we have the occasional mass gathering, the magic of Asian-style contact tracing will be forever out of reach.

From our neighborhood, the ponies of Maskachusetts:

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Related:

• “Boston Mayor Declares Racism A Public Health Crisis” (NPR): Yes, we shut down for 4 months and have more than 2X the Covid-19 death rate of never-shut Sweden, but the real public health crisis is not coronavirus…

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The Swedes who refused to lock down were the previous favorite targets of “scientists” and the media armed with forecasts of doom (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/24/did-doom-visit-the-swedes-yesterday-as-planned/ for example). Now that the Swedes are enjoying, unmasked, their summer and an abundance of UV light, the doomsayers need a new target. How about Brazil? They don’t have an effective lockdown and it is winter there. We all know the critical importance of national leadership whenever a virus is circulating and Brazil’s leader is an infidel with respect to the Church of Shutdown (“‘Death is everyone’s destiny’: Bolsonaro’s words of comfort”).

Here’s the June 10, 2020 IHME forecast:

On August 4, Brazilians will be dying at the rate of 5,248 per day and the rate of death will be accelerating. They will need 57,639 ICU beds and will have just 4,060 to go around.

Who wants to predict the actual numbers for Brazil? Keep in mind that the population is 210 million, so the number of deaths will be dramatic compared to what the typical European nation experiences.

I will go first. My perspective is a “scientific” one. In other words, I will look at one or two data points and then extrapolate wildly. From the chart below, it looks like the non-virtuous Brazilians have, by dint of doing nothing, already “flattened the curve” to a large extent. So my first scientific observation (i.e., guess) is that the death rate on August 4, 2020 will be roughly the same as it is today. On the other hand, the virus has already killed a lot of the easiest-to-kill Brazilians. Therefore, the number should be a little lower. On the third hand, General Winter is fighting alongside the coronavirus in parts of Brazil. If the latter two factors cancel out, the number of deaths tagged to Covid-19 in Brazil on August 4 should be 1,274 (the number from yesterday’s WHO report).

Readers: What’s the result of your own scientific analysis? Care to use the comments for a prediction regarding August 4, 2020?

Follow-up post: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/08/05/how-is-coronaplague-down-in-brazil-and-the-rest-of-the-ihme-predictions/

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Fight the plague by driving with the top down?

Now that things are open in most states (not here in Massachusetts, though! We liked Months 1, 2, and 3 of Shutdown so much we’re going into Month 4.), people have a reason to get in the car and drive. I wonder if convertibles will become more popular as a way of reducing coronaplague. If you have to drive with a non-family member, just put the top down first.

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Suppose that you’re stuck in traffic on America’s roads built for 150 million and now serving 330 million. If everyone is in a convertible with the top down then everyone is breathing on everyone else (not okay unless at a BLM protest, right?). Maybe that problem could be solved by rolling up all of the windows? Now it is like being a grocery store cashier: you’re protected by a clear barrier.

What about exploiting a height advantage? To avoid any virus exhaled by someone stopped next to you at a light, try to have a taller vehicle. If he/she/ze/they bring a Miata, you bring a Mini convertible. If he/she/ze/they bring a Mini convertible, you bring an SUV with the top cut off. If he/she/ze/they bring an SUV with the top cut off, you bring an SUV that has been jacked up before the top was cut off.

My Facebook feed is now packed with panic regarding coronavirus infections that are occurring post-reopening in various states. This is exactly what “science” told us would happen under our March 2020 dogma (example). And it is exactly what Angela Merkel told us to expect. But somehow people are treating it as new information.

One thing that is odd is that people are refusing to consider adapting. People who live in tiny San Francisco dwellings say that they are proud to wear masks all the time and make sure that their only connection to the rest of humanity is Internet. They express pride in not being “selfish” by going out and/or going unmasked. Example:

I feel very lucky in San Francisco and the bay area. SF protocols have been very strict and remain so and there has been only 44 deaths out of 800,000. We’re starting outdoor dining this weekend but not much more. And masks are required if you are within 30 feet of anyone outside (not just 6). Goal is to set culture of mask wearing before things open more. I have seen too many Americans online complaining about mask wearing as if it’s an imposition. I totally agree about too much entitlement as you note and very selfish. I hope we keep this mask requirement for quite a while!

Why does she stay, though? She could have a bigger house in Wyoming, the same Internet, zero income tax, and be as isolated as she wants to be (though does not have to be, since Wyoming is mostly reopened, including for school).

At least until the fearful are confident that coronavirus has burned its way through the U.S. population and/or there is an approved vaccine, why wouldn’t people without a job that requires physical presence seek to move to places where life (and driving) can be conducted outdoors?

Readers: What convertibles do we need? Personally, I want a five-seat convertible, but there is nothing on the market except for one Jeep. Given the height issue discussed above, it would also be awesome to have a topless SUV or at least minivan. At the risk of being tarred with the label of “Tesla fan-boy/girl/zirl/they”, I have to say that electric drive would be more valuable in a convertible than in a regular car. When going slowly downwind there is no exhaust to be blown back into the seating area. It should be easier to keep the cabin quiet if there are no explosions in cylinders.

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/21/plague-proof-florida-and-texas-with-shaded-outdoor-classrooms/

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