Coronapanic – Page 62 – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Cardiology Shutdown in Massachusetts

June 10, 2020June 10, 2020 by philg

I met with a cardiologist friend last night. He says that he is working roughly 60 percent as much as he was pre-coronapanic. “Where we would do five procedures per day, we can now do only two,” he said. “That leaves enough time for deep cleaning between patients. Also, they’re reserving 20 percent of the rooms in the hospital for Covid patients, just in case.”

He and his colleagues have already had multiple patients die while waiting for heart valve procedures that were considered “elective”. (see “StayHomeSaveLives or #StayHomeTradeLives?” and the link to the NEJM article) He gets paid in full despite the reduction in work and billing, and is at a vulnerable age for Covid-19 (70s), but is nonetheless anti-shutdown: “It was only a few years ago when parents were supposed to make sacrifices for their children. Now it is the other way around.”

Today is #ShutDownSTEM day. Plenty of righteous posts on Facebook from friends who are professors of various flavors of nerdism. They’ve been sitting on their butts for three months now, taking baby steps in the direction of online teaching (nowhere near as competently as faculty at Western Governor’s University, which has been online since the mid-1990s). Today they will sit on their butts even more firmly? It has been a struggle for me to refrain from asking “How could you possibly do less than you’ve been doing since mid-March?”

(Not all professionals are idle. A friend Facebook messaged me today about some divorce litigators who are fully engaged on an issue of life insurance. The defendant father wants to have the beneficiaries of his life insurance be a trust for the children (tweens). The plaintiff mother wants to ensure that the life insurance cash is paid to her, to compensate her for any reduction in profits from alimony and child support. The parties are divorced, but the litigation lives on (legal fees on both sides paid for by the father’s earnings that would have been the children’s inheritance).)

Speaking for myself, I participated in a Zoom meeting regarding some health records data analysis today, but all of the coding was in SQL so I am not sure if that qualifies as “STEM”! Later today it will be time to fly the helicopter, which can be considered a “STEM” activity by American journalists when a member of an officially recognized victim group is at the controls. One of the participants in the call is a third-year medical student. He won’t be able to do a clinical rotation until about a month from now (i.e., he will miss at least three months of clinical training).

From a neighbor’s front yard, “Science is Real” (but also not so important that you’d want to do it every day?):

From a recent visit to the doctor’s office in Concord, Massachusetts to get some blood drawn in advance of a regular checkup:

(any of 50+ gender IDs is okay, but we will depict, recognize, and give priority to only two?)

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Team America saved our country from Covid-19?

June 10, 2020June 5, 2020 by philg

One of the finest achievements of American cinema, Team America: World Police, features a group of heroes who have one yardstick for determining success or failure: the number of terrorists killed. The movie opens with the team declaring victory over a small group of jihadis in Paris. They’re satisfied with their results, but the citizens of Paris are unhappy about all of the city’s monuments being destroyed.

Now that our cities are in ruins, I’m wonder if the same logic has been applied in 2020 regarding coronaplague. Americans now care about one thing only: the number of people killed by Covid-19. It doesn’t matter how old or sick these people were before coronavirus got them. Every life that can be saved from Covid-19 is worth an unlimited amount of (a) deaths due to withheld non-Covid health care, (b) family and life destruction due to unemployment, poverty, and kids kicked out of school and imprisoned in small apartments with a miscellaneous collection of adults (“Fewer than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage.”), (c) dollars borrowed that the children being denied educations, playgrounds, and friends will have to pay back, etc.

Isn’t it the same in Europe, you might ask? No! They took a more balanced approach. Yes, coronaplague was bad, but as soon as they figured out that schools weren’t primary drivers of plague, they reopened their schools (except in Sweden, where the schools never closed). Maybe the Europeans will suffer a handful of additional Covid-19-tagged deaths are a result, but they are looking at more than a single number to measure how their nations are doing. How about India? A brief lockdown followed by a swift reopening. Brazil? “sorry for all the dead, but that’s everyone’s destiny.” (even Trump can’t say stuff like this!)

Readers: Was Team America prescient regarding our national tunnel vision? We have a slightly lower death rate nationwide compared to Sweden (where I live in Massachusetts, though, the death rate is more than 2X never-shut Sweden’s, as we enter Month 4 of shutdown).

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Epidemiologists switch from doing politics to writing science fiction

June 9, 2020 by philg

“Emergency COVID-19 measures prevented more than 500 million infections, study finds” (Berkeley News):

Emergency health measures implemented in six major countries have “significantly and substantially slowed” the spread of the novel coronavirus, according to research from a UC Berkeley team published today in the journal Nature. The findings come as leaders worldwide struggle to balance the enormous and highly visible economic costs of emergency health measures against their public health benefits, which are difficult to see.
“The last several months have been extraordinarily difficult, but through our individual sacrifices, people everywhere have each contributed to one of humanity’s greatest collective achievements,” Hsiang said. “I don’t think any human endeavor has ever saved so many lives in such a short period of time. There have been huge personal costs to staying home and canceling events, but the data show that each day made a profound difference. By using science and cooperating, we changed the course of history.”

Armed with a few lines of Excel or R code, epidemiologists had been making prophecies about what would happen 1-8 weeks into the future. Citizens would then be able to see what actually happened:

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/13/the-swedes-actually-did-have-covid-19-models/ (Swedish academic “scientists” off by about 40X despite no change in Swedish policies)
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/24/did-doom-visit-the-swedes-yesterday-as-planned/ (American academic “scientists” off by 10-13X trying to predict events 3 weeks out in a country that had no policy changes)
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/04/12/everything-the-gleeful-journalists-said-would-happen-to-sweden-has-happened-to-massachusetts/ (regarding guaranteed exponential growth without a lockdown)

(It is not surprising that these “scientific” results proved to be false, even beyond the usual “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” factors. As no country had ever tried an American-style “shutdown” (in which citizens still meet at grocery, liquor, and marijuana stores and still party every night on Tinder), only a scientist with a letter from God would have had a prayer (so to speak) of predicting the effects of such a shutdown. The self-proclaimed “scientists” also had no data regarding how easy it was for coronavirus to spread, what percent of the population was naturally immune, etc.)

The obvious inability of “scientists” to make useful predictions is not good for the image of “science”, even if “scientists” hadn’t further brought ridicule on themselves by flip-flopping on masks and the dangers of contaminated surface transmission, telling people it was okay to gather in huge crowds for BLM protesting, and telling others to quarantine while having sex with married women who would then go back to their husband and kids.

What’s the solution? Scientists can take up the genre of alternative history science fiction.

Traditional novel: What if the Germans had won World War II? Maybe the U.S. would be governed by an authoritarian puppet president, controlled by a foreign dictator. State governors would issue stay-at-home orders that eliminated Americans First Amendment rights to assemble. Young children would be locked into small apartments, denied schooling, friends, and playgrounds. Some brave folks would #Resist by going into the streets to battle with the city governments that they themselves had elected and would soon vote to re-elect.

Science-informed novel: Look at this two-parameter mathematical model. It shows what would have happened if we hadn’t locked down like I was recommending.

The beauty of this new approach is that, as with the “What if the Germans had won?” novel, there is no way to prove the author wrong.

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U.S. should approve a saline injection as a Covid-19 vaccine?

June 8, 2020July 7, 2020 by philg

As a nation, we can’t admit our mistakes. We have never apologized to the Vietnamese for our role in the pointless and destructive Vietnam War. We have never apologized to the Russians for supporting the jihadis fighting them in Afghanistan (ultimately, of course, we fought a 19-year (so far) war against those same jihadis). So it seems safe to say that we are never going to apologize to Americans, especially to young Americans, for shutting their schools, jobs, and social life down in a futile attempt to modify the trajectory of coronavirus (against the advice of the former chief scientist of the European CDC and his colleagues in the Swedish government).

Coronavirus has already killed quite a few of the Americans who are easiest for a virus to kill: the old, the sick, those who live in ideal virus breeding grounds (New York City and Boston), etc. When the virus comes back in the fall, as Dr/Saint Fauci says it will, rather than admit that shutdown was a dumb idea, born of panic, how about the following strategy:

approve a saline injection as a “coronavirus vaccine” and say “like the flu vaccine, this Covid-19 shot isn’t 100 percent effective”
tell people “you should expect coronavirus to be a little worse than a bad flu season, perhaps killing 100,000 Americans, but also many of these will overlap with what would have been flu deaths”

Schools can stay open, social life can proceed more or less normally, businesses can run except those that depend on mass gatherings, and the American people and government never have to admit that they made mistakes in the past.

Update: Facebook friend’s comment on this post… “If a bandana is effective PPE for Covid, then a saline injection is surely an effective vaccine.”

1957-58 flu (killed as many as 116,000 Americans, equivalent to about 225,000 today given that the population has nearly doubled since then)
2017-2018 flu (killed an estimated 80,000 Americans)
“Chasing Seasonal Influenza — The Need for a Universal Influenza Vaccine” (NEJM, in which Dr. Fauci is an author): “Influenza A (H3N2) viruses predominated [in Australia], and the preliminary estimate of vaccine effectiveness against influenza A (H3N2) was only 10%.” (i.e., if we still love the flu vaccine when its effectiveness may be as low as 10 percent, why not a saline injection whose effectiveness is 0 percent?)
“Charlie Baker can’t admit he blew it” (Boston Herald, by 68-year-old Howie Carr): You have totally blown it with your hysterical overreaction to a crisis that was largely of your own creation. Just admit it — you panicked when you realized all those nursing-home deaths were going to be on you, and in a pathetic attempt to change the subject, you needlessly shut down the entire state. And now, like the buck-passing bureaucrat that you are, you have no idea how to climb out of this hole that you’ve dug for yourself and 6.7 million innocent citizens. … Let Maskachusetts be Massachusetts again. … Deaths among people under the age of 50: 104. Unemployed since the lockdown began: 1 million plus.

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What happens to Las Vegas?

June 7, 2020June 7, 2020 by philg

An incredibly intelligent friend of mine retired early from his career as a patent litigator and abandoned high-tax New York City for no-income-tax Nevada. He’s now walking distance from about 15 partly-open casinos and multiple shut-down convention facilities.

In a recent FaceTime, he was shockingly (to me) optimistic regarding the city’s future, predicting a bounce-back to normal within a few months.

I would expect Vegas to suffer one of the biggest shocks among U.S. cities. Casino customers are older than average (see this Harvard thesis) and therefore more likely to be concerned about catching coronavirus either on a flight to Vegas or within a casino. Given the essentially pointless nature of the typical convention, will companies still want to send people to these multi-thousand- (or 170,000 for CES) person gatherings? If people don’t show up for conventions, they can’t be lured into paying for hotels, restaurants, gambling, etc.

One countervailing factor is the meltdown of California. Since the economy of California has shrunk while the government hasn’t, tax rates in California will need to be raised. In the meantime, a lot more employers in California are allowing work-from-home. The tax-averse might decide to work from home from Nevada and pay an income tax rate of 0% as well as enjoy a larger house for less money. But I don’t see the influx of people coming to work from home outweighing the loss of business from people who don’t want to get on an international airline flight and sit directly next to someone in a middle seat, masked or not masked.

Readers: What do you think? Is Vegas going to suffer the kind of epic decline that it did in 2008-9?

USA Today on the reopened casinos

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Karen’s Mask Law Compliance Update (Boston to Minneapolis and back)

June 6, 2020June 6, 2020 by philg

Here is one Karen’s report on the extent to which Americans are complying with the new mask laws. This is based on a May 30-June 3 trip from Boston to Minneapolis via Cirrus SR20 (“only a little slower, door-to-door, than a Honda Accord”). Stops included the following:

Massachusetts
Upstate New York (Syracuse, Niagara Falls)
Michigan
Wisconsin
Minnesota
Indiana
Ohio
Upstate New York (Elmira)
Massachusetts

The first thing to note is that travel in the U.S. today is a lot like travel within Europe in the Middle Ages. Every state has its own rules and every city within a state may have additional rules. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, people are supposed to wear masks when walking on a deserted sidewalk or in an empty park. In other parts of Massachusetts, the rule is to wear a mask when in a store or in a crowded outdoor space. In Niagara Falls, the law requires a mask indoors, but not outdoors. In Minnesota, the state recommends that people wear masks in stores, but it is not required. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the other hand, masks are required indoors (except for Black Lives Matter protesters entering stores?).

Our hotel in Niagara Falls, New York was typical. There was a sign on the door saying that everyone had to wear a mask in the lobby. Half the employees were wearing masks. Among the guests, compliance was 100 percent for Asians, 30 percent for whites, 10 percent for Hispanics, and 0 percent for African-Americans. In the adjacent state park, some of the employees had masks on, but almost none of the people walking around did (except at a few key viewpoints and when passing on bridges, people were at least 6′ apart most of the time).

FBOs had signs on the door saying that masks were required. Employees were hanging out inside unmasked, however. The arrival of a NetJets Phenom 300 was always a great occasion for mask display among both crew and passengers. The FBO in Michigan told us that the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, had recently come through. She’s a passionate advocate for lockdown and masks, but came off her private aircraft unmasked and, without any TV cameras around, came through the narrow FBO building unmasked.

Wisconsin? The state offers the same guidance as the W.H.O. (formerly “experts” but no longer worthy of the title due to their anti-mask heresy): don’t wear a mask unless you know what you’re doing and are washing your hands all the time (“Do not touch your mask while wearing it; if you do, clean your hands with soap and water or an alcohol-based hand rub. Replace the mask with a new one as soon as it is damp.”) No sign at the door of the FBO. Nobody wearing a mask inside or outside.

Eden Prairie, Minnesota: some signs recommending masks, but mostly official state advice signs to stay away if you have flu-like symptoms. Inside the Target, the employees were masked, but only about 40 percent of the customers. Mask use was low for the older shoppers. Ethnicity was a good predictor, as in New York: Asians were 100 percent masked. Muslim women who were otherwise covered from head to toe? 0 percent masked. Restaurants are open for outdoor dining; we enjoyed a meal under a tent and our young waitress had a mask… just underneath her nose.

Indiana: No masks at the FBO.

Ohio: Retail and restaurant workers were masked. Restaurants are open for dine-in, so we took advantage and had lunch at Tony Packo’s of M*A*S*H fame.

Upstate New York: No masks at any of the three FBO stops.

Return to Massachusetts: No masks at the FBO that had been an exemplary masked environment not even a week earlier. “Did you give up on masks?” I asked the guy behind the front desk. “There is a crowd of 20,000 protesting in downtown Boston right now. What’s the point?”

On walks around our neighborhood, which adopted a “You must have a mask around your neck at the ready whenever you’re out in public” rule, compliance with the law had fallen from 80 percent (a month ago, when the rule was new) to 20 percent.

Conclusion: Americans are capable of following an inconvenient rule for about a month.

Gratuitous Photos from Karen’s iPhone…

Niagara:

The right way to run shops in a plague environment:

Someone went a little nuts with the nose art for a Diamond Star DA-40:

One hand on the yoke and one hand on the life raft while crossing the 50-degree waters of Huron and Michigan:

“Nice Beaver” (Flying Cloud, KFCM, Minnesota):

I had planned to stay in downtown Minneapolis and walk around, but the civil unrest made it seem wiser to hole up in Eden Prairie. After two nights locked into the Hampton Inn, with only the occasional trip to a nearby strip mall for exercise and necessities, I had no difficulty understanding how people who’d been locked down for three months might riot. Midwestern cuisine:

Good news: outdoor dining is open. Bad news: Applebee’s is open.

Even at an FBO owned and run by African-Americans, Fox News prevails. Also, a shocking site for someone from Boston: an open gym!

Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby across the street from each other in suburban Toledo, Ohio. (The driver in front of us paid for our breakfast.)

Down by the river:

Preflight on the new propeller for the Cirrus:

At he National Museum of the Great Lakes, opening June 10:

Trip highlight: Hungarian(?) food amidst signed plastic foam hot dog buns. Where else can Alice Cooper and Neil Sedaka be next to each other? Or Nancy Reagan and Jimmy Carter? For the younger readers: Sam Kinison on British TV. (here’s where he asked an inconvenient question about an earlier plague)

Approaching beautiful Cleveland with the super-wide lens:

Full moon at 7,500′:

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NYT on Covid: Karens helping Karens

June 6, 2020May 28, 2020 by philg

“My 14-Year-Old Isn’t Socially Distancing. What Should I Do?” (NYT, May 22)…

Karen the reader:

My 14-year-old daughter (who knows that I check her phone) went on what was supposed to be a socially distanced walk with her pal. Afterward, I found a TikTok draft of their attempt at a “social distance” dance, which ended up in a pile of giggles and bumping into each other. I’m disappointed, and am wondering what I should do when she asks to see her friends again.

Karen the NYT therapist:

Given this, when your daughter next asks to see her friends, you might say, “I’ve thought it over, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that you’ll be able to stay at least six feet away from your friends, especially when you miss them so much.” You might also let her know that, even though she might plan to respect the social distancing guidelines, you don’t feel good about putting her in the likely situation of needing to rebuff a dear friend’s spontaneous and enthusiastic hug.
For example, if local restrictions and the health factors in your household permit, you might see if she wants to invite her friends for an outdoor “six feet a-party” at your home or while you tag along at a public location. They’ll need to be where you can see them, even if at a distance or through a window, so that your daughter can blame you for her good behavior while enjoying the company of her friends.
Beyond coming up with practical, albeit frustrating, compromises, we can offer empathy. This often goes farther that we think. You might say, “I know that this is not what you want, and I cannot tell you how much I wish things were different. We’ll do the best we can with the options we have, but I get it if you’re really unhappy about it.”
Given that it looks like we may be in for a long haul with Covid-19, we parents will need to get accustomed to coming up with creative solutions when possible and providing generous support and compassion for the painful situations that are beyond our control. It’s not as much as we want to offer, but it’s likely to be enough to get us through.

Reader comments are almost all from like-minded Karens. If we assume the questioning Karen is the mother of the 14-year-old rebel-without-a-mask, nobody points out that anyone young enough to be the biological mother of a 14-year-old is unlikely to herself be seriously victimized by Covid-19 (if the family formerly visited elderly/vulnerable relatives in a nursing home, presumably that isn’t possible now regardless of the 14-year-old’s vigilance).

I find this interesting because parents used to be worried about 14-year-olds risking the teenager’s own welfare, e.g., by drinking alcohol (legal in much of Europe), having sex (legal in much of Europe), and taking drugs. Since 14-year-olds are essentially invulnerable to Covid-19, what we now have are parents who aren’t even bothering to try to hide the fact that they’re primarily interested in themselves (i.e., reducing an already extremely low risk of a serious consequence from an encounter between the coronavirus and a middle-aged person).

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Covid Karen

June 5, 2020June 5, 2020 by philg

Folks seem to be debating the best way to define “A Karen”. What about this definition-by-example?

I’m generally not an activist, but I just wrote to the University of Colorado Dean of Students to tell her how I felt that the blatant lack of mask wearing by students on hiking trails reflected poorly on the university. I suggested that her office do an education campaign.
I’ve been hiking daily, and in north Boulder nearly everyone is wearing masks on trails, but near the university almost no student-age people are.

It was actually posted by someone who, I think, identifies as a “man” and is about 40 years old, but nonetheless can this be considered the quintessential Karen quote?

(Of course, if they’re healthy enough to go for a hike, a 40-year-old Karen and a 20-year-old student are both more likely to be killed in a car accident on the way to said hike than they are to die from Covid-19.)

What kind of political beliefs does Ultimate Karen espouse? Excerpts from his Facebook status just after the darkest day in U.S. history:

I voted for Clinton because I thought she was the more qualified candidate, and because I looked forward to our kids sharing the experience of electing the first female president. …

and because he’s also quite intelligent:

To Facebook and much of social media: By enabling people to stuff their channels with self-selected and algorithmically filtered content sources as opposed to the free press of yesteryear, you essentially helped obscure the truth and mask the accuracy of what was really building.

and because he cares about Planet Earth:

To Florida: … have fun under water. Your landmass will be 25% smaller by the time our kids are in college.

and this one turned out to be unarguably correct! Florida is being smothered right now… by all of the New Yorkers who fled the 2018 tax law and now by all of the rich New Yorkers who have fled the plague!

(Why isn’t it insulting to “women” (however you want to define that term) if someone says “I voted for Clinton … because I looked forward to our kids sharing the experience of electing the first female president”? Did people who voted for Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel need to add anything to “I believed she was the best qualified person for the job”?)

“Airlines Say Everybody Onboard Must Wear a Mask. So Why Aren’t They?” (NYT), in which Karen watches hundreds of thousands of Americans shoulder-to-shoulder in BLM protests then frets about 50 people gathering on an Airbus
“Coronaplague is a primarily sexually transmitted disease in Massachusetts?” (Karen worries about the students unmasked on the trails but doesn’t think about what they’re doing after-hours)
“Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance” (Politico): For months, health experts told Americans to stay home. Now, many are encouraging the public to join mass protests. … “We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, tweeted on Tuesday. “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” … Some members of the medical community acknowledged they’re grappling with the U-turn in public health advice, too. “It makes it clear that all along there were trade-offs between details of lockdowns and social distancing and other factors that the experts previously discounted and have now decided to reconsider and rebalance,” said Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School. Flier pointed out that the protesters were also engaging in behaviors, like loud singing in close proximity, which CDC has repeatedly suggested could be linked to spreading the virus. “At least for me, the sudden change in views of the danger of mass gatherings has been disorienting, and I suspect it has been for many Americans,” he told me. … Those protests against stay-at-home orders “not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives,” according to the letter’s nearly 1,300 signatories. “Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.”

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Post-coronaplague world of employment will be even less friendly to older workers?

June 4, 2020May 26, 2020 by philg

All of my friends in the new work-from-home economy say that coworkers with newly unskooled children to manage are “useless”. Employers who fire their least productive employees, therefore, in an age-neutral manner, may actually be firing an older-than-average population (and, coincidentally, saving a ton of money on employer-provided health care for both these older adults and their children!).

I’m wondering if the new “wear a mask 8 hours/day” policies will also winnow the older workers out of the U.S. labor force. Older people have reduced lung capacity and muscular strength compared to the young, so they are going to be more impaired by the masks. Already in retail stores I have noticed some older workers struggling and, in some cases, wearing the mask around their necks, even when interacting fairly closely with customers.

Finally, you have the actual risk of coronaplague. As workers get closer to the average age of a Covid-19-tagged death (82 in Massachusetts), they might not want to take the risk of coming into contact with a lot of co-workers, customers, etc.

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (EEOC): “The ADEA prohibits employment discrimination against persons 40 years of age or older.” (i.e., employers wouldn’t hire people over 40 without the threat of lawsuits and coercion by the government)
“Lung Capacity and Aging” (American Lung Association): “Your lungs mature by the time you are about 20-25 years old. After about the age of 35, it is normal for your lung function to decline gradually as you age. This can make breathing slightly more difficult as you get older.”

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