Category: Coronapanic

“Norway health chief: lockdown was not needed to tame Covid” (Spectator):

the Norwegian public health authority has published a report with a striking conclusion: the virus was never spreading as fast as had been feared and was already on the way out when lockdown was ordered. ‘It looks as if the effective reproduction rate had already dropped to around 1.1 when the most comprehensive measures were implemented on 12 March, and that there would not be much to push it down below 1… We have seen in retrospect that the infection was on its way down.’ Here’s the graph, with the R-number on the right-hand scale:

Camilla Stoltenberg, director of Norway’s public health agency, has given an interview where she is candid about the implications of this discovery. ‘Our assessment now, and I find that there is a broad consensus in relation to the reopening, was that one could probably achieve the same effect – and avoid part of the unfortunate repercussions – by not closing. But, instead, staying open with precautions to stop the spread.’

Norway’s statistics agency was also the first in the world to calculate the permanent damage inflicted by school closures: every week of classroom education denied to students, it found, stymies life chances and permanently lowers earnings potential. So a country should only enforce this draconian measure if it is sure that the academic foundation for lockdown was sound. And in Stoltenberg’s opinion, ‘the academic foundation was not good enough’ for lockdown this time.

I am not expecting too many other governments to admit that they panicked and made a mistake by shutting down just as the virus was about to fade out mostly by itself.

Related:

• “Reopening schools in Denmark did not worsen outbreak, data shows” (Reuters): “You cannot see any negative effects from the reopening of schools,” Peter Andersen, doctor of infectious disease epidemiology and prevention at the Danish Serum Institute said on Thursday told Reuters. In Finland, a top official announced similar findings on Wednesday, saying nothing so far suggested the coronavirus had spread faster since schools reopened in mid-May.

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My Facebook feed is packed with the Masked Faithful expressing their outrage at fellow U.S. residents’ incompetence. Examples:

Ran into Meijer today – only about 1/2 the people were wearing masks, and maybe 25% of them weren’t wearing them correctly. A 12% success rate won’t help, folks. … [details on how stupid everyone else is] #communityspread #covidiots PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE send an emergency notification text to everybody’s cell phone. This is important.

[from a Manhattan elite] The last ten people I saw: every single one with his mask under his nose. One with his mask under his chin. Why bother?

I responded to the last one with “The dream of the technocrats encounters the real-world American.” One of her friends reasonably asked “So, how do we fix this? If people genuinely won’t follow directions about masks and distancing, etc. (and it does seem more and more likely that they either can’t or won’t), what’s the solution?”

My answer:

that is a great question! I think it is probably smarter to reconfigure stuff physically. Take out half the shelves in a Target for example, so that people are naturally farther apart. With so many other retailers shutting down, there is plenty of mall space.

switch small retail to more like it was in the 18th century. Customer enters spacious front part of shop and asks for item. Shopkeeper goes into jammed back part shelves to retrieve requested item.

make it illegal to sell the middle seat on an airliner except to a family group instead of relying on people to use masks properly (which includes never touching one’s mask) during a 6-hour flight.

in states with warmer weather, build a lot of big shade structures so that more things can be done outdoors rather than indoors. Add some warming lamps in the ceiling to extend the useful season.

The current situation seems a bit like observing that there are a lot of car accidents and planning to reduce them with more intensive driver training. In fact, the solution that has been found to work all over the world is re-engineering the road system so that the humans that we have are less likely to crash. (Dividing busy roads, for example, to eliminate the possibility of head-on collisions for most of the miles that people travel.)

Readers: What do you think? Re-engineer Americans or re-engineer the American physical environment so that people are naturally more separated? Besides the above, what else could we do?

[My own Karen moment: I was in a big box store on Saturday. It was jammed and there were long lines for anything requiring human assistance now that people have discovered they can earn more on unemployment than by working. The City of Waltham requires masks for everyone, said a sign at the carefully policed front door. Once inside, I observed an interaction between a store worker roughly age 60 who was wearing a mask…. around his neck, and a shopper in his 30s, nowhere near 6′ away, who was seeking help from him. The shopper had his hand on his mask to pull it away from his nose and mouth (leaving the nose completely uncovered) to make it easier to talk.]

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/21/plague-proof-florida-and-texas-with-shaded-outdoor-classrooms/
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/16/plague-proof-the-u-s-with-nursing-home-and-hotel-pairings/

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Here we are in Massachusetts in our third month of shutdown with 2.3X the death rate of never-shut Sweden (some stats). Judging by the shape of the curve of deaths per day, the virus is spreading here at roughly the same rate as it has been spreading in Sweden. Our offices are shut. Our non-essential business are shut. Our flight schools are shut until a bureaucracy can come up with a detailed plan for the few hundred students that might want to fly during the remainder of 2021. Our theaters are shut. Unlike in reopened or never-shut Europe, our schools are shut. How, then, is the virus spreading?

Let’s consider a young healthy person here in Massachusetts. What has he/she/ze/they been able to do?

• play sports with friends: illegal
• meander around a mall: illegal and impossible
• walk outside without a mask: illegal
• go to the movies: illegal and impossible
• go to the gym and get fit: illegal and impossible
• learn to fly: illegal
• go to the local mosque or church: illegal

How about “Meet someone on Tinder, go to that person’s house, have sex, and sleep over”? Legal and possible.

When the only legal option for entertainment, other than watching Netflix, is casual sex, should we be surprised if young people decide that this is how they want to entertain themselves? In my informal survey of people in their 20s and 30s, more than half have no personal fear of contracting coronavirus and all of the single ones continue to be interested in making, um, new connections (and, without even being asked, quite a few admit to having made new connections).

Is there any evidence for this theory? Supposedly, Tinder achieved a historic peak in usage on March 29, 2020 (WTOP). From TMZ:

There’s an app, Sensor Tower, that gives insights into traffic on popular dating/sex apps, including, Tinder, Bumble and Grindr … and millions and millions of people are, at the very least, looking for love, and at worst, hooking up with strangers.

If Tinder is the primary app for the most casual of casual encounters, consider this headline: “During coronavirus lockdown, Tinder surpasses Bumble, OkCupid, Hinge downloads”

Why don’t we see evidence of this on social media? From “The Secret Lives of Perfect Social Distancers” (Atlantic):

“When I look at my choices as objectively as possible, I should not be doing this,” a 26-year-old speech pathologist told me, referring to the romance she started a few weeks ago.

The speech pathologist, who asked to not be identified by name to avoid repercussions at work, has been renting a car and driving from her home in Washington, D.C., to her new boyfriend’s home in Baltimore a few times a week, and keeping it a secret from almost everyone she knows.

For now, the speech pathologist has told only a few friends (all of whom got mad) and her mom (who also got mad) about her blossoming relationship.

What is the point of shutting down flight schools, public restrooms, museums (10 visitors per hour at the more obscure ones?), and picnic tables for burger and seafood shacks if strangers are going to meet by the millions every week as part of enjoying the one form of entertainment that remains legal?

(You might ask how casual sexual encounters can explain the high rates of coronaplague and associated deaths in nursing homes here in Massachusetts. Let’s assume that the inmates are not using Tinder, but the workers and the children of the workers probably are. The typical young person who gets infected with coronavirus will not develop a forehead temperature that will stop him/her/zer/them from entering a nursing home to go to work.)

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One of the savviest MIT professors whom I know turned some of his software expert witness consulting revenue into a lakeside Maine summer retreat. He was able to invite 10 friends at the same time, each friend accompanied by his/her/zer/their entire family. How? The vacation house had formerly been a summer camp and it came with a bunch of cabins as well as a prime location and a lot of recreational space.

Right now it looks as though summer camps in a lot of states are going to be forbidden by governors from operating (NPR, 5/17). So they won’t be able to obtain any revenue. But they will still owe property tax on their real estate, valued as if it could still be used.

Like any other labor-intensive business in the U.S., summer camps surely were already in tough financial shape due to rising minimum wages, rising employee health care costs, increasingly complex labor regulations, and exposure to employment-related lawsuits (imagine if two counselors get hold of some alcohol, drink it, and then have sex). Covid-19 should put the rest of the nails in the coffin, no?

Readers: What do you think? Is it time for people with money to swoop in and buy up these obsolete institutions?

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On May 3, in “Doom for the wicked Swedes is always three weeks away”, the IHME prophecy for Sweden was a peak in ICU usage on May 22 and a peak in deaths (494/day) on May 23.

What actually happened? Yesterday’s WHO report showed 54 new deaths. The day before it was 40. In other words, the prophecy was off by a factor of 10.

They were going to need nearly 4,400 ICU beds. The actual number in ICUs all around Sweden? About 340. In other words, the “scientists” were off by a factor of 13X.

What’s the latest from the prophets at IHME? As of a May 20 update to the forecast, Sweden will have a gradually declining daily number of deaths, in more or less the same shape as still-shut-down Massachusetts. A total of 5,129 Swedes will die from/with Covid-19 (roughly one third the previous forecast). The virus will simply burn itself out, apparently, despite Sweden’s lack of shutdown. (But in other countries, the same shape decline will be attributed to a multi-month shutdown?)

How about the Fall of Saigon-type scenes at hospitals that were forecast? IHME has walked that back to forecasting about 500 ICU beds occupied as of today (compare to 340 actual). Within a month it will be down to 150.

Do the arcs of the epidemic in different countries confirm the Swedish epidemiologists’ theory that Western government policies have minimal effect? Here are a few:

Sources:

• WHO situation reports
• Swedish ICU occupancy

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/03/26/number-of-new-covid-19-cases-worldwide-is-declining-now/ (the overall death rate in Massachusetts is currently 2.3X that of Sweden’s)

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Our decision to shut down is looking ever smarter because a vaccine will be available imminently:

• “Fauci Voices Cautious Optimism About Moderna Vaccine, Calling Trial ‘Quite Promising'” (NPR)
• “The Coronavirus Vaccine Is on Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed” (New Yorker)

Are there any doubters?

From CNN: “Moderna unveiled encouraging coronavirus vaccine results. Then top execs dumped nearly $30 million of stock”

(Supposedly the stock sales were planned in advance, but if these top managers and researchers believed that they’ll be selling 8 billion vaccine doses starting in September, wouldn’t they call their brokers to say “Hey, let’s hold off on those sales”?)

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