Category: Coronapanic

“DESPITE ONE OF WORST CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAKS IN EUROPE, BELARUS REFUSES TO CANCEL MILITARY PARADE” (Newsweek, May 6):

Belarus will continue to hold its annual military parade this week, despite experiencing one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Europe.

According to a tracker provided by Johns Hopkins University, as of Tuesday, Belarus had 7,000 confirmed cases of the virus and at least 103 deaths.

103 deaths? In a country of 9.5 million, that’s “one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Europe”? Wouldn’t Belgium, with 8,000 deaths out of a population of 11.5 million, be a better candidate for “worst”? Or Switzerland, with nearly 1,500 deaths and a population of 8.6 million?

What could account for the journalist and editors at Newsweek describing Belarus as a Covid-19 disaster area?

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic that has impacted countries across the world, Belarus has remained one of the only European nations to not impose a lockdown, to fight the spread of the virus.

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/04/21/infidels-in-sweden-are-refusing-to-die/

“Greta Thunberg to UN: ‘You’ve stolen my childhood with your empty words'” (DW, September 23, 2019):

“You come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” a visibly angry Thunberg told the high-level audience gathered for the UN Climate Action Summit in New York.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing,” thundered the 16-year-old Swedish girl, who has galvanized youth across the world to mobilize against climate change.

This was a debatable point at the time, but just six months later children around the world were cut off from their playgrounds, their friends, and their schools (i.e., most of their “childhood”)! Bizarrely, one of the only countries where this did not happen is Sweden, home of infidels who reject the True Church of Shutdown.

So… Greta Thunberg might turn out to be wrong regarding atmospheric physics, just as the academic researchers who’ve gotten grants for climate modeling may turn out to be wrong (Cato article on a paywalled Nature paper). But I think she got the generational dynamics correct! Given the chance to cut their personal risk of contracting Covid-19 by a percentage point or two, older adults had no difficulty deciding to rob children of their childhood. (And when coronapanic is over, it will be time to for Boomers to go shopping for a new pavement-melting SUV!)

Readers: What’s your best guess as to when children get their childhood back? Folks here in thoroughly plagued Massachusetts are saying that they do not expect schools to reopen in September. The general public will demand protection from child-to-child spreading, even if there are few examples of this documented by the countries that are good at contact tracing. Teacher unions will seek to keep the 100% pay/5% hours/0% commute system that is currently working for them. Children will not get a vote. New York City is saying “50/50” on whether they reopen.

Related:

• NYT on Denmark’s April reopening of schools: “instead of arriving through a single entrance, pupils must enter through several side doors, depending on the location of their classroom.” (here in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the school that is about to be torn down and rebuilt ($110 million for 440 town-resident kids) actually has a door from every classroom to the outside; this was eliminated in the new design on the grounds that it would make the school a more defensible fortress against an armed attacker (if the students couldn’t get out except through a central hallway?), so the new school building, in addition to having a lot less fresh air (“Net Zero”) won’t be as ready for plague times)
• “Greta Thunberg is donating $100,000 to help children affected by coronavirus pandemic” (CNN)
• the Swiss health ministers say that “scientists had concluded that young children did not transmit the virus” and therefore they’re reopening schools; righteous American climate change #resisters will say “the science isn’t settled” on this one? (BBC)
• “Should schools reopen? Kids’ role in pandemic still a mystery” (Science, May 4, 2020) (but there is no mystery to the paychecks that keep arriving in adult teachers’ and school administrators’ mailboxes!)

Amazon has an advertising affiliate program. There is an easy way to get deplatformed that is highlighted in red at the top of the page:

As a reminder, we ask all of our associates to exercise good judgment when covering COVID-19 and refer readers to the CDC website for accurate information. For more information, see the FTC’s guidance around Coronavirus claims. As a reminder, advertising with unsubstantiated claims is a violation of law and a violation of the Operating Agreement and may result in account closure, including withholding fees.

Here’s a partial screen shot:

Soo… you can disagree with the official CDC line (which one though? “Don’t wear a mask” or “wear a mask”?), but your ad-supported web site will become a charity project.

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/02/youtube-casting-out-the-physician-heretics/

We don’t get too much news about our southern neighbor. Given that it is Cinco de Mayo, however, can we ask how Mexico is faring? The charts at ft.com suggest that the country’s experience of coronaplague is fairly typical. Yesterday’s WHO report shows that Mexico, with 2,061 deaths, is substantially less plagued than Canada or the U.S. and that emigrating from Spain to Mexico would have been a smart move, from a Covid-19 perspective.

How about the economy? It is tough to imagine that tourism and oil are doing well. With the U.S. economy in shambles, can the manufacturing plants near the border be prospering? Americans are stuffing themselves like pigs, so maybe Mexican agriculture is thriving?

Related:

• “As World Comes to Halt Amid Pandemic, So Do Migrants” (NYT) says that Mexicans no longer have to play host to half of the world’s asylum-seekers (instead of “fleeing violence” in their home countries, they are now returning home to the violence about which they were prepared to spin a tale on arriving for processing by the American refugee industrial complex)

All over the United States, a principal source of revenue for Native American tribes has been shut down by orders of the (primarily white) state governors. But if Indian nations are sovereign, which is how they’re able to run casinos in the first place, why do they have to abide by the White Man’s shutdown order (which may violate their First Amendment right to assemble in any case)?

There is no “scientific” research to support the idea that Indian-run casinos have contributed to the spread of coronavirus. Many such casinos are in states with a minimal infection rate. If the Indians take basic Chinese shopping mall-style precautions such as checking forehead temps at the front door, how is the White Man entitled to starve them out on a “this might help us” pretext?

(If public health concerns trump (so to speak) the Constitution, why can’t the casino closure order be made permanent? “Gambling Disorder” is a public health concern, complete with DSM-5 code. Plainly having casinos in nearly every state will contribute to the spread of Gambling Disorder. That’s a legitimate public health concern, with potentially fatal consequences, just as much as Covid-19.)

Related:

• “Harvard Says Pandemic Casino Shutdown Is ‘Immediate Threat’ to Native Americans”: “The COVID-19 crisis poses an immediate threat to three decades of improvement in economic conditions across Indian Country,” the letter to Mnuchin said. “Prior to the total shutdown of their casinos, tribes’ gaming enterprises alone were channeling more than $12.5 billion per year into tribal government programs.”

Want to stop coronaplague? The Church of Shutdown says it is as simple as social distancing. But an analysis of social distancing by the Maryland Transportation Institute shows that the very places that are best at social distancing are the ones that are suffering from the worst coronaplague:

Right near the top, the most plague-ridden states: NY, NJ, CT, MA.

Are the wicked being punished? Wyoming and Montana are at the bottom and people there are not dropping dead.

In “Data on nationwide excess deaths” I wrote the following:

Should we suspect from these data that the problems NYC has had with Covid-19 are idiosyncratic? Some other cities and regions also had exposure starting at roughly the same time (mid-January?) and those places locked down within a few days of the NYC shutdown. Yet excess deaths are fairly low (or actually negative) almost everywhere other than NYC.

Is it possible that we’re fighting a nationwide war against a virus that is attacking only a handful of cities for reasons that are peculiar to those cities? Or possibly peculiar to the strain of the virus that has been circulating in those cities? If we take out metro NYC, Detroit, New Orleans (they’re not going to have a second Mardi Gras this year, right?), and Boston, does the “U.S.” actually have excess deaths or any kind of problem with Covid-19 that couldn’t be handled with the most basic precautions?

(And how would we handle the apparently idiosyncratic problems with these cities? Tell New Orleans that Mardi Gras is henceforth restricted to the sober (90% reduction in crowding?). Reopen the United States economy and use the money to pay roughly half of NYC residents to move out to suburbs and other states. The super high density plainly has made NYC a breeding ground for any enterprising virus. Run more subway trains in Boston so that people aren’t jammed in like sardines and/or pay people to leave the city, as in New York. I’m at at loss to know what to do about Detroit, I must confess!)

Is the above chart proof that there is something about NYC and Boston that makes them ideal hosts for a viral epidemic? People in these cities have given maximum effort to observe the tenets of the Church of Shutdown, yet Covid-19 continues to infect and kill while leaving nearly the entire rest of the U.S. alone. Could this be just bad luck? France and Spain went off the rails with Covid-19, while Germany, at least if we believe their official death numbers, was barely touched. On the other hand, if we truly have faith in the Religion of Shutdown, aren’t we forced to conclude that Boston and New York are simply incompatible with a world of 8 billion humans interconnected by air travel?

(What would be ironic if not sad, at least for people like me who live in Boston, is that when this plague was new people in Boston and New York confidently predicted doom for the Deplorable-infested southern states. Intelligence and virtue would protect Boston and New York while stupidity, racism, and sexism would prevent Florida and Texas from responding competently. Now that Massachusetts has 10X the death rate of Florida and 20X the death rate of Texas, the jeering seems to have stopped.)

Also, does the chart falsify the familiar refrain from self-satisfied Californians that the reason they were substantially spared is that they purportedly shut down earlier than New York? The chart shows that, in fact, New York was socially distanced a week prior to California.

Related:

• states ranked by Covid-19 death rates