Category: Coronaplague

According to “Statewide COVID‐19 Stay‐at‐Home Orders and Population Mobility in the United States” (2020), today is the five-year anniversary of the first American lockdown order:

In the United States, the first coronavirus‐related activity restrictions were issued on March 12, 2020, when a community within New Rochelle, New York, was declared to be a “containment area.” A traditional quarantine order would require individuals presumed to be exposed to stay at home. This containment order was not intended to limit individual movement. Instead, it mandated the closure of schools and large gathering places within the zone, including religious buildings (Chappell, 2020). Residents were allowed to enter and leave the containment zone, but they were not allowed to gather in large groups within the designated geographic area.

On March 16, 2020, a “shelter‐in‐place” order was issued for six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area (Allday, 2020). Shelter in place was a term many Californians were familiar with due to its use during wildfires and other natural disasters, active shooter drills, and other short‐term emergency situations. In those contexts, “shelter in place” means “stay where you are,” but that was not what the COVID‐19 orders were asking residents to do. The order did not require individuals to stay where they happened to be located when the order was released. Residents were allowed to leave home for essential purposes, including food, medical care, and outdoor exercise, and people working at businesses deemed to be “essential”—such as grocery stores, hospitals, pharmacies, veterinary clinics, utilities, hardware stores, auto repair shops, funeral homes, and warehouses and distribution facilities—were allowed to continue onsite work.

Related:

• “COVID-19 Lockdowns Unleashed a Wave of Murder” (Reason, December 2024): “In 2020, the average U.S. city experienced a surge in its homicide rate of almost 30%—the fastest spike ever recorded in the country,” write Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris in a research review for the Brookings Institution published this week. “Across the nation, more than 24,000 people were killed compared to around 19,000 the year before.”

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Five years ago, here: Coronavirus enables elite universities to pull off the ultimate scam?

First the big research universities figured out that they could charge more than $50,000 per year in tuition for in-person classes taught by graduate students with a tenuous hold on the English language. Now they’ve figured out that they can charge $50,000 per year without having to deliver in-person classes at all!

… A poster cluster in Harvard Yard, afternoon of March 10, 2020:

Speaking of universities, here’s one from the official White House X feed to Columbia:

SHALOM COLUMBIA: The Trump Admin, led by @USEDgov and the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism (@TheJusticeDept, @HHSGov, & @USGSA), has canceled ~$400M in federal grants to @Columbia over its failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. pic.twitter.com/CavoXbhhvx

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 7, 2025

Note that I don’t believe Columbia will receive less money as a result of this purported “cancelation”. The money will be “unfrozen” soon enough. It will be like the billions of dollars that the U.S. taxpayer has paid to Hamas over the years. We see a headline about “aid” to UNRWA (i.e., a funnel straight to Hamas) being cut off and then the “aid” is quietly restored a few months later after some weak promise is made by UNRWA or affiliates. Nonetheless, I enjoy hearing the former New Yorker saying “Shalom Columbia”!

In case the above gets memory-holed one day by a righteous administration:

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From the Official Newspaper of Lockdown, “Excessive drinking persisted in the years after Covid arrived, according to new data.” (NYT, Nov 11, 2024):

Americans started drinking more as the Covid-19 pandemic got underway. They were stressed, isolated, uncertain — the world as they had known it had changed overnight.

Two years into the disaster, the trend had not abated, researchers reported on Monday.

The percentage of Americans who consumed alcohol, which had already risen from 2018 to 2020, inched up further in 2021 and 2022. And more people reported heavy or binge drinking,

“Early on in the pandemic, we were seeing an enormous surge of people coming in to the clinic and the hospital with alcohol-related problems,” said Dr. Brian P. Lee, a hepatologist at the University of Southern California and the principal investigator of the study, published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

This adds some weight to my oft-expressed theory, starting in March 2020, that American lockdowns and other coronapanic measures would, in the long run, kill far more people than they saved. A person who goes to work in an office is well-separated from the obesity-exacerbating fridge and a stockpile of wine and beer. Co-workers who smell alcohol are likely to inquire. The office environment is thus protective and that protection was lost when the typical state governor made it illegal for Americans to go to work.

Who else noticed this? Donald Trump. From the October 2020 debate with soon-to-be-Genocide-Joe:

I want to open the schools. The transmittal rate to the teachers is very small, but I want to open the schools. We have to open our country. We’re not going to have a country. You can’t do this, we can’t keep this country closed. It is a massive country with a massive economy. People are losing their jobs, they’re committing suicide. There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level that nobody’s ever seen before. There’s abuse, tremendous abuse. We have to open our country.

Related:

• from November 16, 2020: #Science proves that I was right (about the need for RFID chips in humans for COVID-19 surveillance)
• from November 13, 2020: Diversity and Inclusion Training for MIT Students (not related, but from the same time period and it is a lot of fun!)

From Teddy Wong’s (excellent) restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas (maybe don’t try this lettering/language if you’re not Chinese…):

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I recently testified as an expert witness at a trial where the judge told prospective jurors to expect 4-6 weeks of service during which they’d be hearing about dull technical subjects. One lady mentioned a vacation that she’d booked and paid for prior to being summoned. She had receipts for her airline tickets. I was 100 percent sure that she’d be excused. Of course, I was dead wrong. Speaking of dead, though, what stops a juror from developing COVID after a few days of what promises to be an interminable trial? If the court (a government agency) adheres to the CDC religion (from another government agency) and allows the juror to stay home for five days, he/she/ze/they misses five days of testimony and therefore must be excused in favor of an alternate. After the five days of quarantine-at-home are over, the juror embarks on the paid-for-and-planned vacation.

From a malingerer’s point of view, the era of coronapanic is an ideal one (for jury duty and anything else, e.g., the in-laws’ in-laws’ wedding). He/she/ze/they can say “I drove to CVS, donned a sacred Fauci-approved mask, bought an at-home test kit, used it in my car in the parking lot, noted the positive result, and threw out the contaminated materials in the CVS sidewalk trash can so as not to bring a biohazard home.” The surveillance video, if pulled, and credit card records would confirm the story. If an investigator camps outside the purported COVID victim’s house and makes a video of the victim being apparently healthy that only reinforces the #AbudanceOfCaution displayed by the juror.

Given how easy it is to spin this kind of yarn, how is it possible to keep a jury together for more than a week or so? If your answer is “most people are honest,” I invite you to look at the $123 billion in coronapanic fraud that was taken out of taxpayers’ pockets (state-sponsored PBS). One attorney with whom I spoke says that juries stay together week after week because they develop the same kind of bond as soldiers in a war or disaster victims.

Note that, in the below graphic from the Church of Fauci, “your symptoms are getting better” is entirely subjective and impossible for anyone else to falsify (fatigue and headache, for example, are on the official CDC list of COVID symptoms).

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I’m assuming that everyone here follows the Science and that, therefore, everyone wore goggles yesterday to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Dr. Fauci’s recommendation of taking this common sense precaution against the depredations of SARS-CoV-2 and also to fight the current COVID wave. “California is still getting crushed by COVID. When will it end?” (SFGate, yesterday, regarding the punishment of the righteous):

COVID-19 has raged through California over the past few months, and with cases still headed skyward, the virus shows no signs of retreating.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Golden State, along with Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii, is now the most afflicted region in the U.S. Wastewater data, which is often used to help predict future surges, also reveals that several Bay Area cities like San Francisco and San Jose are grappling with “high” Sars-Cov-2 levels compared with other regions.

“It’s very strange that the West Coast continues to be high,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at UC San Francisco, told SFGATE.

The last part is my favorite. Like Job, the California righteous can’t figure out why their god doesn’t love them. Later on, the Sacrament of Paxlovid is pushed. Here’s a perspective from the other side of San Francisco:

Paxlovid doesn't work in vaccinated people. It was embarrassing to watch the administration and many ID doctors recommend this without any credible data. Once panoramic is published, this is going to be the biggest waste of money since tamiflu. https://t.co/79KqEGu6us

— Vinay Prasad MD MPH (@VPrasadMDMPH) April 4, 2024

“Fauci urges Americans to wear goggles for added COVID-19 protection” (New York Post, July 30, 2024):

Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that people wear goggles or face shields as an added measure of protection against contracting the coronavirus, according to a report.

“If you have goggles or an eye shield, you should use it,” Fauci, 79, the top US infectious disease expert, told ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton on Wednesday.

When asked if eye protection will become a formal recommendation at some point, he said, “It might, if you really want perfect protection of the mucosal surfaces.”

Fauci, a member of the White House pandemic task force and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explained the rationale for the measure.

(This is also a reminder that Ron DeSantis would have been the right choice for those who don’t want to be governed by public health bureaucrats optimizing for exactly one variable. As DeSantis put it, Donald Trump turned over the U.S. government to be run by Anthony Fauci.)

How did people react when they saw you yesterday in your COVID goggles? Separately, here’s COVID-safe aviation from the EAA Museum in Oshkosh:

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For those who are logically consistent, coronapanic hasn’t ended. This follower of Science in New York begged people to protect his 2-year-old from a disease that kills 82-year-olds (tweet deleted, sadly):

and then he repeated his plea just a few weeks ago in a now-deleted tweet. I admire people like this hero because SARS-CoV-2 is still with us, still mutating, and still killing humans. Anders Tegnell pointed out in February 2020 that the rational approach to COVID-19 was change your life in ways that you’d be willing to continue forever because, as with influenza, that’s how long SARS-CoV-2 would be with us. If a New York progressive masked his/her/zir/their 2-year-old in 2020, therefore, he/she/ze/they should still be masking 2-year-olds here in Year 5 of coronapanic.

Another New Yorker who has spent more than four years terrified of a respiratory virus but hasn’t taken the seemingly obvious self-help step of moving out of one of the world’s most crowded environments:

I took this selfie on 6/20, on my way home after work. This is NYC! People wear masks to protect themselves from f__king contagious SARS-CoV-2 that has killed >80,000 New Yorkers. I am heartbroken about politicians fighting for mask ban instead of better ventilation for @MTA! pic.twitter.com/k9px8ooZYw

— Julie S. Lam (@MsJulieSLam) June 22, 2024

If he/she/ze/they doesn’t want to get sick, why isn’t he/she/ze/they living in a suburb, having groceries delivered by the Latinx essential workers, and Zooming into work? (note also the two people in the background who are afraid enough of SARS-CoV-2 to wear a 30-cent mask, but not afraid enough to refrain from riding the NYC subway system)

Here’s another example of critical thinking, this time from San Francisco:

Post this prominently in public places. Just do it! pic.twitter.com/Ft5IiF0ZCn

— David Lingenfelter, PhD (@dlingenfelter) June 21, 2024

Most people, however, aren’t rational. Those who disinfected the grocery bags that Latinx essential workers dropped off at their suburban mansions switched to hosting sleepovers for their tweenagers just as soon as everyone had been stuck with what turned out to be a not-very-effective vaccine. Now that hardly anyone is continuing with the behaviors that Fauci promised would preserve them from COVID-19, when do the Faucism signs come down?

From my hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, May 2024, and an adjacent shop:

(The only rational approach to fighting a virus that kills the obese is to be careful in elevators while on the way to a donuts-and-alcohol breakfast.)

From a Marriott in El Paso, Texas, April 2024:

This seems to be an international phenomenon. Portugal went all-in on Faucism (mask orders, 100% vaccine coverage (NYT), etc.) and was rewarded with a 7 percent excess death rate (compare to 6 percent in do-almost-nothing Sweden).

Heading into the rental car center at LIS to pick up the 2024 Mercedes plug-in hybrid diesel that would fail completely after 48 hours:

It was “mandatory” to wear a mask, but the customers crammed together in 45-minute lines (Line 1 to get paperwork and Line 2 to pick up the car; allow 1.5 hours total in the summer regardless of rental company) weren’t wearing masks and neither were any of the employees.

Here’s a hotel in Campo do Gerês, a small town in the mountains where I never saw anyone wear a mask:

Here’s the Jewish Museum in Belmonte (wall and floor signs plus a remarkably succinct history of the Jews):

At a rich guy’s house-turned-museum in Lisbon, a sign celebrating “compliance”:

In Santiago de Compostela, Spain, cathedral museum:

Also in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, a store selling lottery tickets posts on the front window what seems to be an official sign from the state lottery:

In Pontevedra, Spain, the famous church ruins tell visitors to wear a mask and stay 2 meters apart (note also that the church is ruined and has been replaced by what I think translates to “Galicia with Palestine”):

Back in Braga, Portugal, a hotel/restaurant warns customers about the “new” coronavirus:

On landing in Newark, New Jersey:

Are the signs being left up in case mask orders return? People will add Post-Its to the old signs reading “now we actually mean it”?

Related:

• Temporary Permanent Coronapanic

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