Category: Coronaplague

Cure worse than the disease: locked-down Americans became alcoholics

by philg

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 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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Escape jury duty with a positive COVID test result?

by philg

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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Why do homeless Americans tend to wear surgical masks?

by philg

I’ve spent a few weeks in downtown Fort Worth, Texas recently. It’s a lively city center with visual art, music, outdoor events in Sundance Square, restaurants, etc. The terrain is well-suited to cycling and there is a bike share system with reasonably good coverage for places that a visitor might want to go. The ethnic mix reasonably reflects recent immigration trends. Spanish is commonly spoken and there are usually at least a few Arabic speakers out and about (the women covered in hijabs, at least). I’m not fitting in that well due to (a) lack of cowboy hat, and (b) saying “hello” to folks encountered while out walking (a sign of mental illness in any true city, but standard practice in our corner of Florida (pedestrians and drivers wave to each other in Abacoa, Jupiter as well if any kind of eye contact is made)).

Texas seems to be home, so to speak, to plenty of homeless people. Nothing like the zombie army you’d find in a California city, of course, but a shocking prevalence compared to suburban or small town Florida. I had remarked on this a few years ago to an Uber driver in Austin, Texas. He was from Afghanistan and I asked him what the situation in Kabul was. He explained that nobody was homeless in Afghanistan because relatives would take in and care for anyone who couldn’t take care of himself.

Outdoor maskers are uncommon in Fort Worth. It’s nothing like my recent stay in Sherman Oaks, California, where I needed to walk only 1 block from my hotel to meet an outdoor masker. However, 100 percent of the outdoor maskers that I’ve encountered in Fort Worth seem to be unhoused (formerly known as “homeless”). I don’t remember seeing unhoused people, even in California, wearing surgical masks prior to coronapanic. Why are the unhoused more enthusiastic today about the protective possibilities of a surgical mask than the general population is? (To be sure, only a small minority of the unhoused in Fort Worth wear masks.)

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How did people react to your COVID goggles yesterday?

by philg

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:

“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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When will we feel safe enough to remove our coronapanic signs?

by philg

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:

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:

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:

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Americans Airlines speaks to the Followers of Science

by philg

On a recent American Airlines flight from PBI to DFW, the flight attendants played a prerecorded announcement to the Followers of Science: “If you’re wearing a face covering, please remove your face covering before putting on an oxygen mask.”

Other than learning what the world’s smartest people needed to be told regarding a depressurization event, what else did I learn from American Americans? That Charlie’s Angels is an Asian American Pacific Islander story:

DFW isn’t quite as bad as I remembered, at least in one terminal:

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Coronapanic and landlords

by philg

An aviation connection owns 250 apartments in the middle of the country. I asked him whether he’d lost a lot of money during coronapanic when nobody had to pay rent and he was barred by order of the CDC from evicting anyone. “No,” he said. “Nearly all of my tenants kept paying and, in fact, many of them applied for and received government assistance to pay their rent. I already had 20 percent Section 8 vouchers and ended up with about half of my income coming from the government.”

He took the opportunity to refinance his properties at a 2 percent rate and also substantially raised the rents that he was charging (i.e., his costs fell and his revenue soared). He estimates that his property doubled in nominal value between 2019 and today. He raised rents by 50 percent.

Who else got rich? “The local car dealer [in his small town] bought a Phenom 300 and a Bell 407” (that’s $15 million worth of aircraft; the Phenom 300 is made by Embraer in Brazil)

What else has been working for him? Open borders. “I love having Latinos as tenants,” he said (sorry about the hateful failure to use proper English (“Latinx”), but it is a direct quote), “but sad to say that the English-speaking tenants get upset if there are too many Latinos in their complex. They complain about Mexican music being played and noise. I don’t want to be racist and exclude people on the basis of being Hispanic because it makes other tenants upset.” Has the rising cost of labor eroded his increased profit margin from the 50 percent rent boost? “No,” he replied. “White people have pretty much stopped working, but there are plenty of hard-working Latinos. I wish that I spoke Spanish because then I could do a better job explaining what I need.”

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Schools and Science intersect to form absenteeism

by philg

In order to protect 8-year-olds from a virus that was killing Americans at a median age of 82, Science said that it made sense to close public schools for between 3 and 18 months, depending on the degree to which Democrats controlled a city/state. (Adults continued to mix freely at alcohol and marijuana stores, on Tinder, in quickly-reopened restaurants, etc.) This was almost certain to result in premature deaths many decades from now due to the correlation between years of education and life expectancy. However, it looks like the loss of years of education has continued beyond the 18 months that schools were closed in the Cities of the Righteous. From the New York Times, March 29, 2024:

The article is primarily based on “Long COVID for Public Schools: Chronic Absenteeism Before and After the Pandemic” (American Enterprise Institute, January 31, 2024).

Lengthy school closures were primarily perpetrated by politicians and bureaucrats who claim that racial equity is their first priority, but it turns out that the school systems that suffered the worst long-term consequences were “majority nonwhite”:

Florida isn’t mentioned in the article, but if we dig into the underlying PDF report, it turns out that Governor DeSantis forcing teachers to return to work in the fall of 2020 was minimally helpful. Chronic absenteeism went from about 20 percent to about 31 percent in Deplorably Open Florida, very similar to Virtuously Closed New York’s numbers.

Maybe the answer is that even a few months of school closure communicates to about 10 percent of American families that school isn’t important?

Could we use Science to solve this created-by-Science problem? If half a year off school (Florida) was just as pernicious for attitudes toward attendance as 1.5 years off school (New York) maybe we should eliminate the summer break from school for at least two years to re-instill the habit of going to school every day. If unionized teachers refuse to work more than 185 days per year, we could either hire some summer-only teachers or distribute the summer days off more evenly around the calendar so that teachers worked the same number of days. We could have multiple three-week breaks during the year, for example.

Who else doesn’t bother showing up to school since coronapanic introduced them to the joys of being home M-F with the Xbox? Teachers! NYT:

Teachers typically receive paid sick days and a small number of personal days. Over the 2022-23 school year in New York City, nearly one in five public schoolteachers was absent 11 days or more, an increase from the previous year and from before the pandemic. In Michigan, roughly 15 percent of teachers were absent in any given week last school year, compared with about 10 percent in 2019, researchers found.

Related… from Science itself (the CDC), which said “yes” to booze and “no” to schools (and maybe the CDC itself was imbibing when it told everyone to wear cloth masks as PPE against an aerosol virus):

In the case the tweet gets memory-holed:

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Swedish heretics refuse to abandon their heresy

by philg

From a couple of economists in Sweden, proving that sometimes peer-reviewed research must be rejected, “The Covid-19 lesson from Sweden: Don’t lock down” (Economic Affairs):

… countries with more stringent lockdown measures did not experience a lower death rate, as might be expected a priori.

Sweden, with an average lockdown rate of 39 for 2020–21, shows a weak cumulative GDP growth of 3 per cent during the two years 2020–21. Compared with an average annual pre-pandemic growth rate of 2.6 per cent, the Swedish economy lost approximately one year of growth. Countries with a higher lockdown rate lost between one and three years of economic growth.

There is a clear correlation between the degree of lockdown and the budget deficit for 2020–21. It shows the same pattern that emerged in Figure 4 for the relationship between lockdowns and GDP growth: the more restrictions, the deeper was the downturn in the economy and, consequently, the larger was the budget deficit.

In Sweden, with a lockdown indicator rate of 39, the total fiscal cost measured in this way was less than 3 per cent of GDP. In other words, Sweden managed to meet the European Union’s Maastricht criteria of no more than a 3 per cent budget deficit even at the height of the crisis. The corresponding budget deficit figure for the UK, with a lockdown rate of 50, was 27 per cent; for Italy, with a lockdown rate of 60, it was 17 per cent; and for France, with a lockdown rate of 48, it was 16 per cent.

Countries with weak public finances before the crisis experienced a further deterioration during the pandemic. After the pandemic, France had a higher public debt-to-GDP ratio than Greece did in 2009 at the start of the European debt crisis. In Sweden, the debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of 2021 amounted to 36 per cent, just slightly above the 35 per cent ratio before the pandemic. By the end of 2022, the Swedish debt ratio had fallen to 34 per cent and it is expected to fall below 30 per cent in the coming years.

By being less restrictive than other countries, Sweden was able to combine low cumulative excess mortality with relatively small losses in economic growth and continued strong public finances.

Here’s an annotated version of one of the figures from the article:

In other words.. the Swedes still think that they’re right!

Where is the non-Nobel Nobel prize in economics for Anders Tegnell and his not-so-merry band of MD/PhDs who said, in February 2020, “you might as well get used to SARS-CoV-2”?

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Temporary Permanent Coronapanic

by philg

From a Bloomingdale’s department store, February 19. 2024 (entering Year 5 of coronapanic):

Temporarily out of service. We’re sorry, this water fountain is not in use, due to enhanced safety measures in place to protect our customers and colleagues!

(Who will protect them against dehydration? This is a store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, where daily high temperatures routinely exceed 90 degrees in the summer (possibly lethal, according to the New York Times). Bloomingdale’s is managed from Manhattan so the policy against toxic water fountains may come from the COVID experts of New York.)

What I enjoy here is the use of the term “temporarily” regarding a policy that is likely about to hit its fourth anniversary.

What else did they have in the store? Proof that inflation is a figment of your imagination.

A set of sheets is only $1,100.

Why was I in a department store rather than at Costco or Walmart, you might reasonably ask? I was helping my mother get set up as a Floridian. Mom is devoted to patterned sheets, as celebrated in the groovy 1960s and 70s. The style today, however, seems to be plain sheets and a pattern on the comforter (perfect for Palm Beach County when the overnight lows are in the 50s and the public school teacher serves the children hot chocolate (yes, this happened!)). Compared to pre-2020, the department store experience has been transformed. We couldn’t find any salespeople in Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, or Nordstrom. If we saw something on display we couldn’t find packaged versions nearby in the sizes that we wanted. What we were able to do was take pictures of labels and then find the items online at macys.com. Here’s a fun one that is perfect for South Florida (admittedly, even folks who’ve been here 20 years have never seen an alligator in our neighborhood):

If it is impossible to hire people to sell and stock shelves, should the future department store just be a display of stuff that you order online and receive within a few days? Kind of like an IKEA, but without the attached warehouse?

Related:

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