Category: Coronaplague

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?

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For whom do we root in the Super Bowl? A Pfizer COVID vaccine shill or a whole city of coerced vaccination, forced masking, and school closure?

by philg

Today is the Super Bowl. On one side we have junk vaccine profiteer Travis Kelce, paid a reported $20 million to promote Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines (recently shown to have zero effect on death rate among those who’ve previously made it through a SARS-CoV-2 infection; see “Effectiveness of a fourth SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose in previously infected individuals from Austria”). On the other side we have a team from San Francisco, renowned for its muscular 1.5-year public school closures, forced masking, coerced vaccinations (meekly accepted by everyone except In-N-Out), etc.

“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government,” Arnie Wensinger, [In-N-Out’s] chief legal and business officer, said in a statement. “It is unreasonable, invasive and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers into those who may be served and those who may not.”

Our neighborhood is having a party on the green where the kids play every afternoon. The HOA will run a couple of cables from the clubhouse/gym and project the game on an inflatable outdoor screen.

For whom should an anti-coronapanic and anti-Covidcrat American root?

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Covidcrats’ war on poor children, quantified

by philg

The New York Times has a story on how the coronapanic shutdowns set American K-12 students back (which is the same as killing them, by COVID standards, since people with less education tend to live shorter lives and any shortening of a life can be considered a “COVID death”). Of course, the headline is about the “surprising rebound” (every action taken by a Covidcrat was actually beneficial when viewed in the proper light).

The article has a side note that the recovery in reading ability has been weaker and then proceeds to present charts only on math test scores, where the “rebound” has been stronger. Your kids’ rebound energy may vary, depending on family wealth (like life expectancy, correlated with education). The poor kids were destroyed:

So the poor kids are now likely to have both intensified poverty and intensified ignorance as factors in shortening their lives (plus the Biden-era flood of migrants, who are correlated with unemployment and incarceration for the low-skilled native-born).

The NYT journalists and editors don’t mention what happened in the one state where school closure was limited by the governor to about 3 months: Florida. Digging into their cited data source, characterized as a “national study” and with analysis “led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard”, it appears that Florida was ignored by the academic worthies (maybe anti-Science DeSantis suppressed data?).

Sweden recently showed a decline in PISA scores, suggesting that keeping schools open is just as bad for kids as closing them.

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Vaccines so good you should do everything that you did before vaccines became available

by philg

January 30, 2024 memo from my mom’s retirement community “wellness coordinator”:

I am sorry to report that we are seeing an increase in the number of Covid cases here at [the home for elderly Democrats in Bethesda, Maryland]. Over the last 3 days we have 11 new cases.
I ask that you try to distance at meals as much as possible, even avoiding larger table settings. I am recommending that Residents/Guests wear a mask in the hallways and other common areas. I see many residents not wearing masks throughout the community, I cannot make anyone take these precautions, but I highly recommend them:
Resume Social Distancing
Wash hands often
Wear masks in common area
The clinic continues to do Rapid Covid testing. If you think you have been exposed or develop symptoms such as headache, nasal or chest congestion, sore throat, or body aches please come and get tested.

Everyone in the building is a Democrat (they all made money via the expansion of the federal government, either as government workers, lobbyists, contractors to the government, lawyers specializing in navigating regulations, etc.) so they’ve all had the maximum number of COVID-19 shots and boosters (not to mention one or two previous cases of COVID-19). In this highly vaccinated and boosted community, what are they told to do? Everything that they were told to do in 2020, before vaccines or boosters were available!

Separately, Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend wants you to get injected with high-quality Pfizer products:

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Lockdown skepticism as the modern French Resistance

by philg

Vinay Prasad, the UCSF heretic against Faucism, recently posted the following on Twitter:

Heading back to SF from Wash U St Louis
It was great to give 4 talks over 2 days.

I hope to make at least 2 available on YouTube, & 3 on plenary session.

It was heartening to talk to so many sensible doctors. When it comes to COVID19 ppl stopped me in the halls to say…

Masking 2 year olds…
School closure…
Vaccine mandates for college kids…
Lockdowns…

were all illogical and horrific public health and they are glad I spoke up

Many agreed but the climate was too hostile for them to speak up

Is it fair to say that this is like the Resistance in France during World War II? Before 1945, nobody was a member and after 1945 it transpired that every French person had been a member of the Resistance?

(I had thought that support for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) was the anti-Resistance in the sense that Palestinians polled prior to October 7 generally said that they supported Hamas, but after October 7 we were informed that no Palestinians supported Hamas. That’s still what one learns from the media and the typical Twitter feed, but, as noted in International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (and a poll result), Palestinians polled in November 2023 supported Hamas (75 percent) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (85 percent).)

Dr. Prasad is a vaccine believer: “People died by delaying the initial vaccine.” I think he means that people died because it took a few extra months to get the vaccine approved and distributed. That’s probably true for Israelis because if the vaccine been approved prior to the 2020 election, Trump would have been reelected and Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and various civilians likely wouldn’t have dared to kidnap, rape, and kill U.S. citizens for fear that the unhinged guy in the White House would push the button on them.

I still can’t figure out why we aren’t able to see the effects of the vaccine on a country-by-country basis, e.g., a lower excess death rate for a country that got vaccinated sooner. See Where is the population-wide evidence that COVID vaccines reduce COVID-tagged death rates? for a question that remains unanswered despite some studies within countries and the faith of otherwise reasonably skeptical people such as Dr. Prasad.

My own skepticism from three years ago… If COVID-19 vaccines weren’t tested on likely COVID-19 victims, how do we know that they will reduce COVID-19 deaths? (the kind of people whom SARS-CoV-2 had been killing were excluded from the vaccine trial):

Let’s have a look at the Moderna FDA paperwork. Only 3 people in the vaccine group, out of 15,208 total, died during the study (approximately 3 months; see pages 17 and 18), which tells you that Moderna picked a much healthier population with a much longer life expectancy than the kinds of people who have been tagged on death with COVID-19 positive test result. (If we assume that a typical COVID-19-tagged death is among those with a life expectancy of 4 years, we would have expected at least hundreds of deaths during a similar study of vaccination among people who really need the vaccination. Note that the Swedish data suggest that 4 years is an overestimate.)

Also three years old, but more fun… #MarkedSafe from Homemade Cookies and Crafts:

Dear Parents and Caregivers,

As we approach the December break, it is a time of year where many families and school staff like to give homemade baked goods and crafts as gifts of appreciation. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic we are going to respectfully ask to put a hold on this practice as a part of our ongoing efforts to keep everyone safe.

We have all worked hard to keep each other safe and to keep our schools open. We appreciate your willingness to find alternative ways to express your gratitude this year. A letter to the teacher with a specific thanks would be greatly appreciated!

(That was at a school for rich suburbanites. It was open with a mask order in force (later they added vaccine coercion). City school systems ostensibly serving the poor in Maskachusetts were still closed and would stay mostly closed until fall 2021.)

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