Category: Coronaplague

Readers may recall that I’ve been an advocate for preventing airlines from selling middle seats during coronapanic, rather than relying on masks to block the spread of germs (see Coronavirus will breathe life into my two-thirds-full airline idea? (3/23/2020) and Science proves that I’m right: airlines should leave the middle seat empty (4/16/2021)).

As I type this, a friend is on a 100-percent packed flight back to Boston from a ski vacation. He’s never been especially concerned about COVID-19, so his voluntary leisure travel does not make him a hypocrite (see If at least 50 percent of us are Covid-righteous, how did hotels and flights fill up with leisure travelers?).

Here are his instant messages, enabled by Delta’s WiFi ($5 fee):

• A woman next to me on the plane has been sneezing into her mask for 4 hours now. She takes it off, blows her nose profusely and puts it back on.
• The man across from me is coughing all the time.
• You can hear people sniffling.
• I can identify at least four different people sniffling one after the other.
• It is a COVID symphony
• String quartet maybe
• The cello just took off his mask and blew his nose
• Somebody just sounded like he snorted a quart of snot and then coughed five times loudly

Contagion, by the brilliant director Steven Soderbergh, leaves HBO Max tonight. Most of the friends who scolded me for lack of coronapanic orthodoxy and weak adherence to Faucism are still in their crowded vacation destinations, often in foreign countries where they can harvest exotic variant SARS-CoV-2. I know that, by contrast, readers of this blog follow the science and therefore will be home, and certainly wouldn’t wish to participate in a New Year’s Eve superspreader event such as a party without adequate vaccine papers checks, let me suggest watching the movie!

(And, remember, that “Fauci says to cancel New Year’s Eve parties, as millions struggle for normalcy nearly two years into pandemic” (Fox, 12/27): “But when you’re talking about a New Year’s Eve party, we have 30, 40, 50 people celebrating. You do not know the status of their vaccination, I would recommend strongly stay away from that this year.”)

Though both are zoonotic, there are some differences in the movie disease compared to COVID-19. The movie disease doesn’t seem to spread as well as a pure aerosol, but rather is best transmitted via surface contact. The movie disease has a death rate of about 30% for previously healthy children and young adults, i.e., lining up pretty well with what my friends who read the New York Times and listen to NPR believe.

The movie should have been required viewing for all Americans in March 2020. People would have learned what #Science believed at the time about COVID-19, i.e., that it was spread by fomites and that it was critical to understand R0. The movie depicts shortages, mostly peaceful activities by citizens (i.e., looting) and, contrary to what happened with COVID-19, health care workers abandoning their jobs.

The movie also shows citizens resigning themselves to a yearlong lockdown in order to avoid the 30% chance of death.

The movie shows an alternative medicine fad, roughly analogous to what we saw with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. It misses the “often in error, never in doubt” phenomenon that we’ve seen from regular medicine with COVID-19. Doctors, especially CDC doctors, are essentially infallible and advice informed by #Science never has to be revised.

*** SPOILER ALERT *** There are some anachronisms from our point of view. The film was made in 2011, when identifying as Black or as a “woman” (as the term was understood then) was sufficient for being a brilliant scientist. There was no need to also be part of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. Despite not being 2SLGBTQQIA+ (and, in fact, although there are sexual relationships referred to, I don’t think that there are any 2SLGBTQQIA+ characters), the brilliant female scientist is sufficiently brilliant to develop a one-and-done vaccine. *** END OF SPOILER ***

To everyone who will be safely at home watching TV: Happy New Year!

To everyone who will be attending parties: We’ll see you in Hell!

Related…

“Delta and Omicron are coming to your party”: Authorities ask Illinois citizens to vaccinate and mask up” (Illinois News Live):

As New Year’s Eve approached, Ejike told everyone to expect uninvited guests from their gathering: Delta and Omicron, a variant of the virus that is currently prevalent in the state. The word Omicron seems less deadly, especially given that Delta is still a prevalent strain in Illinois, isn’t a reason for people to relax, Ezike said. ..

“Omicron and Delta are coming to your party, so you need to think twice,” said Governor JB Pritzker. “People obviously should pay special attention.

What does the expert on a disease that attacks the obese look like? Here’s Governor Pritzker:

A view from the front:

Let’s check “the curve” for Illinois:

From a reader:

Our usual Mexico hotels are sold out, so we decided on Florida instead. We are going to be [in Hollywood, Florida] Dec 20-27. If you are up for it we can grab coffee.

My response:

I don’t know how everything is sold out when 50 percent of the country says that they’re doing everything possible to avoid COVID-19. Why is there even a single Democrat on a by-definition-optional leisure flight?

Readers:

1. We are informed by #Science that vaccines don’t prevent COVID-19 from spreading (not to be confused with the #Science that informed us that vaccines do prevent COVID-19 from spreading and would “end the global pandemic”).
2. We are informed that, therefore, even a vaccinated group of people will generate new infections
3. We are informed that more infections leads to more mutations
4. We are informed by #Nature that, over an 8-week period, a group of people wearing masks and interacting has at least 89 percent of the chance of becoming infected with COVID-19 compared to an unmasked group (i.e., in the long run, both the unmasked group and masked group will both get infected)

In light of the above knowledge, why wouldn’t leisure trips, which inevitably mix humans and thus generate infections/mutations, be exclusively the province of the Deplorables? Deplorability afflicts less than half of the American public, according to our popular vote. Maybe airline flights can still be full if the airlines cut service. But how can the typical hotel be more than 50 percent occupied?

For Americans who follow science, COVID-19 is a serious enough problem that schools have to be closed, 3-year-olds must be forced to wear masks, etc. But the 50+ percent of us who follow science don’t think COVID-19 is a serious enough problem to refrain from crowding into a 100-percent-full flight to Mexico, crowding into airport lines on both ends, and crowding into a hotel restaurant for 7 nights?

[What happened with the coffee invitation? I scolded the reader for not following Fauci and reminded him/her/zir/them (the reader identified as a “man” the last time that we were together, but I don’t want to assume non-fluidity of gender ID) that every meeting between humans is another chance for SARS-CoV-2 to infect and mutate.]

“I’m vaccinated, boosted and have no health problems. I’m traveling for the holidays” (CNN, 12/21, by Jill Filipovic):

Now that vaccines are widely available in the United States, it’s especially frustrating that we are still held hostage to a pandemic fueled by the people who refuse to get vaccinated and by the policy choices of wealthy nations not to treat this pandemic like a global pandemic and vaccinate the world.

Like millions of people the world over, I’m taking a hard look at my own risk (including the risk I pose to others) and making careful choices about how and when to grab back some aspects of pre-Covid-19 life. Travel is often necessary for my job; it’s also one of my greatest joys and a requirement to see many of my loved ones, family members and closest friends.

I masked in the airport and on the plane and have avoided indoor gatherings and unmasked indoor activities since my arrival.

The top photo in the article shows people in a jammed airport. Most of them are wearing cloth masks, which CNN’s top medical expert (“former president of Planned Parenthood”) described as “little more than facial decorations” on 12/20. On 11/4, CNN reported that the righteously vaccinated are at least half as likely to get infected, and therefore support a mutation, as the vaccinated. As of 7/3/2021, it was “Unvaccinated people are ‘variant factories,’ infectious diseases expert says” (CNN), with the article pointing out that every infection (a phenomenon that we now know is common in the vaccinated) is an opportunity for the virus to have a mutation party: “‘All it takes is one mutation in one person,’ said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and immunologist at Boston College.”

So… if Mx. Filipovic has been reading CNN, he/she/ze/they should know that the only way for him/her/zir/them to #StopTheSpread is to #StayHomeSaveLives. Yet he/she/ze/they is traveling for leisure, thus inevitably incurring a dramatically higher risk of infection compared to if he/she/ze/they had stayed home.

Also, in Covid news, a Trump-hating friend in NYC just canceled his family’s luxury trip to the Caribbean. He felt moderately sick and, in any case, needed a negative PCR test result to enter the wife’s chosen beachy paradise. After $10 trillion in federal spending on coronapanic combined with the wise leadership of Cuomo and his girlfriends (New York State Department of Health budget comparable to Russia’s active duty military budget), the family’s best testing option was waiting in line in the cold for 3 hours on the Upper West Side. (His test came back positive, so that’s a ton of money down the drain. I still can’t figure out why so many people are willing to incur this kind of risk on both sides of an international trip.) As with Mx. Filipovic, though, I can’t figure out why he planned this trip in the first place. If he wants to support President Biden’s #science-driven approach to ending the global pandemic, why won’t he stay home?

Related:

• Perfect illustration of risk compensation rendering COVID-19 vaccines ineffective (the Progressive Bay Arean goes to a wedding in New Orleans)
• California Karen hosts a 200,000-person mass gathering (Super Bowl in Los Angeles)

From this week’s trip to Tampa and back, the Florida Air Museum’s catalog of terrible engineering ideas (Lockheed XFV, XF2Y Sea Dart supersonic seaplane):

The lifeboats on American Victory serve as a reminder that not every policy that appears effective will be effective:

Massive plastic Christmas Trees Of Color in Tampa:

Adults used to compete in trying to give as much as possible to children, bragging about sacrifices of time, effort, and money to ensure that children had a wonderful time and a bright future.

At least in Maskachusetts, things shifted in 2020. The state was a wide-open playground for adults, with “essential” liquor and marijuana stores open to record-breaking sales and Tinder receiving record usage. The bureaucratic grinches, however, came up with almost daily schemes for taking things away from children: schools (closed for over a year in Boston), playing with friends, after-school sports, playgrounds, freedom to breathe during sports (mask requirements both indoors and out), birthday parties with more than a handful of guests (illegal home gathering), etc.

Is it fair to say that adults are still competing in the Grinch Olympics? From “As Young Kids Get Vaccines, a ‘Huge Weight’ Is Lifted for Families” (NYT, 11/25/2021):

When the pandemic came for Georgia, Lauren Rymer had to make a snap choice: her mother’s safety or what she believed was best for her young child.

She locked down her family for the better part of last year, living with her mother, Sharon Mooneyhan, who has multiple sclerosis, and protecting her by keeping her son Jack, 5, out of kindergarten to avoid routine household exposure to Covid. “I didn’t want my mom to miss out on being with her only grandchild,” Ms. Rymer said.

So school was scrapped for mushroom hunts in the forest between her work Zoom calls, Legos and an intergenerational exploration of a backyard chicken coop. The upside was that she and her mother would not have to live in fear of a life-ending snuggle at bedtime.

But grandma had multiple sclerosis and that means instant death if infected with SARS-CoV-2, right? From the National MS Society:

Current evidence shows that simply having MS does not make you more likely to develop COVID-19 or to become severely ill or die from the infection than the general population.

Every parent claims to be altruistic, which conflicts with the conclusions of labor economist Claudia Goldin in “Parental Altruism and Self-Interest: Child Labor Among Late Nineteenth-Century American Families”:

Nonaltruistic behavior by parents was pervasive. Even among families with positive assets, child labor was common…

The labor market evidence suggests that parents were willing to accept large reductions in their own wages to secure employment in areas having abundant child labor opportunities. They were implicitly willing to sell the labor services of their children very cheaply, indeed at a rate that suggest they placed very little value on the foregone schooling (and future income) of their children. … Neither did they permit children to retain their earnings for future use. The children were simply worse off…

The empirical results suggest that parents did not have strong (economic) altruistic concerns for their children. … the family provided little in the way of offsetting physical asset transfers (in the form of gifts and bequests) to compensate children for their lost schooling and future earnings. The increased family income was apparently absorbed in higher current family consumption.

I.e., the parents wanted money to spend on themselves. (Modern edition: family court entrepreneurs will never accept money to be placed in trust for a child’s adult use, but instead want cash that the adult plaintiff can spend right now (in West Virginia, however, child support of more than $24,000 per year per child generally will go into a trust).)

Is it fair to say that the first two years of 14 days to flatten the curve have brought out the most Grinch-like behavior among American adults for at least the past 100 years?

Separately, Merry Christmas! Floridians go all-out decorating with winter-themed China-made outdoor items. Icicles, North Pole signs, snowflakes, snowmen, etc. are all on display as one walks around in shorts and a T-shirt in the 78-degree sunshine. Below is a rare example of a geographically appropriate Christmas display (the alligator), juxtaposed with what is typical (note You Know Who in the background behind the polar bear).

Today is the day that my friend, who woke up with a fever on Thursday, December 16, would have been tested for COVID-19 had he been willing to drive to Lynn (about a one-hour round trip).

Here’s a screen shot from last week when I logged into the Project Beacon site to see what was available at what is advertised as the highest capacity testing facility in Massachusetts (state-funded and organized by the best and brightest):

Results aren’t ready for 1-2 days, which means if he’d gotten his test today at 2:10 pm, he would have gone a full week from having symptoms to getting a test result.

(The beauty of Massachusetts is that people can go from spending hours in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles to days waiting for an appointment at the government-organized COVID-19 testing facility and conclude “Our lives would be much better off if the size and role of government were expanded.”)

How’s the impatient patient doing? (instead of waiting for what would have been his test appointment today, he drove one hour round trip and to the closest CVS that had an at-home test kit in stock; he got a positive result the evening of 12/16)

From a previous post:

• Day 1 of COVID for my friend: fever of 102 (chronicled in Why is it still almost impossible to schedule a COVID-19 test? (at least in Maskachusetts) Note that he had been feeling less than 100% for a few days prior, so this technically could have been considered Day 3)
• Day 1, evening: temperature down to 100. [discussion about Regeneron]
• Day 2, morning: Right now about 100F in each ear. Throat doesn’t hurt as much, coughing subsided. Although now that i wrote that it subsided i needed to cough. I can feel the vaccine working.
• Day 2, afternoon: Gone. It was pretty much gone this morning.

To this we can add the following:

• Day 3, morning: I am perfectly fine – just some snot in the nose. No temperature.
• Me: Denial is one of the classic symptoms of Long COVID
• Day 4, morning: A little congestion in the nose. Temperature completely normal: 98.4 in both ears.
• Through today: still some lingering congestion, thus proving my Long Covid theory