A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
A coffee cup from a McDonald’s in Jupiter, Florida (August 15):
(Since I am vaccinated and therefore don’t have to worry about COVID-19 attacking me via obesity, I enjoyed this coffee with an apple fritter and two cinnamon rolls. #TrustScience )
Full post, including commentsOn arrival in Florida, which coincided with a (presumably typical going forward) summer COVID-19 case peak, I noticed that the wearing of face masks was actually more common than in Maskachusetts. This surprised me a little, given that MA has been the land of ordering people to wear masks and FL has been notable for its lack of mask orders. But, of course, given the hysterical media stories about Florida as the worst-afflicted state in the nation (except for all of the other states where the death rate has been much higher (and the COVID Olympics score would be even more in FL’s favor if you adjusted for percentage of population over 65)), it is natural that the more fearful residents and visitors would wish to protect themselves from a raging plague.
What was interesting was how the fearful had chosen to protect themselves. Instead of wearing N95 and P100 masks, as you might expect for people concerned about an aerosol virus, they were wearing simple cloth and paper masks, about as effective as a chain link fence against sand. I wonder if this is partly due to the media and government telling us that bandanas, paper surgical masks, and stylish cloth masks are “protective”. (I am aware that the theory is that if 100 percent of people wear such masks that transmission will be reduced (such that everyone gets COVID a few weeks later than otherwise? What is the point if R0 is not reduced below 1?), but this is seldom explained clearly. Certainly no public health official says, in public, “it is pointless for you to wear a mask if nobody else is.” (though sometimes they say that in private; see “Fauci Said Masks ‘Not Really Effective in Keeping Out Virus,’ Email Reveals” (Newsweek))
Some of the same phenomenon is on display with vaccine propaganda. A guy in his 60s cited Dr. Fauci for his belief that 99 percent of people having problems with COVID-19 are unvaccinated (according to the UK’s far superior medical record system, however, the Delta variant kills without distinction; roughly 60 percent of those hospitalized with COVID-19 in Israel are fully vaccinated). To show his concern regarding COVID-19, he was wearing a cloth mask emblazoned “Combat COVID” …. under his nose.
Full post, including comments“18 US Orthodox Jewish girls kicked off a Delta-KLM flight following a COVID-19 protocols dispute, reports say” (Business Insider):
Eighteen Orthodox Jewish girls were barred from boarding a Delta flight from Amsterdam to New York on Thursday because of a dispute on a KLM flight about COVID-19 protocols, according to reports.
The passengers breached the protocols by taking their masks off to eat their own food outside of the designated mealtimes, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Despite my general adherence to the Swedish level of coronapanic, if I could take over as dictator of the U.S. and issue executive orders, my first order to would to make it illegal for airlines to sell the middle seat, except to families traveling together.
Related:
Full post, including comments“Fauci: U.S. can get control of pandemic by spring if vaccinations rise” (Axios):
NIAID director Anthony Fauci told CNN on Monday the U.S. could “start getting back to a degree of normality” by next spring [of 2022] if more Americans are vaccinated against COVID-19.
Yes but: “There’s no guarantee, because it’s up to us,” Fauci said in his interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, noting that another variant could emerge unless the current surge is brought under control.
Fauci told Cooper that the U.S. should get “some good control in the spring of 2022” if “we can get through this winter and get really the overwhelming majority of the 90 million people who have not been vaccinated.”
Compare to a leading 20th century economic scientist:
Separately, I am curious about the #Science. If we host a raging a coronaplague, won’t most of those who are currently unvaccinated get infected and develop a similar immunity to what they would have received via vaccination? And aren’t we told by the media that the U.S. is currently suffering from Third Wave coronaplague? Why does it matter, therefore, if some people remain unvaccinated?
Same question on the variants… we’ve told that vaccinated people are still getting infected and becoming contagious, but are less likely to be hospitalized. If this is true, why would the production of variants be tightly correlated to the percentage of Americans who are vaccinated? (And even if we could get God to shut down domestic production of variants, wouldn’t variant coronavirus arrive in the U.S. from other countries? We don’t have a more or less sealed border like the COVID-free paradise islands of Australia and New Zealand.)
What if you don’t want to wait 7 months to see if Fauci’s fairy tale comes true? Move to Florida! There is plant growth all the time here, whether you want it or not. By the time you get your move organized, the current COVID-19 wave should be over.
Full post, including commentsWhat if you rejected my harebrained idea, Build downdraft paint booths for K-12 schools?, and #FollowedScience by investing in acrylic barriers?
“Those Anti-Covid Plastic Barriers Probably Don’t Help and May Make Things Worse” (NYT, 8/19/2021):
Covid precautions have turned many parts of our world into a giant salad bar, with plastic barriers separating sales clerks from shoppers, dividing customers at nail salons and shielding students from their classmates.
Intuition tells us a plastic shield would be protective against germs. But scientists who study aerosols, air flow and ventilation say that much of the time, the barriers don’t help and probably give people a false sense of security. And sometimes the barriers can make things worse.
Research suggests that in some instances, a barrier protecting a clerk behind a checkout counter may redirect the germs to another worker or customer. Rows of clear plastic shields, like those you might find in a nail salon or classroom, can also impede normal air flow and ventilation.
(Note the “false sense of security”, which is why the Swedish MD/PhDs didn’t want to order residents to wear bandanas and paper/cloth masks. Masked humans would be more comfortable crowding together and the vulnerable would feel comfortable entering indoor public environments that, in fact, could not be made safe with these primitive tools.)
Maybe the plastic barriers work better to separate diseased K-12 students? “The Science of Masking Kids at School Remains Uncertain” (New York, August 2021) says “no”:
At the end of May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a notable, yet mostly ignored, large-scale study of COVID transmission in American schools. A few major news outlets covered its release by briefly reiterating the study’s summary: that masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation with more fresh air were associated with a lower incidence of the virus in schools. Those are common-sense measures, and the fact that they seem to work is reassuring but not surprising. Other findings of equal importance in the study, however, were absent from the summary and not widely reported. These findings cast doubt on the impact of many of the most common mitigation measures in American schools. Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.
#Science did not evaluate my downdraft paint booth idea, sadly. From the Watertown, Maskchusetts central post office, August 27, 2021:
Related:
Since all that hospitals are generally doing for COVID-19 patients is providing supportive care (i.e., not treatment) and, in fact, patients can do just as well at home with an oxygen bottle (nytimes), it seemed like an obvious idea to look for a way to handle COVID-19 patients somewhere other than a hospital. If nothing else, this would prevent the COVID-19 patients from infecting workers and patients within the hospital. If we could build renal dialysis capacity, why not COVID-19 treatment centers? is my idea from April 2, 2020:
On the one hand, the U.S. health care system is kind of lame. It consumes a ton of money. New York State spends $88 billion per year on its Department of Health, $4,400/year for every resident, mostly just for people on welfare in New York; Mexico spends about $1,100/year across all citizens, including those with jobs. The U.S. health care system delivers feeble results. Life expectancy in Mexico is 77 versus 78 in the U.S. Despite this prodigious spending, New York has completely failed to protect its residents from something that isn’t truly new.
On the other hand, the U.S. managed to build enough renal dialysis capacity to keep 468,000 Americans with failed kidneys alive. This is a complex procedure that requires expensive machines, and one that did not exist on a commercial basis until the 1960s.
…
Of course, one issue is that we had decades to build up all of this renal dialysis capability while we have only about one more month to build COVID-19 treatment capacity. But once we have built it, can we sail through the inevitable next wave or two of COVID-19?
(Looks like I can take credit for predicting “the inevitable next wave or two of COVID-19” (the U.S. is officially in Wave #3? BBC).)
If renal dialysis can be delivered in a strip mall, why not COVID-19 care? Florida has taken a step in the direction that I suggested nearly 1.5 years ago. From https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/monoclonal-antibody-therapy/ :
Note that the locations are not hospitals. They’re not empty strip mall shops or big box stores as I’d expected, but rather parks and libraries (i.e., existing state-owned facilities). But maybe this is because these are the state-run operations rather than private sector. (Also, as far as I have seen, South Florida isn’t in the Zombie Apocalypse retail vacancy situation that Boston is.)
Also, I wonder if the 9-5 hours support my analogy between the Vietnam War and our War on COVID-19. We were in a fight where the fate of democracy all around the world was at stake… but the upper-middle class back home kept playing tennis and golf and President Johnson and Congress kept larding on social welfare programs without considering the cost. Right now we’re in an unprecedented emergency. Our best and brightest technocrats are using advanced technology and trillions of dollars against an enemy that has already killed more Americans than all wars combined… but we will fight the enemy from 9-5. (I don’t think this is completely fair because the Florida state government has treated COVID-19 as a respiratory virus to be managed like the flu, not as an entirely new phenomenon nor as something that can be vanquished by government action.)
Full post, including commentsThis is kind of fascinating… the New York Times, which was a principal cheerleader for lockdowns, now complains about American public schools having been shut for roughly one year… “The School Kids Are Not Alright” (NYT, August 22):
One of the most distressing aspects of the Covid pandemic has been seeing governors and state education officials abdicate responsibility for managing the worst disruption of public schooling in modern history and leaving the heavy lifting to the localities. Virtually every school in the nation closed in March 2020, replacing face-to-face schooling with thrown-together online education or programs that used a disruptive scheduling process to combine the two. Only a small portion of the student body returned to fully opened schools the following fall. The resulting learning setbacks range from grave for all groups of students to catastrophic for poor children.
From the start, elected officials seemed more concerned about reopening bars and restaurants than safely reopening schools that hold the futures of more than 50 million children in their hands.
Could this be the new definition of chutzpah? (replacing the former “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”)
The rest of the editorial is about new ways for President Biden to force every American schoolchild to wear masks for 7 hours per day. Having bravely confronted the Taliban, Uncle Joe will now turn his post-nap attention to K-12ers who are wearing chin diapers, under-nose masks, or running wild:
President Biden took the right approach on Wednesday when he announced that his Education Department would use its broad authority to deter the states from barring universal masking in classrooms.
How much difference will this make? See “The Science of Masking Kids at School Remains Uncertain” (New York, August 2021):
At the end of May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a notable, yet mostly ignored, large-scale study of COVID transmission in American schools. A few major news outlets covered its release by briefly reiterating the study’s summary: that masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation with more fresh air were associated with a lower incidence of the virus in schools. Those are common-sense measures, and the fact that they seem to work is reassuring but not surprising. Other findings of equal importance in the study, however, were absent from the summary and not widely reported. These findings cast doubt on the impact of many of the most common mitigation measures in American schools. Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.
In the realm of science and public-health policy outside the U.S., the implications of these particular findings are not exactly controversial. Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms.
(As with physics, e.g., Katherine Clerk Maxwell‘s equations, the predictions from coronascience will be different depending on the country in which the experiment is conducted.)
Another interesting media phenomenon is cheering for school districts that defy governors’ orders to reopen fully. See “How three school districts are defying state restrictions on mask mandates” (CNN) for example:
The debate over masks in schools has reared its head once again with the new academic year, and a handful of states have taken steps to restrict local officials’ ability to implement their own masking requirements, either through the governor’s office or state legislatures.
These restrictions — made despite guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommending masks for everyone in schools regardless of vaccination status — have prompted showdowns between state officials and some local school districts, who say they’re trying to protect their communities, particularly students who are ineligible for vaccines.
Perhaps most prominently, several Florida school districts have decided to impose mask mandates, defying an executive order by Gov. Ron DeSantis that forbids such requirements and threatens to take away school funding if school districts don’t allow students to opt-out.
But some school districts have taken more methodical approaches, carefully circumventing state restrictions on mask requirements through careful legal maneuvering or apparent loopholes.
The school bureaucrats’ motives are noble. They want to protect their communities and especially the children. The nobility of their motive is one reason that a governor’s order cannot apply to them.
What if, in April 2020, a school district in a rural area of a state had said “we’re reopening our school in defiance of the governor’s shutdown order because we are trying to protect our children’s future and ensure that they have enough education to thrive. We aren’t suffering from a plague the way folks in the big city who ride the subway to their Tinder dates are”? Would the same journalists have praised such defiance?
Full post, including commentsNobody loved my previous modest proposal: Euthanize the unvaccinated?
Here’s another idea for keeping the righteous safe from those who deny #Science… internment camps for the unvaccinated. Korematsu v. United States affirmed FDR’s decision to send Japanese-Americans into camps. World War II was a bad situation, but Japanese-Americans were a minor and speculative threat. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution did not apply #BecauseEmergency.
Consider that COVID-19, at least according to our media, has already killed far more Americans than died in World War II (and the death of an 82-year-old with diabetes and cancer is actually more tragic than the death of a healthy 18-year-old soldier). So the emergency is far more severe right now than whatever we had concerning us in 1942 when Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. This is certainly no time to let purported Constitutional rights interfere with public health.
We are also informed that the unvaccinated are 99.2 percent responsible for spreading coronaplague and for COVID-19 deaths. The unvaccinated are a clear and present danger to themselves and others.
Isn’t the logical next step placing the unvaccinated into internment camps for their own protection? “Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens” (PLOS, 2015):
Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. Here we show experimentally that immunization of chickens against Marek’s disease virus enhances the fitness of more virulent strains, making it possible for hyperpathogenic strains to transmit. Immunity elicited by direct vaccination or by maternal vaccination prolongs host survival but does not prevent infection, viral replication or transmission, thus extending the infectious periods of strains otherwise too lethal to persist. Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.
The only way to keep the unvaccinated safe from the super-COVID that we’re breeding by vaccinating those who were never at significant risk (with an imperfect vaccine) is to place the unvaccinated into camps where they can be isolated from the vaccinated population.
Readers: What do you think of this idea? And could Andrew Cuomo be repurposed to run one of the camps? He has experience ordering the infected into nursing homes. (But if he hadn’t done that, the hospital situation could have been worse; see Our hero’s hospital is full (but not with patients who should be there).) Maybe Cuomo could be tasked with rounding up the unvaccinated and ordering them into the Protection Camps. If that’s too big a task for one person, Cuomo could be in charge of outreach to young unvaccinated women.
Loosely related… a fixer-upper in Bodie, California, in the same dry Eastern Sierra environment as Manzanar.
I’m preparing to teach a class at Florida Atlantic University and one of my talking points will be “look at insurance rates if you want to understand the risk of data loss.” In other words, a risk cannot be unquantifiable if there are insurance companies willing to sell coverage for that risk.
Then it occurred to me that we could calibrate our level of coronapanic to what insurance companies are doing. The media informs us that life expectancy has plummeted in the United States. Healthy young people are being felled by the mighty Delta variant and it is urgent for them to get vaccinated (so that the headline can read “Healthy young vaccinated person killed by COVID-19″? See “Nearly 60% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Israel fully vaccinated”).
Insurance companies do have a health screening procedure for their larger policies, e.g., trying to exclude those with heart conditions, morbid obesity, etc. If COVID-19 is a significant risk for those the insurance companies consider “healthy” then rates have surely gone up, right?
“Has COVID-19 made life insurance more expensive? These researchers say they have the answer” (MarketWatch, December 2020):
The coronavirus pandemic has produced grim numbers that keep rising, like case counts, hospitalization rates and deaths.
But there’s [one] that hasn’t increased this year: the cost of life insurance.
“We find limited evidence that life insurance companies increased premiums or decreased policy offerings due to COVID-19,” researchers said Monday in a study analyzing more than 800,000 life insurance-policy quotes from almost 100 companies between 2014 and October 2020.
University of Kentucky and Illinois State University economists did discover fewer policies being extended to the oldest of potential policyholders, above age 75. But even then, the cost of those premiums did not noticeably increase.
How are we able to sustain our high level of panic if the insurance companies aren’t adjusting their rates?
Related:
Full post, including commentsIn response to Recycle Chinese and Soviet anti-landlord propaganda to bolster support for Rochelle Walensky’s rent moratorium order?, Mitch wrote:
So getting vaccinated and slowing the spread increases one’s chance of having to pay rent. The incentives are not well aligned.
(The government says nobody has to pay rent in an area where COVID-19 transmission is occurring (90 percent of current renters covered). And they say that getting the vaccine will stop transmission (except that it doesn’t, according to the same government). Thus, it would be financially irrational for a community of renters to get vaccinated.)
“New Rule Raises Question: Who’ll Pay for All the Covid Tests?” (NYT) also raises a question of how people will respond to economic incentives:
Among the employers taking a different approach is Rhodes College in Tennessee: It will require unvaccinated students without a medical or religious exemption to pay a $1,500 fee per semester to cover the costs associated with a weekly coronavirus testing program.
To avoid paying $3,000 per year, in other words, an unvaccinated student need only get some card stock to feed into a laser printer and create his/her/zir/their own vaccination record. HIPAA would prevent the school from calling whatever “healthcare professional or clinic site” is written down on the record, right? In any case, on my CDC card, the clinic site information does not contain the full city/state nor any contact info. A college would have to be very motivated indeed to try to determine whether a vaccination card is genuine. The vaxyes service checks the lot number against the date of administration, but presumably this would also check out fine if the student copied the information from a virtuous friend who actually got the shots:
An initial review to ensure a match personal identification and vaccine card, vaccine dates make sense, lot numbers, and possible fraud markers.
If colleges want the unvirtuous to admit their thoughtcrime and unreasonable resistance to government pressure, wouldn’t it be smarter to offer the testing at no charge? Then the only incentive to forge a vaccine card would be avoiding the inconvenience and discomfort of weekly testing, not $3,000 in cash on top of that.
Full post, including comments