Category: Coronaplague

This 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?

Nobody 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:

• Wave of death among the elderly bankrupts Social Security

Cities are casting out heretics (i.e., those who haven’t accepted a non-FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine). See “San Francisco to require vaccine proof at indoor venues” (AP):

Worried that the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus could derail San Francisco’s economic rebound, Mayor London Breed announced Thursday that the city will require proof of full vaccination at indoor restaurants, bars, gyms and entertainment venues to help keep businesses open.

“This is to protect kids, is to protect those who can’t get vaccinated, is to make sure that we don’t go backwards, is to make sure that I never have to get up in front of you and say, ‘I’m sorry, I know we just reopened and now the city is closed again because we are seeing too many people die,’ ” Breed said.

The mandate will be more stringent than the one announced by New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio last week. San Francisco will require proof of full COVID-19 vaccination for all customers and staff, while New York mandated proof of at least one dose for indoor activities.

Loyal readers will recall that, earlier in coronapanic, I advocated for RFID chips in the necks of anyone who lives in or visits the U.S. This would enable quarantine-enforcement and contact-tracing via door frame scanners. See RFID chips in the necks of college students and #Science proves that I was right (about the need for RFID chips in humans for COVID-19 surveillance), for example. Combined with a central health care database, as in the UK or Israel, it would be possible to confine heretics and infidels to their homes via simple computer programming.

The government has had 1.5 years to plan, but apparently that wasn’t sufficient to develop a durable proof of vaccination card that would fit in a wallet. And, in any case, if an event has thousands of people coming through the doors, how would checking all of these cards be practical? Consider that someone who got injected in a foreign country might be coming through and will be presenting a card in a language that the people at the door can’t read. Also, shouldn’t those checking for heretics be sure to match the name of the vaccination record and the name on a photo ID? How does that work given that (1) IDs are not required for vaccination, and (2) the undocumented may not have ID documents, but are still entitled to full participation in U.S. civic life.

Separately, woudn’t it be fun to build the door scanner that would check the RFID chip, look up vaccine status in the national database, and light up a huge red blinking “HERETIC” sign while sounding submarine movie buzzers and alarms?

[The above should not be read as an opinion on the vaccine requirement policies. I mean only to question how the requirements can be enforced, as a practical matter, without automation and, therefore, some quick way to scan a human and determine vaccine status.]

Related:

• On the subject of adult politicians, such as Mayor Breed, saying that they’re acting to protect children… “Deaths from COVID ‘incredibly rare’ among children” (Nature, July 2021): A comprehensive analysis of hospital admissions and reported deaths across England suggests that COVID-19 carries a lower risk of dying or requiring intensive care among children and young people than was previously thought. In a series of preprints published on medRxiv, a team of researchers picked through all hospital admissions and deaths reported for people younger than 18 in England. The studies found that COVID-19 caused 25 deaths in that age group between March 2020 and February 2021. About half of those deaths were in individuals with an underlying complex disability with high health-care needs, such as tube feeding or assistance with breathing. [For comparison, about 50 children, 16 and under, die annually from traffic accidents in the UK (source) because the nation has not adopted my speed limit idea.]