Category: Coronaplague

For us numbers nerds, here’s an interesting thread from Daniel Hadas, a medieval Latin professor in London who describes himself as a “Catholic humanist”… “Some remarks on Covid and Sweden.”:

… what matters is that life in Sweden during Covid continued largely as normal.

Lockdowns are deeply unnatural. They do not happen without intense social pressure, whether it be through legislation or propaganda. That pressure was absent, or at least muted, in Sweden.
At this point, it is customary to start arguing about statistics. Anti-lockdowners point to Sweden’s low excess mortality. Pro-lockdowners point to the number of Covid deaths, or to unfavourable comparisons with some of Sweden’s neighbours.
But there is no need to look at statistics to draw the essential conclusion about Sweden’s response. Any innumerate peasant can draw it, and indeed it is only those whose sense-making relies on statistics who can think some more potent conclusion lies hidden in them.
The essential conclusion is: 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘥. Sweden’s health system did not “collapse”, whatever that means. Stockholm does not look like Athens after the plague. Sweden is as Sweden was.

No numbers are needed to prove this.

In other words, numbers nerds like me are useless!

Thus Sweden, like every other jursidiction that did little in response to Covid, gives the lie to all the modellers and panic-mongers who screamed at the public that there was 𝘯𝘰 𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 to shutting down society, that every extreme measure taken was not enough.

Maybe Hadas disdains numbers because he can’t think with numbers? Actually he can!

It is ludicrous to maintain that, via statistics, certainty can be established on the causal link between a country’s anti-Covid measures, and the number of deaths in that country. The system we are trying to analyze is vastly complex: the whole of society, over several years. The potentially confounding variables are therefore countless. The effects being sought are small.

I made the following point back in 2020, but he does it more succinctly and eloquently. The majority of Americans assumed that a society with a lower Covid-tagged death rate was superior to a society with a higher Covid-tagged death rate. But that can be true only with some value judgments.

… behind the policy language of “a country’s response to Covid” lie questions for each individual: Should I lock up my children for 23 hours a day? Should I leave my parents to die alone? Should I not touch another man or woman for months on end? … The answer to these questions is not to be found in numbers.

The Swedish response to Covid was right, because, or in as much as, Swedes answered such questions in the negative. The only true disaster threatening us in the Covid years was answering them in the affirmative.

Maybe more people should study medieval Latin!

And because I’m not a humanist, but a numberist, let’s check the numbers:

and here’s the curve (of excess deaths) for Ireland (picked as a comparison country for Sweden by the NYT):

Our kids watched part of a Miami Heat v Celtics basketball game. 20,000 people gathered indoors, more or less on top of each other, in a sold-out TD Garden (in Boston’s North End). Hardly any fan had a mask on.

From 2020 through mid-2022, preventing deaths tagged to COVID-19 was important enough to Bostonians that they equired 5-year-olds to get injected with an experimental vaccine before going into public places, closed businesses (except “essential” marijuana stores), and required everyone (but especially children down to age 2) to wear masks.

It is the official position of Science that COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent infection by SARS-CoV-2 nor transmission of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. (There are also plenty of other lethal respiratory viruses that can spread when 20,000 people gather indoors.) Why were the Covidians of Boston willing to cram into this arena rather than #StayingHomeSavingLives and watching the game on TV?

The risk of a deadly mutation is increased every time that humans gather en masse. “No, the COVID-19 Pandemic Isn’t Over” (Cleveland Clinic, May 2023):

Simply put: If the virus is circulating, it’s also mutating. As we learned during the delta variant surge, some of those mutations can have devastating consequences.

Same idea in less clinical language:

I remain baffled by folks who say that they haven’t changed any of their Covidian opinions yet they’re doing everything possible to help SARS-CoV-2 spread and mutate. Can someone please explain this?

The Covidians who are still masking and/or staying in their bunkers strike me as more logically consistent. Here is a sampling:

I’m also not surprised when Floridians gather en masse. In 2020 they said that they were still going to attend school, work, and social events despite SARS-CoV-2 so it makes sense for them to be living in the same way now. But why did the Covidians change? It can’t be vaccinations. Nearly 200,000 Americans died with a COVID-19 in 2022, quite a few of them in a state of grace (after having received the Sacrament of Fauci).

(Separately, we were sad that Miami came in 2nd in the NBA Finals, but #2 isn’t terrible!)

Science v2021:

Babies and young children study faces, so you may worry that having masked caregivers would harm children’s language development. There are no studies to support this concern. Young children will use other clues like gestures and tone of voice.

Science v2023… “If Your Toddler Isn’t Talking Yet, the Pandemic Might Be to Blame” (Wall Street Journal):

In an analysis of nearly 2.5 million children younger than 5 years old, researchers at health-analytics company Truveta found that for each year of age, first-time speech delay diagnoses increased by an average of 1.6 times between 2018-19 and 2021-22. The highest increase was among 1-year-olds, the researchers said.

Note the headline: it is the faceless “pandemic” that is to blame for these developmental delays. It is not the Covidcrats who ordered 2-year-olds to wear saliva-soaked face rags all day every day.

In case the above tweet is memory-holed:

A cousin is a Scientist (i.e., a physician). He is married to a woman with some Deplorable and Deplorable-adjacent relatives. He recently described getting into a fight with the in-laws in late 2021. He and his wife spent some time in their secure all-Democrat enclave with a filthy unvaccinated 19-year-old cousin visiting from disgusting Florida. The girl appeared to be in perfect health. Shortly afterwards, the wife came down with some symptoms consistent with COVID-19. He then waxed expansively to the Deplorable side of the family regarding his regrets that he had allowed this filthy unvaccinated girl within 100′ of his wife. The wife did not speak to her relatives for more than a year and the rift caused by this discussion remains open in 2023.

Our conversation:

• me: “Did [wife] actually get COVID from this girl?”
• Dr. Cousin: “No. She tested negative and it never developed into anything more than a slight cold.”
• me: “Have you considered apologizing to the in-laws now that Science says COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent transmission?”
• Dr. Cousin: “It’s true that the vaccines were designed to prevent infection and transmission. They were designed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. But if everyone had taken them as soon as they were available, they would have stopped transmission.”

In other news, Science told the Mayo Clinic to drop the masks:

At the same time, Science told the Covidcrats in New York City to keep the masks:

(The depicted young people are Following Fauci by wearing cloth masks against an aerosol virus?)

By including “thank you for keeping your fellow New Yorkers safe”, I think the Covidcrats of NYC are saying that cloth masks stop transmission, but vaccines don’t (since the requirement to wear a simple mask applies even to those who have accepted the Sacrament of Fauci).

We are informed that Scientists have reached a consensus regarding the temperature of Planet Earth on January 1, 2100, yet those who Follow the Science cannot agree on masks-on vs. masks-off?

In case the above tweet is memory-holed, a screen shot:

I’ve long yearned for a state-by-state map that has similar “excess death” data to what Our World in Data delivers for countries (no-lockdown no-mask-order Swedes holding steady at 5%, substantially lower than the countries celebrated for their police- and military-enforced lockdowns).

Courtesy of heretic Stanford Medical School professor Jay Bhattacharya, I finally have one! It’s from the cheerfully named web site “US Mortality”. Here’s a link directly to the map:

In my opinion, the map tends to show that the Church of Sweden MD/PhDs were correct when they predicted, back in March 2020, that government policies in the West would have at best a small effect on total death rate. How does the map show this when different states are in different colors? SARS-CoV-2 likes to kill those of us who are carrying extra pounds. Here’s a CDC map of adult obesity:

(No data for Florida? You’d think those CDC folks would love to be on South Beach and Marco Island rating body shapes!)

To my eyes, the obesity map explains most of the pattern that we see in the excess deaths map. (You’d also want to look at percent of population over 65; a state that is all young people should have an extremely low rate of both COVID deaths and excess deaths.)

A few highlights…

California with its Science-following fully-masked schools-closed vaccine-papers-checking population suffered 22.4% excess deaths compared to 20.4% in Science-denying irresponsible Florida (inherently vulnerable due to 21% of population over 65). Considering how many Californians were paid to stay home (either working as members of the laptop class or not-working as members of the welfare class) and considering that Californians are slender (CDC map) and young (only 15% of population over 65), this might be the worst performance among all states. Colorado was a close second (slender, young, and a 22.8% excess death rate).

The geniuses at University of California, Berkeley celebrated Vermont, Alaska, and Maine as “the three most effective states in responding to the coronavirus pandemic last year”. How did the Scientific prediction from March 2021 work out? Without a city of substantial size, Vermont had 21.5% excess deaths, almost the same as New York (19.1%). Alaska was off-the-charts bad at 27.7%. Maine turned in a reasonable 16.3% performance, so long as you didn’t mind lockdowns, mask orders, school closures, and vaccine coercion (through May 13, 2022).

Kristi Noem was pilloried for refusing to follow Faucism in South Dakota, but her state had 17.1% excess deaths despite a high percentage of obese adults (see CDC map above).

Kentucky’s Democrat governor was celebrated for “halting the spread of COVID-19” while the Republican fool running Tennessee was slow to order lockdowns (The Guardian). Tennessee ended up with a lower excess death rate. (Possibly explained by a higher obesity rate.)

Not counting Hawaii, Maskachusetts and New Jersey had the lowest rates of excess deaths. Some of this is probably explained by the fact that people in MA and NJ are virtuously thin (CDC map). There are also a large percentage of laptop class folks in both states who were able to stay home in their suburban bunkers. But maybe I will be forced to admit that closing Boston schools for more than a year, ordering people to wear cloth face rags on quiet suburban streets, and demanding that children show their vaccine papers were effective measures!

(People who aren’t cisgender white heterosexuals might nonetheless want to avoid Massachusetts, home to “the country’s second-highest number of white supremacist propaganda incidents in 2022” (considering the small population of the state, this is off-the-charts bad per capita). “Hate in the Bay State: Extremism & Antisemitism in Massachusetts, 2021-2022” (ADL):

Amidst increasing nationwide threats to the LGBTQ+ community, Massachusetts has also witnessed a spike in anti-LGBTQ+ activity, including waves of harassment against Boston Children’s Hospital, drag performances and LGBTQ+ events. And as the numbers of antisemitic incidents continue to rise across the country, Massachusetts was no exception. According to ADL’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, it was the sixth most affected state in the country in 2022.

Massachusetts saw a dramatic rise in antisemitic incidents, according to ADL’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. In 2022, the number of incidents increased 41% over 2021 levels…

ADL documented 34 white supremacist events in the state in 2021 and 2022, including protests, meetings, flash demonstrations, banner drops and marches.

In 2022, ADL documented 465 instances of white supremacist propaganda distribution across the state, an increase of 71% from 2021 (272).

In May 2022, a student in Waltham brought a knife to school, threatened his Jewish classmates and held the knife to the throat of a Jewish classmate.

Since 2021, the Nationalist Social Club, also known as NSC-131, has grown rapidly to become one of New England’s most active white supremacist groups; their presence is particularly robust in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts is a hotbed for anti-LGBTQ+ extremism, which increased nationwide in 2022

Patriot Front is a Texas-based white supremacist group with members all over the country, but they have become increasingly active in Massachusetts because of the state’s ties to the founding of the United States.

The last point strikes me as odd. Wouldn’t the Patriot Front need to find enthusiastic supporters in a state in order to be “increasingly active”? The history of the state doesn’t seem relevant.

The mention of Waltham made me nostalgic. When we lived in adjacent Lincoln I used to offer neighbors whose lawns sported Black Lives Matter signs a free trip to Waltham in our minivan: “You can have a look at some actual Black people.” This did not make me as popular as I expected.)