We visited a friend’s 12,000 square foot house the other day in an all-white suburb of Boston (what I learned: don’t buy a 12,000 square foot house unless you want to pay about $75,000 every time it needs paint). After passing all of the Black Lives Matter signs put out by his rich white neighbors (they adore low-income BIPOC but will keep their one-acre zoning minimum, thank you very much!), we got on the state-run highway. During the 40-minute drive, every 5 minutes we passed a state-run sign urging us to get vaccinated. The person reading the sign, quite possibly a driver all by him/her/zir/their self, is told to visit a web site and begin a cumbersome appointment process, We also passed a couple of state-owned state-run rest stops in which health-promoting food, such as donuts, are available.
Wouldn’t it make more sense if the signs said “Get vaccinated right now at the next rest stop”? If the government wants people to do something unpleasant and, in the case of younger folks, quite possibly against their personal interest (since the median age of a COVID-19 death in Massachusetts was 82), why not make it easy? Add an incentive too: “free coffee, donut, and vaccine, next right”.
Given that the government itself owns these highway rest stops, why isn’t there a vaccine tent at every one?
(The Florida Department of Transportation runs similar signs, but the messages that we saw in April were all related to driving, e.g., “check your tire pressure” or “road work scheduled”, rather than coronapanic.)
Andover parents Kristin and Scott are speaking out on behalf of their daughter. She along with two of her friends are freshmen at UMass Amherst. A picture posted on social media of the three friends not wearing masks outside was handed over to the university and that has landed them in serious trouble.
“There was a photo sent to the administration of these girls outside off campus on a Saturday. This is why they lost a whole semester of their schooling,” Kristin said.
Since their suspension, the students have been studying remotely at their homes. However, last week they were cut off from virtual learning. They were not allowed to take their finals, so parents say their kids’ semester was a total loss, both financially and academically.
“That negates this whole semester $16,000 of money and they have to reapply for next semester. But they missed housing registration,” Scott said.
UMass Amherst released a statement saying: “Students received a number of public health messages this semester that emphasized the importance of following public health protocols and the consequences for not complying, and those messages were also shared on UMass social media channels.”
The Instagram post that betrayed their refusal to observe all of the rituals of the Church of Shutdown all of the time:
(Maybe they can be replaced with masked BIPOC?)
Given the depicted weather it seems that these three might well have been vaccinated at the time the photo was taken.
Students on campus say the rules have been tight this year but for good reason. “Maybe a little harsh but like I understand it because you’re not supposed to be doing that,” one student told WBZ Friday night.
The spirited hippies of the 1960s who said “Don’t trust anyone over 30” have been succeeded by college students happy to do whatever Dr. Fauci (age 80, i.e., pretty close to the median age for a COVID-19 death in Maskachusetts) tells them to.
Related:
College Today: Exercise by going to your twice-weekly COVID-19 test (“For the foreseeable future, all UMass Amherst classes will take place remotely, and students in dormitories and off-campus housing are instructed not to leave their residences except for meals, COVID testing twice per week and medical appointments.”)
I wonder if this proves what Dr. Jill Biden, M.D.’s colleague Dr. Jeff Goldblum said: “Life Finds a Way.” The non-Chinese Wuhan-edition coronavirus was perhaps not a good fit for hosts in India, which is why, adjusted for population size, not much happened during Coronawave #1 (TIME: “health experts had predicted that India, with a population more than four times the size of the U.S., would quickly become the world’s worst-hit country”). But now the virus, with approximately 30,000 base pairs, has evolved.
The Seychelles has suffered the world’s biggest surge in coronavirus cases – despite nearly 70% of its population having received a vaccine.
On Monday, the latest date for which figures are available, the archipelago’s seven-day case rate per one million people was 1,480, the highest in the world. It compares to the Maldives, the second highest, with 827 cases per million.
This comes despite 69.19% of people on Seychelles having at least one dose of a vaccine.
Health minister Peggy Vidot said: “Despite all the exceptional efforts we are making, the COVID-19 situation in our country is critical right now with many daily cases reported last week.”
Seychelles, with a population of about 98,000, currently has 1,068 active cases.
The BBC has reported the country’s news agency as saying a third of those active cases are among people who have received two vaccines.
Why is this interesting to those of us who aren’t planning to visit the Seychelles? I think it is a good window into what life in the Shutdown States (e.g., Maskachusetts, New York, California) will be like this coming winter. Everyone will be vaccinated and therefore the successful strain of SARS-CoV-2 will be whichever one can work its way around a vaccine-stimulated immune system.
Speaking of India, it does look as though the trend is following Farr’s laws (bell curve) and that the curve is flattening (either through heroic government and human efforts, if you think humans are smarter than viruses, or because this is how viral infections have worked for the past 3.5 billion years):
My latest thinking about coronaplague is that the Vietnam Wars, viewed from the American perspective, continues to be the best analogy. Technocrats in public health bureaucracies and state governors (except in FL and SD!) assure us with facts, figures, and charts that victory is within reach. We can be a few months away from victory for 10-15 years.
A Facebook friend (she’s around 30 years old) psychoanalyzes those who love COVID shutdowns:
Maybe the reason people born in the 60s-90s are the biggest pro-lockdown people is that it was the “grounded generation,” where parents trying to limit or stop corporally punishing their children instead would keep them indoors, only doing necessary activities, until they’d learned their lesson — longer time periods when the misdeed was larger.
All the “fun spreads the virus” crazytown rules that people have accepted with absolutely no scientific basis for their efficacy, from curfews to live music bans to hair salon closures, align very well to what your parents would stop you from doing when you were grounded.
There’s a lot of free-floating guilt in our society and very little way to dislodge it effectively. Perhaps many of the most devoted lockdowners felt, in their heart of hearts — whether they realized it or not — like humanity needed a good grounding and to not come out until we’d changed our attitude, mister.
Her friend (actually named “Karen”!):
Yes. I think this is absolutely spot on.
From Elizabeth:
And so much of it is about making people change their attitude. People who wear masks that say “I’m only wearing this because I have to” still get treated like shit, as though they weren’t wearing masks at all. Because they dare to disagree with the status quo. It’s not enough to wear the mask… you have to love it too.
Laurel:
Hmm younger generations get banned from specific gadgets ie phone or PlayStation, so they’re being primed to associate entertainment media access with compliance.
The psychology industry has so far provided more literary interest than practical assistance and the above is certainly consistent with that history going back to Freud. (I.e., the above might not be right, but I thought that it was interesting to contemplate.)
The Biden administration, siding with some world leaders over the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, came out in favor of waiving intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines.
The United States had been a major holdout at the World Trade Organization over a proposal to suspend some of the world economic body’s intellectual property protections, which could allow drugmakers across the globe access to the closely guarded trade secrets of how the viable vaccines have been made. But President Biden had come under increasing pressure to throw his support behind the proposal, drafted by India and South Africa and backed by many congressional Democrats.
If we’re comfortable with borrowing and spending $trillions (i.e., printing money) every few months during coronapanic, why not print a little more money and buy, rather than steal, the rights to the vaccines that we think should be free and open-source? Surely there is some price at which at least one of the vaccine makers would sell voluntarily. Pick the one that is easiest to manufacture, buy the formula, put it on a web site, and pay the inventors additional $$ to help anyone who wants to make it.
From earlier today, “Federal judge vacates CDC’s eviction moratorium” (The Hill): A federal judge on Wednesday vacated a nationwide freeze on evictions that was put in place by federal health officials to help cash-strapped renters remain in their homes during the pandemic. … “The question for the Court is a narrow one: Does the Public Health Service Act grant the CDC the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium? It does not,” Friedrich wrote [full text].
Same question for that one. Why did the government, which can print as much money as it wants to (and where such printing has no cost, according to an MIT economist), need to steal from individual landlords? If the CDC wanted everyone to have a rent holiday, why didn’t the CDC pay the rent with borrowed/printed money?
I was chatting with a friend last night. His son is a high school student in the New York City public school system. What’s the experience, 14 months into coronapanic and four months after teachers became eligible for vaccines? “It’s two days per week, two hours per day,” he explained. “But there is no teaching. It’s like a study hall. We just talk to our friends.” What about the rest of the week? “We are online for two hours per day.”
Separately, though the son may not have learned much academic content since March 2020, he is fully educated on Mask and Shutdown Karenhood. He is a big believer in the efficacy of masks for the general public (#Science proves they work; practical trials in the Czech Republic cannot contradict #Science) and is happy to follow the dictates of Governor Cuomo and Dr. Fauci. What’s his personal experience with COVID? After a year of cowering and being masked any time he was outside of the family apartment-bunker… he got COVID. He, his sister, and his mom all had slight cold symptoms (the father had been vaccinated at this point).
Here are some photos from a May 1, 2021 COVID-safe fly-by, up the Hudson River at 1500′ in a friend’s Cirrus SR22T (with A/C!):
An Explanation of Benefits (EOB) has been posted to your *** Plan online member portal. To log into your account and review your explanation of benefits (EOB):
Go to https://****.com/login
Enter your Username (email address) and Password
Click on the Claims tab at the top of the page, choose claims. Member claims are listed by date, with the most recent claim appearing at the top of the list. To view an EOB, click on the claim you want to view, then click on the pdf icon under View EOB.
(name hidden to protect the guilty)
So an Explanation of Benefits is available from my vaccine shot? Let’s actually log in…
Even if the promised Explanation of Benefits did not exist, there was a page devoted to my Moderna shot. Two claims hit the insurer’s computer systems, one for $0 (the vaccine itself? Which Donald Trump arranged for the government to pay for?) and one for administering the vaccine:
The actual price is $33.50 to deal with me? But why bill $67? This is one of those rare situations in which there is no way to cheat the uninsured by hitting them with 2X or 5X the “negotiated” price that 98% of customers pay.
(Separately, I’m not sure how $33.50 makes this profitable for the clinic. They paid someone to build a web site where I could register and schedule, paid for a receptionist to check me in, paid an RN to ask me some medical questions, paid for a place where I could sit for 15 minutes after the vaccine, paid for people and systems to send this $67 bill to the insurance company, etc. Unless the Feds are giving them additional money for each shot, why do they want to be in this business?)
I wonder if the goal of the American health insurance system is to make our federal tax system seem logical, clear, and simple. Happy Tax Freedom Day to everyone! (filing is extended this year to May 17 #BecauseCoronapanic)
Note that Tax Freedom Day, on which you stop working for the government (pay all of those government workers who sat home for the past year!) and begin to work for yourself varies from state to state. It is May 3 in New York, April 23 in Maskachusetts, and April 20 in California. It was April 5 in Texas and April 4 in Florida. Before World War I, Tax Freedom Day was in January:
As best historians can tell, the American colonists-turned-rebels-and-traitors were paying roughly 2 percent of their total income for all taxes. So they achieved Tax Freedom about one week into January while complaining that being British subjects was oppressive (the Brits, meanwhile, were shelling out huge $$ to fight with “Indians” on all of the borders).
How about going forward? If Presidents Biden and Harris spend $1.9 trillion every few months on coronapanic Band-Aids, would the “deficit inclusive Tax Freedom Day” move to mid-summer, or, for those here in MA, into foliage season?
Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.
Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.
Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.
This is exactly what the Swedish MD/PhDs said 15 months ago, i.e., that coronavirus would be with us forever so it wouldn’t make sense to do anything that you wouldn’t be willing to do forever (e.g., close schools).
Let’s look at Sweden versus the eager mask-and-lockdown adopters such as the Czech Republic and the U.S. (varies by state):
Note that New Jersey, if it were its own country, would be #1 worldwide in COVID-19 death rate. New York and Maskachusetts are just behind NJ (chart). The front page of the NYT reminds me, based on IP geolocation, that right now is a great time to panic:
Everyone old/vulnerable is vaccinated and yet there is a “very high risk”?
Related:
April 17, 2020 interview with Johan Giesecke, former chief scientist of the European CDC. (summary: there will be convergence in death rates among countries with different policies; don’t lockdown unless you want to lockdown permanently; his advice was based on the assumption that Americans and other non-Swedes would object to denying children a full year of school)
a follow-up with the Swedish MD/PhD, April 16, 2021 (he admits that he was wrong about how eager Americans and others would be to surrender their liberties and also that he thought COVID-19 would spread faster; he also admits that Dr. Donald Trump, M.D., Ph.D., was better at predicting vaccine availability)
A month ago a friend bet me that, due to vaccines, Maskachusetts would be “back to normal” today and that the governor repealing his mask order (from among at least 66 total orders issued under a state of emergency) would be the determinant of normality and who would buy lunch at his favorite COVID-unsafe indoor Thai restaurant.
In taking the “this is normal going forward” side of the bet, I pointed out that a mutual friend had said the same thing back in March, i.e., that the vaccine would get us back to normal soon. He’d been hiding in his suburban bunker for over a year when he said that. I said “You believed them when they told you it would be 14 days to flatten the curve and then you could go back to normal. You believed them when they said if people would wear masks for a couple of months that would end coronaplague. You believed them when they told you we just needed one more shutdown. Now you believe them when they say that the restrictions will end once everyone is vaccinated?”
My primary evidence against residents of Massachusetts wanting to be unlocked is observing rich suburbanites, i.e., the folks who have enough money to support politicians with donations. They’d been fully vaccinated weeks earlier and were still wearing masks when walking outside at least 100′ from the nearest human. When queried (at a masked distance) they expressed a personal fear of contracting COVID-19, since they’d heard that the vaccines are not 100 percent effective. I ran into a (masked) mom who was walking her dog. She’s been a Shutdown and Mask Karen from Day 1, but complained that her son, enrolled in an elite private high school, wasn’t allowed to participate in crew because he is also in drama and the drama teacher did not want him exposed to additional COVID risk.
Maybe young people living in crummy apartments in poor neighborhoods wanted to be unlocked, I argued, but they have no political voice.
Meanwhile, the local economy is plainly very different from what it was. A lot of small businesses remain closed (as of October 2020, 33% of Boston’s small businesses were shut, 42% of those in hospitality; overall number of people employed is down about 15 percent in Boston versus 0 percent in Miami and actually up in Tampa (click on “Metros”)). The ones that are left are usually too short-handed to serve customers in what we would have considered a proper manner. There are no Ubers, something I also noticed in other cities, but only higher-cost Uber XLs. When queried, an Uber XL driver said “a lot of people can make more on unemployment so it isn’t worth driving regular Uber anymore.”
Most of the “experts” quoted by the New York Times and similar have been spectacularly wrong regarding COVID-19. But we make no claim to expert credentials and it is fun to try prophecy. What are folks’ predictions regarding state shutdown and mask levels over the coming 12 months?
I’ll go first: My best guess regarding the future is that it looks like the past. So the states that are masked and shut now will be masked and shut going forward while the states that are unmasked and open now will be unmasked and open going forward. Due to the fact that coronavirus is seasonal (and a med school professor friend reminds me that we don’t know why flu is seasonal so we probably won’t figure out why COVID comes in waves either), I expect variations around this theme. Summer 2020 was a quiet time here in MA (see NYT chart below) so I would expect the virus and restrictions to relax in summer 2021 and both to come back in the late fall.
Masks are advertised as a cost-free intervention, so I’m thinking that Maskachusetts, for example, might have a “mask mandate” (it’s been a year and the Legislature cannot get organized to pass a “law”?) through at least 2022, though the previous statewide unconditional outdoor mask requirement has just recently been relaxed to “when you’re not able to maintain a 6′ distance”. Masks will be sold as a cost-free way to prevent the virus from returning. When the virus actually does return, the Mask Believers will say that the masks delayed the return and/or reduced the peak of the return.
(From a physician friend: “The flu is gone because everyone is sticking to the rules but COVID is rising because no one is sticking to the rules.”)
Let’s put our predictions here and check them at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from now! Bragging rights for whoever gets closest!
Update: At a Bat Mitzvah today (about 15 people in a room designed to hold 100+), a photographer wanted to get a picture of four 13-year-old healthy slender girls. They refused to take off their masks for an indoor photo. He managed to get them outside. They refused to take off their masks for an outdoor photo.
Related:
A Silicon Valley friend: “I am so Woke that I want to change my pronouns to Karen/Karen.”
Earlier this month I saw a father and daughter flying a kite on the Cambridge Common. It was about 5 pm, windy enough to fly a kite, and nobody was within 100′. Both were wearing masks. A little later I went to a friend’s backyard for dinner around a propane fire pit. Except for me, everyone there was vigilant about being masked, including for kids down to age 5 or so. They were concerned about COVID-19, but as with airline travel, the mask protocol made them feel safe enough to leave their bunkers and gather closer than 6′.
But then some people took off masks in order to eat and/or drink. And some people took off masks in order to hear or be heard better. By the end of the evening, nearly every pair of guests had spent a fair amount of face-to-face unmasked time. If they hadn’t had faith in masks, I think they would either have refused the invitation and/or been more careful about staying farther apart.
Speaking of the virus thriving… I know a married couple who spend nearly 24/7 at home together. The husband caught what seemed like a bad cold, got tested for coronavirus, and tested positive. The wife also felt sick, got tested (two-day delay to schedule then three-day delay for result; cost $105 at Emerson Hospital even though testing is supposed to be free due to some fine print (she didn’t have a primary care doc’s referral)). Her test came back negative. She got another test a few days after that, this time from Regional Express, which actually was free. The free test came back within 24 hours… negative. Neither lost taste or smell. Do we guess false positive for the husband? False negatives for the wife due to not enough virus camping out in her nose? They both caught respiratory infections at the same time, but they were different infections?
(I tried to reach the wife every day during this ordeal, offering encouragement such as “We dug a grave for you in th backyard in case you need it.” Most of the time she wasn’t available. I asked, “If you’ve got COVID [presumptively from the husband’s test] and you’re stuck at home, how can you be unavailable?” She responded that she had been in Zoom meetings. “You have COVID and aren’t taking a sick day?” She replied, “Sick days are for wimps.”)
In case you object that it doesn’t make sense for laypeople to diagnose other laypeople via FaceTime, here’s what Herodotus had to say….
The following custom seems to me the wisest of their institutions next to the one lately praised. [The Babylonians] have no physicians, but when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease themselves or have known any one who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; and no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is.
It worked 2,400 years ago, so it should work today!
