Category: Coronaplague

Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children

by philg

TL;DR: We decided that the west coast was too old, that Miami was too congested, and that Jupiter, Florida, specifically the MacArthur Foundation-planned Abacoa section, was perfect.

Prior to 2020 the political control of a state or town had little impact on day-to-day life, with the exception of custody, alimony, and child support law. Republicans and Democrats might disagree regarding tax rates, government spending, zoning regulations, etc., but not about whether it should be legal to leave one’s house, go to work, attend school, breathe without a mask, interact with other humans without getting an injection, etc. After 2020, however, it is unclear why anyone would choose to be part of a political minority. For a Democrat, being in a Republican-run state means risking death from respiratory viruses that aren’t being controlled with Science (lockdowns, mask orders, coerced vaccination, 12-18-month school closure). For a Republican, being in a Democrat-run state means that one’s children aren’t guaranteed an education (though they might get surgery and show up at the breakfast table sporting a different gender), that one might lose what had been First Amendment rights, e.g., freedom of assembly, and that one will be surrounded by virtuous yard signs and bumper stickers.

For a Republican escaping a Democrat-run state, it doesn’t make sense to move to a place with a state income or estate tax (see Effect on children’s wealth when parents move to Florida). So the search process starts with intersecting the states that remained relatively free during coronapanic and income-tax-free states, which yields South Dakota, Alaska, Florida, and Tennessee. South Dakota is an awesome state for domestic asset protection trusts (along with Nevada, this is where America’s billionaires keep their trusts, but the ultimate protection may not work unless you live in SD or NV) and thus is a good place to preserve wealth from potential plaintiffs. It is a lovely place to spend the summer, but if you have school-age children you might not enjoy being stuck there December through February. With apologies to friends in Anchorage, that goes double for Alaska! Now we’re down to Florida and Tennessee. Nashville, for example, is reasonably nice in January, with average highs of 48 degrees, but Tennessee is more of a working state than a fun/retirement state. If you’re going to move, why not move to a playground? And Miami, oddly enough, despite being much warmer in winter is actually slightly cooler in the summer than Nashville. The WalletHub ranking of Coronafreedom may not give the full picture for Tennessee, whose governor declined the Central Tyrant job and did not order everyone to wear masks. However, unlike in Florida, where the governor forbade local tyrants from imposing mask laws with fines, the Tennessee governor simply delegated tyranny to counties: “Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has not been a statewide mask mandate in place in the state of Tennessee, however, local authorities were given the authority to issue mask mandates within their own jurisdictions.” A state with empowered local tyrants is not exactly free! Thus, as so many fleeing Wall Streeters have discovered, it all comes down to Florida.

This is a report on my own January/February exploration trip to Florida in the Cirrus SR20...

Gainesville. Beautiful campus for University of Florida, but not a beautiful or vibrant town. Apparently when the smart young people graduate they go somewhere else. Particularly unsuitable for aviation enthusiasts as the (great) airport is on the opposite side of town from the nicer real estate (tucked away in suburban developments that have a minimal relationship to Gainesville). At least with respect to Covid-19, the students seem smarter than the (cowering out of personal fear) Ivy League to whom I’ve talked recently. “We’d behave differently,” one sophomore said, “if we lived with our grandparents, but we don’t. There is no reason for us to be afraid of getting the virus and we live more than 100 miles away from our older relatives. Classes are mostly remote, so the only people that we interact with are other young people who aren’t at risk.”

Guess which department has the ugliest building? Note the students hunting for shark’s teeth in a nearby park and the selfie park at the FBO.

Sarasota. Folks with kids will want to live on the mainland rather than one of the islands (great for beach access, but the traffic can be slow getting on/off for the various services and activities that kids need). The neighborhood around the Southside Elementary School is probably the most desirable, with Camino Real being the best street and anything east of the Tamiami Trail being cheaper. Overall, however, Sarasota is more geared around the retired than those of school age. Great airport shared by air carriers and general aviation, about 13 minutes from the Southside school.

The Ringling (world’s only fine art and circus museum!) and the latest condo development for oligarchs (from my friend’s boat).

View from my friend’s apartment and his neighborhood from the air on departure…

Naples. A nice walkable downtown area. Attractive architecture. World-class restaurants at Manhattan prices (if restaurants in Manhattan were open!). There are some young people in town, but they’re apparently mostly tourists. As with Sarasota, dominated by the retired. In fact, the saying goes that “People retire to Sarasota so that they can visit their parents in Naples.” Great airport, 10 minutes from downtown, that is used only for general aviation. It was so busy in late January that jets parked on the ramp were interlaced like jets in a hangar (i.e., it wouldn’t have been possible to get one out of the middle without an hour or two of tugging).

Miami. The ultimate party town now that Los Angeles and New York have locked themselves out of the running and probably even before. “I can never get any work done here,” said one of the private equity guys I was with. KTMB is the preferred airport and it is a long haul from Miami Beach (nearly 40 minutes without traffic). KOPF is a little closer, but nobody seems to like it. If you aren’t going to hit the clubs and don’t have to be in the city for work, why put up with the congestion, traffic, and high real estate prices?

The Wynwood Walls (decluttered now that they’re charging $10 to get in), breakfast cereals for the Age of Coronapanic (Franken Fat, Cap’n Corn Starch, Obesie Os from Killkidds), transportation on which it would be good to get Dr. Fauci’s opinion regarding safety, and a group of #ScienceDeniers gathering at a rooftop club.

On the way out of town, the illegal-to-operate cruise ship pier:

Key West. We went there in a Cirrus Vision Jet to visit a Massachusetts friend who is passionate about kiteboarding and expanding government so that wise Democrats can accomplish more. As it happens, however, he lives in Key West 183 days per year and thus escapes Massachusetts state income and estate taxes. It will be folks other than him who pay for the bigger government that he advocates. Key West is so small that I think it would be tough to find specialized teachers, coaches, doctors, etc. for the modern-day helicopter parented child. The airport has a short-ish runway (5,000′) and is monopolized, with associated monopoly rates, by Bill Gates’s Signature Flight Support (jet fuel for private jet owners who are as concerned as Bill G about climate change).

Fun fact: Pan American World Airways began here. Cuba started out 90 miles away, but it is getting a little closer in spirit with every $1.9 trillion government spending bill… Found the Icon A5 on the ramp at KTMB (my flight in the A5 at Oshkosh).

Wellington Aero Club. West of Palm Beach, right up against the $25 million horse barns of America’s billionaires, you can open your garage door and taxi your twin-engine turbojet out to the 4,000′ private runway (FD38). Good public schools. Great country club for golf and tennis next door. I had a nice time here visiting a friend whose wife is a serious horse rider, but I wouldn’t want to be this far from the beach (30-40 minutes, depending on the specific beach). (See “How a Sleepy Florida Town Became the Horse Riding Capital of the World” and the 30-horse single-family stable below) My friend in Wellington (also a passionate advocate of bigger government who is careful to spend 183 days in the tax-free Land of the Deplorables!) suggested Abacoa, within Jupiter, Florida, as the best family location.

Jupiter: Palm Beach-Fort Lauderdale-Miami can be thought of as a single city, completely jammed, and with the automobile as the primary means of transportation. Juno Beach and Jupiter are the first communities on the north side of this megacity (though the Census Bureau considers them still part of the Miami metro area). The smartest folks in Germany, i.e., those who run the Max Planck Institute, picked Jupiter as the location for their one and only U.S. research lab (in neuroscience). If you’re in Jupiter you’re within a 1.5-hour drive of almost anything that you might need, e.g., the Miami International Airport and a nonstop flight to Europe, but 99 percent of needs can be handled locally. (Disney World is 2:20 away by car.) A tennis coach at the Jupiter Ocean & Racquet Club, a world class facility for (unmasked!) young learners and also great for adults, echoed my friend in Wellington regarding Abacoa, a MacArthur Foundation-created New Urbanism planned-but-not-gated community. “The schools for Abacoa are better than for the wealthier/closer-to-the-beach areas of Jupiter,” he said. [We later learned that the neighborhoods near the beach tend to be older and seasonal; not good for kids looking to play after school.] He pointed out that many of the nation’s most successful people, who could live anywhere they chose, had chosen to live in and around Jupiter. In a state that is blessed with magnificent airports, Abacoa/Jupiter got the short end of the stick. Palm Beach International is about 20 minutes away and the prices are almost reasonable due to the fact that there are three FBOs on the field. On the other hand, nobody is ever going to build T-hangars at KPBI. The North Palm Beach airport, F45, is roughly the same driving distance and it does have T-hangars, but the runway is a little short (4,300′), there is no control tower, and it is a monopoly Signature location (Jet A at $7.21/gallon; compare to $3.70 at Fort Lauderdale Executive (KFXE))

If you didn’t think inequality was as bad as the media tells you… (on the ramp at KPBI; 1960 Debonair and a newly certified Gulfstream G600):

Just south of the airport…

Abacoa. This is a planned “new urbanism” community, a bit like what you might have seen in the Truman Show movie (Seaside, Florida). It is an artificial town in that it is possible to walk/bike to a “town center”, which does have some good restaurants and a coffee shop, but the critical services, such as supermarket and Home Depot, are in strip malls on the edges or across a major road from Abacoa itself. Without traffic, it is an 11-minute drive to a beautiful dog-friendly beach.

That’s what I was able to learn in a two-week trip (including flying the Cirrus up and down the East Coast, which takes about 13 days, depending on the weather…). Measured by whether it is legal to walk out your door without a mask on, go to work, open the doors of your business to customers, send your children to school, let you children enjoy an unmasked after-school activity, etc., every part of Florida offers more freedom than New York, Massachusetts, or California. For someone accustomed to the suburban Northeast, the small yards and tightly packed houses seem like the biggest negative. In the parts of

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The silver (and gold) lining of COVID-19

by philg

COVID-19 isn’t necessarily bad. From the NYT:

Lenox Hill, one of the city’s oldest and best-known hospitals, repeatedly billed patients more than $3,000 for the routine nasal swab test, about 30 times the test’s typical cost.

“It was shocking to see a number like that, when I’ve gotten tested before for about $135,” said Ana Roa, who was billed $3,358 for a test at Lenox Hill last month.

Ms. Roa’s coronavirus test bill is among 16 that The New York Times reviewed from the site. They show that Lenox Hill arrives at its unusually high prices by charging a large fee for the test itself — about six times the typical charge — and by billing the encounter as a “moderately complex” emergency room visit.

In one case, a family accrued $39,314 in charges for 12 tests this winter, all taken to fulfill requirements for returning to work or school. In another, an asymptomatic patient walked in because she saw the banner outside and wanted a test after traveling. Her insurance was charged $2,963.

Patient bills show that at least one additional hospital owned by Lenox Hill’s parent group, Northwell Health, has charged emergency room fees to patients at a mass testing site.

Overall, a system in which a river of cash flows from Washington, D.C. favors those already big enough to hire the smartest people to navigate the system. “Some of America’s wealthiest hospital systems ended up even richer, thanks to federal bailouts” (Washington Post):

As the crisis crushed smaller providers, some of the nation’s richest health systems thrived, reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in surpluses after accepting huge grants for pandemic relief

Last May, Baylor Scott & White Health, the largest nonprofit hospital system in Texas, laid off 1,200 employees and furloughed others as it braced for the then-novel coronavirus to spread. The cancellation of lucrative elective procedures as the hospital pivoted to treat a new and less profitable infectious disease presaged financial distress, if not ruin. The federal government rushed $454 million in relief funds to help shore up its operations.

But Baylor not only weathered the crisis, it thrived. By the end of 2020, Baylor had accumulated an $815 million surplus, $20 million more than it had in 2019, creating a 7.5 percent operating margin that would be higher than most hospitals’ profits in the flushest of eras, a KHN examination of financial statements shows.

Like Baylor, some of the nation’s richest hospitals and health systems recorded hundreds of millions of dollars in surpluses after accepting a substantial share of the federal health-care bailout grants, their records show. Those included the Mayo Clinic, Pittsburgh’s UPMC and NYU Langone Health. But poorer hospitals — many serving rural and minority populations — got a tinier slice of the pie and limped through the year with deficits, downgrades of their bond ratings and bleak fiscal futures.

Wealthy hospitals also benefited because HHS used a broad definition of lost revenue. If a hospital earned less than in the year before, or simply less revenue than it had budgeted for, it could chalk up that difference to the pandemic and apply the relief funds to it.

When government gets bigger, only the big can thrive? If so, that’s a good argument for buying the S&P 500. If Congress adopts all of Presidents Biden and Harris’s proposals, government is on track to consume more than 50 percent of GDP. A big publicly traded company is going to be able to tap into the new veins of taxpayer gold much more effectively than a small business. Even if the U.S. economy stagnates, the big companies can thrive as they get a larger share of the fixed or shrinking pie.

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Maskachusetts: #Science says your backyard BBQ is illegal, but cram 150 people into a tent is okay if someone pays

by philg

An event planner whom we know says that she’s been super busy late. “People had planned backyard weddings, but they’re illegal so they’re going to pay to hold them here.” Her venue is a McMansion-sized house and a big tent with sides that come down during inclement weather. “I can have up to 150 people in the tent. It doesn’t make sense to me since a lot of these people have yards that are huge, but it is good for business.”

From the Maskachusetts State of Emergency page, which links to an appendix to Order #63:

Related:

  • Marie Antoinette of Covid: “Why is it a maximum of 10 people,” our hostess wondered, “regardless of the size of the house? Shouldn’t it be adjusted for square footage?”
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Coronascientists are the modern Aristotles?

by philg

Since the 17th century (see Francis Bacon), people who call themselves “scientists” have been using the scientific method:

  1. Make an observation.
  2. Ask a question.
  3. Form a hypothesis, or testable explanation.
  4. Make a prediction based on the hypothesis.
  5. Test the prediction.
  6. Iterate: use the results to make new hypotheses or predictions.

As previously documented here in this weblog, the “scientists” on whose advice politicians have ordered lockdowns, masks, etc. have consistently failed at Step 4 (making predictions). This failure, though, has been mostly invisible to the public due to the lack of media interest in going back a few weeks or months and comparing prediction to reality. In the rare cases when a false prediction, e.g., that the Czech Republic would have a low death rate due to masks and shutdown (in fact, the country ended up at #1 in the Covid death rate Olympics), is revisited it will be a “scientist” explaining how someone did something during the intervening period and that this action (or inaction) explains the current situation.

Is it Science when you can’t make accurate predictions, but you can tell a convincing tale? Yes! We just have to go back to 350 B.C. and Aristotelian physics. A lifted rock falls toward the earth because it is seeking its natural level. Air bubbles rise because the air seeks its natural place around the earth.

For concreteness (and remember that concrete seeks its natural level underneath highways!), let’s look at the official newspaper of those who #FollowScience. In “‘Life Has to Go On’: How Sweden Has Faced the Virus Without a Lockdown” (New York Times, April 28, 2020), the obvious comparison countries to Sweden were Ireland, Britain, and France. Once additional data are received, and it turns out Britain and France have higher COVID-19-tagged death rates than Sweden while Finland, Norway, and Denmark are outliers, the same scientifically minded folks will assert that Finland, Norway, and Denmark are the only sensible countries to which to compare Sweden and that it would be absurd to use France or Britain as a comparison. We did the same thing domestically. In March 2020, the experts predicted that locked-down Massachusetts would end up with a far lower death rate than Florida (and we should have, since only 14 percent of our population is over 65, compared to 20 percent in Florida). Now that data are available and Florida has suffered only 62 percent of the MA death rate, it is plain to scientists that comparing MA to FL would be nonsensical.

(The article has a funny-in-retrospect section:

From the first signs of the pandemic, the Swedish Public Health Authority decided that a lockdown would be pointless. “Once you get into a lockdown, it’s difficult to get out of it,” the country’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, said. “How do you reopen? When?”

California teachers’ union answer: never! To the Swedes who say “Life Has to Go On,” the majority of Americans say, resoundingly, “No, it does not!”)

A more recent example… “Iowa Is What Happens When Government Does Nothing” (December 3, 2020, Atlantic, owned by someone who got rich by marrying Steve Jobs and now advocates for unlimited migration into parts of the U.S. other than her own Palo Alto neighborhood):

The story of the coronavirus in the state is one of government inaction in the name of freedom and personal responsibility.

“In a lot of ways, Iowa is serving as the control group of what not to do,” Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, told me. Although cases dropped in late November—a possible result of a warm spell in Iowa—Perencevich and other public-health experts predict that the state’s lax political leadership will result in a “super peak” over the holidays, and thousands of preventable deaths in the weeks to come. “We know the storm’s coming,” Perencevich said. “You can see it on the horizon.”

Experts expect to see a spike in COVID-19 cases in the state roughly one week from now [December 10], two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday. That spike will likely precede a surge in hospitalizations and, eventually, a wave of new deaths—maybe as many as 80 a day, Perencevich, the infectious-disease doctor, estimates. Add Christmas and New Year’s to the mix, and Iowans can expect to see nothing less than a tsunami, Perencevich says.

What actually did happen? From the NYT:

Cases peaked on November 13. Given that “cases” are subject to much human whim, e.g., whether people are fed into PCR machines or not, let’s look at deaths:

What happened to the predicted “tsunami” of death after Christmas and New Year’s gatherings? Deaths peaked on December 15. a month after the “case” peak and, thus far, have failed to reach that level again.

Readers: What do you think? If Aristotle can be a great “scientist” despite an inability to predict projectile trajectories or planetary orbits, is it also reasonable to call the coronascientists great despite their inability to predict the likely impact of coronavirus?

Related:

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How many people will die from having sat around the house for a year?

by philg

What is the most sensible scientifically informed response to a virus that attacks the obese and unfit? Sit at home next to the fridge for a year. Could this kill us? “Inactivity Drives 1 in 14 Deaths Globally, New Data Suggest” (Medscape, March 31):

The high cost of a sedentary lifestyle just became a bit more evident ― a new global study shows that inactivity drives up to 8% of noncommunicable diseases and mortality.

Physical inactivity, defined as engaging in less than 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity per week, is estimated to have caused 7.2% (95% CI, 5.4 – 9.0) of all-cause deaths and 7.6% (95% CI, 6.1 – 9.3) of cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths, according to investigators led by Peter T. Katzmarzyk, PhD, associate executive director for population and public health sciences, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Note that the study was done using 2016 data. See “Physical inactivity and non-communicable disease burden in low-income, middle-income and high-income countries” (BMJ)

What about the expectations that Americans would die from the disruption in non-Covid health care ordered by governors? “The Untold Toll — The Pandemic’s Effects on Patients without Covid-19” (NEJM, June 2020) had anecdotes, but no numbers. “Surge in Advanced Cancers Follows COVID-19 Into 2021” (MedPage Today, March 31, 2021) offers some survey data:

Two-thirds of radiation oncologists said new patients more often have advanced-stage disease at their initial clinic visit as compared with prior years. Consistent with data from multiple other sources, three-fourths of respondents said patients have skipped routine cancer screening, and two-thirds said COVID has interrupted treatment for existing patients.

“What we have learned one year into the COVID-19 pandemic is that radiation oncologists continue to see the harmful effects of the pandemic on our patients,” said Thomas J. Eichler, MD, chair of ASTRO’s board of directors, during a webinar to discuss the survey findings. “The data are clear that people with cancer are facing additional burdens in these difficult times.”

(bonus points to this doc for including the phrase “in these times”)

The same publication reminds us that feeling safe is not just about Covid-19. The director of abortion services at a clinic in Bangor, Maine writes “It’s Time for You to Be More Inclusive — Yes, You.”:

Small steps to support transgender patients go a long way in their healthcare

I recently saw a new patient seeking help addressing substance abuse issues. It was our first time meeting, so when I entered the exam room, I introduced myself with my name and my pronouns, as I always do. Before I even offered any advice or asked a question, the patient’s face lit up with a smile. She explained that she was a transgender woman, and hearing me introduce myself with my pronouns was a huge relief, because it showed her that I would treat her with respect.

She quickly opened up to me, describing how she was grappling with a host of challenges and stresses that were made even worse because other people in her life — including other doctors — didn’t understand, didn’t respect, or outright rejected her identity.

Something as simple as including your pronouns when you introduce yourself can indicate that you are an ally and contribute to a sense of safety and inclusion.

I say that I provide abortions, prenatal care, birth control or other resources to pregnant people, not just pregnant women, because all people deserve the right to make their own decisions about if, when, or how they want to have children, without facing judgement.

Separately, if there is a person on this planet who can get through a winter in Bangor, Maine without drinking heavily, consuming drugs, and considering a gender change, I would love to meet him/her/zir/them.

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We now know the price of freedom: $0

by philg

Continuing the Passover-Freedom theme… what is the actual price tag that Americans put on freedom? “The Curious Case of Florida’s Pandemic Response” (Atlantic) suggests that the value is $0.

To the extent that winning a pandemic is possible, Florida seemed to be winning the pandemic.

(the author does not consider the possibility that Floridians did not enter the COVID Olympics)

Governor Ron DeSantis bragged that Florida drew a straight flush of pandemic outcomes: “open schools, comparatively low unemployment, and per capita COVID mortality below the national average.”

But the closer I looked, the more holes I found in the simple pro-Florida narrative.

Yes, Florida is seeing falling COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. But so is just about everywhere else. And its overall pandemic performance is just about typical.

As far as I can tell, though, it didn’t. At 4.8 percent, its unemployment rate is 18th in the country, and not meaningfully different from that of the median states, South Carolina and Virginia, at 5.3 percent. Real-time data tracking state spending and employment show that Florida is doing, again, no better than average. Compared with January 2020, its consumer spending is down 1 percent, which is right in line with the national average. Its small-business revenue is down about 30 percent—again, almost exactly the national average. These statistics may be missing something. But the national narrative of an exceptionally white-hot Florida economy doesn’t match the statistical record of its performance.

What this nation desperately needs is low-skill immigration so that we have lots more people to house:

Since 2012, Miami home prices have increased by 94 percent, nearly the exact same as those in Los Angeles in that time. Prices are soaring as inventory melts away; Florida’s active listings fell by 50 percent last year, and it’s not doing enough to keep up with demand.

A rare moment of checking to see whether coronascience has any predictive value:

In 2020, smart media figures and scientists predicted that COVID-19 would especially ravage Florida, given its open economy and elderly population. They were wrong. Why? Did Florida just get lucky? Is this mostly about the salutary benefits of the outdoors, or the coronavirus’s sensitivity to heat and humidity? Do strict lockdowns simply fail the cost-benefit analysis? The answer to all three questions may be yes.

What’s most interesting to me is that the author implicitly values the freedoms to walk out of one’s door, walk outside without a mask, meet friends at a restaurant, host a party at one’s house, etc. at $0. If two people, one confined to his/her/zir/their home by a governor’s executive order and one free to send children to school, go to work, play a sport, socialize, have the same amount of money they are equally well off. So it makes sense to look at the statistics gathered by economists and pronounce a state (or a society) a success or failure based on those statistics. (We also see this applied to Sweden; people will look at a list of countries ranked by COVID-19-tagged deaths per capita and note Sweden’s position without pointing out that it avoided the lockdowns, masquerades, etc.)

From Wellington, Florida… (Why does the realtor rank “Pool” above “Hangar”?!?!)

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Both non-white residents of Vermont can now get a COVID vaccine

by philg

From the Vermont Department of Public Health:

If you or anyone in your household identifies as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color (BIPOC), including anyone with Abenaki or other First Nations heritage, all household members who are 16 years or older can sign up to get a vaccine.

A little more detail on this government program …

Related:

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We ran but could not hide: U.S. deaths in 2020 were 16 percent higher than in 2019

by philg

TLDR: If we denied children a year of school and spent $trillions, shouldn’t we have something to show for that?

The CDC sped up its tally of deaths in 2020 and now says that American deaths in 2020 were 16 percent higher than in 2019 (CNBC). COVID-19 is now highlighted as the third leading cause of death. If we adjust for U.S. population growth (somewhat difficult to assess because of the undocumented), that’s perhaps a 15 percent higher death rate.

Considering the loss of a year of education for American children, the loss of liberty for American adults, and $trillions in tax dollars flushed down the toilet, this seems like a spectacular failure. While our state governors issued orders to residents and Americans waited for Dr. Fauci to tell them whether it was safe to roast a turkey, Sweden continued to live within its existing framework of laws and customs, e.g., sending children to school, adults to the gym and social life, etc. Swedes did not don the hijab of the Church of Shutdown for hours each day. Sweden ended up with 10 percent more deaths than in 2019 (Statista; note that 2019 seems to have been an unusually death-free year in Sweden and also that, due to population growth, the 2020 death rate was, in fact, lower than the death rate in 2010). Sweden also has a growing population, so a total higher than 10 percent might translate to a rate that is 9 percent higher.

Also from the CNBC article:

It typically takes researchers 11 months after the end of the calendar year to investigate “certain causes of death and to process and review data.” While the daily total Covid death figures reported by the CDC are timely, they can underestimate the actual number of deaths because of “incomplete or delayed reporting.”

For those who believe that humans are in charge of the coronavirus, I imagine that the take-away from these data will be to double down on shutdowns and masks. The assumption will be that, absent our heroic sacrifices, deaths in the U.S. would have been 300 percent higher in 2020 than in 2019, so holding the increase to only 16 percent demonstrates how effective shutdowns and masks are. That masked-and-locked California and wide-open Florida are right next to each other in states ranked by Covid-19 death rate (

) will not be cause to question the assumption that masks and lockdowns are highly effective. (Note that California’s COVID-19 death rate is substantially higher than Florida’s if you consider the over-65 population that is actually vulnerable to COVID-19. Florida has roughly 50% more seniors as a percentage of its population.)

Finally, let’s not forget that our 2020 aggregate deaths also include deaths caused by the shutdown, e.g., people who didn’t get the cardiology procedures that they would have had, extra drug overdoses, etc.

Readers who love masks and shutdowns: Given that deaths in 2020 were 16 percent higher than in 2019, how many American lives do you think were actually “saved” compared to if state governors and local government had done nothing (so we’d still have had Trump funding the vaccines, the CDC messing up initial testing, etc., but there would have been no shutdowns, no masks, and kids would have been in school; we still would have had media hysteria, so presumably a lot of the elderly/vulnerable and elite would have hidden in bunkers voluntarily). We’re fatter than the Swedes and COVID-19 loves to kill the fat, but plenty of Swedes are also overweight. (But don’t count the 20 lbs. that people gained during the year that their governors ordered them to spend next to the fridge!)

Related:

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Impending Coronadoom for Minnesota, forecast versus reality

by philg

Americans are currently living under a forecast of “impending doom” from our CDC Director. Let’s review how folks in Minnesota reacted when their doom was forecast by scientists.

From March 25, 2020, “Governor Walz Issues Stay at Home Order for Minnesotans”:

Modeling released today by the Minnesota Department of Health and University of Minnesota predicts that more than 70,000 Minnesotans could die from COVID-19 if we take no action. The Governor’s two-week order to stay home is forecasted to significantly slow the spread of COVID-19 and allow the state time to make key preparations for the pandemic.

14 days to flatten the curve!

A year later, Matt Malkus looked at this.

Over the past 12 months, nearly 7,000 people in Minnesota actually did die with or from COVID-19, 0.12 percent of the estimated 5.7 million population (though not even Yale knows how many undocumented Americans live in America). So if we believe the model estimate of 70,000 dead, we could say that the cower-in-place keep-schools-closed-for-a-year strategy worked! How does the 0.12 percent death rate compare to what happened in give-the-finger-to-the-virus Sweden, from which many Minnesotans can trace their ancestry? This list of countries by COVID-19 death rate puts Sweden at a 0.13 percent COVID death rate (Sweden automatically tags anyone with a positive PCR test as a “COVID death”).

(As in Massachusetts, Minnesota does not include deaths by age or age group on their dashboard. Only “cases” are published and therefore a reader is left with the impression that COVID-19 primarily afflicts young and middle-aged Minnesotans:

if you had to guess the median age of a COVID-19 death from this chart you might pick 38 (it was 82 in Massachusetts before the data were pulled from the dashboard). Where Minnesota provides comprehensive charts, though, is in “COVID-19 Data by Race/Ethnicity”:

COVID-19 is exposing what has always been true: racism is pervasive and persistent. … We know that communities of color and Indigenous communities don’t need data to verify their experience. … In developing the dashboard, we knew it was important to provide descriptions that accompany the data to provide context so that false information and misunderstandings do not perpetrate harmful rhetoric and racial disparities.

For those prejudiced whites who might try to avoid their Latinx brothers, sisters, and binary resisters as carriers of disease… the Minnesota government anti-racism specialists helpfully explain that “Latinx Minnesotans are testing positive for COVID-19 at nearly 3 times the rate of white Minnesotans.”)

Related:

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Were coronalockdowns good preparation for sending humans to Mars?

by philg

In the dark BC age it was thought that human psychology presented a significant barrier to human exploration of Mars. Humans were social animals who could never tolerate being locked into a small space for seven months, unable to venture out into a hostile and dangerous environment.

But, thanks to young people having meekly surrendered what had previously been considered liberties, we can now draw from a pool of tens of millions of people who spent an entire year in a tiny apartment, often entirely alone, either unable to venture outside or afraid to do so. Perhaps some of them suffered reduced mental health from being sedentary and watching a screen 24/7. But for those who sailed through… this is the ideal pool from which to draw candidates for a Mars mission, no?

The red planet:

(okay, it’s Jordan, 2012, and now apparently open for visitors)

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