Category: Coronaplague

Mask that won’t fog eyeglasses

by philg

Genetically defective friends: just in time for attending all of the parties for the one-year anniversary of “14 days to flatten the curve”, I found a mask that doesn’t fog up my glasses. It is the Honeywell dual layer mask. It sits off your mouth, which makes it kind of like breathing into a paper bag for those who are hyperventilating due to excitement from anticipating the next round of science-informed executive orders from Uncle Joe and state governors.

For max virtue points, here are pictures of me using the mask on a deserted Hilton Head beach with the wind blowing at 12 knots.

Like other masks, it presents a near-field out-of-focus obstruction to visibility. So I can’t recommend it for drivers or pilots.

The new mask has been “authorized by FDA for emergency use.” Presumably the “emergency” referred to is coronapanic and not the climate change crisis or the systemic racism public health crisis. The package goes on to note that there is one pathogen that this new mask hasn’t been tested against… coronavirus (“Not Tested against COVID-19”).

Finally, can we figure out how rich/elite a person is simply by asking those who aren’t health care professionals “How many hours per day do you wear a mask?” For most of the folks I know who enjoy a comfortable income, the answer is just a few minutes per day (walking into a restaurant, zipping into CVS, etc.).

Also from Hilton Head, a “halfway house”:

On Facebook, I captioned the above with “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris promised criminal justice reform. They’ve been our rulers for less than a week and look at the halfway house that is already set up and running. #MorningInAmerica”. It was not well-received.

Inside the halfway house:

Departing from Hilton Head to Gainesville:

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Public health, American-style: Donuts at the vaccine clinic

by philg

Public Health 101: When confronted with a virus that attacks the obese and unfit, lock people next to their refrigerators for a year.

Public Health 102: When the local government runs a COVID vaccine clinic, make sure that it is amply supplied with donuts.

From a town-run COVID-19 vaccine clinic in the Boston suburbs:

Readers might reasonably ask how many of these health-enhancing items I consumed personally. Answer: zero. I was merely there as driver for a 92-year-old and therefore did not feel that I had earned one. Separately, what’s the process for becoming a volunteer driver in our all-white all-heterosexual town? Look for the rainbow flag and “Black History Month” stickers to find the “Council on Aging” door. Knock and receive a Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) form to fill out and also a form in which one must supply one’s pronouns and gender ID.

The vaccination process itself was efficient. We arrived at 11:55 am for a noon appointment and were fully checked out by 12:25 pm. My old-but-fit neighbor noted that she hated wearing a mask, but otherwise was happy with her experience.

Readers: Who has vaccination stories to share?

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Life expectancy scientists never expected a pandemic

by philg

“A Grim Measure of Covid’s Toll: Life Expectancy Drops Sharply in U.S.” (NYT):

American life expectancy fell by one year, to 77.8 years, in the first half of 2020.

Thursday’s data gives the first full picture of the pandemic’s effect on American expected life spans, which dropped to 77.8 years from 78.8 years in 2019. It also showed a deepening of racial and ethnic disparities: Life expectancy of the Black population declined by 2.7 years in the first half of 2020, slicing away 20 years of gains. The life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans, which had been narrowing, is now at six years, the widest it has been since 1998.

“I knew it was going to be large but when I saw those numbers, I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Elizabeth Arias, the federal researcher who produced the report, said of the racial disparity. Of the drop for the full population, she said, “We haven’t seen a decline of that magnitude in decades.”

The last time a pandemic caused a major decline in life expectancy was 1918, when hundreds of thousands of Americans died from the flu pandemic. Life expectancy declined by a whopping 11.8 years from 1917 to 1918, Dr. Arias said, bringing average life spans down to 39 years.

So… coronavirus was nowhere near as deadly as the last truly bad flu, yet the “scientists” in charge of life expectancy calculations apparently did not budget for even a moderately bad flu pandemic, such as 1957. They assumed that human population could be expanded from 2 billion (1920) to 8 billion (2020) without any virus evolving to take advantage of this expansion in hosts (and the hosts clustering themselves together in cities). They assumed this against a continuous stream of publications from the WHO and others that a pandemic was likely. (See Paper titled “Stockpiling Ventilators for Influenza Pandemics” for example; also Pandemic Influenza Preparedness And Response (WHO, 2009, which incidentally tells governments to do the opposite of what governments have done in response to COVID-19: don’t close borders unless you’re an island and don’t tell the general public to wear masks))

Is it possible to make these scientific conclusions, one about life expectancy and one about the likelihood of future respiratory virus pandemics, consistent somehow?

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Is it double-masking or Joe Biden’s presidency that has beaten coronavirus?

by philg

From the no-longer-failing NYT:

As promised, Joe Biden has shut down the coronavirus. And, not only has he shut down coronavirus in the U.S., he’s defeated this pathogen on a planetary scale.

Should we credit the science-informed leadership of Joe Biden, Dr. Jill Biden, M.D., and Dr. Anthony Fauci, no longer told what to say by Donald Trump? Credit double-masking instead? (we can’t credit vaccines, right, because the downturn started before any significant number of folks were vaccinated)

And, if coronavirus is not, in fact, beaten, when does it start up again? (I recognize that #Science is supposed to be done retroactively, i.e., wait for the data to come in and then offer an explanation for the curve shape, but I would also be interested in 2019-style #Science in which the scientist offers a hypothesis and then tests that with later-arriving data)

If you’re confused, don’t feel bad. A medical school professor friend reminded me the other day that physicians still can’t explain why influenza is seasonal.

And, for those who are curious to know how unmasked folks in the Florida Free State are doing relative to the global average…

Compare to opposite-end-of-the-spectrum California, where 40 million people have cowered in place for an entire year:

And the never-masked never-shut South Dakotans:

What about the wicked never-masked never-shut Swedes?

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A Boston-based doctor throws rocks at North Dakota

by philg

Atul Gawande, who works in Boston (though maybe soon in D.C., since he was tapped by President Biden to join Dr. Jill Biden, MD on a COVID-19 advisory board), writes in New Yorker: “Inside the Worst-Hit County in the Worst-Hit State in the Worst-Hit Country”.

How much can we trust a scientist like Dr. Atul Gawande, MD, MPH and the science-informed editors of the New Yorker? The article turns out to be about North Dakota, which enjoyed a year of relative freedom (mask law from November 14, 2020 to January 18, 2021) and experienced a lower death rate tagged to COVID-19 than 9 other states. Maskachusetts, in particular, where Dr. Gawande actually lives, has had a higher death rate than North Dakota despite a year of shutdown and masks.

How about the “Worst-Hit Country”? Can we rely on this Person of Science’s statement that the U.S. is the country that has been worst-hit by COVID-19? Statista says no. There are 7 countries, e.g., Belgium, Slovenia, and the UK, that have had a higher death rate.

How are Americans supposed to put their trust in #Science when there are at least two obvious falsehoods in the article’s headline? Or maybe there are three falsehoods, actually! The NYT page on North Dakota allows one to sort the counties of ND by death rate. Ward County, featured in Dr. Gawande’s article, is nowhere near the top: 274 deaths per 100,000, a little higher than the state average of 191, but nowhere near the worst in ND.

So… the headline contains three assertions from a scientist. All three assertions are false, as measured by the outcome that is most upsetting to humans (i.e., death). Said scientist will soon be telling Americans what they can and cannot do… #BecauseScience.

From my 1993 trip through North Dakota on the way to Alaska:

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If tigers are getting COVID-19, how is 6′ of social distance sufficient?

by philg

“2 Tigers at Indiana Zoo Test Positive for COVID-19” (NBC, February 8):

Fecal samples for the tigers, Bugara and Indah, were collected for testing and came back positive with the virus.

“Bugara, the male Sumatran tiger, has been experiencing a dry cough, and Indah, the female Sumatran tiger, has not shown symptoms at this time,” staff veterinarian Dr. Kami Fox said in a statement issued Saturday. “Both tigers are being watched for any additional clinical signs and remain together in their enclosure.”

The source of infection is not yet known and zoo staff are working with the Allen County Department of Health and the State Board of Animal Health to identify potential sources, according to officials.

It seems fair to assume that nobody got within 6′ of these tigers (a reasonable rule along with don’t bring a slingshot to a tiger fight).

If tigers got infected while (a) outdoors, and (b) more than 6′ away from any infected human, why do we have confidence in our social distancing strategy?

A COVID-19-free tiger in the National Zoo back in the 1980s:

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We love our children so much we will give them an investigational vaccine

by philg

From our nation’s greatest scientist… “Fauci: Vaccines for Kids as Young as First Graders Could Be Authorized by September” (ProPublica, Feb 11):

Children as young as first graders may be able to get the coronavirus vaccine by the time school starts in September, presuming trials are successful in those age groups, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with ProPublica.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has been “really advocating to try and make these trials happen with the same urgency that they happen for adults,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, who is vice chair of its committee on infectious diseases.

It’s essential to act expeditiously, O’Leary said. “I would love to see a vaccine available for all children in time for the next school year.”

So a top pediatrician wants to stick kids as soon as the paperwork is dry from the laser printer. What do the folks who make vaccines say? From moderna (headquartered in the office building that formerly housed the MIT AI and CS labs; also, some of the precursors to the vaccine are being supplied by an MIT AI-lab spinoff that received $1.1 billion from the Trump administration):

If the product is not approved, what is it?

Moderna is committed to safety and ensuring that people have accurate information about the investigational Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine, including how it is accessed and administered.

The effects are still being investigated, in other words, and the vaccine will actually become illegal to use if Uncle Joe declares that coronaplague is no longer an emergency, but if you’re old/fat/sick and worried about dying from COVID-19 maybe you still want it.

How about children? As noted in Maskachusetts: When people aren’t scared enough, change the Covid-19 dashboard, nobody under age 18 had ever died of/with COVID-19 in a heavily plagued state of 7 million through mid-August 2020. But it would appear that we need to revise Is it ethical for a physician to vaccinate a healthy 20-year-old against COVID-19? from age 20 down to age 6.

(For the record, as a somewhat old (57), somewhat fat (6′ tall and wallowing right about 200 lbs.) person I am mildly enthusiastic about vaccines for myself. On the other hand, when the dust settles, I think that the President of Tanzania will prove to have offered the wisest prediction: “If the white man was able to come up with vaccinations, he should have found a vaccination for Aids, cancer and TB by now,” said Mr Magufuli (BBC). Consistent with this leader’s prediction, I think that our fight with coronavirus will work out roughly the same as our fight with influenza. The BBC article itself is interesting. Tanzanians are stupid because they aren’t putting all of their energy, resources, and cash into fighting COVID-19. But roughly half of Tanzanians live on less than $2/day. If you lived on $2/day, would coronaplague be your #1 focus?)

[Update: I showed this post to a medical school professor friend. Who’s more like to be correct, Anthony Fauci or the President of Tanzania? “The Tanzanian.” Does it make sense to vaccinate schoolchildren against COVID-19? “Not from a medical point of view. We have no idea what these vaccines will do to their immune systems in the long run. It makes sense to vaccinate old people who have a substantial risk of being harmed by COVID-19.” Could vaccinating children cut down on the ability of the virus to mutate? “Yes,” he replied. “The more times the virus is replicating, the more potential for mutation.” (Which also means we’ll need border closures forever because inevitably there will be some countries where vaccination is uncommon and coronavirus is allowed to do whatever it wants?)]

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Why can’t schools reopen with willing teachers?

by philg

For nearly every Black Lives Matter sign in the U.S. we have a Black child whose school remains closed due to coronapanic. Almost every other enterprise in the U.S. that was legally allowed to continue operating managed to continue operating and/or reopen after a governor-ordered closure. Some workers left due to the perceived risk and other workers were hired.

Nearly every grocery store that was open in 2019 remains open in 2021, for example. Presumably some “team members” left to avoid being exposed to hundreds or thousands of customers each day, but a subset retreating into bunkers didn’t shut down any store. (And, actually, now that we think about it, was there a tidal wave of death that swept away America’s grocery store workers? If not, why is it too dangerous to teach in a classroom?) Airlines, similarly, did not have trouble retaining enough pilots and flight attendants to continue operating all the flights that they wanted to operate. (Counterintuitively, this turned out to be hygienic: “US airline employees report lower rate of COVID-19 infection than public”) American flight schools have similarly kept going. Some instructors decided that they they didn’t want to share cramped 4-seater cabins with potentially plagued students. They sat in home bunkers (unpaid) while the CFIs who weren’t as worried about Covid for whatever reason have been in the trainers for additional hours (and being paid for additional hours) with students.

Why hasn’t anyone proposed having schools reopen with whatever teachers wish to teach? Maybe the would be a subset of the 2019 teachers plus some new-hires. There is no shortage of Americans who seek to collect a government paycheck, right?

In the earlier phase of coronapanic, one possible answer was that governors and/or public health bureaucrats wanted the schools closed “to protect the community.” But that’s not true anymore. Now we have governors and public health bureaucrats saying that schools are safe to open (the science has changed?) and the only obstacle is that unionized teachers refuse to teach. In any other unionized enterprise, when some or all workers refuse to work, the employer has the right to hire replacement workers for the duration of the refusal. Why can’t public schools hire replacement workers as necessary?

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California schoolteacher goes back to work

by philg

A young healthy vaccinated unionized schoolteacher finally feels safe enough to return to work in Los Angeles:

Photo by Phill Magakoe and actually from “South Africa Halts Use of AstraZeneca Vaccine” (NYT):

South Africa halted use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford coronavirus vaccine on Sunday after evidence emerged that the vaccine did not protect clinical-trial participants from mild or moderate illness caused by the more contagious virus variant that was first seen there.

Scientists in South Africa said on Sunday that a similar problem held among people who had been infected by earlier versions of the coronavirus: the immunity they acquired naturally did not appear to protect them from mild or moderate cases when reinfected by the variant, known as B.1.351.

Remember that (1) Republicans are idiots because they don’t believe in evolution; (2) We need to stay shut down only until the vaccines become available because the virus can never evolve its way around the vaccines and therefore vaccines will terminate the pandemic.

(Corollary to the above: The Swedish MD/PhDs who, back in February 2020 said that coronavirus would be with us forever and therefore you shouldn’t take any public health measures that you couldn’t keep in place for decades, were definitely wrong.)

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If coronascientists can’t predict the future, why do we call their predictions scientific?

by philg

From yesterday’s post on Israel…

For comparison, how about the U.S. case count, plunging since January 1, 2021 despite no changes in policy or significant numbers of people vaccinated (from NYT):

And the plunging hospitalizations, which presumably should lead to a plunge in deaths (since the only thing worse than death is death without Medicare being billed for a hospital stay):

Given that Americans did not change their behavior or policies during the time period covered, coronascience that is actually “scientific” should have been able to predict this peak and subsequent downward trend, right?

Let’s look at what our nation’s greatest scientist (at age 80), Dr. Fauci, said to state-sponsored media just a month before the peak. “Fauci Warns Of ‘Surge Upon A Surge’ As COVID-19 Hospitalizations Hit Yet Another High” (NPR, November 29):

“We may see a surge upon a surge,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “We don’t want to frighten people, but that’s just the reality. We said that these things would happen as we got into the cold weather and as we began traveling, and they’ve happened.”

With the December holidays just around the corner and more people traveling, “it’s going to happen again,” Fauci said. “We’re getting into colder weather and an even larger holiday season.”

The December holidays happened. More people actually did travel: “U.S. air travel reached post-March peak on day before Christmas Eve, TSA data shows” (NBC). Positive tests (“cases”) are half what they were when these superspreading travel events occurred.

From the Official Magazine of Trump Hatred (New Yorker, November 12, 2020)… “The Pandemic’s Winter Surge is Here,” by “Dhruv Khullar, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, is a practicing physician and an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College”:

Unless we put mitigating measures in place, the coronavirus will spread, and sooner than we expect it will get out of control. The only way to avoid mass death is to move quickly and decisively, flattening the curve through masks, distance, testing, tracing, and lockdowns until a vaccine and therapies can avert the suffering caused by covid-19. Passivity is the enemy. The winter surge is here; we decide what happens next.

(Note that science-following humans are in charge of the virus: we decide what happens next.)

None of these things were done, except maybe in California and Maskachusetts, yet the surge that concerned the “scientist” dissipated, apparently due to factors unrelated to human actions.

Here’s Florida “case” curve, with a decline starting just as the snowbirds arrived for Christmas:

Florida is a state with no mask law:

Florida recommends but does not require face coverings for the general public. Several cities and large counties, including Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Hillsborough (which includes Tampa), have mask requirements, but local governments are barred from assessing fines and penalties for noncompliance under a Sept. 25 executive order by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Floridians have rejected what the rest of us call science. Schools are open for in-person instruction (with some objections and lawsuits from science-following unionized teachers). Restaurants are open. Clubs are open. Offices are open. After-school sports for children are open and unmasked. People gather in large groups for social purposes. Even in supermarkets staffed by and catering to the elderly, workers and customers may be unmasked (CNBC). Here’s a January 2020 photograph from a club in Miami, in which people greeted each other with hugs and kisses:

If “scientists” failed yet again in their predictions, why are they still called “scientists”? What has distinguished astronomy from astrology, for example, is the superior predictive power of astronomy. Astronomy also gets better every year. Have we seen any improvement in the ability or people who claim to have scientific insight regarding coronavirus to predict epidemic statistics?

[My personal explanation for the plunge in U.S. “cases”: Back in October, Joe Biden promised that he would shut down the virus. What we’re seeing is simply President Biden delivering on his campaign promise a little earlier than expected (i.e., starting three weeks before taking power).]

Related:

  • Did doom visit the Swedes yesterday as planned? (May 24: On May 3, in “Doom for the wicked Swedes is always three weeks away”, the IHME prophecy for Sweden was a peak in ICU usage on May 22 and a peak in deaths (494/day) on May 23. What actually happened? Yesterday’s WHO report showed 54 new deaths. The day before it was 40. In other words, the prophecy was off by a factor of 10. They were going to need nearly 4,400 ICU beds. The actual number in ICUs all around Sweden? About 340. In other words, the “scientists” were off by a factor of 13X.)
  • How is coronaplague down in Brazil? (and the rest of the IHME predictions) (August 5; the June 10 prediction of the “scientists” was off by 10X).
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