Category: Coronaplague

We have now had 50 governor’s orders here in Maskachusetts

by philg

The City of Cambridge recently emailed to say “Governor Baker’s COVID-19 Order #50 made certain Phase III adjustments, including extension of outdoor dining provisions and opening of indoor and outdoor gaming arcades”. This reminded me that we’ve now had 50 governor’s orders related to this virus.

What’s in the latest one? First, a reminder of how awesome it is to have the power of being a state governor:

(sorry for the images, but the governor distributes these as scanned PDFs without OCR). Then, just as the City of Cambridge says, two pages regarding under what circumstances the state and local License Rajs might allow restaurants to serve alcohol outdoors and might allow arcades to reopen.

What about a never-shut never-masked country with less than half the COVID-19 death rate compared to Massachusetts? Sweden seems to have had about 10 new regulations in the past 6 months and they’ve either been laws passed by the legislature or regulations issued by bureaucracies, not orders coming down from a muscular executive such as the Prime Minister. Sweden is being governed, even in what Americans have characterized as “an emergency”, by consensus rather than via dictates from individuals.

(How is Sweden doing with plague right now? The WHO dashboard shows them at 578 deaths per 1 million residents (i.e., only 99.94 percent of Swedes remain alive). The U.S. is at 584. So, despite our shutdown, the U.S. caught up to Sweden just as the former chief scientist of the European CDC said (in April) that we would.

What if we compare to the state where I live? Maskachusetts is at 1,134 deaths per million (Statistica). The latest dashboard:

Whatever we have done with shutdowns and/or masks seems to have ensured that we will have a “long tail” of infections/deaths rather than the exponential decline to near-zero that Sweden has had.

Note that this is the dashboard from which deaths-by-age statistics were removed last month just as officials were deciding whether to reopen schools: Maskachusetts: When people aren’t scared enough, change the Covid-19 dashboard )

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Back to School Ebola Decontamination Lessons

by philg

A friend’s son goes to a rich kids’ all-boys private school. She has received at least 50 pages of COVID-19-related material in the past few weeks. A sampling…

We are two weeks away from the start of school. We have two weeks to make this work. Please take extraordinary measures for the next 14 days to be sure our boys are ready to go. These include…

Creating a morning routine of taking his temperature, checking his wellness, and completing the Magnus app. No student will be allowed into our building to attend classes if this is not done daily.

Practicing the proper method of wearing a mask, over his nose and mouth. If your son is bothered by the mask resting behind his ears, consider adding an “ear saver” or string to hold the mask ear loops away from his ears. We will provide students with mask breaks regularly throughout the day. Students who do not comply with mask guidelines will be removed from the classroom and could be sent home for the day.

Purchasing a mask that complies with CDC guidelines and the School’s dress code policy. Please no masks with valves. Additionally, the School has adopted a no gaiters policy. Consistent with our dress code philosophy masks should contain no large text, logos, or images ([Rich kids’ school]-branded masks are permitted). Masks are to be worn as students exit a vehicle on campus and all day except during lunch or in designated spaces outside of our buildings. During lunch in our building, we will ask the students to eat quietly while their mask is removed.

Learning how to properly wash their hands. We will ask students to wash their hands multiple times a day. We also have plenty of hand sanitizer, but boys are welcome to bring a small bottle of their own.

Learning how to properly wipe down their materials. At the end of every day, we will ask students to wipe down their computer, their desk, and their chair before washing their hands and leaving the building.

Creating an entrance procedure when your son returns home to include leaving shoes outside of the home, changing and washing school clothes daily, and showering/bathing upon entering the home. [This is my favorite! Decontamination for elementary school kids as though they had just come from a shift in the Ebola ward of the local hospital]

[a few days later]

Boys will be required to wear masks. Gators and vented masks are not allowed at [Rich Kids’ School]. Please be sure your son has an appropriate mask for safety reasons.
The boys will not have access to water fountains, so I would recommend that the boys fill up two water bottles to bring to school each day.
Lunches will be delivered to the classroom, but if you are packing your son’s lunch, please know he will not have access to a microwave.
We will have hand sanitizer in the classrooms, but if you could also send in a smaller personal hand sanitizer for your son to keep at his desk for snack, that would be fantastic.

Like the poster says, “Fall down 7 times, get up 8.” This is the attitude that will get us through the year. [Not “give the finger to the virus” like the infidels in Sweden!]

Beginning on Wednesday, September 9, the Lower School building will open at 7:30am. Once checking in at the front of the Lower School, the boys will proceed through a hand sanitizing station in the Lobby and then go directly to their homeroom.

Please remember to complete the Magnus App each morning by 7:30am. We will be requiring families to complete the health screening before allowing your son into the Lower School each day.

Please remember to send your son with a mask each day, he will need to be wearing it as he exits the car and it will need to remain on throughout the day (except when permitted to remove it at the direction of his teacher). Neck gaiters and masks with valves are not permitted.

[from the nurse?]

Our Health Staff is available for a drive up medication drop off to receive medications required for administration at school including all emergency medications. We will follow all CDC guidelines for COVID-19 procedures during drop off. Please email our Health Office at [] or call directly xxx-xxx-xxxx to confirm arrangement.

All medications delivered to school require a current physician’s order on file in your Magnus Health account and must be delivered in their prescribed container or they will not be accepted. Please store in a clear plastic bag labeled with your son’s name, grade, and date of birth.

Please have your ID and the student’s medication prepared for drop off as noted above. Please wear a mask when our staff meets you at your car to obtain the medications.

Where: Lower School Entrance – a table will be set up and COVID-19 procedures will be in place.

Please do not wait to access your mobile app. Your son’s COVID-19 screening tool is available now. Completion of the symptom surveillance tool is to be completed by 7:30 a.m. for timely submission. If unable to complete timely, please save a screenshot of your son’s final “Pass” to show for school entry.

Directives to set up your Magnus Mobile v2 APP and user credentials are here. Reminder: You must login to MyBackpack and access the Magnus Health portal ONLINE first to create your Mobile App username and password. Hover over YOUR name and choose “CHANGE Credentials”. [… three pages of instructions followed … ]

Parents will need to update the app to the latest Version 20.08.26. Parents using an iPhone can do this by installing the update within the Apple Store, or by deleting and reinstalling the app. Android users are able to perform the same update by updating via Google Play Store, or by deleting and reinstalling the app.

If you have a student at [Rich Kids School] and other schools using Magnus Health for student information or COVID-19 screening (i.e. [some other schools for rich kids in the same city],…anyone using Magnus Health)..you must log out of the account created for your son’s account for the MOBILE APP and log into your parent account for your other child with the username and password created to access their health information and surveillance tool.

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RFID chips in the necks of college students

by philg

“A University Had a Great Coronavirus Plan, but Students Partied On” (NYT) is about how humans did not behave the way that the scientists assumed they would:

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, more than 40,000 students take tests twice a week for the coronavirus. They cannot enter campus buildings unless an app vouches that their test has come back negative. Everyone has to wear masks.

Enough students continued to go to parties even after testing positive, showing how even the best thought-out plans to keep college education moving can fail when humans do not heed common sense or the commands from public health officials.

What the scientists had not taken into account was that some students would continue partying after they received a positive test result. “It was willful noncompliance by a small group of people,” Dr. Goldenfeld said.

Some of the students who tested positive even tried to circumvent the app so that they could enter buildings instead of staying isolated in their rooms, university administrators said in a letter to students.

Attending university is a privilege, not a right. Why not an RFID chip in the neck of everyone who chooses to attend a school? With sensors over each door, each student can be tracked, even if he/she/ze/they fail to carry his/her/zir/their phone. It works well for dogs. Mindy the Crippler has never complained about her chip. The universities can buy kits on Amazon for $14 each, which includes a one-time-use syringe. From a consumer:

Chances are, you are planning to use this kit to microchip your animal yourself and skip the vet visit. If so, you are going to be very pleased. It is super easy to use – implanting the chip takes just a few seconds and registration takes about 5 minutes online (the chip also comes with a snail-mail paper registration form if you prefer). You may feel a little squeamish about the process but as long as you implant the chip quickly and confidently, your animal will probably barely notice. I just chipped my 7 week old Lab puppy and she barely even flinched. It would be a good idea to have somebody hold the animal still so you have both hands free – the needle is EXTREMELY sharp and you don’t want to risk jabbing too deep or potential jabbing yourself.

So the chipping of undergrads could be done by the graduate students who live in their dorms and whose job is keeping them out of trouble. If a student who is marked COVID-19-positive in the database tries to go through a door with a reader, Campus Police is summoned automatically to shepherd the errant soul back to quarantine. (Or, to cut down on policing encounters and costs in the Age of BLM, doors on campus could be covered in plywood and replaced with PetSafe dog doors that open only in response to a recognized RFID chip. The 11×16″ standard size opening would give students an incentive not to load up at the dining hall.)

Mindy the Crippler proudly displays her chipped neck:

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Time to love smokers again?

by philg

Strolling by the smokers’ ghetto outside one of our local airport’s FBOs made me wonder when it will be time to abandon our fanaticism regarding the occasional whiff of tobacco smoke. We are certain that any of our fellow humans may kill us with a breath of coronavirus. Why do we worry about the unpleasantness of someone smoking a cigarette 5′ from an exterior door versus 20′? Do we still need Mini-Mike Bloomberg’s 2011 ban on smoking in various outdoor places, such as beaches and parks?

Do we have the energy to fight the anti-smoking battle at the same time as the anti-coronaplague battle? When do we admit that we’re not as capable as Adolph Hitler and his loyal Germans and even they had trouble fighting on multiple fronts?

I’m not a smoker, but I’m now ready to welcome my smoking brothers/sisters/binary resisters with a hearty “You could be exhaling a lot worse!”

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New York Tough at the U.S. Open

by philg

New Yorkers are afraid to let even a handful of spectators into the Arthur Ashe Stadium (capacity 23,771). Someone sitting by him/her/zir/theirself could contract coronavirus. When a group of Americans is fully stocked with an Abundance of Fear, how do they characterize themselves? The banners that cover the seats and ensure none of the tournament-affiliated folks can sit there read “New York Tough”.

[Why couldn’t they give free tickets to people who were previously hospitalized for COVID-19? NYC has many thousands of such folks and, so far, there is no evidence that they are catching the Only Disease That Matters (TM) for a second time.]

How about the rest of the messaging in the stadium? “Black Lives Matter”! A lot of the commercials also show that the people who play and/or are interested in tennis are primarily Black. For reference, here are the players who are collectively experts on Black American lives:

At the end of each match, the winner stands in front of a microphone wearing a surgical mask (freely touching it, exactly contrary to WHO recommendations) while answering questions from a masked official standing 10′ away.

Related:

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California: Masks will stop a viral epidemic, but won’t help with smoke

by philg

“Bay Area smoke: To breathe safely, stay inside and don’t count on masks” (Mercury News):

Don’t count on masks to help with bad air, experts say

But people shouldn’t expect much protection from the bandanas or surgical masks they have become accustomed to wearing in public to prevent the transmission of COVID-19. Experts also caution against relying on the more sought-after N95 respirator masks because they are in short supply.

With wildfire smoke, microscopic soot particles, about 2.5 microns in size, can be inhaled and cause inflammation, explained John Balmes, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, in an article published on the university’s website.

There also is concern that poor air quality from the wildfires could increase the severity of COVID-19 symptoms. Dr. Stephanie Christenson, an assistant professor of pulmonology at UC San Francisco, said this concern is based on preliminary research linking air pollution to increased COVID-19 susceptibility, severity and death.

Because of the pandemic, people should continue to wear cloth and surgical masks in public, because they block respiratory droplets and help slow the spread of the coronavirus, Christenson said. Unfortunately, these masks don’t block out the “very, very small” toxic particles from wildfire smoke, she said.

So the coronavirus is smaller than 2.5 microns?

Back in February, in “Can Masks Capture Coronavirus Particles?”, our big enemy was “spheres with diameters of approximately 0.125 microns (125 nm). The smallest particles are 0.06 microns, and the largest are 0.14 microns.”

As of July, the coronavirus was still 0.125 microns in size, according to “Can HEPA Air Purifiers Capture the Coronavirus?” (Wirecutter).

The McKinsey folks responsible for Enron’s success, in “Can HVAC systems help prevent the transmission of COVID-19?”, describe humans being victimized by particles as small as 0.1 microns.

Science tells us that masks are useless against smoke particles that are 2.5 microns in size and also that masks will stop a 0.125-micron coronaplague dead in its tracks. #FollowScience !

(From the New York Times, the progress of coronavirus in a state under a universal mask order and blessed with science-informed leadership:

)

See also the higher rates of coronavirus infections in masked U.S. and France compared to never-masked Sweden and barely-masked Netherlands:

From Bar Harbor, Maine:

Related:

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Join the teachers union if you don’t want the government sticking needles in your arm

by philg

One of the latest orders from the Maskachusetts governor is that children will be denied a K-12 education if they don’t submit to a flu vaccination. (In ancient times, of course, this could be conveniently obtained at the school itself in about 30 seconds, from a public health nurse with a gun, but today this will involve more than 20 minutes of paperwork at a CVS or similar.)

So everyone in the school building will have a reduced chance of getting the flu? There was a discussion about this on the town mailing list. The righteous who attended a School Committee meeting reported that the bureaucrats concluded that they lacked the power to force the teachers to accept the needle.

(How effective is the flu vaccine? Not effective enough for the British medical technocrats to recommend it for those between 11 and 65 years of age (Oxford; NHS), perhaps partly because “Over time, protection from the injected flu vaccine gradually decreases and flu strains often change.” (NHS). If the Brits are correct, perhaps the current American zeal for flu shots will lead to a lot of flu deaths among the elderly 10-20 years from now. See “Repeated flu shots may blunt effectiveness” (CMAJ, 2015))

In other coronaplague news, the town decided not to defer construction of what seems to be, on a per-student basis, the most expensive school ever built in the United States. They started demolishing the old building in June, as planned. Instead of the old building plus the temporary trailers, therefore, the school will try to operate within half of the old building and the trailers. In other words, they affirmatively decided to reduce the square footage per student in the middle of a raging viral epidemic.

Related:

  • “Brazil’s Bolsonaro says COVID-19 vaccinations will not be mandatory” (Reuters): “Many people want the vaccine to be applied in a coercive way, but there is no law that provides for that,” Bolsonaro said in a Facebook live chat with his supporters. … “There is no way for the government – unless we live in a dictatorship – to force everyone to get vaccinated,” Mourão said in a radio interview.
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Demand for cars is UP, not DOWN

by philg

It looks as though I actually can be wrong about everything.

From March 25, When do car makers cut prices?

Shouldn’t the car manufacturers be having coronavirus special deals? A car plainly isn’t worth as much as it was two months ago. Why are the prices mostly the same? Are people actually buying cars at a similar rate to what it was a year ago? Is the shutdown of car factories roughly balancing the collapse of demand? Even with the U.S. and Europe paralyzed, Japan and China are open for business, right? They can produce a ton of cars, can’t they?

We still don’t have that new car, but it looks as though I was dead wrong as usual: “Looking to Buy a Used Car in the Pandemic? So Is Everyone Else” (nytimes, yesterday). Excerpts:

Eager to avoid public transit and Uber, and to save money, buyers are emptying dealerships.

“Used cars are supposed to depreciate, but I’d look up the book value of a car on the lot and see it was higher than at the beginning of the month,” said Adam Silverleib, president of Silko Honda in Raynham, Mass. “I’ve never seen that before.”

Early in the pandemic, when many people avoided leaving home for all but the most pressing needs, carmakers offered no-interest loans for as long as 84 months to lure buyers. With new-car inventories low, such generous incentives have mostly disappeared.

I was only 90 percent wrong about new car demand:

Those fears might be overdone. Buying a used car does not increase the number of cars on the road, of course. And sales of new cars are not taking off. If anything, part of the sudden mania for used cars stems from the yearslong rise in the price of new cars and trucks. On average, new vehicles now sell for about $38,000, more than many consumers can afford or are willing to pay.

Speaking of wrong about everything, Senior Management likes the idea of a station wagon. These are rare birds on our Planet of the SUVs and I am seriously averse to the Karenmobile (Volvo). That leaves “How Subarus Came to Be Seen as Cars for Lesbians” (Atlantic: “it’s the result of a calculated, highly progressive ad campaign launched 20 years ago.”) and… what else? We saw an interesting looking car the other day, a Buick Regal TourX:

1.4 billion Chinese consumers can’t be wrong about Buick, can they?

Related:

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What happens when cold season starts?

by philg

I’ve been in a bunch of masked-up environments recently. People have their masks off to take a sip of a beverage or a bite of a sandwich. What would happen if someone took off the mask in order to sneeze and wipe his/her/zer/their nose? Pandemonium, panic, and violence?

Are we going to end up with a society more like Japan, in which it is rude to be out in public while coughing or sneezing? (this does not seem to have helped with virus control there; the death rate from flu in Japan has been 2.5X the death rate in the U.S.)

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What’s the coronaplague situation in Peru?

by philg

From NPR, March 24, “I’m An American Stuck In Peru — Glad To Be On Lockdown To Avoid COVID-19”:

Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra had just declared a total quarantine for 15 days, halting all air and land transportation, even taxis. With fewer than 150 cases of coronavirus identified at the time, the Andean country was immediately going into lockdown to stem the spread of the virus. … We have followed the daily White House briefings, where U.S. leaders often insisted what a great job they were doing but stopped short of announcing a national lockdown. … By contrast, on Friday in Peru, President Vizcarra addressed his nation in a speech that sent his popularity skyrocketing. He insisted on the urgency of the quarantine, then chastised those Peruvians who disregarded it and the local authorities who didn’t enforce it “with the strictness this situation requires.” … In the next few days, TV news showed images of residents on their apartment balconies cheering on police and public health enforcers in the streets. … Peru’s swift shutdown of intercity travel is likely to help reduce the spread of the virus. The government’s actions, the nation’s solidarity and seriousness of its approach have raised our hopes that the quarantine will expire as planned on March 31, and the disaster will be controlled enough to permit limited travel for folks like us to return home. … At least the measures here mesh with the lessons The New York Times drew from a study of Italy, the new epicenter of the virus: “that steps to isolate the coronavirus and people’s movement need to be put in place early, with absolute clarity, then strictly enforced.” U.S. infections have surged each day yet the federal government has remained reluctant to impose drastic actions. Other countries such as Italy and Spain have enforced quarantines, but too late to stop COVID-19 from ravaging them. … When we do get out, what scares us most is the life we may encounter when we get to the U.S.

From June, Christian Science Monitor:

Peru set a global example of quick action in the face of COVID-19, implementing a nationwide lockdown March 16, soon after its first confirmed case. The government invested in respirators and hospital beds, and offered bonuses to medical professionals. It designed an economic relief package that not only offered low-interest loans to businesses and helped employers keep workers on payrolls, but also targeted the poor, vulnerable, and self-employed with vital cash transfers.

In other words, the country did everything right thanks to effective leadership. However…

Despite Peru’s lauded response efforts, it now [in June] has one of the world’s longest lockdowns, and the second-highest tally of COVID-19 cases in Latin America, with more than 264,000 cases and more than 8,000 people killed. In the region, Peru ranks only behind Brazil, which has taken a decidedly less deliberate approach to halting the pandemic. Where things went wrong, experts say, was in misunderstanding the dynamics of poverty in a country that has gained “middle-income” status over two decades of growth.

Peru took the same kind of muscular action that was credited with keeping Covid-19 deaths in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam to 0. But the virus went in a different direction in Peru, suggesting that humans do not control the virus. The WHO dashboard shows Peru having the world’s highest COVID-19 death rate, having surpassed (female-led) Belgium, Spain, the UK, Chile, the wicked scoffers in Brazil, the unfortunate Italians, the wicked Swedes with their anti-lockdown anti-mask MD/PhDs, and we Americans, so sorely lacking in the national leadership that would intimidate the virus.

Peru has had a lot of problems with drug-resistant tuberculosis. Maybe it is a place where microbes infecting the lungs happens to flourish?

Readers: What do we know about Peru right now? Can it be said that the God of Shutdown is a fickle god and is punishing truly righteous Peruvians for reasons that we will never understand?

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