Category: Massachusetts

The Church of Shutdown abandoned the Sacrament of Masks, at least for the vaccinated, here in Massachusetts at the end of May. The ritual is kept alive at the Apple Store, however. From the Burlington Mall, today:

Things are quieter at the Microsoft Store and Lord & Taylor (both closed):

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Adjacent parking lot (Burlington, MA is 3.3 percent Black, so Black Lives Matter… mostly in other towns):

Although masks are now merely “advised” (only for the unvaccinated) rather than required by governor’s order, more than half of the folks in the mall and at a nearby supermarket were masked.

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We risked death-by-variant-COVID-19 today at the Watertown Mall, meeting friends for dim sum. Although the Massachusetts state of emergency persists at least until June 15, a combination of 69 governor’s orders as of yesterday boiled down to “masks are no longer required indoors”. (Or at least, “you can’t be arrested or fined under state law for not wearing a mask indoors”; maybe a city or town could order you to wear a mask.)

I would have expected an enterprise that makes money from inviting the public to share an indoor space to deemphasize the risk of sharing an indoor space as soon as that deemphasis was legal. To the contrary, however, the shopping mall operator and some individual stores had kept up their sign barrage. We walked by at least 40 COVID-related signs between the door to the small mall and the restaurant itself (waitstaff still fully masked). How does this help their business? Wouldn’t an intelligent person who believed all of these signs decide to stay home and order everything from Amazon rather than take the risk of in-person shopping?

A sampling:

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The mall includes a Target and 100 percent of the shoppers whom I observed were masked, both in the Target and in the rest of the mall.

I asked two of our (adult) friends how many COVID signs they’d walked past in getting from their respective cars to the restaurant. Both answered “none”. One was sufficiently mindful of COVID-19 that he arrived in a double-mask (fabric over N95) while the other sported a plain N95 mask. Yet their minds hadn’t registered the signs.

Note that the public health experts who have technocratically managed the Massachusetts plague such that our COVID-19 death rate, adjusted for population over 65, is only 3X that of Florida’s (a Robert S. McNamara-style victory?), still advise subjects to wear masks, especially for those who are not vaccinated.

(A few days ago we went on a bicycle ride with the kids in a quiet exurb. Slender apparently health people aged 10-20 would jump off the sidewalk in order to maintain at least 10′ of distance and if they weren’t already masked would rush to raise up their chin diapers.)

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Headline from a rich white town’s “school committee update”:

We are among only 3% of MA school districts to hold in-person classes all year 5-days-per-week!

Of course one would not want to imagine that the government could lie to us, but, as part of his 68 (so far) orders, Governor Baker delayed the start of school here in Maskachusetts until mid-September. Therefore, the “all year” part of the above should be “almost all year” (also, the school day was shorted to end at 1:45 pm instead of 2:50 pm, except on the days when teachers already were entitled to a free afternoon (Wednesday), in which case school ended around 12:30 pm).

Flipping this around, we learned that 97 percent of school districts (and the bigger ones were in this group so it would be more than 97 percent of students) denied children at least some of what previously would have been considered their right to an education.

The same newsletter, prepared by white people who administer a school in a nearly all-white town, contains a section titled “Facing dual traumas of racism and inequity” and we learn that “School Committee members have committed to our own anti-bias training,…” and “Middle school students organized a Black Lives Matter group.” Nowhere is it mentioned that the probability of a young Black life being educated in a school in Massachusetts has been extremely low for the 2020-2021 year.

Related:

• states ranked by COVID-19 death rate (compare to countries ranked and see that science+masks+shutdown would have landed Massachusetts near the very top of the world’s countries in COVID-19 death rate, if MA were its own country)
• “Wellesley School District Faces Civil Rights Complaint From Parents Group” (WGBH, an NPR affiliate): In March, the [almost-all-white] Wellesley schools hosted a Zoom session described as a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian-American students” and other students of color in grades six through twelve. Attached to the complaint was a screenshot of the invitation, which stated: “*Note: This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.” .. “If you identify as White, and need help to process recent events, please know I’m here for you as well as your guidance counselors,” the invitation read. “If you need to know why this is not for White students, please ask me!” … “The goal was to provide a safe space in which students and staff could reflect, share, and be supported as members of our school district,” the email said. “At the same time, we can also understand the discomfort that some members of our community have shared when learning of a practice that they perceive to be discriminatory. It’s important to note that affinity spaces are not discriminatory.”

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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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We have been barraged by emails from our kids’ schools during the Christmas vacation week. If we traveled, the public school administrators want to know where and when and they want to see medical records of a PCR test (required under the governors’ travel orders, though at this point most other U.S. states have a lower rate of COVID-19 cases within 7 days compared to MA). Example:

We will be strictly enforcing the Governor’s Travel Orders and sending students home when we learn about travel and have not received notification and verification of required test results.

The school actually requires additional testing and quarantine days (14) beyond the referenced travel order, which requires 10-day quarantines and testing for those 10 and older:

Children who are 10 years or younger are not required to have a test. However, without a test, they must quarantine before returning to school. So, families will need to choose to either have their children tested and provide the result of the test to the school nurse so that they can return to school immediately if the results are negative or they will need to keep their child home in quarantine for 14 days if a negative test is not provided.

(i.e., if children can keep quiet about that trip to Disney World, they can continue to receive an education!)

The kicker to all of this is that COVID-19 tests aren’t available, except to the mostly-imprisoned college students who don’t need them (they get tested twice/week). Here’s one self-pay $80/test service (recommended by a private school administrator) that you might think would have slots because they don’t take insurance and don’t provide the taxpayer-funded testing that was supposed to be Americans’ right:

As of Sunday morning, it would be possible to get a test on Friday evening in the Cambridge location:

So the result would come back on Monday? That’s 8 days later and the governor’s travel order requires a 10-day quarantine. So the effort and $$ for the test shortens the quarantine period by only 1-2 days.

Separately, one thing that is great about Americans is that we won’t give up our passion for bureaucracy and paperwork even after we declare an “emergency”. For example, although a non-physician (the governor) orders subjects to get tested after travel, a subject can’t actually be tested without paying a physician in addition to paying the lab. From the CIC Health site, regarding pricing for organizations:

To cover the physician who provides the legally-required referral, the clinician to oversee the test, the software for ordering and reviewing results, and logistics support. This fee ranges considerably based on the components required, and range from $5-$35.

As there is no medical treatment for COVID-19 (remdesivir is approved by the FDA, but considered useless by the WHO) and the vast majority of folks who test positive for COVID-19 have no symptoms and the person getting the test probably isn’t sick to begin with, what is the point of paying a physician?

Finally, let me note that rich white people seem to be ignoring the travel order. Friends with vacation houses in other states go to and from freely. A friend recently met up with us for a dog walk in the woods. He talked about having just returned from a ski trip to another state. I asked “Unless you were skiing in Hawaii, didn’t you have to get a Covid test to comply with the governor’s travel orders?” He responded that he hadn’t bothered and wasn’t going to bother. What’s his day job? Physician.

Related:

• Turboprop coast to coast to coast with youngsters (we managed to get a test, but in Kentucky where they’re apparently better organized)
• beacontesting.com, a massive project; on January 3, the site showed “no upcoming times are currently available” at any of the Boston-area locations, but a 2.5-hour round-trip drive to New Bedford, MA would have enabled a test on January 4

Update: Patrick, below, asked whether the situation was better in Western, Maskachusetts, e.g., Pittsfield. The answer seems to be “no”. As of January 3 at 2 pm:

Update from a friend who is considering a brief trip from his all-white COVID-free exurb of COVID-plagued Boston (he’s locked down in a 12,000 square foot house on 10 acres) to rural Maine:

I see. So if I leave MA, go to Maine, and come back – I must quarantine for 10 days. But if I go to Boston and back, I don’t need to. Got it.

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