Among the Deplorable anti-vaxxers (doctors and nurses in Florida)

by philg

We were invited to a birthday party for one of the kids in the neighborhood. A slender mom who appeared to be in her early thirties, on finding that we had moved from Massachusetts, said. “I have a close friend up there, but I haven’t been able to visit because she is afraid to be around anyone who is unvaccinated, even though I had Covid back in August.” It turned out that her Covid encounter was similar to what other unvaccinated friends experienced in 2020. She had a low fever, took a nap each day for a few hours, and had some body aches. Per standard, she tested negative several times before testing positive. Why hadn’t she been previously vaccinated? “Covid is not that big a deal and I didn’t trust that the immunity from the vaccine would be good enough or last long enough to be worth the risk of taking a new medicine.” She was not against older people choosing to get Covid vaccine shots, but she was against the government requiring it. #NotHerFrontDoor:

What was the anti-science Deplorable’s job? Nurse practitioner. Some Democrats explain the tendency of married women to vote Republican as due to brainwashing by husbands. Following the same logic, maybe a science-ignorant husband had controlled her mind? I asked about her husband’s job. “He’s an E-R physician,” she responded. “He got one shot and then decided it was mostly hype and never got the second one. I think all of us [in the family] have already had Covid at some point in the last two years.”

It turned out that the father of the birthday girl was a internal medicine doc and therefore more than half of the adults attending were doctors or nurses, all under age 50. Nearly all turned out to be anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-school closure, and anti-forced vaccination. They wanted to save lives, and in fact for most of them that was their day job, but they did not believe that salvation from SARS-CoV-2 infection was achievable via public health orders. (I.e., they might have been willing to fight a war against Covid if they believed that a war was winnable.)

None mentioned Donald Trump or any other political figure, so I don’t think that their Deplorable attitude toward Saint Fauci and the lockdowns, masks, and vaccines is driven by politics. In fact, the young nurse practitioner said, in response to my description of our old neighborhood with the political and social justice sign forest in front of most houses, “I have no interest in politics and these remote issues. I think about our kids, our jobs, and our friends.”

Separately, one attendee was from Martinique (an athletic coach, not a doctor). He talked about how the French government imposed the same rules on Martinique that apply back in France. “They’re supposed to check your vaccine passport and exclude you from a restaurant if you don’t have it,” he said, “but everyone in Martinique knows everyone. Are you going to exclude your brother-in-law from your restaurant? It never made sense because almost everything in Martinique is outdoors. They sent the military police in from France to enforce the rules. It is not a good place to be right now.” (see “France sends police reinforcements to Martinique to quell Covid unrest” from December 1)

Finally, what is the current #Science on immunity via infection versus immunity from vaccines? I personally know at least one person who became seriously ill with Covid 5.5 months into his Moderna protection period. I don’t know anyone who got Covid twice, though. And I haven’t read about people returning to the hospital for treatment of severe Covid 6 or 12 months after their first bad Covid experience. I asked some doctor friends “Do people get welcomed back to the ICU with a second case of Covid and doctors tell them ‘Here’s your old bed and ventilator”?” The answer was that it is vanishingly rare and essentially only the immunocompromised who have gotten Covid more than once.

From May 28, “Why COVID-19 Vaccines Offer Better Protection Than Infection” (Johns Hopkins):

Immunity from natural infection starts to decline after 6 to 8 months. We know that fully vaccinated people still have good immunity after a year—and probably longer.

(Just as 14 days to flatten the curve may take several years, good immunity for longer than a year runs out in 4-5 months.)

From August 25, 2021, “Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections” (Israeli study):

SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, … This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.

In the U.S., in other words, #Science says that the vaccines are way better. In Israel, #Science says that natural infection is much better (previous infection results in 1/13th the reinfection rate compared to those who got vaccines).

Color me confused!

From an immigrant physician friend:

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Reading list: San Fransicko

by philg

A friend, who was forced to abandon his $10 million custom-built house in San Francisco after the wife refused to continue to live in a neighborhood where people injected heroin in their driveway, recommended San Fransicko.

I rejected the recommendation at first because I don’t have any intention of moving to the Bay Area or even visiting. See Working in San Francisco today (2019), in which I quote an understated young colleague:

[the meeting is] inside of WeWork Civic Center on Mission between 7th and 8th wedged between a homeless encampment and emergency heroin detox center. I would recommend picking a hotel in another part of town. … Due to the layout and direction of the one way streets and traffic I’ve found cabs/Uber to work fairly poorly and often take longer than BART. I stopped using cars when junkies started trying to open my door at stop lights.

But the book turns out to be more widely relevant. First, the author proves that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged:

In the 1990s I had worked on a broader set of progressive causes, including advocating for the decriminalization of drugs and alternatives to prison. But for most of the last two decades my research and writing has focused on the environment. And, in the early summer of 2020, I was busy running my nonprofit research organization and preparing for the release of my book on the topic. It was anarchy of a different sort that motivated me to write San Fransicko. During the pandemic, a growing number of people in floridly psychotic states were screaming obscenities at invisible enemies, or at my colleagues and me, on the sidewalks or in the street, as we went to and from our retail office in downtown Berkeley, near the University of California.

Though I have been a progressive and Democrat all of my adult life, I found myself asking a question that sounded rather conservative. What were we getting for our high taxes? And why, after twenty years of voting for ballot initiatives promising to address drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, had all three gotten worse?

Inspect the lamppost before parking your Tesla Model S Plaid:

Complaints about human waste on San Francisco’s sidewalks and streets were rising. Calls about human feces increased from 10,692 to 20,933 between 2014 and 2018. In 2019, the city spent nearly $100 million on street cleaning—four times more than Chicago, which has 3.5 times as many people and an area that is 4.5 times larger. Between 2015 and 2018, San Francisco replaced more than three hundred lampposts corroded by urine after one had collapsed and crushed a car.

(Car and Driver: “trust us, you don’t want to do 200 mph in [the Tesla S Plaid]. Even 162 mph was terrifying, wandering and nervous to the point that we were concerned about our ability to shepherd it between lane lines. The steering doesn’t firm up enough with speed, making the task more difficult. At similar velocities, a Taycan is resolutely stable. Another reason to fear a 200-mph speed is brakes that got soft during our testing.”)

The author points out that Californian taxpayers give “people experiencing homelessness” and “persons with substance use disorder” (CDC preferred terms) everything that is required to survive until death by overdose:

Progressives give homeless people the equipment they need to live on sidewalks. After Occupy Wall Street protests were held in Oakland’s City Center in 2011, protesters gave their tents to the homeless and money to buy more.8 Five years later, a graphic designer in San Francisco purchased and gave away $15,000 worth of camping tents. “Other organizations were giving them out as well,” noted the city’s head of homeless services in 2016, “and now we’ve got 80 encampments.” San Francisco remains significantly more generous in its cash payments to homeless, and other spending to serve them, than other cities. For example, San Francisco’s maximum General Assistance cash welfare monthly benefit for the poor is $588, as compared to $449, $221, and $183 for individuals in San Diego, Los Angeles, and New York City, respectively. While New York City, Chicago, Phoenix, and San Diego spend 3.5, 1.1, 0.9, and 2.5 percent of their budget on homelessness services, San Francisco spends 6 percent. When local, state, and federal funding are accounted for, San Francisco spends $31,985 per homeless person just on housing, not including General Assistance, other cash welfare programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and other services. By contrast, New York City spends $11,662 and Los Angeles spends $5,001.

San Francisco, according to the book, is the nation’s best destination for any would-be “Persons who returned to use” (CDC). The city and its array of homeless industrial-complex non-profit org contractors will supply “Persons who use drugs/people who inject drugs” with clean needles and crack/meth pipes in a location conveniently across the street from an open-air drug market.

For a bunch of rich say-gooders, San Franciscans are awfully stingy:

Mayor Breed said she opposed Proposition C because she feared that spending yet more on homelessness services, without any requirement that people get off the street, would backfire. “We are a magnet for people who are looking for help,” she said. “There are a lot of other cities that are not doing their part, and I find that larger cities end up with more than our fair share.” After San Francisco started offering free hotel rooms to the homeless during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, first responders reported that people had come from across the state. “People are coming from all over the place—Sacramento, Lake County, Bakersfield,” said the city’s fire chief. “We have also heard that people are getting released from jail in other counties and being told to go to San Francisco where you will get a tent and then you will get housing.”

If housing is a human right and health care is a right and clean needles are a right and inequality is bad, why does San Francisco object to caring for the poorest and most addicted of Bakersfield? The San Francisco median household income is 2X what the good citizens (and undocumented!) of Bakersfield enjoy. Californians will cheerfully pay for every American’s abortion. “California plans to be abortion ‘sanctuary’ if Roe v. Wade is overturned”:

With more than two dozen states poised to ban abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court gives them the OK next year, California clinics and their allies in the state Legislature on Wednesday revealed a plan to make the state a “sanctuary” for those seeking reproductive care, including possibly paying for travel, lodging and procedures for people from other states.

Why is it objectionable to pay for housing the nation’s already-born unfortunates?

I’ve long been an advocate that the marginal tax rate should be 100 percent on incomes greater than my own and on wealth greater than my own. It turns out that the unhoused think along the same lines:

Even people who would prefer to live in sober environments say they do not want to quit their addictions. “When we surveyed people in supportive housing in New York,” said University of Pennsylvania homelessness researcher Dennis Culhane, “almost everybody wanted their neighbors to be clean and sober but they didn’t want rules for themselves about being clean.” In 2016, after the city of San Francisco broke up a massive, 350-person homeless encampment, dozens of the homeless refused the city’s offers of help. Of the 150 people moved during a single month of homeless encampment cleanups in 2018, just eight people accepted the city’s offer of shelter. In 2004, just 131 people went into permanent supportive housing after 4,950 contacts made by then-mayor Newsom’s homeless outreach teams.

How about the richest and goodest of the rich say-gooders?

In 2018, a reporter asked Marc Benioff if Prop C would create a magnet effect. “It seems like one of the things that you guys are doing is you’re creating a magnet for people to come to the city and be homeless,” she said, “because it’s not a hostile environment. Everybody has talked about seeing people out on the street openly shooting up.”

“That’s just not true,” said Benioff. “I can tell you that’s clinically not true. Our University of California at San Francisco, we’ve got the clinical studies to show you that when you give homeless people a home, their lifestyle does change.”

According to Benioff, #Science (“clinically”) proves that providing a house is the cure. What is Marc Benioff doing about it, relative to his net worth (estimated by The Google at $10.8 billion)? He could spend $9.8 billion on helping his brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters who are experiencing homelessness and still have “tres commas”. According to the developer that I talked to in Real estate peak near? (cost to buy a crummy old apartment building about the same as to build new), it costs about $130,000 “per door” to build medium-quality apartments. If Benioff spent his way down to “merely three commas” that would work out to 75,000 new apartments and, therefore, assuming a 2BR average size, 150,000 human lives transformed (more than double the entire unhoused population of San Francisco and Los Angeles combined). Where are “The Benioff Towers” in which the nation’s unhoused can be housed in peace and tranquility?

(Separately, it looks as though Mr. Benioff has not been persuaded by the “Black Girls Code” signs that are attached to the buses that circle his $1 billion office tower.

“Salesforce’s equality struggles burst into the public” (Protocol, 2/8/2021):

In a resignation letter posted to LinkedIn earlier this month, Cynthia Perry wrote a searing take-down of the company’s racial equality efforts, specifically the treatment of Black employees, at the massive software provider.

“I am leaving Salesforce because of countless microaggressions and inequity,” she wrote. “I have been gaslit, manipulated, bullied, neglected, and mostly unsupported … the entire time I’ve been here.”

[Salesforce’s] struggles with race and equality aren’t new. For one, its diversity statistics remain abysmal: Just 3.4% of its 49,000 workers identify as Black.

“Salesforce, for me, is not a safe place to come to work. It’s not a place where i can be my full self. It’s not a place where I have been invested in. It’s not a place full of opportunity. It’s not a place of Equality for All. It’s not a place where well-being matters,” she wrote in the letter posted on LinkedIn.

“Words must be followed up with action. And if they can’t be, then there should be no words,” she wrote. “There is a really big gap between how Salesforce portrays itself and the lived experience I had working at this company.”

Let’s hope that the above highlighted point is incorrect. Otherwise rich Bay Area residents could be in real trouble!)

What’s the story here in Palm Beach County? The median income is only half of San Francisco’s and there is no income tax, but funds are in ample supply due to property taxes on the mega-rich (soon those $80,000/year property tax payments will be 100% deductible from federal taxes!). The 2008 “Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness in Palm Beach County” says that 1,766 people were homeless in 2007. The 2020 count was 1,510 (of whom 480 were sheltered).

Circling back to the opening sentence, what are the rich people who have continued to live in San Francisco doing? “San Francisco residents are hiring private security to patrol their streets in bid to stay safe, amid crime spike that has left many fearful of going outside during the DAY” reports the Daily Mail. And, indeed, my friend confirmed that this was the path his former neighbors were going down.

More: read San Fransicko.

Related:

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Should supermarkets have live music?

by philg

On a recent trip to Naples, Florida, we discovered that the Seed to Table supermarket (across the main road from our Marriott TownePlace Suites hotel; we explained to the kids that this was a double lie because the rooms are not suites and the hotel is not in town) has live music in the evenings. Example:

The first two years of 14 days to flatten the curve have been terrible for musicians, with venues closed by order of Covidcrats, people with money fleeing urban areas, events canceled, etc.

What if other supermarkets adopted the Seed to Table idea, though? Except for the extremely COVID-concerned, people are still going to supermarkets. It is easier to do in Florida because the ceilings are usually so high (the music at Seed to Table happens about 30′ above the main floor), but why not a guitarist in the produce section to encourage people to linger and thereby maximize public health with increased vegetable sales? If I can take over as public health dictator, I will mandate an opera singer performing Wagner in the chips section to discourage sales of Cheetos and Ruffles (also ration coupons for chips and anything including sugar, of course, since obesity is contagious and is an intolerable health risk in the age of COVID).

Readers: dumb idea as usual?

Separately, Seed to Table made the news back in February 2021, e.g., with “Florida grocery store bucks mask mandate; owner says Covid death toll is ‘hogwash'” (NBC):

A video that was taken at a South Florida grocery store shows nearly every customer and employee without a mask.

The footage was filmed this week at Oakes Farms Seed to Table Market in Naples, about 42 miles south of Fort Myers. In it, not a mask is in sight and social distancing is not being followed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly stated that masks and social distancing can help slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Note that Florida state law eventually came around to the owner’s point of view, i.e., that local officials cannot order masks (see “Florida governor signs law preempting local COVID edicts” (AP, May 3, 2021)).

What does the market look like inside? (produce from local farms in abundance; good restaurants, coffee, and an ice cream parlor; wine shop; not the place to go for cleaning supplies and the other non-food stuff that supermarkets carry)

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Enforcing orthodoxy among physicians

by philg

From the Federation of State Medical Boards:

The FSMB is closely monitoring troubling legislation that has been introduced in a number of states aimed at limiting state medical boards’ authority to act in the furtherance of public health and patient safety. If enacted, a number of bills would make it more difficult for licensing boards to discipline a licensee for spreading disinformation. The FSMB strongly opposes any effort to restrict a board’s authority to evaluate the standard of care and assess risk for patient harm.

Unless politicians obsessed with free speech intervene, physicians could be canceled, presumably, for saying that schools should stay open while marijuana and alcohol stores should be closed (as evidenced by California and Massachusetts public health experts, who follow the science at all times, #Science proves that marijuana and alcohol are “essential” while education is optional). Certainly we need a system where docs can be stripped of their ability to earn a living if they agree with the World Health Organization (#Science as of early June 2020) that masks for the general public are not effective (archive.org) and cite Peru, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia as examples.

Separately, a friend recently attended a cardiology continuing education class at a luxury resort hotel. COVID-19 is a public health emergency, of course, but not severe enough to prevent doctors from occupying $600/night rooms paid for by employers (well, ultimately by you via your health insurance dollars!) and gathering each morning to spread Omicron to each other. As the class was being held in a free state, only about 60 percent of the docs showed up to the meeting room in masks. Drs. Karen, Karen, and Karen had done enough complaining by the end of the morning session that signs and emails were posted demanding masking for the remainder of the event.

Related:

  • non-COVID specialists in Maskachusetts might not have to work too hard for the next few months… “Elective Procedures Paused at Some Mass. Hospitals Amid COVID Spike, Bed Shortage” (NBC Boston): Gov. Charlie Baker has ordered Massachusetts hospitals with bed shortages to stop non-urgent procedures this week. “Mass General and the Brigham are running most days over 95% capacity. The state is trying to get us to 85% capacity to have that extra elasticity for additional patients, but that is a really big reach for us,” said Dr. Ron Walls, chief operating officer at Mass General Brigham. … As of Tuesday, more than 900 people statewide were hospitalized with COVID. “We’re seeing a pretty big resurgence of delta right now. Our numbers of inpatients in our Mass General Brigham system in the past three and a half, four weeks have almost doubled,” said Walls. [89% of people in Greater Boston, age 5+, are vaccinated.]
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What can my Identity Doppelganger do with a Citi Custom Cash Mastercard in my name?

by philg

Almost time for serious Christmas shopping. Personally, I prefer to pay for everything with someone else’s credit card.

Apparently, this idea is not original because I started getting U.S. mail letters and text messages regarding a Citi Custom Cash Mastercard. This was a little confusing because I was not a Citi customer, as far as I knew.

It took about 10 phone calls and hours on hold to sort out the mystery. Citi doesn’t want to talk to anyone unless he/she/ze/they (a) enters his/her/zir/their credit card number (which I don’t have, since I never applied for a card or received one), and (b) enters his/her/zir/their Social Security Number (which I was initially unwilling to do, since I am not a customer and they shouldn’t need it, but of course I eventually had to provide it).

It requires a huge amount of diligence and time to get through to anyone at Citi to report that one’s identity has been used without authorization. The smart thing to do would have been to give up, but I managed to look at my credit report via chase.com (a much more efficient enterprise, I think!) and it showed a $9,400 credit limit card that had been opened on November 10, 2021.

The would-be smart shopper used my address and cell phone number. Presumably the physical card would have been mailed to my address, but I never got it (we’re in an apartment building with locked mailboxes so unless it was a former tenant or the management company, I don’t see how anyone could have gotten into the mailbox).

This leads to a couple of questions…

  • How did Citi create a Mastercard account without ever mailing out a physical card?
  • How did an identity thief expect to benefit from opening a credit card account if the physical card would simply be mailed to me and not him/her/zir/them?

Somehow I think that my doppelganger was able to at least attempt charges because one Citi letter says “we noticed suspicious activity on your Citi Custom Cash Mastercard account that may have been unauthorized.”

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Inflation harms the elite, the working class, or the poor?

by philg

From page of the New York Times today:

Whom does inflation harm? It has to be bad for someone, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t be front page news. In fact, you would have to scroll down five times to reach “Migrant Truck Crash in Mexico: ‘They Were All Cadavers’”, a story about “a horrific crash that killed at least 54 migrants.” The NYT story that was much more important than 54 deaths:

The Consumer Price Index is rising sharply, a concern for Washington policymakers and a sign of the rising costs facing American households.

Inflation jumped to the highest level in nearly 40 years, fresh data released on Friday showed, as supply chain disruptions, rapid consumer demand and rising housing costs combined to fuel the strongest inflationary burst in a generation.

As housing and other day-to-day costs rise, workers may begin to ask for raises to help offset the financial blow. Employers are competing for laborers at a time when job openings far exceed the number of people actively looking for jobs, and wages are rising at a brisk pace. The Employment Cost Index, a measure the Fed watches closely, picked up notably in the three-month period that ended in September.

Increased pay has not been enough to fully offset inflation for most people: Wage gains are up sharply, especially for low earners, but are not rising quickly enough to keep up with the acceleration in prices.

The language gives the reader the impression that inflation is most detrimental to the American rabble. Let’s look at some of the language:

  • American households
  • laborers
  • people actively looking for jobs
  • low earners

On the other hand, if it is front page news in a newspaper controlled by elite Americans, shouldn’t we suspect that elites are being harmed? Throughout coronapanic, for example, the NYT advocated for public schools to be closed (#AbudanceOfCaution), thus depriving non-elite children of an education even as elite kids continued in their private schools or with home tutors.

Let’s consider someone on the bottom rung of the American income distribution. He/she/ze/they is entitled to free public housing, free health care via Medicaid, free food via SNAP/EBT, and a free smartphone (Obamaphone). If the market value of his/her/zir/their apartment in Cambridge, Maskachusetts, Manhattan, or San Francisco is $3,000 per month and rises to $30,000 per month, what difference does that make to someone who isn’t paying rent? Similarly, if someone on Medicaid had been getting hepatitis meds for $84,000 in pre-Biden money, what does he/she/ze/they care if the price goes up to $840,000?

What about a working-class wage slave who has borrowed up to his/her/zir/their eyeballs, like any true American? The house was bought with a mortgage and then a home equity loan siphoned out the gains due to inflation. The driveway contains three vehicles, all of them purchased with borrowed money. The wage slave was gulled into three years of college and never finished. He/she/ze/they is left with $45,000 in debt from that debacle. Maybe his/her/zir/their wages won’t quite keep pace with galloping inflation, but all of the debt is effectively wiped out.

What if we get to the above-median end of the American income and wealth spectrum? By definition, someone with “wealth” is a saver, at least on net. Savings, especially if kept in bonds, are attacked by inflation. Stocks generally fell during America’s previous experiment with rampant inflation (printing money to finance Lyndon Johnson’s new comprehensive welfare state and also the Vietnam War that JFK and Johnson embroiled us in). Here’s a chart of the S&P in constant dollars (source; the gray regions are recessions). It doesn’t recover its 1972 value until 1987:

How about the government itself? Inflation makes it easy for the government to pay bondholders ($29 trillion in federal debt isn’t so bad if a Diet Coke costs $29 billion). Inflation enhances capital gains tax receipts, since the U.S. taxes capital gains without adjusting the basis price for inflation. An asset bought 50 years earlier, even if it went down slightly in real value, will be taxed at 33 percent (federal plus state in California) on essentially the entire value when sold. As evidenced by their low quit rate, government workers are paid much higher salaries than they would earn for comparable work in the private sector. Inflation, especially when combined with a fraudulent CPI formula, allows the government to quietly cut employees’ wages.

The effects are certainly going to be uneven, but it is fair to say that generally the powerful inflation that our leaders are brewing is a force for redressing the inequality that the same leaders decry?

(Separately, let me remind readers that all of my ideas are stupid. Back in January 2021, I cautioned a friend who had borrowed money to buy a factory new $3 million Cirrus Jet. I lived for so long in New England that I developed a Yankee idea that you shouldn’t borrow for a personal airplane. In nominal dollars, the jet is now worth far more than he paid, of course, so essentially he is being paid by the lender (and bondholders behind the lender?) to fly around in his jet.)

Related:

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Jussie Smollett convicted

by philg

A friend texted me that Jussie Smollett had been convicted. I replied “Racism and homophobia in the U.S. are a lot worse than we thought.”

(How can I be sure that Mr. Smollett was innocent and, therefore, convicted unanimously by 12 jurors only because of their racism and homophobia? From our leaders…

The top reply to then-candidate Biden’s tweet:

)

Related:

  • Merry Christmas from the iPhone 12 Pro Max (Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing are leaving the courtroom after arguing on behalf of Donald Trump and they get hit by a taxpayer-funded empty city bus. God meets them at the pearly gates and asks if they have any questions. … )
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Life insurance and Covid

by philg

Previous looks at estimating Covid death risk from insurance rates:

From Canada:

Canadian life and health insurers paid $154 million last year in individual and group life insurance claims from deaths related to Covid-19, an industry group says.

The latest statistics published on Tuesday by the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association (CLHIA) include details about benefit payouts related to the pandemic, as well as premium growth in life insurance and annuities.

An additional $150 million in disability claims was paid in 2020 above projections to support recovering workers.

Overall, the insurers paid $14.3 billion in life insurance benefits in 2020, $36.6 billion in health insurance benefits, and $46.2 billion in retirement benefits, the report said.

So the Covid-related death claims were 1 percent of the total in a county that had, in 2020, about 40 percent of the Covid-tagged death rate compared to the U.S.:

What about the overall increase in payouts in Canada? The same publication says that 2019 payments were $12.1 billion. That’s an 18 percent increase and, therefore, payouts went up by 17 percent for non-Covid reasons in 2020. Perhaps simply due to a big sales push 40 or 50 years ago?

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes “Covid Spurs Biggest Rise in Life-Insurance Payouts in a Century”:

Death-benefit payments rose 15.4% in 2020 to $90.43 billion, mostly due to the pandemic, according to the American Council of Life Insurers. In 1918, payments surged 41%.

If we dig a little deeper, the article shows us year-to-year percentage changes. What happened in previous “surge years”? In 2015, payouts were up by 9.5%. In 1994, they were up by 13.1%. What was the great wave of death that swept the U.S. in 1994?

It looks as though 2019 was an unusually great year for life insurance companies (except those that sell a lot of annuities!). Payouts went down 1.7% despite population growth.

If we believe the Canadian data, adjusted for America’s higher Covid-tagged death rate, only about 2.5% percent of the 15.4% bump can be due to Covid. That would leave us with about 13% as the non-Covid increase, similar to the 1994 surge, and less than the 17% non-Covid increase that was experienced by Canadian life insurers.

Related:

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D.C.-based technocrats decide where to park the Afghan migrants

by philg

“For Afghan Refugees, a Choice Between Community and Opportunity” (NYT, 11/24/2021):

In resettling thousands of displaced Afghans, the Biden administration must weigh their need for support against the needs of the U.S. labor market.

That is the difficult question facing President Biden’s administration and the nation’s nonprofit resettlement organizations as they work to find places to live for the newly displaced Afghans. As of Nov. 19, more than 22,500 have been settled, including 3,500 in one week in October, and 42,500 more remain in temporary housing on eight military bases around the country, waiting for their new homes.

Initial agreements between the State Department and the resettlement agencies involved sending 5,255 to California, 4,481 to Texas, 1,800 to Oklahoma, 1,679 to Washington, 1,610 to Arizona, and hundreds more to almost every state. North Dakota will get at least 49 refugees. Mississippi and Alabama will get at least 10.

It seems as though the D.C.-based technocrats have decided that the Afghan migrants will not live in Montgomery County, Maryland, Fairfax County, Virginia, Northwest D.C.. or, indeed, anywhere within a two-day drive of Washington, D.C.

Related:

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What percent of GDP would we have to give to the health care industry in order to have enough Covid care capacity?

by philg

“U.S. Hospitals Feel Strained as Virus Cases Surge Again” (NYT, today):

As the Delta variant fuels hospitalizations in the U.S., health care systems struggle.

Health officials may be bracing for the Omicron variant to sweep through the country, but the Delta variant remains the more imminent threat as it continues to drive an increase in hospitalizations.

Health care workers said their situations had been worsened by staff shortages brought on by burnout, illnesses and resistance to vaccine mandates.

More than 55,000 coronavirus patients are hospitalized nationwide, far fewer than in September, but an increase of more than 15 percent over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times analysis. The United States is averaging about 121,300 coronavirus cases a day, an increase of about 27 percent from two weeks ago, and reported deaths are up 12 percent, to an average of about 1,275 per day.

Americans pay nearly 20 percent of GDP into the health care industry. 1 out of every 6055 Americans is hospitalized with/from Covid. That’s 0.017 percent of us. Nobody liked my April 2020 idea of building strip mall Covid care clinics like renal dialysis centers. Nobody likes the proven-to-work idea of home care for medium-sick Covid patients (NYT). So we’re apparently stuck with the model that everyone who needs supplemental oxygen will get it in a hospital bed (of which we have about 920,000). The NYT informs us that we don’t have enough capacity after paying 20 percent of GDP to the health care industry. So that leads to today’s question: how much would we have to pay in order to fund sufficient capacity?

(A friend is a business executive at a VA hospital. He said that the VA system set up some high-capacity Covid wards with appropriate ventilation systems to protect the rest of the hospital (filtering the exhaust air, unlike at private hospitals that dump Covid aerosols out into the environment!). He said that private hospitals won’t do this because Covid surges don’t happen often enough and therefore, profitable though it might be to treat an actual Covid patients, it wouldn’t be profitable to set up a big section that is usually idle.)

Note that Florida is edging out of the safe zone, according to CovidActNow. But, on the other hand, hardly anyone cares enough to talk about Covid, masks, vaccines, etc. From Marco Island, yesterday:

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