Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“Unvaccinated Covid-19 patients are filling up hospitals, putting the care of others at risk, doctors say” (CNN):

Hospitals are surging with unvaccinated patients infected with the Delta variant — which could affect car accident victims and other non-Covid-19 patients who need hospital care, doctors say.

“None of these patients thought they would get the virus, but the Delta variant has proven to be so highly contagious that even the young and the healthy, including pregnant patients, are now starting to fill up our hospitals,” said Dr. Neil Finkler, chief clinical officer for AdventHealth Central Florida.

(Note that it is not “women” who become pregnant, but “patients” in a beautiful rainbow of gender ID)

Here’s how it looked on my phone (Apple News):

Why haven’t the technocrats come up with the obvious modest proposal? If the unvaccinated are euthanized they won’t clog up the hospital beds to which the righteous are entitled.

Related:

• “A Covid-19 Lesson: Some Seriously Ill Patients Can Be Treated at Home” (New York Times), reminding us that there is actually no reason for most hospitalized COVID patients to be in the hospital (an oxygen bottle in the hospital doesn’t work any better than an oxygen bottle at home)

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If you want to be by yourself in the U.S., one sure way is to get on a public transit bus outside of rush hour. Pre-coronapanic occupancy of a city bus, including during rush hours, was about 6 (U.S. DOT, 2019):

If it used to be, outside of rush hour, 3 people on a bus with a capacity of 75 prior to coronapanic, what do we think it is today? Anecdotally, I would say that 0, 1, or 2 passengers are the most common occupancies. At 7:37 pm on a Monday evening in Detroit, the articulated bus in the picture below had two passengers and the standard bus had none.

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Both buses had “face masks required” signs on the front. The question today: Why? Under no circumstances will these buses become more crowded than an average retail store, in which masks are not required. Why a categorical rule that a solo passenger in the back of an otherwise empty huge bus must wear a mask?

Separately, here’s the web page for the QLINE, a 3.3-mile streetcar system that cost $140 million to build:

More than a year of shutdown waiting for coronapanic to end. Empty cars seemed to run every hour or so with “not in service” signs on the front.

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I wasn’t invited to Barack Obama’s 700-person mass gathering and I haven’t followed the example set by the former President by hosting my own. However, I did recently attend my first big in-person gathering since March 2020, i.e., EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”). One thing that I wondered about at Oshkosh, while surrounded at most times by 100,000+ people, roughly 1 in 200 of whom were masked indoors (closer to 1 in 500 or 1 in 1,000 outdoors), was what the point of city- and state-level COVID-19 restrictions are in a country where there are no internal border controls (or any external ones either, assuming that the person wishing to cross is willing to say that he/she/ze/they have suffered from domestic violence, gang attention, etc.?). A relatively quiet moment inside the Garmin pavilion (zooming in, I can find one guy in a non-N95 mask; what’s his rationale I wonder?):

First, let’s assume that, contrary to the lived experienced of folks in the Czech Republic and Peru, masks and police-/military-enforced lockdowns actually are effective. #Science proves that masks and shutdowns save lives, no matter how high on the COVID-19 death rate leaderboard a masked-and-shut country is. Wrapping a population in saliva-soaked bandanas will stop an aerosol virus.

Second, let’s assume that people can travel freely from an irresponsible unmasked un-shut part of the country to a virtuously masked-and-shut part.

Under these two assumptions, is the masking and partial shutting of Los Angeles, for example, effective when people can leave LA, attend an unmasked mass gathering, and return to LA?

Here’s a scene that has been repeated more or less every weekend in St. Petersburg, Florida, for example:

(Phone video of 10,000+ people gathering in various bars along one street. Fortunately the local public health authorities ordered children to wear masks for 7 hours/day in the nearby schools!)

I don’t like to say that everything needs to be directed by the central planners in Washington, D.C., but I’m having difficulty understanding why we ever thought that this state-by-state, county-by-country, and city-by-city policy-setting could be effective, even if we started from the assumption that humans are in charge of coronavirus.

(The 1,000+ government employees, e.g., USAF flight crews, Army helicopter crews, U.S. Navy pilots, FAA controllers, NOAA scientists, police officers, etc. were entirely unmasked at the event, even, for example, when officially hosting the Delta-variant-infected public inside poorly ventilated aircraft or hangars. It seems that scientifically-guided leadership from the White House is not sufficient to convince even those on the government payroll.)

Related:

• “Oxford study: 2020 Sturgis Rally tied to more than 400 COVID-19 cases across 30 states, 1 death”

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“Despite delta, Sturgis Motorcycle Rally poised to ride again” (ABC):

South Dakota’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which begins Friday and runs through Aug. 15, is expected to draw upwards of 700,000 attendees. Last year’s rally, which took place during the height of the United States’ summer surge, had more than 400,000 estimated attendees, many of whom didn’t wear masks as they patronized bars, restaurants and concerts.

The downstream effect was tangible: At least 649 COVID-19 cases were linked to Sturgis, including secondary and third-degree contacts.

Republican Gov. Kristi Noem supports the rally, a major economic driver in the state.

“There’s a risk associated with everything that we do in life,” Noem wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “Bikers get that better than anyone.”

So… the 400,000 Fauci-deniers in 2020 were responsible for 649 out of the 35,392,284 total cases thus far reported out of PCR toaster ovens in the U.S. Reprehensible! (see this Bill Burr video at 6:40 for the correct way to say “reprehensible”)

See also “Oxford study: 2020 Sturgis Rally tied to more than 400 COVID-19 cases across 30 states, 1 death”:

More than 463 COVID-19 cases across 30 states were directly connected to the Sturgis Rally in August and September 2020. Seventeen patients were hospitalized and one person died, according the report by the Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

The #Science-informed righteous condemned the Sturgis gathering in 2020 and they are condemning it this year as well.

Let’s look at a smaller mass gathering that is not condemned and for which there have been no calls for shutdown. Provincetown, Massachusetts has a population of about 3,000, which expands with tens of thousands of additional visitors during summer weekend (certainly not to 400,000; the town has essentially just two streets). From Slate:

According to a report the agency released on Friday, the CDC’s latest findings were based on a July 4 COVID-19 outbreak in queer mecca Provincetown, Massachusetts, where among a cluster of 469 (with no deaths) at the time of study, an astonishing three-quarters of the infected had been fully vaccinated. As of July 31, the P-Town outbreak had ballooned to 965 cases.

It was about halfway through our weeklong stay when one vaccinated friend from New York City began to report not feeling well. Unable to stop coughing, he and his boyfriend drove to Outer Cape Health Services, where he tested positive for COVID and immediately fled the cape. Soon after that, I began to hear whisperings—whether at the Mussel Beach gym or traditional “high tea” gatherings by the pool at the Boatslip Resort—of a “gay cough” circulating among some out-of-towners.

The gathering in Provincetown caused 2X as many cases as Sturgis 2020, despite being only about 1/10th the size (could there be a behavioral difference comparing Harley riders to P-town visitors?). Shouldn’t we expect public health experts to demand a governor’s order to shut down the P-town scene? Why is it irresponsible for motorcycle enthusiasts to gather in South Dakota and responsible for New Yorkers and Bostonians to gather in Provincetown?

Addressing the national lifeguard shortage (July 2018):

View of the harbor from the public library:

A P-town shop in which all genders are welcome, but only one gender ID has a future (July 2018):

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The featured Young Adult Non-Fiction section at the public library (March 2019):

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What if we try to merge the rainbow of Provincetown with the value system of Sturgis? We get “Better a Sister in a Whorehouse than a Brother on a Honda” T-shirts in a rainbow of colors!

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The government had approximately 50 years of warning that hundreds of thousands of people would be gathering at the Oshkosh airport last week (608,000 through the gates (but the same person could be counted twice if showing up on multiple days, I think); 10,000 aircraft landing KOSH). The same government says that it will pay any price (with printed money?), bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe to get life-saving vaccines into the arms of those too stupid to realize that they need salvation. From July 28, 2021, state-level: “‘Get vaccinated’ is the united message Wisconsin health officials say amidst COVID-19 spike”. From July 29, federal: “Biden announces measures to incentivize Covid-19 vaccinations, including a requirement for federal employees”.

You don’t have to be a marketing genius to see the opportunity to reach the general public at EAA AirVenture. Ford runs a big pavilion promoting its SUVs and pickups. Cookware, mattress, knife, and massage chair companies rent small booths. You can check out a new concrete truck or military vehicle from the local defense contractor. You can order an AC Cobra replica. The majority of the attendees aren’t pilots and many attendees aren’t even interested in aviation specifically, but merely show up as companions with someone who is. Some Mennonite farm kids, below, for example, just waiting for a technocrat to inject them for their own good:

Why wouldn’t the multi-billion dollar government vaccine bureaucracy not set up a booth at Oshkosh and offer people one-shot J&J or their first or second shot of the other vaccines? EAA probably would have given the government worthies space for free, given that the COVID-19 mandarins have the power to shut down gatherings such as EAA AirVenture. It can’t be a shortage of personnel. At any one time there were probably hundreds of government workers on site for various reasons (police, U.S. military recruiters in their recruiting booths, U.S. military crews that had come with aircraft, FAA administrators and educators, Border Patrol folks showing off their gear, etc.). [Exactly 0 of these folks were observed to be following President Biden’s example by wearing masks!]

Here’s a sampling of non-aviation enterprises that decided a gathering of hundreds of thousands was worth showing up for:

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The excuse is that vaccine injections are too complex to deliver without a permanent building? The government actually has several permanent buildings at its disposal during “Oshkosh”. One is an FAA Safety building and one is half of a huge hangar in which various agencies explain their operations (“International Federal Pavilion”). Even without a permanent building, Chick-fil-A was delivering 20+ sandwiches per minute out of a trailer and tent:

Related:

• Why aren’t vaccines available at highway rest stops?

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