Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Cities are casting out heretics (i.e., those who haven’t accepted a non-FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine). See “San Francisco to require vaccine proof at indoor venues” (AP):

Worried that the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus could derail San Francisco’s economic rebound, Mayor London Breed announced Thursday that the city will require proof of full vaccination at indoor restaurants, bars, gyms and entertainment venues to help keep businesses open.

“This is to protect kids, is to protect those who can’t get vaccinated, is to make sure that we don’t go backwards, is to make sure that I never have to get up in front of you and say, ‘I’m sorry, I know we just reopened and now the city is closed again because we are seeing too many people die,’ ” Breed said.

The mandate will be more stringent than the one announced by New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio last week. San Francisco will require proof of full COVID-19 vaccination for all customers and staff, while New York mandated proof of at least one dose for indoor activities.

Loyal readers will recall that, earlier in coronapanic, I advocated for RFID chips in the necks of anyone who lives in or visits the U.S. This would enable quarantine-enforcement and contact-tracing via door frame scanners. See RFID chips in the necks of college students and #Science proves that I was right (about the need for RFID chips in humans for COVID-19 surveillance), for example. Combined with a central health care database, as in the UK or Israel, it would be possible to confine heretics and infidels to their homes via simple computer programming.

The government has had 1.5 years to plan, but apparently that wasn’t sufficient to develop a durable proof of vaccination card that would fit in a wallet. And, in any case, if an event has thousands of people coming through the doors, how would checking all of these cards be practical? Consider that someone who got injected in a foreign country might be coming through and will be presenting a card in a language that the people at the door can’t read. Also, shouldn’t those checking for heretics be sure to match the name of the vaccination record and the name on a photo ID? How does that work given that (1) IDs are not required for vaccination, and (2) the undocumented may not have ID documents, but are still entitled to full participation in U.S. civic life.

Separately, woudn’t it be fun to build the door scanner that would check the RFID chip, look up vaccine status in the national database, and light up a huge red blinking “HERETIC” sign while sounding submarine movie buzzers and alarms?

[The above should not be read as an opinion on the vaccine requirement policies. I mean only to question how the requirements can be enforced, as a practical matter, without automation and, therefore, some quick way to scan a human and determine vaccine status.]

Related:

• On the subject of adult politicians, such as Mayor Breed, saying that they’re acting to protect children… “Deaths from COVID ‘incredibly rare’ among children” (Nature, July 2021): A comprehensive analysis of hospital admissions and reported deaths across England suggests that COVID-19 carries a lower risk of dying or requiring intensive care among children and young people than was previously thought. In a series of preprints published on medRxiv, a team of researchers picked through all hospital admissions and deaths reported for people younger than 18 in England. The studies found that COVID-19 caused 25 deaths in that age group between March 2020 and February 2021. About half of those deaths were in individuals with an underlying complex disability with high health-care needs, such as tube feeding or assistance with breathing. [For comparison, about 50 children, 16 and under, die annually from traffic accidents in the UK (source) because the nation has not adopted my speed limit idea.]

From Greenfield Village, to which Henry Ford moved the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop:

The sign:

“Thousands of pages had been written on the so-called science of flying, but for the most part, the ideas set forth, like the designs for the machines, were mere speculations and probably ninety percent were false.” — Wilbur Wright

As with coronaplague, there was a credentialed elite to which those interested in heavier-than-air flying were supposed to defer. Professor Samuel Langley, for example. As with coronaplague, the only things that these scientists couldn’t do were make accurate predictions or design systems that functioned as they desired.

Aside from the Wienermobile, my favorite part of the Henry Ford Museum visit was seeing family groups in which one or two members were unmasked while the rest were following science by wearing simple non-N95 paper or cloth masks. Despite fine science-guided leadership from the White House and nearly 70 percent of folks in Wayne County being Democrats, only 1 in 50 of the visitors wore a mask indoors. How could a saliva-soaked cloth or paper mask protect the handful of wearers from contagion? And, if that was the goal, what was the point? In the group below, for example, Adult 1 and Teenager would be protected, but Adult 2 would spread whatever germs acquired during the museum visit once back in the car or home (unless they also use masks within the car/house?).

Here’s another example. The older couple in the back of the Model T walked around Greenfield Village, one masked and one not masked:

Readers: What is the rationale of family groups in which one person regularly uses a mask in public while the others do not? How does the masked person hope to escape coronaplague under those circumstances? (Or maybe the answer is “he/she/ze/they doesn’t, but wishes to protect others” but, in that case, why does he/she/ze/they stay in the family? Why not take advantage of Michigan’s no-fault divorce system and move away from the thoughtless science-deniers?)

“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)

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.

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.

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”