Why didn’t we adjust the school calendar to avoid cold/flu season?

by philg

The good news is that everyone here in Maskachusetts is wearing a mask in nearly all indoor and most outdoor venues. Thanks to 52+ governor’s orders, much remains shut down and/or capacity-restricted. We have an endless river of Chlorox for sanitizing and those schools that are vaguely open, for example, discharge students early so that the sanitizing process can begin at 12 or 1 pm.

The better news, for the viruses that cause common colds, is that none of this has prevented the common cold from thriving and hopping from human to human. The Boston area seems to be in the grip of a full-scale cold epidemic (of course, because colds are not COVID-19, nobody is bothering to gather statistics).

Half of the parents whom I meet when out walking Mindy the Crippler or interacting with folks at the airport, etc., have now been presented with the task of keeping children home for 14 days following the sniffles, an upset stomach, a headache, or any other symptom that might conceivably be COVID-19. An alternative is to get a child tested for coronaplague, but that turns out not to be simple. The state, with its infinite river of IT $$, has a web site that shows testing centers near a given zip code. But it is not integrated with availability from those centers. So the hapless parent then gets to work a web browser and telephone for several hours trying to find an available test slot. This is nearly impossible because every other parent whose child had a symptom is also trying to do this.

I’m wondering now why we didn’t start the school year in June, at which point the coronavirus was mostly burned out here in Massachusetts (restaurants reopened then, for example) and set things up with outdoor classes under shade structures and a break from November through February, the prime cold/flu season.

(How am I doing? After consuming more Sudafed than a meth lab, my congestion is mostly resolved.)

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More than 5,000 scientists to whom Joe Biden won’t be listening…

by philg

“Biden Vows to Lock Down Country to Curb the Coronavirus if Scientists Say It Is Needed” (Slate):

Former Vice President Joe Biden said he would not hesitate to issue a nationwide stay-at-home order if scientists said it was necessary. In his first interview since officially becoming the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Biden was asked about what he would do if, as some are warning, there is a surge of COVID-19 infections in January alongside the regular flu season. “I would shut it down,” Biden told ABC’s David Muir in a joint interview with Sen. Kamala Harris. “I would listen to the scientists.”

Welcome news for Science Karens across the nation, certainly. By working through the Harris-Biden administration, the nerds can decide which Americans can leave their houses, who can work, who can learn, etc. Where can Joe Biden and President Harris find a list of scientists who should not be listened to? The signers of the Great Barrington Declaration:

As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.

The true crazy talk:

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

Who are the non-scientists behind this unscientific approach to COVID-19?

  • Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.
  • Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.
  • Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.

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What to do when lockdown doesn’t spare your island nation from COVID-19?

by philg

… more lockdown. Just off a WhatsApp call with a friend in Ireland. The mostly-island nation has been mostly locked down since March. After six months of lockdown and 14-day quarantine for anyone returning or coming in, what’s new with our favorite virus? The #Scientists have recommended that the country go into “level 5” lockdown in which nobody can be more than a short distance from his/her/zir/their home. More or less everything will be closed except for schools (I explained that, in the U.S., science tells us that the schools are the first thing to close, not the last!).

“Coronavirus: ‘Act now to prevent lockdown’, Irish PM warns” (BBC):

In a televised address, he confirmed that level three restrictions would be imposed nationwide from Wednesday.

The move rejects a recommendation by public health experts to impose the strictest level five measures.

Mr Martin said moving to level five could have “severe implications”.

“If we all act now we can stop the need to go further, with introducing level four and five restrictions,” he continued.

The taoiseach said this would risk hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Does the failure of lockdown thus far to contain the virus shake anyone’s faith in lockdown? “No,” said my friend. “People say that the lockdowns haven’t worked because not everyone adhered completely to the lockdown.”

What did he think of these policies? “The problem with listening to NPHET [National Public Health Emergency Team] is that they have only one brief: COVID-19. They can’t tell you how to balance other interests.” (This is the same point I made in Looking at Covid-19 death rate is like the old saying “An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”?:

Is asking an epidemiologist whether to keep schools and playgrounds open like asking your accountant whether you should buy a dog? Yes, the expert can give you a bit of insight (“my other clients with dogs spend $4,000 per year on vet, food, and grooming”), but not a life-optimizing answer.

If Ireland, a small island nation, can’t control COVID-19, is the U.S. kidding itself?

For maximum health, my hotel breakfast in Cork, Ireland in 2019:

A place for Corkers(?) to pray to the God of Shutdown:

Kilkenny, a rare glimpse of COVID-19-killing UV light:

Now-illegal gathering in Kinsale:

At what point can the Irish say that their multi-month lockdown has failed and it is time to try something different, e.g., what I proposed in a comment on Transmission of coronaplague among the fully masked Japanese:

Masks Reduce Viral Load Enthusiasts: If you’re right, why drag out the “light load immunity development” for several years, as the U.S. is doing by combining masks with shutdown? Why not fill sports stadiums with (a) sick people who can cough out virus unmasked, and (b) healthy people who will wear masks and absorb healing immunity-building light viral loads? After a couple of weeks of this, how could coronavirus possibly thrive in the U.S.? Also, reopen workplaces, gyms, schools, etc., and actively encourage anyone who is sick to continue coming in amongst the masked healthy.

(Separately, if masks and feverish sanitizing and most-things-shut-down work, why is there a raging common cold epidemic in Boston right now? How did the cold virus manage to get through all of these barriers we’ve set up?)

Is there any standard for declaring lockdown/masks a failure?

Related:

  • WHO dashboard (Ireland has about half the COVID-19-tagged death rate of the U.S. or U.K.)
  • Irish plan for checkpoints to restrict mobility: More than 2,500 Garda members are set to be deployed as part of a policing surge across the Republic in response to all parts of the State being upgraded to Level 3 Covid-19 restrictions, with major traffic congestion anticipated due to the impact of so-called super checkpoints. Gardaí have said they believe traffic congestion, especially on the approaches to Dublin and within the city and county, will be very heavy. They were hopeful the delays would prove so long it would discourage people leaving their home county and encourage them to work from home. Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said 132 permanent static checkpoints would be established on motorways and other main arterial routes across the country, as well as thousands of mobile checkpoints erected for short periods before moving elsewhere.
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Why can’t Michael Bloomberg run a fleet of abortion buses?

by philg

“The Case for Accepting Defeat on Roe” (NYT, Sunday, by a law professor):

Maybe it is time to face the fact that abortion access will be fought for in legislatures, not courts.

In “Unpregnant,” the HBO bildungsroman released this month, the plot revolves around a 17-year-old heroine who travels from Missouri to Albuquerque — a road trip of 1,000 miles — because that’s the nearest place she can get an abortion without parental consent. Watching it made me recall a conversation with a feminist friend, who shocked the hell out of me last year by saying that progressives were too focused on protecting Roe v. Wade.

Why? The argument is that we currently have the worst of both worlds. We’ve basically lost the abortion fight: If Roe is overturned, access to abortion will depend on where you live — but access to abortion already depends on where you live. At the same time, we have people voting for Donald Trump because he’ll appoint justices who will overturn Roe. Maybe it is time to face the fact that abortion access will be fought for in legislatures, not courts.

Saint RBG’s flirtation with heresy:

So what should we do now? Often forgotten is that R.B.G. herself had decided that Roe was a mistake. In 1992, she gave a lecture musing that the country might be better off if the Supreme Court had written a narrower decision and opened up a “dialogue” with state legislatures, which were trending “toward liberalization of abortion statutes” (to quote the Roe court). Roe “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue,” Justice Ginsburg argued. In the process, “a well-organized and vocal right-to-life movement rallied and succeeded, for a considerable time, in turning the legislative tide in the opposite direction.”

The billionaires trying to cleanse American politics from the filth of Republicanism could, for a tiny fraction of what they’re spending to defeat the hated Trumpenfuhrer, purchase and operate a fleet of buses painted with “Bloomberg’s Abortion Caravan” on the side. Have the buses continuously tour the U.S. and anyone who wants an abortion can hop on to be driven to, for example, Maskachusetts. We have abortion on demand up to 24 weeks; abortion of a “fetus” after 24 weeks available in the sole discretion of a single physician concluding that “a continuation of her pregnancy will impose on [the pregnant woman] a substantial risk of grave impairment of her physical or mental health.” (And, for maximum logical consistency, we also require insurance companies to ladle out $millions to preserve the life of a “baby” born at 21 or 22 weeks!)

Also from the law professor… If Allah wills it, future Americans who aren’t aborted will be paying taxes at higher rates (but we promise that the higher rates will apply only to those deemed “rich”)…

I’m still reluctant to embrace the “overrule and move on” strategy, but moving on may be our only choice. And if abortion stops playing such a role in presidential elections, then Democrats may fare better with the 19 percent of Trump voters who have bipartisan voting habits and warm feelings toward minorities; we know 83 percent of them think the economy is rigged in favor of the rich and 68 percent favor raising taxes on the rich.

Once their presidential vote is not driven by Supreme Court appointments, how many might decide to vote on economic issues? And what greater tribute could there be to R.B.G. than both a legislative restoration of abortion rights, and a new Democratic Party that can win — not just by a hair but by a landslide?

Readers: What do you think? Democrats say that the want to provide abortions to more people (not “more women” because men can get pregnant and nurse babies as well) and Democrats have $billions at their disposal. If practical access to abortion is their sincere goal, why aren’t they already using these $billions, combined with Chinese diesel and electric bus technology, to provide practical access to abortion everywhere in the U.S.?

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Stronger teacher union leads to a closed school

by philg

“Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?” (SSRN):

The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures affecting millions of K-12 students in the United States in the spring of 2020. Groups representing teachers have pushed to reopen public schools virtually in the fall because of concerns about the health risks associated with reopening in person. In theory, stronger teachers’ unions may more successfully influence public school districts to reopen without in-person instruction. Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States, we find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semi-parametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, and a further disaggregation to the county level. We also do not find evidence to suggest that measures of COVID-19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions.

If there is a strong teacher union, does that mean parents are out of luck when it comes to free government-run babysitting? No!

“Schools Reopen to In-Person Learning, but Teachers Work From Home” (Wall Street Journal, September 28) describes a world in which teachers can stay home in their PJs while a newly hired “proctor” risks death or maiming from Covid-19.

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Karen is stoned

by philg

From the country’s loudest advocates of shutting down schools… “Mother’s Little Helper Is Back, and Daddy’s Partaking Too” (NYT):

After the kids go to bed, the grown-ups are drinking and smoking pot to distract themselves from the hellscape that is pandemic parenting.

The increase of substance use among parents is “just kind of understandable,” said Jonathan Metzl, the director of the department of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University. “This is an incredible, once-in-an-epoch stressful situation, and the kinds of outlets people usually have in their lives are just not available.” We can’t go to the office, we can’t go to the gym, we can’t really see friends or family, and we never get a break.”

(No mention that parents in Sweden can go to the office, to the gym, and can see friends and family!)

What’s up with the drug that went from illegal to “essential” within a few years?

Many states where marijuana is legal have seen a big increase in sales since the virus began; for example, in Washington State, “cannabis revenue spiked at the height of the pandemic,” according to budget analysis from a local news radio station, KXLY. And some data from earlier in the pandemic showed that prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications were on the rise. Prescriptions for Klonopin and other similar drugs rose 10.2 percent in March 2020 from March 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing statistics from IQVIA, a health research firm.

But for some parents, getting just a little stoned is the only way they can eke out a small measure of joy in an otherwise fairly hopeless time. Deborah Stein, 43, said her nightly pot gummy is the one thing allowing her to get a good night’s sleep on a regular basis.

She’s the mother of a 21-month-old in Los Angeles and works in the theater industry, which has been “completely decimated” by the virus, and she and her husband are worried for their future livelihood, along with the health of their families, the air quality, the election and about a million other things.

After dinner, the couple splits a “chill” gummy containing 1.8 milligrams of THC. “It’s a way of carving out this hour or 90 minutes we get to spend together, before we have to walk the dog,” Ms. Stein said. For at least that brief window, “we get to be peaceful.”

So the newspaper that, in response to a virus that kills unhealthy people with a median age of 80+, wanted schools and society shut down now complains that parenting healthy children isn’t as much as it used to be because schools and society are shut down.

Very loosely related… our young neighbor’s new puppy. Why get stoned every night when you can instead be occupied with housetraining?

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Black Lives Matter/Blue Lives Matter sign for a car

by philg

A friend’s high school-age son recently earned his driver’s license. He already has an idea for improving the family Tesla 3: a rotating license plate, like in the old James Bond movies, that would read “Black Lives Matter” when the GPS determined that the car was traversing urban territory and “Blue Lives Matter” when on the Interstate highway or in the suburbs.

This product seems to be available commercially: licenseplateflipper.com.

I wonder if it could be improved, though. How about E Ink-based signs built into the four sides of a car? As the Social Justice movement progresses over the years, the signs could be kept up to date from a touch screen within the car or automatically downloaded from the manufacturer’s social justice executives. When driving into a retrograde Red State, the messages could automatically be switched to “Heading to Sturgis,” “Preserve the Second Amendment,” and similar.

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Trump’s date with coronavirus proves that He gives shape and meaning to Democrats’ lives?

by philg

Donald Trump has given us additional evidence that the Swedish MD/PhDs were correct when they said, back in March, that nearly everyone in western countries would eventually be exposed to coronavirus and that shutdowns and hiding in bunkers merely delay the inevitable.

Unlike Jair Bolsonaro, however, Trump did not say “I gave the finger to the virus back in March so now I’m just going to recover at home.” Instead, by going to Walter Reed he is apparently hoping to prove that coronavirus is a mild disease from which anyone who has a helicopter, 50 physicians, and four experimental drugs with limited availability can easily recover.

The handful of Republicans with whom I communicate are generally sanguine about the prospect of Donald Trump living only four years beyond his Biblical allotment of 70. They don’t wish Trump any harm, certainly, nor do they hope that he will die, but they recognize that whether a virus decides to kill a human is typically beyond humanity’s control.

Democrats, on the other hand, seem to think of nothing else. Exhibit A: “Get Well, Mr. President,” from the Editorial Board of the New York Times. After four years of cautioning readers that Trump was the new Hitler, the NYT wants Hitler v2.0 to be in the best of health.

Democrat friends on Facebook have been posting obsessively. They are careful to point out that they don’t want Trump dead. They want him to live so that they can then concentrate on prosecuting and imprisoning him for his crimes in a multi-year process that will begin in January 2021. These folks say that every day Trump is in office, Americans die by the thousands because of his poor decisions and bad example to idiots in Red states whom they’ve never met. But they also want him to stay in office at least until January 2021 and then to live for decades beyond.

I wonder if hating Trump has given many Americans a purpose in life for the past four years. Perhaps their lives would be empty and meaningless without Trump and that’s why they are so concerned about his recovery. Yes, they hate Mitch McConnell too, but the guy apparently does not have sufficient personality for hatred against him to give shape and meaning to anyone’s life.

From a neighbor’s house, 2 out of 5 signs on the same theme:

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How is Africa doing with COVID-19?

by philg

We’re just coming out of what would be the Southern Hemisphere’s winter. How is Africa doing with coronaplague?

A European friend offered a theory that the countries with the highest death rates from coronavirus are those that were keeping the largest population of frail elderly people alive via high-tech health care. If you’re dependent on machines to live, he reasoned, you’re an easy target for flu or COVID-19 or any other virus.

This kind of analysis was used by some economics professors in “16 Possible Factors for Sweden’s High COVID Death Rate among the Nordics” (PDF download available for free; layperson’s summary by one of the authors). Sweden had been rather fortunate for a few years relative to its neighbors in terms of deaths among its frail and elderly. In addition to its larger low-skill immigrant population, this supersized frail/elderly population provided easy targets for the virus and may have accounted for about half of Sweden’s extra COVID-19 deaths.

Where the analysis would seem to break down is Peru. The country isn’t notable for a huge population of people on advanced life support and yet it has had a very high COVID-19 death rate (also one of the earliest and strictest lockdowns plus universal masks).

The WHO dashboard shows a lot of African countries with low death rates, even lower than one might expect given the low median age within those countries (Nigeria’s median age is 18, for example, compare to about 38 here in the U.S. (varies by ethnicity/race), 41 in Sweden, and 27 in Peru).

From my Africa pictures:

(That’s Cape Town from the sCessna 210 that my friend flew there from North Carolina. Crossing multiple oceans and mountain ranges in a 1970s single-engine piston airplane with a gasoline-filled ferry tank in the back seat is just as safe as ever, but the trip would be illegal today so as to protect everyone from the hazards of coronavirus.)

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How are Californians doing in restoring their race-based university admissions scheme?

by philg

“A Detailed Look at the Downside of California’s Ban on Affirmative Action” (NYT, August 21):

Twenty-four years ago, California was consumed by debate over affirmative action. A charismatic Black businessman named Ward Connerly led support for Proposition 209, a ballot initiative to ban racial preferences in admission to the state’s world-renowned public universities. The measure passed with 55 percent of the vote and inspired similar changes in nearly a dozen other states.

This November, with an initiative to repeal Proposition 209 on the ballot, California voters will have the opportunity to change their minds.

How are the polls on this one? The New York Times says we need to go back to state-run racism and it will actually be the best thing for the Asian kids who don’t get into the colleges of their choice:

Ending racial preferences in a state university system harmed Black and Hispanic students while doing little to lift whites and Asian-Americans, a study asserts.

Buried in the middle:

Of course, selective university admissions is a zero-sum game. For every Black and Hispanic student excluded by Proposition 209, another student, probably white or Asian-American, took their place. But in focusing on those who got into the most selective U.C. campus at Berkeley, the study found that white and Asian-American students received little concrete benefit from the policy. Mr. Bleemer’s study suggests they would have otherwise enrolled in an equally selective college elsewhere, and had the same chances to graduate and begin successful careers.

The Asian kids weren’t harmed because they earn a lot of money anyway even if they don’t get to attend UC Berkeley at a low cost. But maybe this is just a restatement of what economists have found, i.e., that being smart enough to get into an elite college is a great predictor of income, but attending an elite college isn’t that relevant (summary: what is taught in college is of minimal economic value).

Readers: What’s your prediction about how the California righteous will vote on this one? Will there be a rush to hire Victimhood Studies graduates to restart the sort-by-skin-color system for college applications?

My prediction: Census data show that California is 39.4 percent Hispanic. There’s another roughly 6.5 percent who are Black (and whose lives therefore matter!). Ignoring that these categories may overlap to some extent, my prediction is that 45 percent of Californians vote for to bring back race-based admissions out of self interest (since it is designed to help Black and Hispanic applicants; this number might be off if a lot of the folks in the designated victimhood categories are ineligible to vote due to not being citizens). Then add 15 percent of the remainder. These could be white people who aren’t going to have children, for example. Voting to restore race-based admissions can make them feel good without any personal sacrifice or sacrifice for anyone they care about. That’s 8 percent. So the ballot Proposition passes by 53-47.

Related:

  • “Kamala’s America?”: California today boasts a fabulously rich technology elite; it’s also home to the highest poverty rate among the states, adjusted for costs, according to the U.S. Census. Under its largely one-party regime, notes liberal economist James Galbraith, California has seen inequality grow at among the fastest rates in the country. The state endures the widest gap between middle and upper incomes in the country—72 percent, compared with a national average of 57 percent.
  • “Prop 16 confusion: Affirmative action ballot measure struggling in polls” (NBC): … despite the recent political wave in favor of social justice, the ballot measure isn’t polling particularly well. Why? It may have something to do with the measure’s confusing wording. … “Watching a focus group with Black voters from Los Angeles, they all said no we won’t vote for this as it was read to them,” said Eva Patterson, who co-chairs the Yes on 16 campaign. “Then we explained that it was in favor of affirmative action and equal opportunity, and they all said, ‘Of course we’ll vote for this.'” … The latest polling on Proposition 16 shows 31% of Californians in favor, 47% opposed and 22% unsure. In the Bay Area, the numbers are a bit more in favor of the measure: 40% for, 41% against and 19% not sure. [It is “equal opportunity” because opportunity is based on skin color and anyone who wants to can follow Justin Trudeau’s lead in adjusting skin color?]
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