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Addiction Problem in Los Angeles
LA has reimposed an indoor mask mandate starting tomorrow.
If I told you that because COVID cases are few but increasing, that you should continue to stand on one foot while eating pizza you would likely point out that such a gesture has no impact on the spread of COVID. Exactly right. In fact, none of the NPIs done by any government at any level anywhere in the world has had any significant or even measurable effect on the spread of COVID. We now know with statistical certainty that the lockdowns and closures had little or no effect other than economic, medical, and social injury, that school closures were scientifically ill-advised and harmed kids more than COVID and that general mask mandates had no measurable impact on any country or local jurisdiction that imposed them. COVID was always gonna COVID and the numbers went up and down on COVID’s own terms. Other than vaccines, we have no effective tools but we continue to pretend that we do.
The real problem is that thousands of elected officials and government employees have developed an addiction to “managing” the crisis. The fear porn surrounding the dreaded “delta variant” is irresponsible but entirely consistent with how the pandemic has been “managed.” The delta variant is proving to be more contagious but a lot less lethal than the others but you would never know that from the news or official pronouncements.
For example, unlike the US, Britain appears to be undergoing a horrific surge in COVID cases–over 40,000 per day:
Worldometer COVID UK.
And yet, almost nobody is dying from COVID. Thirty-seven COVID deaths yesterday in a country of 68 million:
Worldometer COVID Deaths UK.
The insanity is that (a) for whatever reasons, this pandemic is no longer anywhere near as deadly; (b) nothing we tried so far made any difference, and yet (c) we are told it is urgent to double down on the same futile policies despite the cost and the unambiguous reduction of danger. It is nuts that our “leaders” and “experts” refuse to acknowledge how much they got wrong. But the worst part is that that they have no exit strategy other than to double down on stupid until they can indulge self-congratulations when COVID decides to leave largely on its own like any other pandemic.
And back to the new LA mask mandate… Here is an exercise for the reader. Look at the new cases per 100,000 for LA County in the data below. Assume that 20% of those are false positives, that there are six times as many active cases as reported positives at any given time, that those who test positive are infectious for an average of three days or less and that really sick people are also out and about with the same frequency as healthy people. What are the chances of randomly encountering an infectious person in LA? (Put your answer in the comments.)
California state COVID dashboard, 7/16/21.
If you are unvaccinated in a closed space with that individual, the key risk metric is not masks but time and airflow rates. Non-lab-grade masks retard the bulk of sudden horizontal micro loogie projections but are pretty useless against a steady flow of airborne viruses in badly ventilated closed spaces. And any viruses initially trapped in those blocked sneeze/cough micro-loogies (now plastered across the mask wearer’s face) did not die and can then be released continuously instead of just falling to the floor as they would if sneezed or coughed out without mask absorption.
At what point does LA admit that it’s time to stop the nonsense. None of this worked so let’s just stop pretending. As with control addicts in other jurisdictions, even if we get down to zero cases, how long would we be ordered to wait until it’s officially over? Will we have to stay locked down and masked up so COVID does not come back? Put that mask back on and remove half those tables and chairs, do you want COVID to come back and kill Granny?!
Will Los Angelenos push back? Question the logic and “science” of their leaders?
I am not optimistic. I live on the opposite coast in an absurdly blue jurisdiction and the addiction to obeisance to The Science (i.e., the sensibilities of the Elect) appears to be as addictive among my neighbors as “crisis management” is for our rulers. God help us all. Stupid is winning. And masks don’t stop stupid. They may help spread it.
Published in General
It is pathetic watching how people, who are afraid and inept, do foolish things to feel less stupid and less incompetent. Can’t someone tell them to knock it off? Okay, I guess they wouldn’t care. At least they are doing something. Right.
It enrages me that there was not more of “the emperor’s got no clothes” reaction when governors started issuing silly percentages about capacity in restaurants as if there were some giant fine-tuning knob. Or the magical thinking about various permutations of the six-foot fetish.
It enrages me that it has been obvious since April 2020 that COVID rises and falls in the same way across entire regions in some seasonal fashion regardless of differences in policy efforts within the region. And yet “experts” continued to predict surges on the very day it is clear that case numbers in their state have peaked or try to blame rising counts on some form of disobedience and, worst of all, claim drops as evidence of policy success.
And why has the science been so slow to grow? We still have wildly conflicting studies about HCQ, Ivermectin, and Vitamin D. Our knowledge of the mechanics of the transmission and the precise optimal conditions for the spread has big gaps. The disease will be long gone before all the anecdotal data about what treatments docs in the front lines tried can be resolved.
Like Glenn Reynolds and Richard Fernandez are always saying, the cult of expertise has taken a major hit.
We have Ivermectin, HCQ and other anti-viral treatments. This one sentence ruins your post.
(a) It is natural and normal for a respiratory virus to become more infectious and less deadly. This is from simple survivor bias. Very deadly versions put people in the grave instead of out-and-about spreading them around.
(b) people react faster than the government edicts. Humans have agency and seek information and change behavior accordingly. You can conclude that edicts are useless, but not that “nothing tried makes a difference”.
(c) politicians are rewarded for taking action and punished for not taking action. Political choice theory biases politicians to protecting the Karens.
I was referring to NPIs. And have seen an awful lot of conflicting credible studies about the efficacy of those treatments. The very fact that so many practitioners are using different protocols is an indication that this is not fully resolved.
Bad “leadership” is not just in California. Here’s a photo a surfer in Spain getting arrested for surfing after a positive Covid test. Yes, those are hazmat suits.
California is pathetic. I don’t have anything smart or articulate to add to that.
OB, do you know of any explanation for the large increase in cases in the UK? I see that the death figure has not increased significantly, though there is typically a 2-3 week lag time between an increase in cases and an increase in deaths, so I’m not sure that we can conclude, yet, that these new cases in the UK are less deadly.
I perused the US Worldometer page, and don’t see any similar increase in the US as a whole or in the couple of states that I checked. This is good news. I also didn’t see such an increase in the data for France, Germany, or Italy.
I wonder if it relates to the UK’s vaccination policy. I haven’t studied this in depth, but it’s my understanding that the UK decided to extend the delay between the two vaccination shots, on the theory that it was better to have a larger number of people half-vaccinated than a somewhat smaller number of people fully vaccinated.
There is a new variant called “Delta,” and after a quick search, the reports seem to be mixed as to whether the vaccines are significantly less effective against this variant.
I do agree with you about what looks like an overreaction in LA County.
Bathos:Will Los Angelenos push back?
Er. No.
We Angelenos, being ever so fashionable and all, have always been on the cutting edge of the latest thing and fad for over a century now in everything imaginable including government, so long ago we fell headlong into the clutches of the oh so fashionable Democrat One Party State Dictatorship effectively enforced by Public Employee Union thugs which now effectively forbids those rabble we call voters from effectively having any say in our governance. I bet all you outside the State of Cali are so jealous? Ya, you know you are!
One little story from today. In my neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills there is large kinda Piazza place at the top of the my hill ( my neighborhood was designed with a Mediterraneean Hill-town in mind), with a fairly large ( about a 40 foot diameter) landscaped traffic circle in it. Decades ago some of our neighbors including me and my wife bolted in a teak bunch for people to sit on in this traffic circle.
Recently one of my neighbors has taken upon himself to maintain the landscaping which of course our fair City Government doesn’t seemingly give a damn about. So I was talking to him this morning about enlarging the bench area so it could become a better neighboring gathering place, but his retort was that he had already talked to the City about that and the City was adamant against anyone actually sitting in their traffic circle. So there. Our Overlords know best as always.
The Brits seem to lead the way on variants (the first one we panicked over started there). Spain, Holland and Portugal also have new blips but nowhere else in W Europe that I see. More than half the UK is vaccinated and more than half of Britons have been infected (reported number times six) so this is a weird outcome that would be troubling but for the failure of deaths to rise (7-10 days is the lag I have seen with respect to changes in slope.) Hospital beds in use for COVID patients went from 1,636 to around 3,000 in the last ten days but that is a long way from pushing capacity.
It would be weird and entirely predictable if COVID became endemic, widespread but largely harmless, having already killed the most vulnerable while in its more virulent form–and governments act like it is still a crisis.
She has to be brought indoors while she is still infectious and can more easily infect others. If she remains at the beach where it is almost impossible to infect anybody else, then it won’t spread. My policy would be to give asymptomatic COVID-positive people supplies and tents on the beach for 48-72 hours.
Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, has seen a number of “breakthrough” cases–fully vaccinated people who nevertheless contracted and tested positive for covid-19. The town manager had this to say:
His remarks fit with my understanding of how the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were supposed to work. They offer a different kind of protection than traditional vaccines do.
But the “outbreaks” in LA and England look a lot like the outbreak on the Diamond Princess. They are pretty small numbers, all in all.
This is where the immunity picture gets confusing: some people have innate immunity, possibly from their parents’ exposure to some other corona virus, and that type of immunity is presently unmeasurable; some people have by now acquired immunity; some people simply cannot muster the T-cell response to fight it off upon initial exposure.
It is so hard to argue with the mask-lockdown types. We can’t say definitively they don’t work, at least not definitively to them; they can’t say definitively that they do work, at least not definitively to us.
It’s kind of where we are with evolution as the explanation for the origin of biological life on the planet and global warming or colding or changing. :-)
It has already been clear that most of us (who are not morbidly obese, not very elderly and/or immunocompromised) have enough acquired cross-immunity to resist or minimize COVID infection. What is weird is that kids with a much shorter exposure history are even more resistant. The only real mystery was why we did not adopt of policy of circling the PPE/isolation wagons around the obvious targets while everybody else goes back to work and school.
General suppression strategies were never going to work. The existing literature predicted that. The lockdown types quite literally don’t do science. They have no clue about COVID seasonality. They have no clue about side-by-side outcomes for different policies. They assume that every dire prediction is true. They confuse science with the sensibilities and media habits of their circle, their class. They defer to credentials.
The politicians (and bureaucrats) do have a problem with addiction to power. I have to travel to California in about a month to take care of the assets of my recently deceased parents-in-law. I will be a few hundred miles away from Los Angeles County, so I am hoping the LA County insanity doesn’t spread too far.
I don’t care about “cases.” Nor should anyone trying to dictate rules. So people feel terrible for a few days to a week. Tough. Lots of common illnesses cause us to feel bad for a while. Until the illness requires widespread hospitalization or causes a significant amount of death, it’s not a disaster worthy of upending society. The rate of hospitalizations and death from Covid-19 is decreasing. It is inappropriate to alter society (for example by requiring the wearing of masks) for a decreasing risk.
There’s a reason a year ago the media switched from talking Covid deaths to Covid cases.
Redefine what should scare you.
As one Ricochetti wrote: “Fear won’t prevent you from dying, but fear will prevent you from living.”
Wonderful post that articulates a lot of what I’ve been thinking. I live in a very woke-Blue suburb north of Chicago and, based on what I’m seeing, I’m not thinking anyone in Blue California will push back. If anything, they’ll embrace the measures.
Part of that is because they think they have “cured” COVID and are enlightened, unlike those nasty Red-State people. Part of it is signaling that they are not like those irresponsible people who, in their minds, are the ones spreading COVID by not wearing their masks.
And, actually, they just refuse to believe/see that the government — including local health officials — screwed up at every step and every chance they got. There is no point in trying to get them to believe the facts.
I have several of them as friends and they truly live in a different world. (The few friends I have left are in different circles and I NEVER tell them my views, so I can still be friends. So I know of what I speak.)
I’m not sure what the next step is, but I seriously cannot take another lockdown.
I think we have quite a bit of data from these last 15 months to argue against the mask-lockdown types. The states with the most draconian lockdowns and intrusive mask policies fared no better than states that didn’t. The graph of the L.A. County case stats in comment #16 above looks almost the same as everywhere else in America since the beginning of the pandemic, i.e. a virus is gonna virus.
Another member feed post from today (or yesterday) discusses the sharp rise in drug overdoses in 2020. The overdose statistics are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the collateral damage caused by lockdowns. In the months and years to come we’ll see statistics on the disaster lockdowns were to mental health, missed cancer detection and prevention of serious cancer cases and deaths, detection of heart disease and deaths, etc., etc., etc. We’ll also see studies on the detrimental effects of mask policies on children’s physical and mental health. Finally, we’ll see the effects of the entirely unnecessary lost year of learning on those students who were shut out of school for an entire year thanks to selfish teacher’s unions that ignored the science in favor of extorting money and power from federal, state, and local governments.
Will these statistics and studies be suppressed by the collusion between Big Tech and the Biden administration? Probably. I’m not optimistic.
Yes, there is a lag between cases and deaths, but even allowing for that the death rate for this round seems to be not nearly as high as during previous increases in cases. One possibility is that this new round is disproportionately afflicting unvaccinated young people, where the fatality rate would be much lower than among oldsters. Another possibility is that the Delta variant is not as deadly. Or it could be a combination of both. You’d think there would be data on that by now, and you’d also expect the news media to get it wrong.
World-o-meter is basically an expression of monies donated to Johns Hopkins, and we are talking about the 1.2 billion bucks the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had given JH up to last Spring. I have no idea how much they have given JH since.
It’s nice to believe science and medical people don’t abandon their consciences & fudge numbers to read the way that top donors indicate they want them read. But there are serious indications that as much as half of all Americans still believe in them, the consciences of our scientific and medical “experts” are shoved to the back burner when Big Money Talks.
Last summer, pharmaceutical giant Novartis was hit with a 670 million dollar penalty because of that firm’s illegal monetization of doctor recommendations. What the Fed’s lawsuit against Novartis stated was that Novartis offered bribes to doctors who successfully pushed prescriptions for drugs onto us consumers (business people no longer refer to us as patients.) The bribes came in the form of $500 gift cards, 1,000 sets of new golf clubs, and free cruises for doctors and their families. To get in on this, all the med profession had to do was keep writing up prescriptions for drugs Novartis produced, whether the consumer needed them or not.
Anyway there are decent sources for COVID stats.
Far better to pay attention to COVID stat sources like john Ioannidis of Stanford, or the Dutch equivalent of the CDC who put together this chart of COVID fatalities arranged by age:
Old Bathos, it’s my belief that two reasons are continuing to fuel the continual emphasis on how COVID is still among us and how we better think about it every moment of every day and get as many vaxxes as the PTB let us have, or we all will die.
So the first of the two reasons is the money. COVID fear allowed Congress to pass two (or is it now three?) bills to relieve future generations of any possibility of not being born with massive budget deficits. So some 3.1 trillions or more has been put into the economy, rather willy nilly.
Even the murderer Scott Peterson, who took the life of his young wife and their unborn child, received a sizeable COVID stimulus loan. A full 100 billion dollars is to be spend to “COVID-ize” our grammar and public schools. The school money is absurd: fewer than 400 children ages 6 to 17 have died as a result of COVID.
But absurd or not, no politician is going to kill the COVID goose as long as its existence promises future golden eggs.
The second reason is for full control. Half of the pubic is now aware that the COVID plandemic was brought to us through an arranged and carefully thought out assignment whereby the US taxpayer subsidized the Wuhan lab and then Oops! that lab leaked the bioengineered virus right on time and on schedule.
Trump had bought the US economy back to life and it looked like he would continue to do good things for the country and the middle class. The rise of the virus helped take down his re-election prospects.
Here in Calif, Gavin Newsom’s ill advised, selfish and greedy dictates involving full masking up and locking down pushed those who were undecided about Newsom into the column of voters who have long wanted him out. His recall election is on the ballot for the day of Sept 14th. So given what happened this past November, it is not hard to imagine him dictating to the Dem leadership that now that the new variants might kill us all then it is a necessity to be releasing significant numbers of unrequested mail in ballots to help keep him in office.
It is also true that if those in control allow us to again live normal lives, we might spend some of that normalcy taking out the tyrants who flourished under the COVID fear. Across the nation, parent groups are challenging local school boards and officials who overdid the COVID response. In some cases, parents have forced the resignation of entire school boards! Locking the nation back down would certainly stop at least some of that momentum.
Lighten up, Francis. The LA County Sheriff is refusing to enforce the mandate, saying “is not backed by science and contradicts the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines.”
The reality is that most people have about had enough of this and will do as they please. Don’t believe
everythinganything you read in the corporate media. As often as not, the opposite of what is reported is closer to the truth.From your distant perch, you can’t see much of what’s going on. The reality differs from what you’re being told. Take the red pill. There is no spoon.
I guess the good news is that it means Democrats believed some risk remained of losing the next elections. The disease has always been about the election since Democrats saw what it did for them. Everything they do is about the elections and unless we do something drastic it’ll be over for the country, even if the Chinese aren’t running matters.
Politics, power, ideology created a kind of secondary infection worse that the initial one. Never leave out stupidity and ego when listing causes.
It’s no longer about controlling the spread of the virus. It’s about controlling people . . .
What you’re hearing a lot now, being stated consistently across MSM and issuing forth from Jennnnnn Pisssaki’s mouth is the “99.999393” number, about the percentage of people dying from COVID that did *not* get vaccinated. The way they’re saying it makes it sound that number comes from right now, when it includes all the people who died of COVID prior to the vaccine being developed and administered to the public.
This is deliberate misrepresentation. It’s being used as justification for continued, or in LA’s case, re-instituted lockdowns – all of which is counter to the science. All of it is counter to the science.
But OK. Lock away. That should fix everything in California. What will happen is that no matter the outcome, they’ll stick to the “masks” mantra as preventing thousands more deaths, and there’s no way to prove that one way or the other. Then they’ll all be able to go out to expensive restaurants and congratulate each other on saving the world and ensuring their permanent sinecures in public office.
It might be the only way these things change is not through voting, but from the elimination of the bureaucracy and reduction in the size of gov’t. No matter who runs for office, those barnacles do not scrape off easily.
I just want to mention that our researchers at the BSL-3 facility culturing pure Wuhan coronavirus wear less protective garb (although they do wear a real respirator and shower after they are done). On a sunny beach like that, you would be fine with gloves and maybe a face shield if the gal is coughing on you or something. That’s leaving aside the fact that she was not a hazard in the first place and they only created a hazard by approaching her. Coronavirus does not last long in sunlight.
I must apologize Bathos, there has been some pushback – from the ever increasingly terribly honest LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, whose jurisdiction covers unincorporated areas of the County and a smattering of smaller cities.
On the generally far Left Spectrum cable news ( which I have to skip over to get to the good cable stuff) I saw the other day that Villanueva went off on the Homeless and spouted some very uncomfortable ( at least for the powers that be) and stubborn facts:
• Over the last ten years, the number of Homeless in LA County has doubled from 40,000 to 80,000 – I believe the largest concentration of the Homeless in the country by far. All this happened despite having the County spending 6.9 Billion dollars over that period – yes you got that right 6.9 billion smackers in one county – on social services for the Homeless.
• According to the Good Sheriff, roughly 30% of the Homeless are mentally ill and roughly 70% are drug or alcohol addicts, so only about 30% of the Homeless will even respond to those social services we spent 6.9 Billion on.
• There are places like very arty and counter culture Venice Beach ( where the interview was happening) which lives by the tourist trade which have seen their tourist business decimated by inundation by the Homeless and as a result 134 businesses in Venice Beach have been shuttered.
• The LA County Sheriff force encounters on average 5 new dead homeless lying in the gutter every day as a result of the oh-so compassionate social policies of our great politicians. Thank you very much.
One last point, those cities that lie outside the jurisdiction of the Sheriff like mine of LA City will almost certainly enforce the new mask mandate that starts today.
Because of his increasing honesty, I worry for the life of our Good LA County Sheriff Villanueva. The powers that be in LA , just like our Supreme Leader Stalinist Uncle Joe Biden, do not take kindly to the spreading of “misinformation” aka the TRUTH.
Haha! Love it!