Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
When Will Your Governor Declare the WuFlu Crisis Over?
What is the COVID response endgame in your state? Does anybody know? Ricochetti have discussed at length the issue of the moving goalposts since the implementation of a two-week curve-flattening. But where are we now?
The politics of the matter are increasingly detached from the relative effectiveness of past and present official actions and policies and especially detached from the actual state of the pandemic. So now, under what circumstances can officials foster an impression of success, take credit for it and stop saving us?
The trick will be (a) to prevent voters from asking why we could not have re-opened a lot sooner; (b) not merely deflecting blame for the economic carnage but to secure additional authority and power to “solve” that crisis as well, and (c) to make sure the timing yields the most partisan electoral advantages.
The single largest political obstacle appears to be a vested political interest in lockdown policies. We have known at least since April that this disease carries little risk to non-elderly persons with no existing co-morbidities. In my home state of Maryland, for example, the Governor issued an order on April 29th authorizing state health authorities to fashion detailed (mandatory) guidance for nursing homes. (The CDC did not fully spell out its current recommendations regarding nursing homes until May 18th. ) The Governor Hogan’s order was seven weeks after the initial lockdown order thus by then too late politically to concede that (a) lockdowns had had little effect with respect to protecting the vulnerable (b) the focus needed to be on the vulnerable and (c) a return to normal with prudent awareness of risks and best practices was possible without significant additional risk to the vulnerable once prudent precautions were in place to protect the vulnerable. If you told everybody we could all die without these restrictions and you then lift them before there is a cure, will everybody think you were lying?
Gov. Whitmer in Michigan just successfully pressured the school system into canceling high school football. (Whitmer reminds me of that one hyper-religious relative who wishes it could be Lent all year long—she seems to revel in punitive actions against normal life.) The risk of additional COVID deaths from playing in or attending a high school football game is probably more than offset by the risks of adverse risky behavior by teens done in lieu of football, by downstream personal losses such as the loss of scholarship opportunities and by not saving the lives that would have been saved by hastening the onset of herd immunity. The average age of a Michigan COVID fatality is 75.4. There have been 600 deaths so far this year among the two million school and college-age persons in Michigan. Eight of those are COVID-related. Lockdowns directed at the young are utterly asinine. But politically useful perceptions much be served. To the bitter end.
Taking credit for success. The execrable Gov. Cuomo is taking victory laps because the COVID crisis is about over in NY. Cuomo is responsible for this decline in the same way it could be said that effective air defenses at Pearl Harbor eventually caused Japanese warplanes to return to their carriers thus resulting in an American victory. The truth in NY is that the disease just ran out of targets.
Cuomo can be forgiven for the initial error of focusing so completely on hospital capacity that the order to return infected persons to nursing homes was issued. He was relying on the same experts that prompted President Trump to dispatch a US Navy hospital ship to NYC. However, it is an open question as to whether Cuomo’s error was corrected in a timely manner. It is also undeniable that his administration fudged reporting to hide nursing home deaths and his subsequent partisan handling of the issue is a disgrace.
But Cuomo’s absurd self-congratulations will be the norm as the disease recedes. My seat-of-the-pants estimate is that by mid-September, there will be no US state in which the daily number of cases is increasing, the national running fatality rate will approach that of usual flu and thus continuing the lockdowns will be harder to justify. But there is probably enough political momentum behind innumerate politician- and media-driven fear, mask-enforcement mania, and incentives to depress Trump’s re-election to keep the pain in place in blue states well into November.
The Swedes dropped a turd in the political punchbowl. I would argue that nothing done by any government had any significant positive effect on the incidence and lethality of COVID-19. There are indications that improper use of ventilators and the political barriers to the use of some medications had an adverse effect but overall, the bug spread and killed everywhere in a very similar fashion no matter what anybody tried to do to forestall or prevent it.
QUIZ: (a) Match each graph to the COVID death data to the right jurisdiction. Choices are Italy, Michigan, New York, and Sweden. (b) Explain how any the varied approaches of these jurisdictions could have made possibly any difference given the remarkable similarity in outcomes.
So when is it over?
Published in General
Keep the reported infection rate as low as possible until the next election.
Voters do not (seem to) care about the death rate, or death rate demographics, only the reported infection rate (and maybe the rate of testing, but that’s only a maybe). Voters (seem to) demand reassurance by politicians that they and/or their children definitely won’t be infected, even though the likelihood of death and/or long-term health implications may be minimal for them.
OldB,
This is why Fauci’s leadership (or to be precise lack of leadership) is so critical. With Fauci making excuses for the idiot Democrat Governors from the top they will drag their feet and cling onto every lie to justify their idiot policies. Fauci needs to go now. He is neither objective nor reliable.
Completely agree.
Regards,
Jim
Never. The point is isolation, disconnection, fear, and misery to gain control.
I also think we don’t know stuff, that would really change how peoplecresponded.
Every day, it feels like The Truman Show.
One day the isolated puzzle pieces will come together, and fit. But not today.
Depressing. Hope you’re wrong. Still, depressing.
Also, the Mark of the Beast, where you can’t buy or sell unless you have it.
I know it is perceived as kooky by many, but this feels like a set-up and a con to get people on board with what otherwise would be rejected.
I have felt that way since March. Even then I saw the path of tyranny to forced vaccination. I’m kind of surprised how slowly it’s unfolding.
I’m just trying to gather the Courage of the Saints to refuse when they come to my door.
Kyrie Eleison.
It depends on whether President Pelosi or President Harris thinks that this epidemic being over will promote the Total Transformation or not.
Daily deaths are marginally lower than the peak. Seven day moving average is flat.
And you want to declare “victory” and move on?
As much as I like DeSantis (remember, he only agreed to lock down after pressure from Trump), and he has refused to lockdown with the spikes that have happened, I don’t think he’ll ever declare it over. I think he will make modest recommendations to lower restrictions, but that’s about it. I think it would be politically foolish and risky to do more than that.
To me it seems that there is no “victory” unless and until there is an effective and widely available vaccine. In the meantime, we are just drawing things out. And, aside from protecting the vulnerable and preventing the overwhelming of hospitals, what’s the point? We can do those two things with much less drastic measures.
Am I wrong?
@drbastiat Dr. Bastiat brought up these issues in July in his post “Politicians Are Stuck.”
Our nation’s leaders have not carved out a back door from which we can now exit easily.
The lack of executive leadership is on full display in our country. I once had to work with a lawyer from the old law firm of Hale and Dorr (now called WilmerHale) in Boston. I learned a lot from him. I helped him out on a difficult case, and in his words, he owed me. :-) So I got some free legal advice for a few years afterward and a good friend too. :-) At one point, I asked him to look at a document my husband and I were asked to sign in order to have a real estate broker sell our house. It was the standard half-page document that all brokers and sellers signed in Massachusetts. I didn’t think it would be a big deal, but once you’ve worked with a really good lawyer, you learn to ask questions. At any rate, he called me and said pointedly, “Marci, do not sign this document.”
“Why not?”
“There’s no expiration date.”
That was pretty serious stuff, and it’s something lawyers know to look for. It was pretty shocking that this contract that brokers and sellers had been signing throughout the lawyer-filled state of Massachusetts for years was so flawed. When I told the broker, he got very flustered. “No one has ever had problem with this contract before.” He thought I was nuts. Clearly, the board of realtors had never worked with a really good lawyer. Too funny. :-)
That incident, however, trained my mind too, and it’s something I look for. What’s the end date? What the goal? When is this over?
It doesn’t really surprise me that this flaw exists in current policies that are coming essentially from the medical field. It was always a concern for me in my mother role and other caregiving roles that treatments and therapies and medicines and such that were prescribed often came without an end date: “When this happens, you can stop.” They simply don’t think that way. I always had to ask, “What are we looking for? How long should we keep doing this?”
What we need is a really sharp executive now to take a look at where we are and come up with a plan for backing out of this parking space. :-) Each city and state needs to look at these policies and set some benchmarks.
Yabbut, we were told that the point of the exercise was to prevent runaway exponential growth. Nowhere on that graph is there anything but short bursts of linear growth.
In my Blue State of Washington? Never. Dimslee is drunk with power, and will never relinquish it. He has said that it will end when there is a reliable vaccine. And who decides when there is a reliable vaccine? The corrupt CDC? Fauci?? The Sheep of Seattle will re-elect him in November. Polls show that over 60% of the (Seattle) population of Washington think he is doing a good job with the Wuhan Coronavirus crisis. May those Seattle residents rot in slavery, behind their perpetual masks.
The sooner we can leave the state, the better.
New York and Massachusetts are a little more relaxed than they were last spring, but not too much.
The thing is, it is really hard to know what to do right now up here. Massachusetts presently has the third-highest unemployment rate in the country–it’s a whopping 13 percent. There’s a huge exodus from the state because of it.
I think we need better answers than we have at the moment.
I know the virus is still a problem.
I started to say never. But it might change if there is a working vaccine and low cases, low deaths for a while and then some much shinier object/crisis comes along that is not health related and another and another to put as much distance between this specific fear being mongered and another.
I think schools will be a huge part of this. If school populations show marginal infection rates (as is likely), and school officials hold fast, it will be a huge indictment of how badly many officials overreacted in the spring. In Texas governor Abbott did himself a lot of damage trying to thread the needle with his policy decisions. Too bad as overall he has been a good governor, but like many he was too afraid of making a mistake. Deaths and hospitalizations continue their downward slide.
No. The point is there was never going to be a policy “victory.” I want an acknowledgement that the existing policy choices done to prevent the spread don’t accomplish anything. We are taking a massive economic, societal and psychological hit for nothing more than the symbolic satisfaction for a few people that we are Doing Something.
That increase in cases that your AZ graph is like that of the entire southern US where the bug arrived later than the northeast (Lower population densities? Climate? Beaches? Air conditioned enclosed spaces?) and is mostly younger young people who could NEVER have been expected to hunker down and isolate for months. The fatality rate has continued to drop. The curves in every state will likely be the similar everywhere with no clear answers as to why it was vastly more deadly in NY than TX. The certainty is that lockdowns, masking orders Etc are not effective against this bug.
My point is that bad policies are in place for political, not scientific reasons and they will only be removed for political reasons.
I don’t know how they do the data in Arizona but those spikes look a lot like catching up with a data backlog (recording the date when the data was entered, not correcting for the actual date of death). This has been happening in a lot of states. Texas has a huge backlog of uncleared data that is making data driven decision making hard. I think the daily hospital room occupancy numbers are the best data series right now.
I also think that the problem with daily death tallies is the systems were never made for that kind of precision. If you’re not tracking a pandemic, monthly data is probably all you care about. (You’re not using it for decision making, just the historical record.)
This is, to me, the central issue.
I understand Kozak’s perspective here:
He’s right. The disease is certainly still a problem. We certainly can’t declare victory, and just say it’s over.
But I keep going back to Old Bathos’ point above. Is any of this helping? Are we sure? Is there any evidence to show benefit? Because for all the harm our quarantine is doing, the benefits had better be absolutely enormous. And comparing data from states and countries with different approaches, I certainly don’t see differences in outcomes that are all that enormous.
I would be more sympathetic to the viewpoint that we should continue our efforts to manage the COVID virus if I could find some evidence that our efforts are having some impact.
I’m not arguing that we’ve won.
I’m arguing that we’re not even really playing the game – our efforts don’t seem to have had a big impact on the course of the disease.
And again, with all the damage we’re doing, that impact had better be enormous. I just don’t see it…
@oldbathos, that graphic is very telling. And it illustrates your point as well as any multi-paragraph “analysis” could be expected to do. The virus will run its course pretty much no matter what government action is taken and, as with other viruses, our bodies will develop resistance to its effects.
As with many others, I have come to the conclusion that the most reasonable approach is proper sanitation (frequent hand-washing) for the general public and self-isolation for those of us who are most vulnerable due to age or health conditions.
In Bolivia in the 1990’s the officials were bought and paid for by big monetized interests that wanted to privatize Bolivia’s pristine water.
It took only 100,000 bucks per legislator there to accomplish that.
Bill Gates has, as both second richest man in the world, and as the person holding the strings of many foundations and shell companies, an excessive amount of money to “convince” toadies such as our governors, state legislators, and Congress critters to get aboard his plandemic.
Never forget: Gates has figured out that the fastest way to exponentially increase one’s wealth is to make normal, everyday activities illegal. And that philosophy ties in nicely with the ambitions of all the petty bureaucrats who until 5 months ago, were absolute nobodies. Now everyone from your local county public health officer to your state’s infectious disease co-ordinators are revving up to increase the size of their agency and each department inside their agency.
Amazing Polly over on Brighteon has produced several videos detailing all the interwoven connections between Gates and The WHO, and The UN. I think there is a very deep connection between Gates and Red China, extending beyond whatever infection route the WuFlu traveled.
Gates has stated repeatedly that even after the vaccine is available and injected into all 7 billion people world wide, it will not be over. These statements have been made on normal TV morning talk shows, with the usual cast of characters drooling all over Gates as he divulges his plans for our society. As the American people will need the security and protection of his genius to ensure that someone somewhere knows where each and every one of us happens to be, with the PTB using the excuse that it is necessary to know where each infected person is, as well as keeping tabs on who is vaccinated, who isn’t, and more. (Much more.)
Even if that’s true, it’s still nowhere near the exponential growth that was predicted. Of course, they’ll just say, “it’s because of all the public health restrictions that the growth didn’t become exponential.”
Back in May, PJ Media was hoping that the CDC’s own findings would shorten the restrictions.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/22/the-cdc-just-gave-us-the-biggest-reason-to-end-the-coronavirus-lockdowns-n417178
But then the Puppet Masters behind the scenes realized they could keep the “COVID is more horrible that Godzilla stalking Rodan across seven continents” myth alive, by getting the media to focus on announcing new cases 24/7.
So now we have so many more states falling under the repressive measures that earlier were only seen in Calif and New York and Michigan. It was depressing to realize from Kay in Montana’s posts that they wear masks there too these days.
Can we declare victory, when Cov19 deaths are less than deaths from other flu-like illnesses? That would be about 15/day.
When a Democrat is back in the White House . . .
Well, the biggest problem is that people think they can outsmart death, and remove risk.
I think the lack of expiration date on this quarantine is now deliberate, as a function of power and control.
People will still die, but others will die of other stresses from avoiding the ‘rona and the ‘vid.
People will always die. No Crisper gene splice, miracle vaccination, or well-intended treatment will stop that truth from becoming ours.
It is sad that fear of dying robs people of living.
Safe travels Rushbabe. Get out as fast as you can. No scenery or happy memory can overcome the insanity of current d at Seattle or Portland.
Begin your new chapter in a place that is free.
Because the vaccination, and proof of having it will need to be renewed. So, they have just built in a new perpetual life need.
The vaccine.
Do we even talk about how many deaths from regular flu continued all throughout the covid quarantine?
Nope.
But deaths for that kept pace with covid deaths.
The media is burying any information that would put the SARSCoV2 in its proper proportion to other deaths.
I agree with all of this post, but this sentence perfectly captures Cuomo’s behavior.
Willow,
Sort of like the boxer who delivers a massive blow to his opponent’s fist with his chin.
Regards,
Jim