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Where Are the Outbreaks?
If you listen to those who are supposedly in the know, we’re having a winter spike because people are getting together in their homes for dinner parties and Thanksgiving meals. We’re having a spike because selfish people won’t wear masks in public. But what’s actually behind the outbreaks? New York State issued the findings from contact tracers, and to say it doesn’t fit the preferred narrative is an understatement.
Despite the fact that restaurants are now closed for indoor dining, in the middle of winter, thereby effectively destroying the rest of those who have survived to this point, less than 1.5% of those who tested positive could have their infection traced to a restaurant. No, the real spread is within households. And why are people getting sick? Some insight:
My guess. They pick it up working. Spread to vulnerable people in their house because they can’t socially distance and have no where to isolate. Maybe spread it to other families if they’re sharing childcare and home schooling responsibilities because they can’t afford tutors.
— Victoria Fox (@drvictoriafox) December 13, 2020
What might we have done instead of shutting down entire sectors of our economy, thereby destroying them? That will be the subject of countless case studies moving forward, but one very effective strategy would have been to pour a fraction of the money we put into loans meant to bail out the restaurant and service industries and put it into rigorous testing, quarantine hotels, and paid sick leave for those who fell ill and short-term disability leave for high-risk households.
Instead of helping these low-income service industry workers, we destroyed their financial security and their children’s educations, all while upper-class Americans continued to order Door Dash from the remaining restaurants and worked from home remotely.
The story of our pandemic response is one of the privileged wrecking the entire lower-class, senselessly and thoughtlessly. The latest statistics on where we’re seeing spread is just another data point in that narrative.
Published in General
you know, there’s a lot of truth in what you say. the affluent have easily moved to working from home, financially are unfazed, and I know there are sectors of the market that are doing just swell. I’m sorry to learn of those that are really screwed. Well welcome to the age of politicians that are revered not for their helpful policies, but for their “woke” dialogue, regardless on the results. Time magazine will honor them just because.
We went to one of our favorite restaurants last Sunday to use the gift cards from last Christmas that we have not been able to use for most of the year. Normally, it’s quite crowded and often there is live music. The tables and booths were isolated from one another by plexiglass shields and only every other one was in use. The chef came out of the kitchen to talk to my wife in order to assure that her food allergies would not be triggered by any of the ingredients. The meal was delicious, as usual, and we tipped generously. I can’t believe that this was any worse than going to the grocery store.
My daughter manages a little coffee shop that struggled for months with take-out-only before a brief respite was granted. Now the lockdown is back with a vengeance, and where is there any proof of the need?
The lockdown is scheduled to completely knock out any of the winter holidays.
It all seems so sad and pointless.
Oregon has been relatively transparent with its COVID statistics, but one area I haven’t seen shared is its contact tracing. I read recently that some jurisdiction – can’t recall which – was unable to trace 60% of its cases. I suspect that Oregon is in that ball park. I have not seen a breakdown of socioeconomic factors of the infected, but it is reported by zip code, so it could be figured out.
Although transparent with some of its statistics, one area where the state is opaque is policy decision making. Schools are shut and restaurants are closed, but the governor won’t share how those decisions were reached.
We’re supposed to have a big uptick in cases – but we’re also in a big uptick in testing.
In Florida, it’s more positive tests per week than during the peak of the epidemic – but only about half as many hospitalizations and deaths.
The trend for those is up somewhat – but nowhere near enough to match the “positive” cases. This is in a state that’s effectively been out of lockdown for months, with only “masks indoors while not in your house” as the rule.
And, after more than nine months, I still don’t know anyone personally who has died or who has been hospital-level sick. I’ve now met a total of TWO people who merely tested positive, and I didn’t know either of them beforehand. I assume I do know someone, somewhere, who passed on, but the news hasn’t made it through the grapevine to me yet.
“The story of our pandemic response is one of the privileged wrecking the entire lower-class, senselessly and thoughtlessly.’
Some of it is honest mistakes…some of it was inevitable given the situation. And some of it was incompetence.
But much of it is is indeed class-based, as you say. Directed more at the gainfully-employed and small businesspeople than at anything that should really be called ‘lower class’.
See my related post Living in the Hate of the Common People.
The actions taken by politicians that feel the need to “do something” has really amounted to catering to the elites at the expense of working folks and small businesses (working folks with more to loose). This has been enabled by “science” that has not produced data on the terrible toll and limited benefit of lockdowns. Of course Big Tech and Big Pharma are willing to kill people to boost their profits. It is a scamdemic.
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
– H.L. Mencken
Because “Dart Board” might be viewed with suspicion.
Indeed. Now look at other governmental (and non-governmental) action through this lens.
Contact tracing is valuable if it is instituted in a large scale manner early on.
By May 2020, over 2.4% or more of the population was already infected. (At least that is what testing stated.) By late summer,that possibly over 10% was. Of course some things I’ve read state the most accurate way to do test results involves looking at antibodies.
Starting contact tracing in the Autumn some 8 months into a supposed pandemic is insanity.
Important to note there is plenty of money for the contact tracing, some 100 billion bucks, and a lot of juicy jobs that pay 20 bucks an hour. With it now being realized that Bill Gates had already arranged for which Congress critter would promote the needed legislation to bring about the 100 billion bucks. That arrangement occurred in August of 2019. (Anyone else feel a bit more suspicious of Gates after realizing this Act of God might have been planned as early as August 2019?)
Today on “Meet The Press” the head of the NIH, Dr Francis Collins let it slip that the vaccines have been looked into for a year. Was that a slip of the tongue, and was it Freudian? Or just a mistake in the information he offered?
(This was was re-edited at 11:40Pm Ca time, as earlier it inadvertently truncated and left out pertinent info and misrepresented a statistic.)
I don’t think leftist politicians planned to put people in the service economy out of work and move them to welfare, thus relieving them of the burden of work. But I think that once that became an option, they found it palatable. Not because they are Machiavellian Marxist geniuses seeing six steps ahead of everyone else, but because they are fools who find reaffirmation in the half-baked, never-interrogated mindset they’ve had since college.
Old-style progressives in the 30s: People need jobs! Good jobs, quality work, the sort of labor that lends dignity and a sense of belonging and accomplishment!
Modern progressives: actually no, turns out you don’t. Work is inherently exploitative. You need the dole, so you can free.
But how are those elites going to get their fine wines and cigars and meals and stuff delivered – or even made to start with! – let alone their high-speed internet and working plumbing and stuff, and their trash collected, and all the rest, if they’ve put all the people who do those things out of work, because they must stay home?
Do the elites EVER realize how badly they messed up, and suffer the consequences?
I know! That entire end of the economic model – any economic model – has to be considered. Because there is an inherent flaw in the idea about if everyone getting a universal income. Then who is going to do the work?
Who is gonna getup at 6 am to plow the field and feed the cows? Or sit in a customer service center and assist customers who do not know how a product works? Or go into a hospital and attempt to help patients?
The word you are looking for is not despite, it is because.
Specifically: because restaurants are now closed for indoor dining less than 1.5% who tested positive could have their infection traced to a restaurant.
You might argue it wasn’t necessary (ie prove causality) or that the costs were greater than the benefits, but that’s separate from the logic of the argument.
Perfection.
So if spread isn’t happening in restaurants and other public indoor venues, where people are wearing masks, social distancing, and so on, and there is spread in households, where people are not wearing masks, etc., then masks and other measures must actually work pretty well.
No. It’s not 1.5% because restaurants are now closed. Speaking of logic.
If close contact indoors inevitably meant infection, why aren’t airlines out of business? Why are grocery stores still open? All the people working in those gigs would have had a serious spike of infections.
And that hasn’t happened. So no, I don’t think closing the restaurant can be given credit for the low traced contact percentage.
Being in a panic with regard to the recent spike in infections, they are pulling on the levers of power they have available to them. Some of the most important areas where suppression of virus spread could be reduced are out of their reach so they pull on the levers they have.
Airplanes have HEPA-filtered ventilation systems that provide top to bottom air flow. This minimizes the possibility of transmission in the aircraft where people spend most of their time when traveling. Restaurants do not have such high-end ventilation systems. There have been proven cases of people contaminated by air flowing across the room.
That would be fine logic if you could actually carry it to states that have not kept restaurants shuttered for months. You can’t. There are many states in which people go out as normal, though they wear a mask to walk from the door to the table, where they immediately take their masks off and enjoy their meals.
There is lower capacity in restaurants across the country, to be sure, though that also varies per locality. (In Austin, TX, the restaurants are currently at 75%, I believe.) As far as I can tell, no restaurants are closed (unless by choice) for indoor dining in many states, and the contact tracing results are all very similar. For an example, you can compare and contrast the spread in California versus Texas.
Do I know people who have had Covid? Yes. Of course. But I think the spread is inevitable. It’s a virus. It’s not the flu. For some people, it’s definitely much, much worse than the flu. But we can’t stop everyone from getting the flu, even with a flu shot. If I was particularly vulnerable at any time to getting Covid–or the flu or any other nasty bug, for that matter–I wouldn’t go eat in a restaurant. I wouldn’t expect a restaurant owner to simply go out of business to make certain I wouldn’t go eat in a restaurant.
After March, this has never made any sense at all to me.
In retrospect, it seems that the best policy would have been to create public isolation spaces for the vulnerable who cannot isolate effectively in their household. Also to provide childcare support for family of limited means to keep people working. The schools should never have closed. Vulnerable teachers should have been furloughed on full pay and young teachers brought in to take their place with waivers of licensure laws. The outlays by government would have been far lower and the economic impact far lighter.
At the risk of being grossly pertinent, you cannot eat with a mask on. But you can shop or fly with a mask on – and a lot of people do just that.
The level of risk is not exactly the same, and it does the anti argument (and arguers) no favours to pretend that it is. In fact the opposite.
I think there is some utility to masks, but that utility has been wildly overstated. People in restaurants wear a mask to walk five feet to their tables. Then they wear absolutely no masks for the next hour or two while dining. People in homes sleep together, kiss each other, often drink from the same glasses, etc. The level of intimate, sustained contact is much higher than pretty much any interaction one has in a public setting unless, possibly, at a mosh pit in one’s twenties. It’s not a good comparison at all.
But they can still get it from direct contact – there’s no hepa filter in the aisles the flight attendants walk through, is there? Hepa shields? Hepa masks?
How about grocery stores? Hepa-carts?
This is absolutely true. And it reminds me that a sense of panic rarely leads to good decisions.
Don’t worry, you risk nothing by typing.
But the causality still isn’t there. Especially considering more recent publications, even from the CDC, that asymptomatic people are unlikely to transmit the virus, due to load and shedding. Not everyone shops or flies with a mask on, either.
But OK. Don’t forget that they’re contact tracing here, which is in itself a guesswork approach. Deriving conclusions from it is its own risky behavior. Sorry. Behaviour.
That’s a fair point. I don’t know how the infections break down by source when you compare Texas and California. It would be interesting to see them.
There’s also the possibility that climate has an impact, so a lot of states may have we additional variables to take into account.
And parts of Texas did have that temporary morgue thing due to peaks in deaths – I’m not sure that California also did.
I get that, but a lot of infections are asymptomatic. Staying away from restaurants without totally isolating yourself from everybody may not cut it.
With the wisdom of hindsight – and perhaps even without it – it may have been better to focus in isolating high risk groups from society (or at least giving them that option). But to quantify and prove – I guess compare Sweden and Denmark, taking everything (COVID deaths, economic damage, related morbidities) into account?
Everybody’s situation is different.
It would be interesting to see the restaurant linked infection stats for two otherwise similar states that had different regulations/ behaviours.
(Thank you, btw. That u is precious and well loved.)
It’s the equivalent of organic rather than analytical chemistry.
I’m frustrated with the lockdown policies because over the past few months, I’ve been in so many business and medical establishments in which the owners and managers have quite creatively embraced the idea of ensuring that a good distance can be maintained between people, masks are worn where possible, and handwashing or hand sanitizing is convenient.
My dentist particularly has spent an enormous of money equipping her office with air purifiers and UV-light surface sanitizers, and she has been seeing patients for several months. And I had a procedure at an endoscopy center recently that required full anesthesia, and there were lots of people in the procedure area, and they were using effective virus barriers between people.
I think we should have gone back over the summer to relegating these virus controls to local board of health issues. That would have been a good middle ground from where we were last March in our first attempt to control the new virus. (It has turned out that this virus is not as new as we thought. It looks like other viruses we’ve had experience with so we can handle it with known strategies, just deploying them in different sizes to adjust for the smaller size of this microorganism.)
I really hope there is equal attention from the press starting now on the losses of jobs and businesses that have resulted from these broad-brush virus control strategies. I am having nightmares about homelessness. We’re heading into winter here in the Northeast, I am so worried about people freezing to death.
We cannot handle one problem alone at the exclusion of all others. And I think that’s what we’ve been doing. I read a couple of stories about the coming rash of evictions January 1. The CDC is now jumping into this horrific problem because they think newly formed households will become mini-disease vectors. I’m sure they are right about that–there’s no doubt that we will probably see more cases as a result. But that should not be the main concern with the poverty that is growing right now. Poverty creates all kinds of ill health–mental and physical.
We need to fix this as quickly as possible.
I was thrilled to see the head of the NIH beseech the public to stop spreading conspiracy theories about the vaccines. We desperately need these vaccines. We can’t push back the public’s fears of this virus at this point. The public is really afraid of it. If we want the normalcy that will protect people from joblessness, we have to have the vaccines now.
Personally, I think these vaccines are miracles and the result of billions of people’s prayers. If it weren’t for politics, we’d be as excited as we were to see the Moon landing. As one guy said somewhere last week, these didn’t take a year to develop. They took thirty years to develop. :-)
Don’t worry at all. It will all be over, solved by Biden and his new vaccine by March or April when we’ll open up everywhere.