Tag: COVID

Member Post

Gossamer Cat
Gossamer Cat
4515419
 

I am a good conservative, but I try to take a sensible approach to life and not dismiss outright the views and pronouncements of those of a different political persuasion.  Even a broken clock is right twice a day.  Therefore, during Covid, I have tried to do what made sense to me regarding all the […]
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Three Martini Lunch

Independents Sour on Biden, Whitmer Hid COVID Deaths, Ukraine Evacuations?

01
Hosted by Greg Corombos & Jim Geraghty

Join Jim and Greg as they react to independent voters turning very negative on President Biden. They also highlight a Michigan audit showing many more nursing home deaths from COVID than Gov. Gretchen Whitmer previously admitted. And they sense Russian military activity could be coming soon in Ukraine as the U.S. considers evacuating the family members of American diplomats there.

 

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Rasmussen Poll: 45% of Democratic Voters Favor Confining the Unvaccinated to ‘Designated Facilities’

Victor Tango Kilo
Victor Tango Kilo
8424
 

Here’s the TLDR from a Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Report survey. For Democratic voters:

  • 55% support fines against those who choose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
  • 59% support house arrest for the unvaccinated.
  • 48% support fines or prison for questioning vaccine efficacy on social media, TV, or the radio or in online or digital publications.
  • 45% support temporarily confining the unvaccinated to “designated facilities” (cough) internment camps (cough).
  • 47% support government tracking of the unvaccinated.
  • 29% support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine.

Second look at a national divorce?

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Masks For Thee But Not For Me: Cruise Ship Edition

David Deeble
David Deeble
810970
 

Readers may recall the jarring images of maskless political elites such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Carolyn Maloney attending last year’s Met Gala as The Help stood by dutifully breathing up against pieces of fabric.

Some in the cruise and cruise-commentary world, far from seeking an escape from the reinforcement of such class divisions, find comfort in embracing them. Cynical as I am, I was surprised to learn that a cruise line would require a fully-vaccinated crew member to don a mask while working alone on the open decks of a ship even as passengers a few feet away enjoy the ineffable feeling of their lungs filling with fresh ocean air.

But such, it seems is the case.

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Life During Woke Time

Victor Tango Kilo
Victor Tango Kilo
1514
 

I came across this thread this morning, supposedly an insider account of life in Big Tech from an engineer enduring work life under the plague that has taken lives, disrupted workplaces, turned schools into rigid, authoritarian child prisons, and spread suffering to countless families across the country. And also, COVID, which has somehow made the woke plague even worse. Keep in mind that not only can anyone make up anything on social media, but making up fake stuff is social media’s raison d’être. (Raison d’être being a French word meaning, I believe, “shoehorn.”) Also, the usual caveat of being skeptical to any anecdote that validates a prejudice applies. All that said, it’s an interesting read.

I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before. Wanted to give a rundown of what it’s like from the inside right now. Obviously insanely radically leftwing. BLM/LGBTQ. Trans flags hanging in office. Pronouns stated before meetings. Special affiliation groups for everyone but white men. All what you’d expect.

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Three Martini Lunch

Americans See Through Biden, Pacific Coast Parking Lot, Kamala’s Latest Flop

10
Hosted by Greg Corombos & Jim Geraghty

Join Jim and Greg as they dissect the stunningly horrible poll numbers for President Biden in a new poll both on key issues and his overall performance. They also shake their heads as the backlog of cargo ships off America’s west coast gets worse and worse. And they are flabbergasted as just how bad Vice President Kamala Harris is at the simplest parts of her job, like answering basic questions.

 

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The Omicron Variant: COVID or Common Cold?

Roderic
Roderic
4916
 
Genetic relationship between SARS-Cov-2 variants.

Omicron variant and other major or previous variants of concern of SARS-CoV-2 depicted in a tree scaled radially by genetic distance, derived from Nextstrain on 1 December 2021 (Wikipedia)

Now that the full sequence of Omicron has become known it’s remarkable to see how different Omicron is from all the other SARS-CoV-2 variants. It did not arise as a simple mutation of the others, it’s different in several ways. It has 60 RNA mutations causing 36 amino acid changes, several in the all-important spike protein. In a radial graph of genetic distance Omicron forms its own group way off to the side of the other variants (see diagram).

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Member Post

Richard Easton
Richard Easton
1311166
 

New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington have instituted or are about to institute vaccine mandates to eat in restaurants.  But we know that COVID is a disease of the obese with the CDC (cough) stating that the obese may have triple the risk of hospitalization from COVID. Therefore, I think that the solution is to […]
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HubWonk #87

Am I Contagious? Divining Covid’s Community Conundrum

00
Hosted by Joe Selvaggi
With guest Hannah Mamuszka

Joe Selvaggi talks with Alva10 CEO and precision medicine expert Hannah Mamuszka about which tests are best for determining who is contagious and the implications for the CDC’s new isolation recommendations.

Guest:

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Three Martini Lunch

Senate Midterms, NYC Lets Non-Citizens Vote, Sotomayor Clueless on COVID

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Hosted by Greg Corombos & Jim Geraghty

Join Jim and Greg as they welcome Senate Republicans making their decisions about running in 2022 and with two incumbents deciding to run again, the GOP odds of taking the majority probably improved. They also fume as New York City Mayor Eric Adams decides to support a city council resolution allowing 800,000 non-citizens in the city to vote in municipal elections. And they’re stunned as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor claims – in oral arguments – that 100,000 kids are seriously ill with COVID and that many of them are on ventilators. None of that is anywhere close to accurate.

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Urgent Care Doctor: I Quit

Kozak
Kozak
152545789
 

I quit my job last week. I was working another Urgent Care shift and I finally reached my limit. We have been slammed with the third wave of Covid. Volume is up to over 100 patients a day. This compares to normal times when 40 patients is considered a busy day. That’s 100 patients. 12 hours. One provider. One nurse. One X-ray tech. One front desk person.

Since the last surge, we have been begging our management to do something to relieve the pressure. For a brief two-week period, they paid time-and-half if people would pick up extra shifts. They had some shifts double staffed with providers. They even shut down registration when things got out of hand. But these were temporary, intermittent, and not consistent. By and large, we were just told to “deal with it.”

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Three Martini Lunch

Dem Agenda Sinking, December Jobs Disappointment, Ned’s Nursing Home Nightmare

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Hosted by Greg Corombos & Jim Geraghty

Join Jim and Greg as they welcome the news that Senate Dems have virtually no hope of advancing their bill to federalize elections and BBB isn’t faring any better. They wince as the December jobs report once again comes in way below expectations. And they throw up their hands as Connecticut orders COVID-positive patients into nursing homes.

 

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Great Barrington Declaration Was Always the Best Way to Handle Covid

Tom Patterson
Tom Patterson
24
 

The scientists who drafted the Great Barrington Declaration: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Harvard University; Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Oxford University; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford University. (Photo via AIER.)

The controversy over Covid management is not a medical disagreement but a political fight. It’s also a free speech issue, the question of whether those who disagree with the political/medical status quo should be silenced.

Although we have learned more over time about the origins and development of Covid, there is no question it is a contagious virus that spreads primarily through respiratory secretions. Infections range from symptom-free to fatal, but serious disease and death occur almost exclusively in the infirm and the elderly. Like all viruses, the coronavirus mutates, apparently into variants that are more contagious but less deadly.

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The Vaccine Mandate: A Case for Caution

Richard Epstein
Richard Epstein
76
 

New York, NY – October 25, 2021: Municipal workers of the city march across Brooklyn bridge and rally at City Hall Park against vaccination mandate.

On Friday, January 7, the United States Supreme Court will hear argument on one of the most contentious cases of modern times: National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, which addresses the question of whether the plaintiffs are entitled to a stay of legal proceedings until the legality of a federal vaccination mandate can be authoritatively resolved on the merits.

COVID-19 policymaking has been at the center of attention in the United States since early 2020. Over the past two years, the cases, hospitalizations, injuries, and deaths have had multiple cycles with no clear end in sight. By the end of 2020, a number of different vaccines had become available to prevent the disease. Two of these, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, rely on a new mRNA technology. With great expectations, both of these were approved by the Food and Drug Administration last summer, a step taken only when the FDA determines that vaccines (or other drugs or medical devices) “meet the FDA’s rigorous scientific standards.” The FDA also continuously updates its recommendations for approved booster shots for COVID. The work of the FDA has been complemented by that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which as of December 29 had adopted a categorical position of recommending that all individuals get their initial or booster shots of the vaccines as soon as possible.

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Three Martini Lunch

Chicago Teachers Flunk, Government’s Accountability Crisis, Dizzying New COVID Rules

21
Hosted by Greg Corombos & Jim Geraghty

After noting Sen. Schumer’s latest failure to kill the filibuster, Jim and Greg serve up three crazy martinis! First, they hammer the Chicago Teachers Union for refusing to teach in-person over the Omicron case numbers. They also unload on the Virginia Department of Transportation for continuing an ugly governmental trend of admitting a major problem but insisting that nothing could have been done better in response to the traffic nightmare on I-95. And their heads are spinning as the CDC releases absurdly burdensome recommendations for fighting COVID and that private employers are following the mandates and firing people while nothing happens to unvaccinated federal employees.

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Study: Plexiglass Barriers Successful at Trapping Virus Near Heads of Workers

David Deeble
David Deeble
13131133
 

A peer-reviewed study has concluded that the plexiglass barriers surrounding customer-facing retail workers successfully traps the COVID virus on, around and near their heads. The’s study’s summary report states “No doubt about it – the virus really gets up in your grill when there’s no proper airflow.”

According to the report, by encouraging the air surrounding employees to “you know, hang around,” the plastic barriers contribute an ideal transmission environment for the deadly COVID virus.

The study’s conclusion even went so far as to say that by removing the barriers to encourage better airflow, restaurants might then be able to safely seat more customers inside their doors during the winter months instead of “forcing them to live like animals by having dinner on a Chicago sidewalk. In February.”

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Three Martini Lunch

Common Sense on Energy, Schumer’s Latest Ploy, Teacher Unions vs. Kids

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Hosted by Greg Corombos & Jim Geraghty

Happy New Year! Join Jim and Greg as they are pleasantly stunned to see the European Union embracing natural gas and nuclear power as their wind and solar energy efforts fall far short of producing the amount of energy needed. They also slam Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s latest effort to skirt the filibuster to pass Dem legislation on elections. And they hammer teachers unions for once again leading the charge to return to distance learning or just “pause” schools for two weeks to weather the Omicron cases of COVID.

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Piano Keys, Chess Pieces, and Marketing/Persuasion

David Foster
David Foster
11101109
 

Jon Gabriel, writing about the failure of the Biden administration and of senior bureaucrats to predict the reactions of the populace to their Covid policies, cited Dostoyevsky:  “men still are men and not the keys of a piano”…which reminded me of something George Eliot wrote, back in 1866:

Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessman had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own . . . You would be especially likely to be beaten if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.

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Three Martini Lunch

2021 Martini Awards Part 5: Most Overreported Story, Most Underreported Story, Best Story of 2021

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Hosted by Greg Corombos & Jim Geraghty

It’s media day in our year-end Three Martini Lunch awards and Jim and Greg have plenty to say about how things were covered – if they were covered at all.  Specifically, they look at the stories the mainstream media covered far too much, the ones they conveniently ignored because they didn’t fit their narrative, and they highlight what they saw as the best stories of 2021.

 

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Member Post

Front Seat Cat
Front Seat Cat
179
 

We didn’t really discuss politics at Christmas dinner this year. The conversation was actually funny and disturbing at the same time, even minus the politics.  I’ll save parts of it for later. I did have a somewhat political conversation with a dear friend and client, when we met to share lunch and gifts. She asked […]
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