Tag: WuFlu

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Ace shared an article a few days that captured feelings that I have but hadn’t put words to. Naomi Wolf wants closure for the last two years and people responsible for the destruction and lies to pay consequences. Last August, my abusive governor reimplemented an indoor mask mandate, temporarily. Anyone who’d been paying attention knew […]

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The original script recently came to light: I can’t go on with the shutdown.I’m too happy. Do you mind,Media, if I say a few words?Thank you. I just want to tellyou how happy I am to be back on T.V. making bad predictions again.You don’t know how much I’ve missedall of you. And I promise […]

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I have heard people ask, “if the vaccine is here, why are we still shut down?” Public health officials tell us not to stop distancing even if you have been vaccinated; there might still be transmission. My response is this. The vaccine represents rapid herd immunity. We should see infection rates drop. When that happens, […]

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Saw a bit a fun that brightened a slightly frustrating commute this morning. My normal route saw construction on a lane of the interstate start this week in the first couple of miles. Therefore, I headed south from the house instead of north to avoid the traffic backup. This morning, my alternate street was closed […]

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My Covid Adventure

 

In early December, I got Covid – the Wuhan Flu, ChiCom Fever. This is the disease that has California and New York locked down. The one that has us cowering in fear. (That’s not a joke. I have several otherwise-sane friends, who are locking themselves in the house, venturing out only when they have to. Two are MENSA members.)

What was it like? Are you ready?

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I was at a gas station about 30 miles west of Memphis today and no one was wearing a mask. I talked to the cashier and she said that you don’t wear masks for the flu. She agreed with my comment that the flu is much dangerous to kids than Covit. Perhaps there’s hope after […]

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While the news is constantly giving us daily new WuFlu cases, and daily new WuFlu deaths, it all becomes noise after a while. It seems to me that the chart below — case fatality rate — is really the only statistic that matters. But it’s not one that makes headlines. Nationwide, Case Fatality Rate continues […]

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We owned a house in Winnetka from 2003-19. At the end of June, we went there for a few days to visit friends. It was fairly normal given the WuFlu. The local bookstore was open. Masks were required indoors but that’s the case in most places in America. We were there last weekend and the […]

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I found an old Albuquerque Journal edition, from 29 March 2020, while cleaning this weekend. WuFlu is the big news and the headline is “513 COVID-19 Deaths Predicted For NM”. The chart has a projection of 513 deaths by 3 July with an error range of 245 to 803 deaths. The article states that “researchers […]

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Tennessee State Representative Bud Hulsey, in responding to a question: You can’t tell Tennessee people, look folks the United States Constitution, the State of Tennessee’s Constitution is the law of the land … well kind of. Until you have a virus and somebody dies. You can’t say that. Preview Open

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COVID-19: The Dilemma in Pictures

 

We’d all like this to go away so we can get back to normal life. This is an attempt to show what’s involved graphically. Here’s a chart of what lets the virus expand its human footprint, or causes it to shrink:

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Many have played, or at least heard of, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. The goal is to find a path from the prolific actor to any other Hollywood persona, using six or less links generated by shared credits on films. Bacon seems to have worked with half that industry. And thereby hangs a […]

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The Perils and Pleasures of Modeling

 

The term ‘model’ is much in the news, and I’m not talking about @RightAngles trade. It’s the term apparently favored by the media to describe a general area that may also go by: cybernetics, system dynamics, advanced statistics, simulation, control theory, and others. Having some academic and professional background in the domain, this is my (inevitably simplified) attempt to sketch its limits, so you can be smarter than the average journalist.

So, simplifying, as warned: There are two types of models. One is broadly statistical in approach. The other attempts to be more mechanistic.

History and the Vector of Shame

 

Perhaps you have seen the meme that shows WWII soldiers and says something along the lines of “they stormed the beaches for us, we’re just being asked to stay on our couches.” As far as exhortations to stay home go, I suppose it is one of the less annoying and more anodyne ones, but it’s still full of a smug, pompous, and scornful shame directed at us today, extolling the virtues of our honored ancestors over and against the alleged sins of our current generation.

It absolutely reeks of the sort of derision that says “not only are you no better than them, but you’re actually likely a great deal worse since we have to nanny you into staying in your own home.” It is an appeal to heroic nostalgia for a sepia-toned and non-existent past, where somehow the people were “more real,” more manly (or womanly) than today. Putting aside my general annoyance with such nannyism, as a perpetual student of history, I also have to cry foul over the comparison and call it what it is: bilge.

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And just like that, it was over.  We’d been on total lockdown for less than 10 days when it happened.  @max, wielding his awesome killing power, shut down the PIT. I’d say that these were new and fearful times, but we’d been through this before.  As the longest running thread on Ricochet, we know the […]

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Coronavirus Graphs Update: Pray for the Big Apple

 

There has been a very significant increase in reported WuFlu cases out of New York City during the last few days. I’ve been monitoring the spread of this disease carefully for a bit over a week, and this new NYC data has been the greatest cause for concern that I have observed. I had to find a new data source to address this, from Johns Hopkins (technical note in the comments).

Pray for New York. Pray for Gov. Cuomo and Mayor DeBlasio to lead the people of NYC with wisdom and resolve. Pray for President Trump, and other federal authorities, to provide them with the assistance that they may need.

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This is my first analysis of the WuFlu pandemic focusing specifically on reported deaths and death rates.  This report focuses on the same 6 major countries as my other recent reports (the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain), plus a special focus on NY City.  My data source is Johns Hopkins, for the period […]

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Coronavirus Calculations: The Perils of Projections

 

There’s a saying that I learned back in the 1980s while studying probability, statistics, and mathematical modeling: “Torture numbers enough and they’ll confess to anything.” It was right up there with “correlation does not imply causation” and “GIGO.” (GIGO stands for garbage in, garbage out.)

As most of you know by now, I’ve been skeptical of the catastrophic projections of the expected progression of the WuFlu. I do not think that the figures presented are an intentional “hoax,” though I suspect that some people and institutions, particularly the major media, have an ideological reason to exaggerate the danger. But I suspect that the bigger problem is the limited amount of information presently available, even to the most sophisticated modelers.