Category Archives: Covid19

#Resistance

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Fernandez writes about the urge to escape confinement, and how it’s universal. Even throws in a Shawshank Redemption quote. He labels it “rebellion,” a word that implies the authorities are right and the rebels are wrong.

Close, but no cigar. His analysis doesn’t distinguish the need to escape UNJUST confinement, which was what occurred in that film, and has occurred with all the lock-downs.

“Cases” are skyrocketing despite lock-downs and mask orders, but “deaths” are not, and particularly not among children, teens, young adults and working people. That means universal house arrest is not necessary, never was. We’re being punished for no good reason. That’s unjust confinement.

The urge to escape unjust confinement is not only natural, it’s right and moral and just. It’s not an act of rebellion against lawful authority. The people trying to continue the unjust confinement are in the wrong, not those of us trying to escape it.

Joe Doakes

I’ve got a mother in memory care. I’ll be protecting her (and/or going along with her facility’s plans for taking care of her), whatever it takes.

I’m also going to get a ^%$#@ social life back.

Both can be done.

No There, There

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The question remains: with 85% of downtown workers not working downtown, and at least 10,000 of them never coming back, how much is this article about skyway businesses sodtpedaling the reality?

Steve Cramer, the president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, says only 15% of the typical workforce population works downtown right now.

Several businesses in the Skyway are closed at least temporarily due to COVID-19. Cramer couldn’t specify how many.

“We probably will see a few less of those establishments when things kind of bounce back, but when things bounce back, that will create new opportunities for growth so we’re looking for that hopeful day as well,” Cramer said.

In theory, yes – if Governor clink ever “allows“ things to go back to normal, it’s hypothetically true that all those empty skyway store fronts will provide a world of opportunity for the next round of merchants.

Provided, of course, that people come back – that working from home doesn’t gut the commercial real estate market – and that the public safety situation downtown doesn’t keep businesses away

Blue Fragility – State Of The States

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The pandemic is beginning its eighth month – and the lockdown is well into seven months of devastation America’s economy, mental health and well-being.

And you’re starting to see Big Left hopping up in down with glee – the case numbers are starting to move upward in “Red” America, justifying their almost onanistic, millenialistic desire to see the infidels pay for their impudence.

But how’s it really going out there?

I took the stats from Worldometers as of October 13th, and broke them down across a few different statistical groupings:

GroupingCovid fatalities per capita as of 10/13, 2020
National average666
“Blue” state average713
Red State average362
“Purple” state average (“red” states with major, usually Democrat-controlled, metro areas)569
States with > 10 milllion population704
States with > 20 million population863
States with <1 million population (all “colors”)354 (307 if you leave out hard-blue Rhode Island)

The Redneck Bloodbath just isn’t happening.

Mere Miles From The Statue Of Liberty

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New York law enforcement looking for Jews trying to sneak in a little forbidden prayer:

There are times I think secession is too mild-mannered. It might be time to expel some states from the US, and offer their citizens asylum.

Blue Fragility: It Never Ends

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This is not the Babylon Bee.

“Alternate reality”.

New York still has a per capita death toll triple the national average. New York City’s economy – off Wall Street, anyway – is in the tank. It’s school system is saved from being a shambles only by having been a shambles before the epidemic. Fredo Cuomo and Ratzo DiBlasio spent the last six months playing out petty intra-party political squabbles as New Yorkers died in box lots.

Progressives do, indeed, exist in an “alternate reality”.

Riddle

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Who’s got two thumbs, and is the only person in the world who can’t call Donald Trump’s Twitter feed “an ill-advised mass of ready/fire/aim malaprops?”

Why, that’d be Representative Ryan Winkler, if he were pointing two thumbs at himself:

50-90% of Covid patients are asymptomatic. For many others – myself included – it felt like the chest cold I get nearly every spring; if it weren’t for a strange rash on my hand, I wouldn’t have even gotten an antibody test, much less a serology test.

So – now Ryan Winkler is Covid-shaming. Seems he knows as much about epidemiology as he does black history.

This is today’s DFL.

Once Bitten

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A majority of Americans are not only worried about violence after the election – they’re doing something about it:

When asked about just what sort of violence they expected to see, those polled responded with “riots,” “looting,” “burning” as some of their predictions. “Trashing of cities” was another response.

The YouGov poll was completed between October 1 – 2, 2020 and used 1,503 respondents.

It followed another poll released October 1 that found 61 percent of Americans agree with the concern the U.S. could be on the verge of another Civil War.

Additionally, 52 percent of consumers have also stockpiled food or essential goods in anticipation of social unrest tied to a resurgence of coronavirus in the coming months and/ or the election.

Unmentioned – they’re also gunning up numbers that crush all previous records.

This could be good news for conservatism in the long run; genuinely self-reliant people tend not to vote “progressive”.

Provided the GOP doesn’t screw it up…

…oh.

Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

Due To Covid

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I used to drive to work, half-an-hour each way.  I listened to Sirius XM
in the car.  They sent me a renewal reminder: $160 for another year.

I called and told them to let it lapse.  I work at home, I don’t listen
to the car radio.  Oh, but they can offer me a promotional rate.  And
expand my package to let me listen on-line.  And . . .

No.  If you hadn’t tried to gouge me, maybe I’d have let it renew.  But
teaser rates and short-term promotions won’t lure me back; they only
serve to prove you could have offered me a better deal earlier, but
chose not to.

I suspect there will be a raft of business failures in the next year or
two, prompted by similar experiences.

Joe Doakes

I’ve got my own beeves with Sirius’ way of doing business. A company whose technology is that expensive and whose service is nonetheless that expendable needs to be a lot smarter than Sirius is.

MEDIA CLICHÉ ALERT

Especially in these uncertain times.

I had to do it once.

It’s All About The Race

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Hi, I’m from the CDC and I’m here to ask you to take a free Covid test. If we detect Covid antibodies, you will be forced to skip the next two weeks of work, banned from restaurants and stores, your kids’ school be closed, and everyone you know will be under the same quarantine. Would you like to take the test?
No, get the hell away from me.
It’s because I identify as Black, isn’t it? Hater.

Joe Doakes

Why, it’s almost as if those expeditions were testing for social compliance more than Covid.

This Is Your Twin Cities Media

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The flotsam and jetsam of the left’s social media legion of the invincibly depraved has legs so tingly this morning at the news the POTUS and FLOTUS have Covid, they had to drag themselves hand over hand to the kitchen to make their avocado toast.

Of course, they were in Duluth before the news broke, so the Twin Cities media has jumped into high gear to investigate, not ballot harvesting (oh, good heavens, no) but just how close Minnesota’s GOP congresspeople and candidates actually were to the President.

Strib columnist Jennifer Brooks:

Don’t worry, Jen. John Thompson is on it.

If the FCOTUS recover without complications – fingers crossed, prayers being prayed – I’m almost tempted to send all these “journalists” sympathy cards.

Timing

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A friend of the blog emails:

Do I have this right? The pandemic has reduced commuter travel as employees and students work from home. The buses all say “essential travel only” and are not allowing the crowds they once had. Honestly, they probably don’t even have the crowds- fewer people are using the bus right now. I haven’t been on a bus lately, but I still get the texts about reduced service. Several times a day, buses aren’t running for all sorts of reasons.

Yet, despite all of this, Metro Transit employees were set to get a 2.5% raise and a $1500 bonus? The hospital where I work cancelled raises, eliminated CEU money, and cancelled the Holiday parties and meals because elective surgeries were cancelled for 2 months. Yet, these transit employees think their bonus and 2.5% raise are “crappy offers” and rejected the offer, voting for a strike?????

 I rarely use such language, but seriously, WTF is wrong with these people? I mean, look around- they ought to be happy with being employed, let alone a raise this year.

If Metro Transit struck now, who would know? 

Other than the people the DFL and their public employee union enablers want to keep miserable anyway? 

Great Job, Fredo

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Just remember – according to the mainstream media, Andrew Cuomo is the smart governor.

Nearly 90% of New York bars and restaurants didn’t make their rent last month:

Eighty-seven percent of bars, restaurants, nightclubs and event spaces in the five boroughs could not pay their full August rent, according to data from 457 businesses surveyed between Aug. 25 and Sept. 11, in a new study released Monday by the nonprofit NYC Hospitality Alliance.

It’s a 7 percentage-point increase from June and a four-point jump from July, darkening the dire picture for eateries desperately seeking relief following six months of partial — and in some cases total — closure due to COVID-19 shutdowns.

Some 34 percent of this group said they could not pay rent at all last month, and only 12.9 percent were able to meet full payments.

With winter coming up, and an administration of Karens running things, NYC’s restaurant and night life scene may just start looking like the proverbial “cold Omaha”.

Although Omaha is faring much better these days.

Deal Or No Deal

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I watched Family Feud last night.  Joe Biden told me he’d impose a national mask mandate to save us all from Covid, so I should vote for him.

Now, it seems he won’t. 

So . . . no reason to vote for you, then, Joe?  Might as well stick with the devil we know?

Good by me.

Joe Doakes

He’s vamping.

Well, no – the people feeling him his lines – they’re vamping.

A Hero For Our Time

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British vacationer follows the “wear a mask, except when eating or drinking” rule to avoid wearing a mask throughout a four hour flight:

A British tourist has bragged about making a tube of Pringles last ‘four hours’ so he could avoid wearing a face mask on his flight to Tenerife.

Holidaymaker Michael Richards, 41, bought the tube of salt and vinegar Pringles on board the easyJet flight and nibbled on one every two-and-a-half minutes.

A man, a dream, a plan…

…a victory. 

Per Capita

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I don’t think per-capita death rates is the correct measure.

Covid does not strike all age groups equally.  Minnesota had zero Second
Graders die of Covid under a strict lock down, Wisconsin had zero Second
Graders die of Covid under no lock down.  Does this tell us anything
about lock downs?  No, because Second Graders don’t die of Covid.  They
are not the at-risk pool. Old people are the at-risk pool.

Also, nobody retires from Florida to move to New York, it’s the other
way around.  Comparing state death rates per capita fails to take into
account that a larger percentage of the population in retirement states
are old people, which gives those states a larger at-risk pool.

A fair comparison is the result of policies in
high-death-rate-per-at-risk-pool states versus
low-death-rate-per-at-risk-pool states.  It takes a fair amount of math.

Minnesota has 5,600,000 people of whom 16% are over 65 [1].

Florida has 21,500,000 people of whom 21% are over 65. [2]

Deaths by Covid are broken into Age and Sex by State. [3]   Yes, all the
numbers are phony, but they’re equally phony.

Doing the math:

Minnesota has 695 Covid deaths in Men aged 65 and up; 816 Covid deaths
in Women aged 65 and up; total 1,511 Covid deaths in the at-risk
population.  1511 -:- 5,600,000 = .0002698.

Florida has 4,177 Covid Deaths in Men aged 65 and up; 3,701 Covid deaths
in Women aged 65 and up; total 7,878 Covid deaths in the at-risk
population.  7,878 -:- 21,500,000 = .0003664

Florida is doing worse than Minnesota, which I did not expect. That
doesn’t mean our strict lock-down made any difference, since college
kids partying on the beach generally have little contact with Grandma in
the nursing home, but the statistics don’t help our case as much as I
thought they would.

Unless I made a mistake, which is totally possible.  Check the math
yourself.

Joe Doakes

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/MN

[2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/FL/PST045219

[3]
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Sex-Age-and-S/9bhg-hcku/data

Fatalities per capita may not be ideal – but it’s the closest thing to a measurement that is simultaneously common enough to be a mathematical lingua franca and compares apples to apples, as it were.

Point taken.

What If We Held A State Of Emergency, And The State Of Nature Didn’t Care?

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Hypothesis: neither the lockdown nor the re-opening really affected the course of the pandemic:

TrendMacro, my analytics firm, tallied the cumulative number of reported COVID-19 cases in each state and the District of Columbia as a percentage of population, based on data from state and local health departments aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project. We then compared that with the timing and intensity of the lockdown in each jurisdiction. That is measured not by the mandates put in place by government officials, but rather by observing what people in each jurisdiction actually did, along with their baseline behavior before the lockdowns. This is captured in highly detailed anonymized cellphone tracking data provided by Google and others and tabulated by the University of Maryland’s Transportation Institute into a “Social Distancing Index.”

Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown, which range from April 5 to April 18, it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns — DC, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts — had the heaviest caseloads.

It could be that strict lockdowns were imposed as a response to already severe outbreaks. But the surprising negative correlation, while statistically weak, persists even when excluding states with the heaviest caseloads. And it makes no difference if the analysis includes other potential explanatory factors, such as population density, age, ethnicity, prevalence of nursing homes, general health or temperature. The only factor that seems to make a demonstrable difference is the intensity of mass-transit use.

The whole thing is worth a read and a critical evaluation.

But as this thing progresses, it seems more and more that the public health response was largely political posturing, and that the scientifically supported response was to promote responsible personal behavior (not just wearing masks and washing hands, either – losing weight, quitting smoking, managing diabetes and blood pressure all have outsized importance), aggressively protecting the extremely vulnerable, and investigate treatments (ideally free of politically-motivated interference).

We are in times in which the conservative approach (i.e., science) is pretty radical.

The Inconvenient Response

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A friend of the blog writes:

Here is the President’s press briefing from March 16. http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-3/ 

As I read it for the first time ever, I am amazed at how similar his statements are to almost every other elected leader, regardless of party. President Trump tells us here that he recommends social distancing, limit gatherings to 10 people, avoid restaurants, bars. Choose take out. Choose distance learning if possible. And he states, way back in March, that this is going to be going on for a while, maybe past August, he suggests.
These are his prepared statements. What I mainly heard reported at the time was his off the cuff responses to the media. He is a wild man with his words when he’s not reigned in. Everyone knows it.
The media is now complaining that Trump knew the whole time how dangerous this was and “minimized” it. Yet, here, on March 16, his prepared remarks do not minimize it. In fact, he even asks us Americans to make sacrifices. He reminds the young that they will have milder cases, but can easily spread it. Think about the vulnerable elderly around us.
It is all there. But, the media chose to focus on other things, chose to portray this as political- Republicans versus Democrats. 
Now, the President’s rallies in some counties in Nevada have been cancelled. The media again wants us to believe that Trump is not on the side of protecting citizens by reporting a faux conflict between the President and the Governor of Nevada. Yet, the White House guidelines recommend smaller gatherings due to current virus spread in those areas where the President would rally. As the Press Secretary said, no one is forbidding a spontaneous gatherings. But, the President cannot host a large gathering himself. These distinctions are important. It shouldn’t take research to read between the lines. When can we hold the media responsible for the public reaction to the virus?

I think we are holding them responsible.

Problem is, the people who aren’t inclined to trust the media can’t disdain them more, and the Legion of the Invincibly Ignorant who still do aren’t going to be convinced no matter what.

End Game

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Let’s assume Governor Walz’ response to Covid-19 is not part of a larger
Democrat hoax, not an attempt to frighten voters into believing
President Trump has failed them, not a coordinated attack on the
American way of life.

Let’s assume Governor Walz truly has Minnesotans’ best interests at
heart.  That’s why he declared a Peacetime Emergency.  That’s why he
implemented one of the strictest Stay Home orders in the nation.  That’s
why he implemented the mask mandate and why he refuses to relinquish his
emergency powers.  Assume that’s all true.

What’s his end game?  When does the Peacetime Emergency end – when the
virus is defeated?  How will we know when we’ve won?

Walz was on television September 3rd reminding viewers that masks are
mandatory to prevent the spread of the virus.  But his own Health
Commissioner admitted days earlier that we cannot stop the spread, we
can only hope to manage it at some unspecified level of transmission. 
Oh, and if you are sick, wearing a mask doesn’t protect the people you
interact with.

So we know the virus will continue to spread and that’s okay, just not
as fast as it’s presently spreading.  Why does that matter?  The curve
is flat.  No hospital is overwhelmed.  There was no surge.  The
refrigerated warehouse bought to store plague corpses, sits empty. 
We’re at fewer than 2,000 deaths – even crediting the phony numbers –
which is 72,000 deaths short of the computer model prediction. No child
has died, no teen, but schools are closed.  Daily deaths are in the
single digits which is indistinguishable from the normal death rate (123
Minnesotans die every day, from all causes).

“Cases” tell us that people are carrying the virus in their bodies, but
people carry around lots of viruses.  The rhinovirus causes the common
cold.  Herpes simplex virus causes cold sores. Everybody has them and
they flare up occasionally, but we don’t count “cases” of them because .
. . nobody cares.  People don’t die of a cold sore.

And they’re no longer dying of Covid-19, either.  The vulnerable
population has died off.  The hardy survived, same as every epidemic
throughout the history of humankind. We don’t need to keep fighting the
virus.  We’ve won.

Time to declare victory and move on.

Joe Doakes

All of those assumptions at the beginning of the article were for purposes of argument. I will give Governor Klink the benefit of no such doubt.

Karen Almighty

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This was posted on one of those insidious neighborhood Facebook pages around which America’s newest plague, “Karen”, congeals:

So, let me get this straight: people, mostly college students, being in an age bracket that has suffered precisely zero COVID-19 deaths in the state of Minnesota, are going to a bar staffed mostly by people in their 20s and 30s (who have also experienced zero COVID-19 deaths so far), To celebrate going back to school after six months of absurd, ineffective, potentially counterproductive and onerous quarantine that has left them, like the rest of society, aching for some kind, any kind, of social contact at a time in their life when that is what they’re supposed to be doing?

What did I get wrong?

I’ll tell you what the paragraph above got wrong: They haven’t gotten into the bar yet.

Plums (a reliable, responsible-drinking source tells me) observes standard sociall distancing inside, as well as on the patio out back, notwithstanding the fact that they are nearly no confirmed cases of outdoor spread of the virus, no matter what your distance, no matter whether you’re wearing a mask or not.

I’m not saying the Karen involved is a totalitarian.

I am saying actual totalitarians need lots of people like her in society to have a chance of taking over.

A Children’s Story

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Story of the Little Governor Who Cried Surge, by Joe Doakes

Once there was a Governor named Timmy.  He had a fine house and many servants, but he was bored.  “I know,” he thought, “I’ll cause some excitement. That’ll be fun.”

So Timmy ran through the streets yelling “Curve! Curve! We’re all gonna die!”  People panicked and bought hand sanitizer, toilet paper and bottled water.  But they did not die.

Timmy laughed and laughed.  But then he got bored again.  He ran through the streets again, yelling “Covid! Covid! We’re all gonna die!” People panicked and worked from home.  They wore masks.  They ate take-out food. But they did not die.

Timmy laughed and laughed.  But then he got bored again.  He ran through the streets a third time, yelling “Cases! Cases! We’re all gonna die.” But the people had read the headlines.  They knew there were many new Covid cases but hospitalizations had fallen and nobody died.  The people did not panic. 

Timmy was furious.  This was no fun.  He argued with the people.  “We’re on the edge of a cliff.  As cases spread, hospitalizations will rise and people will die, in a surge!  A massive surge!  I warned you all Spring that it was coming in May, could be June, or possibly July.  We got lucky in August but now it’s September and look out!  The Surge!  The Surge!  We’re all gonna die in The Surge!”

But the people turned away.  They threw their silly masks in the rubbish bins.  They went to weddings for young people starting a new life.  They went to funerals for old people ending a long life.  They went to backyard bar-b-ques with friends to celebrate the good life.  The did not listen to Little Timmy at all.

And Little Timmy cried and cried.

The End

In much of the Metro today, it pretty much is a children’s story. More later.

Public Policy

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If I told you that scientists had discovered a new virus which was
guaranteed to kill one guy living in Schenectady, New York unless the
entire nation went into super-strict lock-down, should we do it?

No, because public policy isn’t made for one guy, or ten, or 100, or
1,000 or even 10,000, which is more than the number of confirmed deaths
due to Covid-19, according to newly revised figures from the CDC.

Liberals are scrambling to explain that the new number doesn’t mean what
it says it means.  To them, ‘died of’ and ‘died with’ are the same.  If
Covid is listed as a ‘contributing factor,’ then it’s still a deadly
disease and we should still be in lock-down.

Nonsense.  When I die, the cause of death will be heart failure and the
contributing causes of death will be obesity, diabetes, high blood
pressure, high cholesterol and cirrhosis of the liver. But I didn’t die
of any of those contributing cases.  You don’t pick and choose which of
the underlying causes is the scariest. You pick the cause that killed me.

The existence of the virus is not a hoax.  The panic response is a
hoax.  And this is proof.

Joe Doakes

This is one of those areas where I thing both sides are putting out terrible information.

If someone who’s 100 pounds overweight and has hypertension and diabetes gets Covid and dies, what killed her? You could say all the comorbidities were at fault . You might not be wrong, per se – but if she’d have hypothetically lived another ten years but for the Covid, what then?

Medicine involves a lot of ambiguity. Politics – at least, political messaging – doesn’t.

Cowed

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We knew the numbers were bullshit, but not why.  This article explains why – any trace of the virus counts as a “case” even if the amount is so tiny the carrier is not sick or not even contagious.

Once again, the numbers have been inflated to frighten the public into believing they are in danger and it’s all Trump’s fault so they must vote for Biden if they value their lives.

Sickening lies, all of them.

Joe Doakes

Rahm Emanuel told them never to waste a crisis.

They don’t.

Blue Fragility: Be It Resolved

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Whereas the United States’s death toll per million citizens ranks as the eighth-highest among significant nations (forget about Andorra and San Marino), at 572 Covid fatalities per million…:

All graphs taken from Worldometers, September 2, 2020. Make sure you sort by the Deaths per Million column, or you won’t be any smarter or better informed than a Strib reporter.

And whereas every state with a death toll (in fatalities per million) higher than 572 per million (as of September 2, 2020) is a “blue”, Democrat-run state with the sole exception of Mississippi:

And whereas within even those states, the overwhelming concentration of the death toll in terms of fatalities per million is in those states’ “blue”, Democrat-run urban areas (Example: New York):

(Example. California):

And whereas the states about which the American left has been caterwaulilng about – Florida and Texas – have per-million fatality rates below the de factor national average of 572 per million

(and whereas even in those examples, the fatalilties are overwhelmingly concentrated in Democrat-run areas within those Republican-run states (Texas shown below),

and

Notwithstanding the fact that after months of insisting that “Red” states were going to get completely bludgeoned by the virus, any day now, every single state (with the exception of sparsely populated Vermont and Maine and isolated Hawaii) in the bottom 15 states in terms of fatalities per million is a Republican-run state, even after the resurgence of infections in July, and

Wheras the deaths among the most vulnerable, the elderly, are overwhelmingly concentrated in “Blue”, Democrat-run states from New York to Minnesota, as a result of policies that were systematically abjiured in “Red” States, and

Whereas terms like ‘Wuhan Flu” and “China Vinus” are, we are told, inaccurate not to mention racist,

Be it resolved that from now on, the Covid-19 virus shall be known as “The Blue City Democrat Plague“.

Choice

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A friend of the blog writes:

Just had an online meeting with our kid’s teacher. Expectations were laid out and kid is expected to be on time and we can expect a daily schedule that has the kid doing school work live, on line from 9-3:30. (There are breaks built in as there are during in person learning). 

We are at a charter school. Compare that expectation with the public school teachers union, who wanted one hour weekly of live in person, online learning.

We need more advocacy work like what Rashad Turner is doing. here. 

These are crazy days indeed, with me being on the same side of an issue as Rashad Turner.