CORONA---Flatten This

          It is nice, I guess, that a few commentators and politicians are finally starting to question the wisdom of “flattening the curve,” but where were they six weeks ago?  Four weeks ago?  Last week?

          It’s not like the basics of the strategy were concealed from us.  “Flattening the curve” always meant spreading out the incidence of corona infections over a longer period of time, not reducing the overall number of infections or deaths.  The horrific vision presented to us was that our doctors and nurses and hospitals would be facing an enormous number of cases all at once, would be overwhelmed by the task, and would not have enough manpower or equipment (e.g., ventilators) to help all those stricken.  By spreading it out over months, there was a hope (more hinted at than expressed), that those who fell ill would get better treatment and that some of them would survive who otherwise might not.  There was also a possibility (again, rarely stated), that delaying the onset of some cases might allow time for new treatments or a vaccine to be developed, so that those whose crisis was delayed by flattening the curve would have a better chance of survival.  No promises, you understand, but that was the idea.

          The price to be paid for this flattening was not discussed at all, though it quickly became clear it would be large.  Rapidly, as increasing numbers of cases were trumpeted on television and on the internet, the screws were tightened.  “Large gatherings” were banned, and that was the end of baseball and basketball and hockey and tennis and golf and collegiate sports and concerts and theaters and weddings, and backyard parties and schools and colleges and bowling leagues.  Then restaurants and bars were shut down.  Then all “non-essential” businesses, parks, beaches, walking trails, swimming pools, basketball courts, and so on.

          As all this was happening, where was the public discussion?  Where were the debates?  Where was the Senate?  The House of Representatives?  State legislatures?  Where was there even a single soothing, rational voice suggesting that the benefits of flattening the curve needed to be weighed against the costs?  Where was Ted Cruz or Rand Paul or Mitch McConnell or Rush Limbaugh or Ben Shapiro?  Or anybody?  Where was there a voice pointing out that there was no evidence flattening the curve would reduce the toll of the virus, and that putting 30 million people out of work and destroying tens of thousands of businesses would kill a certain large, predictable number of innocent human beings, so maybe we should take a day or two to think about what we were doing?

          There are lots of people and lots of politicians who want to think lockdowns will save lives, but there was never any evidence that flattening the curve would reduce the suffering and death produced by the coronavirus.  How could there be, since limiting the number of cases was never the purpose, and since shutting down an entire society and an entire economy had never been tried before?  As we are learning, there still is no evidence that the lockdowns are working to reduce the effects of the virus, despite the press’s hysterical condemnation of American states or other countries (e.g,, Sweden), that decided to rely on the self-regulating processes of men acting freely and cooperatively rather than invoke the heavy boot of edicts and orders and snitch-lines and policemen.

          A study was published April 8 by the Israeli National Council for Research and Development by its Director, Isaac Ben-Israel, indicating that the virus has followed a constant pattern across many countries, regardless of the response of the government:

           “It turns out that a similar pattern---rapid increase in infections that reaches a peak in the sixth week and declines from the eighth week---is common to all countries in which the disease was discovered, regardless of their response policies: some imposed a severe and immediate lockdown that included not only “social distancing” and banning crowding, but also an economic shutdown (like Israel); some “ignored” the infection and continued almost a normal life (such as Taiwan. Korea or Sweden), and some initially adopted a lenient policy but soon reversed to a complete lockdown (such as Italy or the State of New York).  Nonetheless, the data shows similar time constraints amongst all these countries in regard to the initial rapid growth and the decline of the disease.”

This is what has happened, and is happening, in Italy, Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, the UK, the USA and Israel.  The numbers of new infections follow the same pattern everywhere.

          In other words, the benefits of flattening the curve are still largely theoretical, as they have been from the beginning.  Will some be saved by spreading out the stress on the healthcare system?  Maybe.  Will the delay in the onset of the disease for some allow time for life-saving treatments to be discovered?  It’s possible.

          But the costs of flattening the curve are real and substantial and do not depend on computer models.  We know that poverty kills, through homelessness, substance abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, poor health, and suicide.  And we know that when unemployment rises from 3.7% in 2019 to 30% in 2020, people will die.  All these correlations in mortality have been studied for decades.  For an individual, unemployment increases the risk of premature death from all causes by 63% (approximately, of course---different studies produce slightly different results).  Every person thrown out of work by our governments is put at risk.

          I’m not going to attempt to present you with a number of deaths that the strategy of flattening the curve will cause.  I wouldn’t know how to do so, and the uncertainties attached to such a calculation would make it irresponsible to present any such number.*  But let’s just look at just one cause of death and its links to unemployment.

          The link between unemployment and suicide has been known for decades, and the rule of thumb usually cited is that for every 1% increase in the rate of unemployment, the number of suicides goes up by 1%.  Based on this formula, an article in the British Journal of Psychiatry concluded that the economic crisis in 2007-8 produced an additional 4750 suicides in the United States.  In the world of suicidologists and others who study such things, this was a completely non-controversial finding.

          Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the U.S. most years, and in 2017 (a “normal” year for U.S. suicides), this meant that 47,000 Americans killed themselves.  If, by flattening the curve in 2020, we increase the unemployment rate by 25% (from 3.7% to somewhere near 30%), we will increase the number of suicides by 25%.  That 25%, applied to a “normal” suicide total of 47,000, means there will be an additional 11,750 self-inflicted deaths this year.  And that will be only part of the cost directly attributable to flattening the curve.  I’m not even estimating the number of people who will drink themselves to death or be killed by their spouses or by other opportunistic infections or medical problems that don’t get treated.  (We are beginning to hear plenty of stories about people who die at home from heart attacks, strokes or other serious problems because they were afraid to go to a hospital or did not know where they could get treatment in an emergency.)

          There is an additional cost we may pay by shutting down society and flattening the curve, though at the moment, we can only speculate on how large it may be.  This is the issue of herd immunity.

          Normally, when a very contagious disease sweeps through a population, everyone who survives it emerges with antibodies that protect them from being re-infected.  Eventually, so many people have these antibodies that the disease becomes unable to “find” new victims and sustain its presence in the community.  It becomes dormant.  It may re-appear a hundred years later (e.g., the Black Plague), to attack an entirely new population, but the people who survive the first epidemic, even the ones who never got the disease and developed the antibodies, are safe.  The herd has become immune.

          By flattening the curve, we may be interrupting this natural process and allowing our population to remain vulnerable to coronavirus indefinitely.  It may come back, in other words.  In fact, it may become endemic, meaning that it never goes away.

          Anticipating the screams from my critics, let me point out I am not recommending that everyone intentionally get infected, and I am NOT suggesting you take your cancer-ridden 86-year-old grandpa to an NBA game.  Keep him home and protect him.  But it is a wonderful thing for everyone if a large proportion of the population gets the virus and develops the antibodies and doesn’t die.  If we can achieve herd immunity, we may not see the damn thing again for a long time.  This is why the most short-sighted thing we have done is close schools and colleges.  The chance of children and 20-year-olds dying from coronavirus is almost zero, and the advantage of having an immune population for the next sixty or seventy years is immense.  Besides, if we don’t expose healthy young people to the possibility of coronavirus, what do we do next year when it comes back?  Unless we plan to close schools forever, it was foolish to do so now.

          (There’s even a more important reason not to close schools, which is that quarantining healthy people puts them at risk.  It is only by regular exposure to germs that we build a strong immune system.  Isolation only weakens and degrades the protection that our bodies achieve by fighting off microorganisms.  There is a hilarious, and true, YouTube video of George Carlin describing how swimming in the Hudson River’s raw sewage as a child protected him for life from the ordinary run of diseases.)

          I am writing this article to present the argument that “flattening the curve” by shutting down schools and businesses and locking everyone in their homes will kill far more people than simply educating the public and suggesting measures people might take to protect themselves and, especially, the most vulnerable among us.  To me, it has been clear from the first moment that the strategy would have lethal effects and that it was the sort of bone-headed idea that only lifelong bureaucrats and other politicians drunk on power could come up with.  After all, it was never supposed to save lives and it was never supposed to reduce infections.  The only purpose was to render the cases we were destined to encounter easier to deal with.  And the cost?  Many thousands of innocent lives and a return to the privations of the Great Depression, only worse.

          But what if I were wrong?  What if Isaac Ben-Israel and the Israeli NCRD is wrong?  What if locking down America to flatten the curve did save some lives?  What if people were saved because peak demand was reduced at critical moments and we had the resources to save everyone who was savable?  What if innovative treatments emerged that rescued some of those who got the virus later on, and who got the virus later only because we had flattened the curve?  And what if the herd immunity issue turned out to be a non-issue?  What if flattening the curve saved enough lives to balance out the buckets of blood and treasure we would pay by shutting down society?

          Who would benefit from this grand bargain?  Assuming the flattening of the curve would NOT cost more lives, who would it serve?

          Well, the first group of beneficiaries would be the health care establishment, especially the government healthcare establishment represented most prominently by 52-year bureaucrat Anthony Fauci.  What was the result of choosing the absurdly catastrophic computer models relied on by Fauci, our government, the news media, and left-wing governors around the country?  New hospitals!  A hundred thousand new beds!  We need 50,000 ventilators!  Let’s park a hospital ship in New York Harbor!

         

          The beds?  Well, never mind.  The ventilators?  Well, let’s just put them in a warehouse---I know we’ll need them really soon!  And the Hospital Ship Comfort?  Back to Virginia, matey.  Ahoy!

          But that’s just money being pissed away, something the governments in America do every second of every day. Down the drain, yes, but it’s just money.  It’s what you get when you allow doctors and scientists to make government policy, and there’s a lesson to be learned there, but that’s a discussion for another day.

          But it’s the other tradeoff that’s more troubling and more sinister.  Forget the money being wasted.  Let’s look at the lives this strategy will cost.  And for that calculation, let’s assume there are lives to be saved from flattening the curve.  Let’s assume there are a lot of them.  Let’s assume there are ten thousand people saved by the lockdowns and the panic and the end of our freedom to make a buck, go to the beach, eat in a restaurant, and see a baseball game.  Who are they? Who gets saved?  Well, guess what?  It’s Woodstock Nation.  The most optimistic scenario for “flattening the curve” is that it will extend the lives of ten thousand Boomers (and some who are older), for an additional five or ten years.

          They will pay no price for this, of course, or not much of one.  They won’t lose their jobs because they don’t have jobs.  They are doing fine on their pensions and 401(k)s and other investments and Social Security.  Those who ran businesses gave them up a while ago.  Some of them will pine for the Stanley Cup playoffs but, hey, we all have to make sacrifices.

          So who will pay the price?

          Well, remember the suicides?  And the addiction and the homelessness and the unemployment?  The price for extending all those Boomer lives for a few years will be paid by the Millennials and the Gen-X crowd.  They are the thirty million unemployed.  They are the entrepreneurs losing their dreams, and all their savings, right now.  They are the divorces.  And for the ones who actually die in this meltdown (and we know they will, though we will never know their names), they are the ones who had every reason to expect fifty or sixty more years of happy, prosperous life.  But to protect the elderly and those near death, the young must be sacrificed.

          This is the bottom line for flattening the curve.  It is the farewell present from the Me-Generation to their children and grandchildren.  Saving the lives of the elderly by trading them for the lives of those forty years younger is the final, most narcissistic, binge of the Boomers.

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki    

                 * I will leave that sort of “science” to the Dr. Fauci’s of the world.  On March 11 of this year, Fauci famously testified to Congress that the fatality rate for coronavirus cases (a subject on which he had virtually NO information), was ten times that of the seasonal flu.  As we have learned since, it now appears that Fauci’s fatality rate was too high by a factor of a hundred.        

HELL BOUND---1957

          Once in a while, you run into a movie that captures you for reasons you cannot defend aesthetically.  “Hell Bound” is not a very good movie.  It’s not “Citizen Kane.”  It’s not “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  It’s not even Adam Sandler on a bad day.  And yet, I’ve watched it four or five times now (it’s on Prime, for free), and I return almost every day to watch a scene or two.  Every scene, in fact, has one or more aspects that fascinate me, though the movie as a whole is silly.

          It’s 1950’s noir, and not only is it noir, it’s nasty noir.  It’s the kind of noir that makes you say, “Wait a minute.  Why did the psycho villain protagonist kill that guy?  It doesn’t make any sense to kill that guy, does it?  Was he just in a bad mood or something?”

          The star (the psycho villain protagonist), is John Russell, an impossibly good-looking guy who had been an athlete at UCLA and a decorated Marine in WWII.  His biggest gig was as Marshall Dan Troop, the star of Lawman, a cowboy drama from 1958 to 1961 that distinguished itself from other cowboy shows by its complete lack of humor.  “Gunsmoke” had a funny bit every now and then.  So did “Rawhide” and “Bonanza” and “Maverick,” but not “Lawman.”  The story is that Russell insisted on it because he just couldn’t do funny stuff.  Certainly, nobody asked him to in “Hell Bound.”

          The girl who plays Paula is June Blair, who was born on October 30, 1936 (TMDB) or October 30, 1932 (IMDb) or October 20, 1933 (Wikipedia).  But though we don’t know when she was born, we do know she’s still with us, living out her retirement in California somewhere.

          Ms. Blair’s career took off after she appeared as the centerfold in the January 1957 issue of Playboy, which led to “Hell Bound,” which led to other roles, which led to marrying David Nelson and appearing on “Ozzie and Harriet” in a number of episodes.  June was indeed a babe, and she was lovingly presented in “Hell Bound” by the smitten and perverted director William J. Hole Jr.  Mr. Hole was obsessed with June’s feet, and there are a number of scenes in which June removes her shoes when she meets a guy or kisses a guy or gets stabbed or drinks a glass of milk (one of the director’s other fixations is milk-drinking).  Virtually every time June appears on the screen, we wind up looking at her tootsies.

          By which I do not mean to disparage the talents of director William J. Hole Jr.  Yes, he has his quirks, but the guy knows how to make a nasty noir movie.  In particular, the guy knows how to photograph a beating.

          And there are many beatings in “Hell Bound.”  Many.  A surprising number.  John Russell (who plays Jordan), is putting together a caper in which he and a number of accomplices will steal a large quantity of pure smack arriving at the Port of Los Angeles on an Asian freighter, but his problem is that each of his comrades in crime is peculiarly unsuited to perform the task he or she has been assigned.  Jordan faces the thankless and unending job of keeping everyone prepped to perform his or her role, and most of the story is about his difficulties in doing so.

          Jordan, it turns out, is not one of those modern people-persons who motivate through nurturing or hugs or compliments or building up the self-esteem of those team members who might fall short of his expectations.  No.  Jordan is not that kind of guy.  He beats the crap out of people.  It’s how he secures “buy-in” from his “stake-holders,” as we say nowadays.  He delivers beatings.

          And when I say “beatings,” I don’t mean “fights.”  There is no pushback from his underlings in the crime conspiracy (though one of them does ask why it was necessary for Jordan to wake him up in order to give him his beating).

          I’ve watched the beatings over and over again, (and I’m pretty much a pacifist as most of you know).  They are beautiful.  William J. Hole Jr. choreographs the bejesus out of them.  They’re like the Swan Frickin’ Lake of noir-style violence.  And whatever you may think of John Russell’s somewhat wooden acting, his background as an athlete serves him well in these sequences.  I mean, you really wonder how anyone could survive a slap in the face from him.  And then he gives some poor bastard a dozen more.

          I would be remiss if I did not mention my favorite scene of all, which features Dehl Berti as Daddy, a super-cool drug-dealer having a drink of milk (of course), at a burlesque show while a strung-out hophead is trying to buy dope from him.  You may recognize Berti because he had a long career as a character actor and may be the second-most well-known Chiricahua Apache of all time (Geronimo was a bit more famous).

          And finally, there’s a bit of history for those of you who fancy that sort of thing.  A chase scene near the end is shot in an L.A. trolley-car graveyard filled with the “yellow cars” that served Angelinos from 1901 to 1963 until some evil capitalist (I’m a little foggy on the conspiracy stories) shut them down and made everybody buy cars and drive on freeways.  Yes, “Hell Bound” has a little of everything.

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki

CORONA---Random Thoughts

     One of the first symptoms of coronavirus is said to be the loss of the sense of smell.  Actually, the very first thing to go is the sense of humor.

*

     Now that I am required to wear a mask for eight hours straight while I'm working---well, one naturally examines the situation, searching for the bright side.  So far, the only thing I've been able to come up with is that when I'm finished eating, I don't have to wipe my face anymore.  I just put the mask on.

*

     In Philly, there are many houses with anti-Trump lawn signs that say "Hate Has No Home Here."  The signs have been there for 3 1/2 years.  I used to think that, in terms of narcissistic virtue-signaling, nothing could possibly be more annoying.

     I was wrong.  The campaign to get people to stand at their front doors and clap for health care workers at 7:00 PM every day is worse.

*

     Overheard outside of Cuomo's office: "Wait a minute!  What are we gonna do with all these goddamn ventilators???"

* 

     There seems to be a movement to end the custom of shaking hands, not just for the duration of the coronavirus outbreak, but forever.  Dr. Fauci said recently, “I don’t think we should ever shake hands again, to be honest with you.”  Trump, who is a known germophobe, later seemed to agree.  “Maybe people aren’t going to be shaking hands anymore,“ he said.

     That’s why I've started patting everybody on the butt.

*

“Give me liberty or give me death!”

                   ---Thomas Paine, 1775

“I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

                   ---Ulysses S. Grant, 1863

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

                   ---Franklin Roosevelt, 1933

"Fear kills more people than death."

                   ---George S. Patton, 1944

“America was not built on fear.  America was built on courage, on imagination, on an unbeatable determination…”

                   ---Harry Truman, 1948

"Some things are beyond your control. You can lose your health to illness or accident. You can lose your wealth to all manner of unpredictable sources. What are not easily stolen from you without your cooperation are your principles and your values.

                   ---Neil Armstrong, 1979

“Stay Safe.”

                   ---America, 2020

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki

CORONA---In Which Your Faithful Correspondent Reveals Himself to be a Nutter

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. ---H. L. Mencken

Notes from the big box:

1)

          In my store, all the water fountains, in both the public and the employee areas, have signs on them:

ATTENTION

THE WATER FOUNTAIN IS OUT OF ORDER

DO NOT USE

          They are not out of order, of course.  They work fine.  Someone decided the fountains could be a source of infection so they slapped the signs on them, which everyone obeys.  I haven’t seen anybody even touch one of the drinking fountains for two weeks.

          Since no one uses them, I do.

2)

          We had a dust-up the other night near the frozen fish.  One shopper (no mask), got too close to another shopper (with a mask), and when the masked shopper objected, the other one coughed on her and said, “I got the virus, bitch.  Now you gonna get it.”  Bad language followed, then fists.  The police, who are often around in the evening, brought an end to the festivities.

          The store is usually busy, and the aisles are only four feet wide, so it’s impractical to be always six feet away from everyone.  There’s a polite dance that occurs when you need to get past someone, a dance that says, “I care, I really care, and I’m not exactly trying to infect you, but I’m going to come within six feet of you now because it would be way too much trouble to avoid you entirely.”  I do this dance dozens of times each day.  It is the new manners. 

3)

          John started working at the store about a week ago, and we quickly identified each other as members of the resistance.  If we see each other during the day, we remove our gloves, if we are wearing them, and shake hands.  We haven’t had a conversation since the first time we met in the break room, but we always shake hands.

          Shaking hands is now an act of civil disobedience.

4)

          Each of us now gets at paper mask at the beginning of each shift.  The first time it happened, I asked if I was required to wear it.  “No,” was the answer, though I was told by a different person, also a superior, that though it was not “required required,” it was “recommended.”

         

*

          On April 7, Dr. Birx stated during the daily Corona briefing that, in the U.S., all deaths of persons who have the coronavirus are listed as corona deaths.  On Thursday, Dr. Fauci appeared on the Today Show, and described any concern that deaths might be mistakenly attributed to corona as a “conspiracy theory.”  (What’s he doing on the Today Show, by the way?)

          This is the same man who testified to Congress on March 11 that the fatality rate from corona was ten times the fatality rate of seasonal flu.  He could not possibly have known this because no one knows, even now, what the fatality rate might be.  Whether or not it was his purpose, this statement had the effect of ratchetting up the panic level to new heights.

          Dr. Fauci is a bureaucrat, with an agenda.  Asked a legitimate question about how deaths are categorized, he suggests the people asking such a question wear tin-foil hats.  A month before, he made a wildly irresponsible statement to Congress based on evidence he knew was totally unreliable.

          This is not a person who should have any power over the lives of the American people.

*

          Don’t believe the approval polls.  Trump is in trouble.

          Russia collusion, Stormy Daniels, Ukrainian phone calls, the 25^th Amendment, emoluments (my personal favorite)---none of these imagined scandals could bring him down, but this time, his own character deficits are coming together to undermine his support with his political base.  And you get the impression he never even saw it coming.

          Trump is an executive, and his fondest vision of himself is that of the uber-businessman, like Herbert Hoover, who can fix anything.  For him, coronavirus is the Wollman Skating Rink all over again.  This was the project in NYC that launched him as the kind of can-do guy the city needed and wanted, the kind of guy who could fix something (in record time and under budget), that everyone else had spent years and millions of dollars on, without success.

          So when his bureaucrats came to him with coronavirus, he took up the cause with a vengeance.  HE would get everyone tested!  HE would flatten the curve!  HE would shut down the economy and then HE would revive it with trillions in freshly-printed money and brand-new totalitarian powers!

          And he ran headlong into the bureaucracy, of course, like the faceless minions at the CDC whose corona test didn’t work and who wouldn’t permit any pharma company to produce one that did.  (And who would not permit the manufacture of face masks unless they conformed to fifty pages of regulations.)  Or the implacable Dr. Fauci, for whom the convenience of healthcare providers appears to be the only concern.

          But the intransigence of the bureaucrats is something every president has to deal with (and Trump is actually better at it than others).  The real problem, again, is rooted in Trump’s character.  He will not do his homework.  He will not read a book.  He will not study the data.  He will not ask Fauci, ”Hey, Doc, why are we trying to flatten this damn curve anyway?  You never told me that part.”  Instead, he will turn over policy-making and thinking to the “scientists” and just be the executive who does their bidding.

          And that’s the problem for Trump with his base.  They don’t understand why twenty million people had to be thrown out of work and tens of thousands of small businesses destroyed.  They don’t understand why people will have to lose their homes and their savings and their marriages and, for some, their lives.  They don’t understand why the federal government is taking over the role of capital markets.  What does that have to do with a virus?

          Sometimes, I look at Trump during the corona briefings and I wonder whether he’s starting to figure out that he has been played, that his own character flaws are being used against him.  But the problem is that even though he can see the economic shutdown is a mistake, he doesn’t know how to pull it all back from the abyss.  He is responsible for urging authoritarian leftist governors to shut down their states and now they won’t reverse course even if he wants them to.

          Trump owns the coronavirus.  He wanted to own it and now he does.  His decision to turn over his policy-making authority to bureaucrats and “experts” may well be his downfall in November.

*

          I am a conservative, so I am used to having minority opinions on matters of public policy.  It’s why I am such a supporter of the First Amendment, especially now that the left is so open and enthusiastic about silencing those who disagree with them.

          Still, I like to think I’m not a whack-job.  I don’t believe there are mole people (or Nazis) living underground in the Antarctic, and I’m pretty sure men walked on the moon in 1969.  So I was surprised to find I am part of a tiny minority of people who think it’s foolish to shut down the U.S. in order to “flatten the curve,” or reduce the corona deaths, or whatever the latest stated purpose is.  The poll I saw had 79% of Americans who think this is the right thing to do and only 9% who don’t.

          Nine percent.  It’s a low number.  In fact, it’s about the lowest number you get in polls because no matter what you ask people you can always find 8% or 9% who believe the goofiest thing imaginable.  Nine percent of Americans believe Elvis is alive, and OJ was innocent, and Tupac is living with a Navaho tribe in New Mexico.  I mean, they are different 9 percents, but you can find 9% of people who believe all those things.

          And now, because I believe shutting down the country is causing, and will cause,  far more pain and deaths and misery than a less authoritarian approach would, I’m one of them.

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki