CORONA---Philly Update

           Two entries ago, I noted that the COVID fatality rate in Philadelphia now has little to do with actual deaths caused by the virus, but is instead a function of the city’s testing protocols and the super-inclusive definition of a “COVID fatality” as the death of a person who once tested positive for the virus.

 

          Though the pandemic in this city ended in July 2020, Philly will continue to report about 60 COVID deaths per month indefinitely since

 

          1) Virtually every sick, elderly person who is about to die will get a COVID test in their last two or three months of life,

 

          2) Anyone who dies with a recent positive COVID test result will be characterized as a COVID fatality regardless of the actual cause of death, and

 

          3) About 1100 elderly people die in Philadelphia every month, and with a positivity rate for tests of 6%, about 66 of them will have recently tested positive.

 

          Now that the positivity rate for tests in Philadelphia has jumped from 6% to 11%, the number of fatalities designated as “COVID deaths” can be expected to jump as well.  In October, it was 66.   November will end soon, with 90 – 100 designated deaths.  In December, with a full month of the new 11% positivity rate, the city’s Health Department will report around 125 people dead from the coronavirus.

 

          Until the positivity rate changes again.

 

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki       

CORONA---The Thanksgiving

            At my big-box store, we get pinged on our phones when somebody we work with gets the Rona.  Then the protocol is that we have to get our temperatures taken when we come in to work, for two weeks.  Since April, we have had one or two cases a month, so we have gotten used to presenting the forehead when we enter the office to begin the workday.

 

          In the twenty-one days of November so far, we have gotten these texts seven times, so I finally asked the HR lady about them.  Are they dead?  Are they on ventilators?  Are they sick?  No, no, and no were her answers.  Not even a sniffle among the seven of them.

 

          I’ve been reading that COVID testing sites have been overwhelmed lately with people who want a test before they visit Granny on Thanksgiving.  This is probably the explanation for the recent surge in positive tests (which some people call “cases”).  It will probably subside a bit after Thanksgiving and then explode again in mid-December as young people leave school and head home for Christmas.

 

          I’m guessing this is what is happening with my fellow employees as well.  Many of them are young and work part-time while in school, and I’m sure many of them have grannies.

 

          The seven positives I work with will have to avoid Grandma next Thursday, and that’s too bad, but we can all still be thankful this is the first pandemic in history where most of the victims remain in perfect health.

 

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki 

 

CORONA---The Numbers in Philly

           Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is a city of 1.5 million people.  Corona first appeared here in March, and our fatalities, as reported by the Philadelphia Department of Health, are as follows:

 

          March              14

          April               593

          May                677

          June                300

          July                 106

          August              57

          September         62

          October             66

 

          Anything that could reasonably be described as a “pandemic” ended sometime in July, but the city dutifully reports our COVID deaths and uses them, along with reports of new cases, to maintain the continuing dread.

 

          In fact, based upon current reporting and testing protocols, the numbers of deaths in August, September and October represent the statistical minimum number of COVID deaths here.  The Philly Department of Health, assuming it keeps doing what it is doing, will continue to report one or two deaths a day.  COVID fatalities in Philadelphia are now a function of the Department’s reporting practices rather than a reflection of epidemiological truth.

 

          First, based on 2019 stats, about 1192 people die in Philly every month.  A few, of course, are young people---homicides, suicides, a cancer here and there---but the vast majority are elderly Philadelphians who die of heart disease or cancer or respiratory diseases or diabetes, or Alzheimers or Parkinsons or one of the myriad of scourges that the flesh is heir too.  This means that, near the end, they are usually attended by doctors and probably spend some time in a hospital.  And in 2020, that means that before they pass on, they get a COVID test.  When you get a COVID test these days, it’s normally going to be a CPR test.  These are the ones that detect the virus’s nucleic acid, or some debris thereof, rather than an actual infection.  These are quickly becoming famous for generating a large number of false positives and “cases” where the patient has no symptoms.

 

          The positivity rate for CPR tests in Philadelphia is around 6%, so of the 1192 Philadelphians who are going to die in a given month, somewhere between 60 and 70 will have had a recent positive result to a COVID test.  Their deaths will be recorded as COVID deaths, no matter what the actual cause is.  This too is routine.

 

          Based upon current bureaucratic practices in Philadelphia regarding the virus and record-keeping, at least sixty deaths each month will be attributed to COVID.  And this will continue indefinitely.

 

Copyright 2020MichaelKubacki     

CORONA---Now We Have To Do This AGAIN???

                “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

                                             --- C. S. Lewis

 

          As we slog through this absurd chapter in American history, I am starting to get pissed off.

 

          Always, the story changes.  Now we are told reinfection with the virus is a looming danger.  There’s no real immunity, you see.  The antibodies disappear after a few weeks, or a few months.  An article I saw recently reported four cases of people who caught the thing twice.  Four people in the world.  So we’re all at risk, all over again, including the poor suckers who have already had it.

 

          Immunity for the afflicted is literally the first thing mankind discovered about disease---that if Og got the plague but somehow survived it, he wouldn’t get it again.  Humans first realized this thousands of years ago.  For Edward Jenner and the other medical pioneers of the 18^th Century, it was the basic idea behind vaccination.  Ah, but neither Og nor Jenner ever had to face this SARS-CoV-2, did he?  Now we are told that even acquired immunity is a false comfort.  And most people believe it.

 

          This, of course, only concerns the type of immunity acquired by catching the disease and recovering from it.  Once the immune system has defeated the invading virus, a quantity of special B-cells and T-cells are produced that remember the specific invader and wait around (watching football games and Tik Tok videos), in case it shows up again.  They usually survive for decades if they’re waiting for measles or chickenpox to return, but the Rona-killers only last a month or two.  We are told.

 

          The obsession with these antibodies is one of the many big lies we are told by those who wish to lock us down, shut down businesses, terrify our children, and force us to strap underwear to our faces.  The memory B-cells and T-cells are important, of course, to those who have acquired them the hard way, but that is a tiny percentage of the population.  What’s truly important is the 98% of us who never got the virus even though some of us have been exposed to it almost every day.  The immunity-deniers never even acknowledge the existence of this other line of defense that has always been present.

 

          That is because COVID is a “novel” coronavirus.  It’s what they told us from the start.  Nobody (and nobody’s immune system), has ever seen it before, they claim, so we are all at risk and we still are.  That’s their story and they are sticking to it because to admit the vast majority of us never had anything to worry about would be to admit that all the societal and economic destruction these authoritarians have unleashed on us was pointless.  And that’s something they will not do.

 

          But there is only one explanation for my continued good health and the continued good health of hundreds of millions of others.  Yes, this COVID-19 is “novel” in the sense that our bodies had never encountered it specifically, but our bouts with other coronaviruses (e.g., the common cold), over the years provided us with B-cells and T-cells that could recognize COVID-19 and get the job done.  It’s a process called “cross-reactivity,” and it is NEVER discussed by the bureaucrat kings and queens who rule us.  The big lie is the refusal to acknowledge the existence of cross-reactivity and the immunity of most of the population.

 

          While I’m catharting here----is that a word?  probably not, but it should be----let me take a minute to discuss the uncaring cabal of really-smart leftwing elitists and their “experts”---the people who have brought about the shutting down of worldwide society, culture and economies and the wanton destruction of millions of lives and livelihoods.

 

          Let’s start with the slogan, “We’re all in this together,” which now, whenever I hear it, makes me grab the nearest piece of pottery and hurl it into the fireplace.  It’s not true, of course.  It has never been true, though it typifies the self-centered blindness of those who chirp it endlessly.

 

          There are certain people who are not at all inconvenienced by the lockdowns and shut-downs, and these are the people who think they are a grand idea.  These are folks with a well-paying, professional career that they can pursue without leaving the house.  Or they may be people with a comfortable stream of retirement income, the resources to have everything they need delivered, and a home containing high-speed internet, a flat-screen, a recently-rehabbed kitchen, and a small backyard area suitable for some plantings and a compost bin.  Let’s throw most public sector employees in there as well.  Not cops and firemen and garbage men, but the other ones who don’t have any work or do, or not much of it, but get paid just the same.***  Those folks are not having a very hard time of it, are they?

 

          For everyone else, it’s like a bomb went off, nobody told us it was coming, and nobody will tell us why they had to drop it on us.  For people who work in restaurants or hotels or theme parks or cruise ships, or entertainment, or anything to do with travel or tourism or fitness, well, they’re screwed.  Think of all the people who work for non-professional-level wages in jobs that can’t be done online.  There are a lot of them.  There are tens of millions of them.  And the oh-so-comfortable self-quarantiners are barely aware such people exist.  How could they be?  The poor suckers who bus the tables and turn down the beds just don’t show up in their Zoom calls.  

 

          Around the country, we are told, half the restaurants will not reopen, or if they do, will not survive with capacity restrictions.  Tens of thousands of small businesses are no more, along with the years of savings and planning that went into opening them in the first place….  But these are statistics, numbers.  Instead, let me tell you about two specific lockdown nightmares and the people involved.

 

          The Koresh Dance Company, in Philadelphia, was started by Roni Koresh in 1992 and has somehow survived for 28 years with a dance school that teaches modern dance, hip hop, ballet, and whatever to five-year-old girls, their big sisters, their mothers and their grandmas.  In addition to that thin stream of income, Roni and his brothers/partners occasionally land a small grant from somewhere or other.  The troupe, which consists of ten dancers, has performed all over the world but has never exactly qualified as a “profit center.”  I am not privy to Roni’s books, but I would be surprised if any of his dancers were paid that new “living wage” of $15/hour.  Typically, they dance for ten years because they love it, have a bartending job on the side, and then quit to search for a career that will actually allow them to eat and marry and buy a house.

 

          Though I haven’t asked, I suppose the Company was eligible for some of the federal relief money that was being handed out to help businesses retain employees, but they are not in it for the money, and the activities of the Koresh Dance Company have basically ground to a halt.  There are some online dance classes available, but attendance is sparse.  The troupe’s entire schedule of performances for 2020, and into 2021, was cancelled, so there were no rehearsals for months.  Now Roni has started them up again, but actual performances remain a distant fantasy.  Meanwhile, the dancers are in the process of losing a year from a career that may only last five or ten.

 

          I don’t know if the Koresh Dance Company will survive the lockdowns, but what is being done to them seems particularly sad and unjust.  Like anybody else, I suppose dancers would like to be rich too, but all of them went into dance for the sheer love of it, for the need to do it, and they knew financial rewards would probably never be in the cards.  They believed, however, that if they gave their art everything they had, they could survive on the crumbs available in a place as rich as America.  Then the politicians and bureaucrats decided they knew best for all of us.

 

          The other lockdown nightmare concerns a woman named Justine that I met only once.  A couple years ago, she managed to scrape together the resources to open a yoga studio in the neighborhood.  My wife does yoga, and I wound up meeting Justine at a dinner party and talking with her a bit.

 

          I think she had a couple other instructors who ran a few classes for her, but Justine did most of the teaching, along with all the marketing and accounting and sweeping up and security and everything else that somebody trying to get a small business off the ground has to do.

 

          And her business was surviving.  From my one conversation with her I got the impression yoga was “her life,” and that she was 100% focused on making her yoga-studio dream come true.  It’s hard not to root for somebody like that.

 

          And then the Governor of Pennsylvania and the Mayor of Philadelphia shut her down.  Three months later, in June of 2020, she couldn’t pay the bills anymore, and she closed the studio.

 

          A dream deferred, or destroyed.  Tens of thousands of dreams deferred or destroyed.  Lives uprooted.  Careers ended.  And our betters will never accept responsibility for it.  According to the mayors and governors and “experts,” it’s the disease that’s destroying people’s lives.  And that’s the biggest lie of all, because it’s not the virus that may destroy Koresh and it’s not the virus that shut down Justine’s studio.  It’s the lockdowns.  It’s the politics.  It’s Cuomo and Murphy and Wolf and Whitmer and Newsom and Fauci.  It’s the people who are so certain they know what’s best for us, they will not even look at what they have done.

 

Copyright2020Michael Kubacki  

 

*** Regarding public employees, I suspect there is a special place in hell for the people who work at the public libraries in Philadelphia.  Though library workers are still getting paid, these people have kept the doors locked for 7 ½ months.  Meanwhile, they demand I return a book I checked out in February, something I cannot do because the doors are locked and even the drop-boxes are closed 23 hours a day.  OPEN THE GODDAMN DOORS!  

THOUGHTS ON THE ELECTION OF 2020

 

          Of all the Democratic tactics being employed to win this election, the most cynical is the effort to sow chaos across the country, especially in swing states, with unnecessary changes to election rules.  There is no apparent purpose for these sudden vote-by-mail schemes other than to enable cheating and widespread post-election litigation.  Out of the confusion, Democrats hope to cobble together an electoral victory.

 

          Nothing would give me more pleasure than to see this attempt backfire.  It is being reported across the country that Democrats are signing up to vote by mail at three times the rate of Republicans, but the procedures vary from state to state and many voters are finding the process confusing.  For example, there are posters all over Philly urging people to “PLAN YOUR VOTE,” which makes me think they are already worried Biden voters will screw up their ballots.  After all, you never had to “plan” to vote before.  All you had to do was show up at the polls on Election Day.

 

          The possibilities are reminiscent of Bush—Gore in 2000, when the Democrats were reduced to arguing, in federal and state courts, that black people were too stupid to vote correctly.  This time around, Democratic lawyers might have to assert that pretty much anybody who tried to vote for Biden by mail was an idiot.

 

          We are told (incessantly!), that this is a winnable election for Biden.  How deliciously ironic it would be if Biden loses because of the cheat-by-mail scam, but we learn he would have won if the Democrats had played it straight.

 

*

 

          If the Democratic Party comes out of this election in control of the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives, a top item on the Democratic legislative agenda will be to “pack the Supreme Court” by mandating at least four new seats and appointing leftist lawyers to fill those seats.  No prominent Democrat denies that this is the plan.  There are many reasons this will benefit them, but the most important is that it will enable them to eliminate the Electoral College as the way we elect presidents.

 

          The legal basis for the Electoral College is found in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.  This means that the only way the Democrats can achieve their dream of a presidential election decided by the popular vote is to amend the Constitution, which is a very difficult process.  Under Article V, any amendment to the Constitution must be “ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States….”  Three fourths is 38 states, an impossible number to achieve for such an Amendment.  There are simply too many Wyomings and Mississippis and Montanas out there, and they will never agree to turn over the selection of all future presidents to California, Texas, New York and Florida.

 

          But with a packed Supreme Court that will cast its blessings on any legislation passed by a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president, there are two possible ways to eliminate the Electoral College without amending the Constitution.

 

          The first method is already underway.  This is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), a campaign that began in 2006.  States that adopt the NPVIC agree that their electoral votes will be given to the presidential candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote.  The Compact will be triggered when enough states have joined so that their combined electoral votes total 270 or more, thus ensuring the Electoral College victory of the popular vote winner.  Currently, 16 states (all blue or purple), have joined the Compact, with total electoral votes of 196.  Efforts continue to secure the additional 74 electoral votes needed.

 

          Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution provides that any such interstate agreement cannot be effective unless it is approved by Congress.  Presumably, that would not be a problem so long as both houses of Congress are controlled by the Democrats.  There are also constitutional problems with the NPVIC, however, and these would need to be decided by the Supreme Court.

 

          For one thing, there is something fundamentally dishonest about using a method like this to destroy the Electoral College system we have used since the founding of the nation.  There is an explicit amendment process in the Constitution itself, and the NPVIC is simply a clever way to circumvent it.  A larger issue may be the argument that the compact would completely disenfranchise all the states that did not sign up.  Once the NPVIC achieves its 270-vote trigger, the Electoral College votes of all the states not participating would be meaningless.

 

          Packing the Supreme Court would ensure that the compact would somehow be deemed constitutional.

 

          The second way Democrats might destroy the Electoral College system would be more direct.  They might enact legislation requiring that presidents be elected by popular vote.  Once signed by the president, the law would be attacked as unconstitutional since Article II, Section 1 mandates the Electoral College.

 

          The Democrats’ defense would be that Article II, Section 1 was superseded by the passage of the 14^th Amendment in 1868.  The 14^th Amendment has been used by many politicians, scrupulous and unscrupulous, for many purposes, but it has been recognized for some time as the source of the idea that the right to vote, and the principle of “one-man, one-vote” are recognized by the Constitution.  This was the finding of Justice Rehnquist in 1974 in Richardson v. Ramirez.  (In fact, there is no explicit guarantee of a right to vote.)

 

          In other words, the argument would be that Article II, Section 1 and the 14^th Amendment are in an irreconcilable conflict, and the popular vote legislation was passed to resolve that conflict.  A newly packed Supreme Court, willing to rubber-stamp any radical Democratic idea, would agree.  And the Electoral College would be history.

 

*

 

          The one thing that has been crystal clear for at least a year is that Joe Biden, should he prevail in the 2020 election, is not mentally competent to serve as a “real” president.  This has raised the puzzling question of who would serve as president if Joe beats Trump.  Would Biden simply be removed and replaced by his vice president, Kamala Harris, or would he serve as a figurehead, with some committee of Democrats (Pelosi, Schumer, Sanders, etc.), actually doing the governance for the Executive branch?  When Biden was locked away in his basement for months and was only displayed under tightly-controlled circumstances, we didn’t know if he was even capable of serving as a pantomime president.

 

          The significance of the two Trump-Biden debates and of Joe’s real ability to attend occasional campaign rallies has answered the question.

 

          It is now clear that Biden is able to appear in public, for short periods of time, and say what has to be said and do what has to be done.  At least for the time being, he is capable of attending state dinners, placing medals around the necks of heroes, and smiling appropriately at the Easter Egg Roll.  This means that unless his deterioration markedly accelerates, he can serve as a show president for some significant period of time while the secret Democratic politburo runs the executive.   Kamala Harris, an extremely unpopular Democrat who had to drop out even before the primaries, will not be needed to play any significant role.

 

          The realization that they don’t need Kamala is probably why her campaigning has been cut back so drastically.  She was chosen as VP solely for her sex and skin color, and the Democrats don’t want her out in public more than she has to be.  Now she doesn’t have to be.

 

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki

WHY MUST I WEAR A MASK?

 

          On Friday, the Department of Health reported that Philly has had a total of 35,582 confirmed COVID cases.  In a city of 1.5 million people, this means that about 2% of Philadelphians are known to have caught it.  For some, the only evidence was a positive test.  For others, the virus was fatal.

 

          The 2% rate is common throughout the northern US---New York is 2%, Illinois is 2.2%, South Dakota is 2%.  (Most European countries are 1% or below.)  Of course, these are just the “confirmed” cases.  Undoubtedly, there were people with very mild bouts, who perhaps woke up in the middle of the night with a fever but were fine by morning, so they never went to a doctor or got tested.  How many?  We cannot know, but let’s say the number of real cases was actually ten times the number of confirmed cases.  That would mean 20% of the Philly population caught the virus in some fashion.  It seems like a large estimate, but let’s use 20% as our figure for the maximum number of residents who were touched.

 

          I like 20% as the maximum infection rate because it has other evidence to support it.  Remember the Diamond Princess?  This was the cruise ship locked down in Yokohama back in February.  It took weeks to get everyone tested and moved ashore and repatriated.  There had been no mask-wearing or distancing prior to its quarantine, and there is little chance to escape the close quarters of a cruise ship.  All 3711 passengers and crew, in other words, were exposed to the virus on board, yet only 712, or 19.2%, caught the bug.  There were many other “accidental quarantine” situations involving cruise ships and dormitories and military barracks (including a very recent one at the University of Wisconsin), and the infection rate in these types of petri dishes is generally somewhere in the 20% range.   

 

          That leaves 80% of us who never caught the disease.  Why not?

 

          Well, it’s not like we didn’t get the chance to.  Here in Philly, back in April and May, there were often a thousand COVID patients in Philly hospitals.  Average deaths in the city were thirty per day for those two months.  It seemed there was no escape from the virus.

 

          But then the deaths and the serious cases just dropped off the table.  On June 19, the Department of Public Health, which had given daily reports on hospitalizations, announced that “Hospitals are not under strain and are returning to normal operations, so going forward we will no longer include these figures in the weekly press releases.”

 

          And that’s what happened everywhere, at least in northern climes like the upper U.S. and all of Europe.  (The pattern in warmer places is slightly different.)  The curve shows a rapid rise and a peak that lasts for two to four weeks, and then a fairly swift decline in serious outcomes.  The numbers will vary from place to place but the curve looks the same, regardless of whether or when there were lockdowns, mask edicts, school closings, etc.  New York looks like Sweden which looks like Italy which looks like Germany which looks like South Dakota.

 

          Why?

 

          When deaths and hospitalizations go from hundreds a day to one a day, it is because the virus cannot “find” vulnerable people.  It happens because there are almost no potential victims left.  Almost everyone had either caught the damn thing or they were never going to catch it because they were immune.  That’s why in June and July, the serious cases and the deaths almost disappeared.  It’s why the ventilators went into storage closets.  The virus did not leave Philadelphia.  It just couldn’t find victims even though there were still at least 80% of us untouched by it. 

 

          We’re immune.  At least four out of five of us have been immune from the beginning.  There is no other explanation.

 

          There is certainly no other explanation for why I personally remain in the pink of health.  While there may be a few people in this city who completely isolated themselves from any contact with the bug (though I don’t personally know any), I am not one of them.

 

          I have worked continuously at my extremely busy big-box store through this entire year.  Though there are signs all over the sales floor and frequent announcements, social distancing is all but impossible.  Every day, I pass within inches of dozens of customers and fellow workers.  Masks were not required until April, and most people wear them, but they are frequently pulled down to the mouth or neck.  A show is made of spraying shopping carts with sanitizer before the customer takes one, but people touch everything else in the store, constantly, and it would be impossible to clean every surface.

 

          In addition, except when I am at work, I never wear a mask in public though I am required to do so by our Governor’s executive edict.  When an employee at a bank or supermarket I am visiting comes up to me and asks me to wear one, I do, but usually nobody says anything.  Though I’ve known from the beginning that mask-wearing is ineffective in curbing respiratory virus infections, I initially followed the requirements just to be polite.  No more.  The mask has become a political fetish object for the totalitarian Left, and that makes me angry, of course.  However, the main reason for my resistance is that there is simply no reason for me to wear one.  I’ve been exposed repeatedly---every day probably---and I never got sick.  I pose no risk to anyone.  I’M IMMUNE.

 

          And I’m not the only one.  All of my co-workers are in the same position, along with all the other workers at big-box stores and supermarkets.  A few of us have gotten sick during the pandemic, or at least “tested positive,” but the vast majority have not because we are part of the 80% of the population that was never at risk to begin with.

 

          Then there are all the people like my friend, an emergency room doctor at Frankford Hospital in Philly.  Through the pandemic, he has continued to deal with everything that walks through his door---gunshot wounds, overdoses, strokes, suicide attempts, heart attacks, diabetic comas, and yes, COVID patients.  Though he wears a mask and gloves and follows all the protocols, there is simply no way he was not exposed to the virus, yet he remains healthy and uninfected.

 

          It almost seems that the Executive Orders and Edicts and Pronunciamentos become more intrusive and restrictive as the virus itself fades into the past.  The need for universal mask-wearing (if there ever was one), is certainly lower now than it has been since the beginning of the pandemic, but the politicians and bureaucrats show no sign of slowing down in their efforts to regulate us.

 

          But why?  What is the purpose of this endless tinkering with our lives and our freedom?  We have all learned something about what each of us is facing and we have become more knowledgeable about our individual needs and what we are comfortable with.  Want to wear a mask?  I would never tell you not to.  But each of us is in a unique position to decide for ourselves what level of concern or precaution is reasonable.

 

          We are not children, and we do not need the Governor of this state or any other to tell us what is best for us.  We are all capable of making those decisions for ourselves, as responsible citizens have always done.  Faith in individual responsibility and freedom, in fact, is the foundation of our society. My position is a simple one: if there is no reason for me to wear a mask, and there is not, I should not be ordered to wear one, and there can be no legitimate legal authority for such an order.

 

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki       

CORONA---Tidbits

          I have nothing against vaccines.  Our son got his full package of dip-tets and whooping coughs and everything else.  I recently got a shingles shot and a pneumonia shot.

          But who will want the new Rona vaccine when it comes out in October or November or early next year?  I get a flu shot every year (though I’m starting to wonder why), but it’s a vaccine formulated not for last year’s flu but for the predicted next one.

          In the Northern Hemisphere, the Rona is dunzo pretty much everywhere, or will be very soon.  The 20% who were vulnerable to it caught it and recovered from it, except for the unfortunate few who died.  The other 80% of us were immune from the beginning, so why would we want a vaccine now?

          The fantasy of a vaccine rests on the assumption that the 80% of us who didn’t catch the Rona somehow were never exposed, so we are still at risk.  But how did I escape it?  I have worked at Target every day, sometimes with masks and sometimes without, and have passed within inches of hundreds of strangers (many unmasked), for months now.  None of my dozens of co-workers have gotten sick at Target either, though a few caught the bug from family members.

          And what of my neighbor, a doctor who works the emergency room at Frankford Hospital pulling bullets out of gang-bangers, rescuing the morbidly obese from diabetic comas, and reviving the dregs of Philly society from drug overdoses?  He has even treated Rona patients, plenty of them.  How come HE never got sick?

          I suppose there are a few people around who so thoroughly locked themselves away that they were never exposed to the virus, but I live in a city and I doubt there are many of them.  Even the most careful (paranoid?) people I know went out to shop or exercise or visit a friend at one time or another, and yet 80% of us were untouched by the virus.

          So what is the point of developing this vaccine?

*

          On September 2, 2020, the CDC website disclosed that out of the 169,044 U.S. COVID deaths in their database, 6% of the fatalities (about 10,000), were attributed to the coronavirus alone.  The other 94% of victims had an average of 2.6 co-morbidities (e.g., heart disease, diabetes).

          In a nation of 330,000,000, ten thousand deaths spread over six months is not a lot of people.  It’s about one per state per day.  Seven times as many Americans die of strokes.  Thirty times as many die of cancer.

          My point here is not to disparage or somehow denigrate the other 159,000 dead people who passed on with an average of 2.6 other co-morbidities.  They were people too and their deaths are just as heart-breaking for those they left behind.

          There is, however, a lesson to be learned from this information: there is no conceivable reason to close schools and colleges.  Normal healthy people under the age of fifty, a group that includes almost every student and every teacher, face virtually NO risk of catching the Rona and dying from it.  Each of them are hundreds of times more likely to die in an accident traveling to or from school than they are to become a CDC fatal data-point.

          On July 15, Reuters reported that in Sweden, which never locked down and never closed its schools, the number of children aged 1- 19 who died from COVID was zero.  In addition, Sweden’s Public Health Ministry reported there had been no difference in COVID risk between teachers and those in other professions.

          Elderly teachers, or those (including students), who are vulnerable for one reason or another should, if they wish, take this semester off.  But the current panic that has millions of children and university students sitting at home, isolated, watching lectures on a screen, is pure lunacy.  The actions of politicians, often at the behest of teachers or teachers unions, is unforgiveable.

*

          As the human body is subjected to stress through malnutrition or injury, the bodily systems that protect us are shut down in the reverse order that they appeared in the history of human evolution.  Since the immune system was the most recent system to appear in homo sapiens, it is the first to go when an individual is stressed.  This is why impoverished, poorly-nourished people get hit hardest in a pandemic.

*

          I’m in Rehoboth, Delaware on a beach vacation, and while the mask rules in Philadelphia and Delaware are basically the same (masks required in all public places, including the street), there are obvious cultural differences.

          Here, there are signs on every storefront, every lamp post, and every entrance to the beach.  Flashing highway signs that used to tell you how fast you were driving now tell you to wear a mask and distance yourself.  And not all the signs I see are government-issued.  Many are one-off items created and posted by individual store-keepers trying to distinguish themselves by their cleverness.  (“Simple Fact You Breathe Out Of Your Nose.  Unless You Are An Amphibian, Mask Must Cover Nose And Mouth.”)  You just don’t see much of this in Philly.

          On the other hand, obedience on the streets of downtown Philly is close to universal, while here in Delaware, there are plenty of folks walking around with no masks.  Another difference is that in Philly, you see more people with masks pulled down below the nose or below the mouth but still on the face, as if paying lip service to the rules.  In Rehoboth, the improperly worn mask is hard to find.  People either obey the rules or they don’t.

          My guess is that the difference is political.  Philly is a deep-blue city that gave Hillary 82% of its votes in 2016.  The liberal left tends not to question authority much, so they are mostly going to comply with the mask edicts.  Delaware is a blue area too, of course, but not to the same extent.  Also, there is a hillbilly culture in Delaware that does not exist at all in Philadelphia, and hillbillies have no problem at all defying authority.  If they don’t want to wear the damn mask, they ain’t gonna.

*

          In terms of the median age of its citizens, Japan and Italy are among the oldest nations in the world.  In Japan, the median is 46.9; in Italy, it is 45.1.  Yet their COVID experiences were very different.  Italy had 35,491 fatalities.  Japan, with twice the population, had only 1296 deaths.

          There are many theories about why this happened, and most of them are based in the fact that Italy, as nations go, is regarded as a basket case and Japan is not.

          One theory, however, is not based in healthcare infrastructure or nursing home rules, but in the fact that Italy is a well-established Vitamin D desert while Japan is packed with healthy and happy Japanese people bursting with all the Vitamin D they require.  The theory, and that’s all it is, is that a lack of D makes you especially vulnerable to the Rona.

*

          Sweden’s government officially said it was sorry for failing to protect elderly vulnerable people by immediately isolating them from the virus.  So far as I have been able to discover, the Swedish government is the only one, anywhere in the world, that has apologized for its mistakes regarding the virus.

*

          A recent study at Harvard reported that 25% of COVID positives across the country have one or more flu viruses as well.

*

          On February 3, 2020, the cruise ship Diamond Princess was quarantined at the port in Yokohama.  Over the next five weeks, following testing, passengers and crew were allowed to leave the ship for repatriation or hospitalization or land-based quarantine in Japan.  Of 3711 passengers and crew, 723 tested positive for COVID.  Nine died.

          There was a lesson here that was ignored.  The people on this cruise were in a confined space, eating at the same tables, walking around the ship and chatting with each other, with no knowledge that they were exposed to a virus.  Nobody wore masks until the outbreak occurred, and there was no distancing at first.

          Yet 80% of the passengers and crew never got sick.

          There were other isolated communities in army barracks or dormitories that were subjected to similar accidental quarantines, and the level of immunity was similar.  The case of the Diamond Princess was the most instructive since it occurred so early in the pandemic and since the group was so large.

          Nobody noticed that even at the beginning there was a large reservoir of immunity among us human beings.  Nobody noticed that COVID-19 could not possibly be “novel.”

*

          The NYT reported on August 29 that it did a study on recent PCR test results from Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada, and concluded that 90% of those people testing positive carried barely any virus.

          PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) tests detect the presence of genetic material (RNA) from the coronavirus, but the amount of virus in a sample is typically not disclosed to the patient, who is simply told he is “positive” or “negative.” The threshold used is so low that even a tiny amount of debris from destroyed virus can trigger a “positive.”  The actual amount of corona RNA is part of the test results, however, and this is what the NYT looked at in determining that the cases we see now may not be real infections.

          The widespread use of PCR tests is a possible explanation for the “casedemic” we are now seeing, where there are significant numbers of new cases in various parts of the country (e.g., colleges with returning students), but very little actual sickness and no deaths.

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki

CORONA---The Masquerade Ends

          The mask wars are over.  Science lost.

          I’ve written about mask edicts before, and the widespread belief that cloth or paper masks can protect the public from catching viruses like the Rona.  At this point, I think I’ve read everything that has been published on the subject in peer-reviewed journals for the last twenty-five years or so.  (It’s surprisingly easy to find academic articles these days, and it generally costs nothing.)  To summarize, there is no evidence that wearing a mask in the park or in a supermarket does a damn bit of good in stopping the spread of viral infections.

          In addition to these studies and findings, there have been a number of articles in the past few months (mostly not peer-reviewed and mostly published by “associations” rather than academic periodicals), all of which purport to tell us that cloth masks provide a “barrier” (a word they invariably use), to viruses.  The coolest ones use laser-enhanced photography to show colored plumes of aerosol droplets raining down ten feet away, at least until a mask is interposed.  They shed no light on the spreading of viruses, of course, but the pictures are great.

          You don’t really have to read all these articles, though it’s educational to do so because you will rather quickly discover how much of “science” (which you are paying for), is pure horseshit.  But rather than read all the articles, all you really have to do is watch a few interviews or podcasts about COVID featuring epidemiology researchers and professors and such.  Whenever the subject of masks comes up, they chuckle.  The reaction is involuntary.  Many of these people have dealt with deadly pathogens in labs, wearing elaborate haz-mat gear to protect themselves.  The idea that masks, even the N-95 variety, could prevent the transmission of viruses, is amusing to them.

          But you will never read this perspective in a newspaper or see it on TV because the effectiveness of mask-wearing has now been accepted by virtually all news outlets, regardless of their slant or politics.  Even scientists and doctors have stopped talking about the uselessness (and even negative effects), of mask-wearing, at least partly because some dissenters have lost research funding and others find their views taken down from social media sites with no explanation.

          The “illusory truth effect” is a phenomenon, identified at Villanova University in 1977, where people will come to believe a falsehood when it has been repeated often enough.  Familiarity alone, rather than any reasoning or factual inquiry, becomes the basis for an accepted truth.  This seems to be what has occurred with the belief that wearing a mask in public protects us from the Rona.  And now that this is the “truth,” no discussion is permitted.  It never was, actually.  I still have not seen an article in a mainstream publication (e.g., the NYT, the WSJ, etc.), where the past twenty-five years of medical research is even mentioned.  All you get is the same admonitions and the same scolding, from every newspaper, every bureaucrat, every health department czar, every Fauci-wannabe, every governor, every mayor---wear the mask, we’re all in this together, etc. etc. etc.

          The resolution of this issue is accepted even by many scientists who know that masking is pointless.  Ivor Cummins, an Irish biochemical engineer and science reporter, has said he doesn’t like to appear “churlish” by criticizing public mask-wearing rules since he understands the impulse people might have to “do something” about COVID, even if the thing they are doing is useless.

          OK.  I get it.  But I still don’t share this view because the powers enforcing mask-wearing are not uniformly benign.  It is being used by authoritarians in some places (i.e., Europe), to punish mask-dissenters with huge fines and even jail time.

          More importantly, accepting a falsehood as a ruling principle for society is fundamentally contrary to our basic values.  We in the West have become historically free and wealthy and long-lived because we have embraced reason and science, at least where public policy is concerned.  What possible good can come from a return to irrational beliefs and superstition in the face of a deadly medical challenge, even if it’s churlish to tell all the scolds and politicians and time-servers they are wrong?

          Besides, I’m irrational enough as it is.  I believe God spoke to Moses and parted the Red Sea and I believe Christ died on the cross and was resurrected to save my soul.  I believe these things with all my heart and I can’t prove any of them, and when I actually write them down they sound a little ridiculous but I believe them anyway.

          But that’s it.  That’s all the irrationality I can stand.  I’m not going to believe in mask-wearing too, no matter how many people want me to and how many nice people believe in it.  I’m not going to believe GMOs are bad for you either, or that OMEGA-3s make you healthy.

          God is love.  I’m cool with that.  For everything else, I need a double-blind study.

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki