Month: April 2020

Really Bad News for The Democrats and Drudge

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Unfortunately all good things must come to an end and for the doom and gloomers that has happened.  We just passed global  COVID-19 peak death.

They can fake it for a while by conflating any death with COVID-19 deaths but even that will get hard to believe even for the people locked in blue states.  When New Yorkers start seeing Floridians strolling around on beaches it’s gonna get to be a bit thick.   From now on they’re just going to have to attack the President on the economy and he knows how to turn that to his advantage as he works to re-open and revitalize American industry.  He’ll blame Nancy Pelosi for not approving unemployment and small business relief and she’ll fold like a cheap suit.

But what will Drudge do?  All I can think of is some sort of cross over articles where sexbots infected with COVID-19 disguised as ventilators attack hospital workers like some sort of sleazy direct-to-video terminator plot line.  Well Matt Drudge’s got to eat somehow.

 

 

33% of Those Tested in Chelsea MA Had COVID-19 Antibodies in Their Blood

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Mass General Hospital performed random COVID-19 antibody testing in a suburban neighborhood of Boston (Chelsea, MA) and found that 1/3 of those tested were positive.  Performing my patented back of the envelope calculations on statistics available from Massachusetts I find the following:

Massachusetts has a population of about seven million people.  1,404 Massachusetts residents have died from COVID-19 infection.  Assuming that 33.3% of the state has been infected by the virus then the death rate from COVID-19 in Massachusetts is 0.06%.  And that actually is in the range of deaths you’d expect from the normal flu.

Alright, let’s check the assumptions.  Is Chelsea representative of Massachusetts as a whole?  Probably not.  It’s more densely populated than most parts of the state.  So let’s do the calc again for Chelsea:

Chelsea has a population of about 40,000. people.  39 Chelsea residents have died from COVID-19 infection.  Assuming that 33.3% of Chelsea has been infected by the virus then the death rate from COVID-19 in Chelsea is 0.29%.  Now that is higher than the death rate for the normal flu, let’s say five times higher.  But that’s a lot less scary than the extinction event they’ve making this thing out to be.

So, here is where we are.  For most people who will “catch” the COVID-19 virus they will never know they had it.  They’ll think their allergies or a cold gave them some symptoms for a day or two.  For something like three people out of a thousand, mostly the elderly or the chronically ill, this virus will be a life or death struggle.  If society wants to spare those people from risk they’ll need to be isolated.  For everyone else we need to go on with our lives and get back to work so our taxes can pay for taking care of the vulnerable.

The Blue Bird of Happiness Gets What’s Coming to Him for Living in New England

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Exhibit A – Wednesday April 15th a beautiful sunny day

 

Exhibit B

A closeup of Mr. and Mrs. Bluebird redecorating one of Camera Girl’s deluxe blue bird apartments in the sky.

Exhibit C Saturday April 18th.

And the punch line as the happy couple take it in the teeth.

Late April in Southern New England

The moral of the story?  Global warming ain’t everything it’s cracked up to be.  Suffice it to say that for the next week or so the photo of the day will include a number of shots of spring flowers covered in show.

Opening Up America

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I watched the press conference that previewed the President’s program to restart America.  I must say it sounds a lot like my own take on how it should be done.  The President allowed his three doctors to walk us through the medical criteria that would be used to determine when a particular state had reached the health thresholds needed to progress to the first, second and third stages of the process.  One useful visual aid were three graphics that showed the United States over the last couple of months of the crisis with the states colored by the severity of the pandemic in each state.  What was apparent was that most of the country is only lightly affected by the COVID-19 disease.  And that in certain areas like the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana the caseloads and the infection rates are so low that it will be safe to proceed directly to the first stage of the reopening process.  And the doctors used all the comforting scientific jargon about gating the progress and sentinel surveillance site testing to avoid a resurgence caused by asymptomatic cases mixed in with the unaffected.

And it was good to hear the President reassure the people in the hardest hit areas like New York and New Jersey that their states will be allowed to maintain the heightened shutdown they currently need but at the same time allow people in relatively unaffected areas to follow safe but much less restrictive protocols that will allow them to go back to work and normalize their lives again.  The President stressed that the elderly and the infirm will be the focus of quarantine efforts going forward because these are the populations where ninety percent of the deaths are occurring.

And finally, I heard the President reiterating the need to provide relief to the small businesses and their employees who are the primary victims of the business shutdown that we currently have.  He stressed that the end game is to get back to a point where a restaurant or a sports stadium will be able to serve its clientele as it was designed to, not half full or almost empty.  Infrastructure projects were also mentioned and that is to the good too because those types of projects have a follow-on effect for the rest of the economy in the areas where they are located.

So, from all ways of looking at this announcement, it was a winning performance.  It was scientific, authoritative and quantitative.  It was practical, flexible and not some kind of one size fits all approach.  It provided very good news for a large area of the country that is either moderately or minimally impacted by the virus, that things will be getting back to normal very soon.  But it deprived the gloom and doomers in the northeast from accusing the President of ordering them into danger.  That means the Governors in those areas will be responsible for making the difficult decision of when they will start transitioning their states back to much needed productivity.  And they probably wish they could use the President as a scapegoat because the economies in those areas are being decimated and waiting for the crisis to be completely over before loosening the quarantine is probably impossible.  So, the resurgences that are bound to occur during the loosening of quarantine are bound to be highlighted by the media.  Well, let them work that out for themselves.

A very good press conference all in all and a good day for the country in its journey back to normalcy.