I remember that headline in the Times about the school lacking proper ventilation. I remember scrolling past that and thinking God damn it, what a joke, this is why I don’t read 80% of the New York Times. And it probably ranks as my fourth source of daily news. You’ll see articles on the front page about the health risks posed by gas stoves. Great article Thomas. We have to resist any new calls for masking. It’s amazing. They never learn. Johan Norberg is a great voice of reason. I appreciate you quoting him. I just ordered his new book on how “capitalism will save the world” after reading his “In Defense of Global Capitalism.”
Indeed, those who pontificated on Sweden now just ignore the facts. One can see that just comparing states within the US. Florida was supposed to be a disaster. In fact, the largest disaster was and remains New York and a handful of other northeast states: by far the highest raw death rates and excess mortalities in the country, making disproportionate contributions to the national total. So now the pontficators just ignore New York. Andrew Cuomo was forced to leave office, but not for the reason he should have been.
As for the mortuaries in parking lots, those stories were always exaggerated. A friend whose sister was a hospital nurse in NYC in the spring 2020 said (more than once) that the large numbers of dying COVID patients in certain hospitals was simply a result of the city and the hospitals deciding that serious COVID cases had to go to a limited number of facilities. They were overcrowded for a month or two, then things normalized as cases were left more geographically distributed. At no time were they in danger of running out of respirators (although they had a shortage of kidney dialysis machines, which were far more needed). The CDC did drag its feet on rapid testing for much of 2020, so the tests took longer to become available here than they did in, say, Europe. Rapid testing early on would have made it easy to slow the spread, by those infected just isolating until better. Instead, healthy people had to "quarantine" on a large scale. Temporary isolation of the sick was and remains more effective at slowing spread than the vaccines.
She also said that her job consisted of caring for "the very large and the very old," the main victims of serious COVID. Notice how it took two years for the CDC to acknowledge the strong relationship of serious COVID to old age and certain pre-existing conditions, a relationship many noticed in the first months. Meanwhile, the CDC continued as late as late 2021 to put out official misinformation about child mortality from COVID (miniscule, in reality, far less than from the annual flu) and pushed social and legacy media to censor those pointing out straightforward factual errors if they came from "official" sources.
And let's not get started on the disaster of school closings, especially in big cities, where kids were essentially on their own for two school years. Europe re-opened most of its schools for younger kids in spring 2020, and high schools and colleges in late 2020 and 2021, without any disaster.
Everything important about this disease was exaggerated or (if inconvenient, like discussion of its origins) censored.
Yes, blue states and cities turned in a dismal performance on the whole. Andrew Cuomo was the poster boy for that aspect of the pandemic. It turned out that the greatest proponents of government activism were comically inept when it came to governing.
No one can claim that the US handled the COVID pandemic efficiently, but neither can we say that our fears were unwarranted, even if our countermeasures were not always well managed.
Have we forgotten the portable mortuaries parked in hospital lots, handling the excess deaths? Have we forgotten the "It's just a hoax" reality-deniers who coughed out their last breaths demanding horse-deworming meds instead of effective drug therapy that could have saved their lives? As to the cost of all of this -- yes, there were serious social and economic costs which we are still dealing with today. By and large, the US has fared better coming out of COVID than other economies, and despite way more vaccine skepticism than I would ever believe possible for a developed nation like ours, we have reached over 70% vaccinated.
I'm afraid I can't agree. The lockdown policy was a flat-out economic disaster that led directly to the present inflationary spiral. The school closures were an equally flat-out social and educational disaster whose effects will linger for decades. The incompetence and duplicity of governments, the public health establishment, public education, and the media have shredded their credibility. As the example of Sweden shows, none of that had to happen.
The move is already on -- just in time for another Presidential election year. If anyone doubts the politics of the Wuhan Virus, aka COVID19, well, gee, I got some swamp land you're gonna love. Check out DailyClout.io for details on how a lot of the whole jab thing worked.
I remember that headline in the Times about the school lacking proper ventilation. I remember scrolling past that and thinking God damn it, what a joke, this is why I don’t read 80% of the New York Times. And it probably ranks as my fourth source of daily news. You’ll see articles on the front page about the health risks posed by gas stoves. Great article Thomas. We have to resist any new calls for masking. It’s amazing. They never learn. Johan Norberg is a great voice of reason. I appreciate you quoting him. I just ordered his new book on how “capitalism will save the world” after reading his “In Defense of Global Capitalism.”
Indeed, those who pontificated on Sweden now just ignore the facts. One can see that just comparing states within the US. Florida was supposed to be a disaster. In fact, the largest disaster was and remains New York and a handful of other northeast states: by far the highest raw death rates and excess mortalities in the country, making disproportionate contributions to the national total. So now the pontficators just ignore New York. Andrew Cuomo was forced to leave office, but not for the reason he should have been.
As for the mortuaries in parking lots, those stories were always exaggerated. A friend whose sister was a hospital nurse in NYC in the spring 2020 said (more than once) that the large numbers of dying COVID patients in certain hospitals was simply a result of the city and the hospitals deciding that serious COVID cases had to go to a limited number of facilities. They were overcrowded for a month or two, then things normalized as cases were left more geographically distributed. At no time were they in danger of running out of respirators (although they had a shortage of kidney dialysis machines, which were far more needed). The CDC did drag its feet on rapid testing for much of 2020, so the tests took longer to become available here than they did in, say, Europe. Rapid testing early on would have made it easy to slow the spread, by those infected just isolating until better. Instead, healthy people had to "quarantine" on a large scale. Temporary isolation of the sick was and remains more effective at slowing spread than the vaccines.
She also said that her job consisted of caring for "the very large and the very old," the main victims of serious COVID. Notice how it took two years for the CDC to acknowledge the strong relationship of serious COVID to old age and certain pre-existing conditions, a relationship many noticed in the first months. Meanwhile, the CDC continued as late as late 2021 to put out official misinformation about child mortality from COVID (miniscule, in reality, far less than from the annual flu) and pushed social and legacy media to censor those pointing out straightforward factual errors if they came from "official" sources.
And let's not get started on the disaster of school closings, especially in big cities, where kids were essentially on their own for two school years. Europe re-opened most of its schools for younger kids in spring 2020, and high schools and colleges in late 2020 and 2021, without any disaster.
Everything important about this disease was exaggerated or (if inconvenient, like discussion of its origins) censored.
Yes, blue states and cities turned in a dismal performance on the whole. Andrew Cuomo was the poster boy for that aspect of the pandemic. It turned out that the greatest proponents of government activism were comically inept when it came to governing.
I think Plato said something like, dude, those people who want power the most, keep them away from it :-D
No one can claim that the US handled the COVID pandemic efficiently, but neither can we say that our fears were unwarranted, even if our countermeasures were not always well managed.
Have we forgotten the portable mortuaries parked in hospital lots, handling the excess deaths? Have we forgotten the "It's just a hoax" reality-deniers who coughed out their last breaths demanding horse-deworming meds instead of effective drug therapy that could have saved their lives? As to the cost of all of this -- yes, there were serious social and economic costs which we are still dealing with today. By and large, the US has fared better coming out of COVID than other economies, and despite way more vaccine skepticism than I would ever believe possible for a developed nation like ours, we have reached over 70% vaccinated.
I'm afraid I can't agree. The lockdown policy was a flat-out economic disaster that led directly to the present inflationary spiral. The school closures were an equally flat-out social and educational disaster whose effects will linger for decades. The incompetence and duplicity of governments, the public health establishment, public education, and the media have shredded their credibility. As the example of Sweden shows, none of that had to happen.
The move is already on -- just in time for another Presidential election year. If anyone doubts the politics of the Wuhan Virus, aka COVID19, well, gee, I got some swamp land you're gonna love. Check out DailyClout.io for details on how a lot of the whole jab thing worked.