It’s been a while since we ‘waited two weeks’ for covid data to come in, but it’s that time once again! Oh, the nostalgia! Nevada dropped all mask mandates on February 10th, while nearby states hemmed and hawed about the ‘correct’ time to remove masks from citizens and students.
Here are the curves for Nevada and their neighbors. (CA still masking kids, OR still masking everybody, UT dropped its mandate months and months ago, as did AZ and ID).
As predicted at the time, removing mask mandates didn’t move the curve at all. Nevada continues to experience the same drop as all their neighbors, some of which are masking and some of which aren’t. Spring works every time, masks never did.
The cynical among us believed it was never The Science guiding our response, but always the Political Science. And that position got a serious bolster this week with Biden’s polling firm instructing the Democrats to declare victory over covid. Now suddenly there’s no mask mandate in Congress, just in time for the State of the Union. And in NY, kids will finally be able to be mask-free. Not today. Not tomorrow. On Wednesday, the day after the State of the Union. Bonus quote:
"We will not stand for any bullying or ostracization or harassment for an individual or business who chooses to wear a mask as we're still going through this," Hochul said in a statement.
Yes, we all know it’s been the people in masks getting harassed the last couple years.
And in one of the most blatant pivots of the last couple years, even SNL is now giving permission to wonder if NPIs ever worked at all.
These are the very same people who told you that you were killing grandma if you didn’t wear a mask or get your shots. The people who called you selfish and immediately claimed the moral high ground, while adding lockdown deaths to covid deaths. Remember classic stories like this one?
But — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — Georgia has a curve that looks incredibly similar to their neighbors. This is yet another example of how ‘the rules’ aren’t what made the difference between a manageable crisis and overrun hospitals.
Now the same people who have been wrong this entire time are going to declare that they beat covid. The ‘leaders’ are going to tell you that things are actually really great, and there’s something wrong with Americans that won’t let them realize how awesome everything is right now.
No mention of where that ‘phenomenal negative psychological impact’ could POSSIBLY have come from. I guess we’ll have to tune into CNN to find out.
A Look At 'The Science'
This has been about politics from day one. Anthony Fauci has provided funds anywhere he can to support gain of function work that is illegal in the United States, and repeatedly lied about what he did. The virus escaped from the Chinese virology lab in Wuhan - I realized that as soon as I heard "Wuhan." Back when I was working for US Intelligence it was the known center for Chinese biowarfare. The canard about the wet market was an obvious red herring.
Nancy Pelosi politicized the virus as soon as possible, and made sure that things for citizens were as difficult as possible. The worse things were, the easier it would be to get rid of Donald Trump and gain political power for Democrats. Personally, I'd charge her with treason.
She got her wish. By the middle of March Trump was not proactive, merely reactive to what Pelosi was doing. This is known as reflexive control, and Trump's thin skin and need to be in the limelight at all times were the buttons she pushed. The response was what she wanted. Waste time, waste resources, make people fearful, ensure Trump was unable to govern, first through the multiple attempted coups that, thanks to John Durham's most recent court filings, we now know were a campaign ploy by Hillary Clinton, then later, by reversing the roles played in Ukraine by the two parties, with Democrats giving bribes and collaborating with Ukrainians and Russians to invent blackmail material while hiding the activities of Hunter Biden. Today, I saw on MSNBC a contributor repeating the lie about Trump being a Russian mole. Really?
We've known since the Spanish Flu how to deal with viral illnesses. Put people outdoors and in sunlight, focus efforts on those most at risk. In the case of COVID19 we knew that there was nearly zero threat of complications (ICU admissions) for people under 50. So we pretended that everyone was facing the same risk, and shut down the global economy, causing many more times the deaths that the disease itself did. The recent release by Johns Hopkins, the world's premier medical statistics analysis center, of a metastudy found that shutting down the global economy reduced deaths from COVID19 by 0.2%. Christ.
Well when the science results in horrid inflation it's clear the pandemic has not gone as planned. We might fear the virus which few understand, but when you reach into their pocket to grab their money, people do understand. And what do you know - they don't like it! Surprise. Thus the policy must change. They have known this at the very top but the middle functionaries haven't quite gotten the message but it's arriving. They now see the people are upset and are really looking hard at what they have been through. And for what? The infections kept going despite all the theater. The damage has happened and the people want someone to blame. They aren't buying that the damage was caused by white supremos or the normal whipping boys. Whether the policy shift was soon enough remains to be seen; if anything, the public has little long term memory. But the fall will see a string of reminders. Those that took advantage of the fear in order to promote a social change may discover their overreach.