This game of hunt-and-kill Covid cases has reached peak absurdity, especially in media culture.
Take a look at Supermarkets are the most common place to catch Covid, new data reveals. It’s a story on a “study” assembled by Public Health England (PHE) from the NHS Test and Trace App. Here is the conclusion. In the six days of November studied, “of those who tested positive, it was found that 18.3 per cent had visited a supermarket.”
Now, if the alarm bells don’t go off with that one, you didn’t pay attention to 7th grade science. If the app had also included showering, eating, and breathing, it might have found a 100% correlation. Yes, the people who tested positive probably did shop, as do most people. That doesn’t mean that shopping gives you Covid and it certainly doesn’t mean that shopping kills you.
Even if shopping is a way to get Covid, this is a very widespread and mostly mild virus for 99.8% percent of the population with an infection fatality rate as low as 0.05% for those under 70. Competent infectious disease experts have said multiple times that test, track, and isolate strategies are nearly useless for controlling viruses such as this.
This story/study was so poor and so absurd that it was too much even for Isabel Oliver, Director of the National Infection Service at Public Health England. She sent out the following note:
Thank you. One down, a thousand to go.
The New York Times pulled a mighty fast one with this piece: “States That Imposed Few Restrictions Now Have the Worst Outbreaks.” This would be huge news if true because it would imply not only that lockdowns save lives (which no serious study has thus far been able to document) but also that granting people basic freedoms are the reason for bad health outcomes, an astonishing claim on its own.
The piece, put together by two graphic artists and seemingly very science-like, speaks of “outbreaks,” which vaguely sounds terrible: packed with mortality. It’s odd because anyone can look at the data and see that New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut lead the way with deaths per million, mostly owing to the fatalities in long-term care facilities. These were the states that locked down the hardest and longest. Indeed they are locking down again! Deaths per million in states like South Dakota are still low on the list.
How in the world can the NYT claim that states that did not lock down have the worst outbreaks? The claim hinges entirely on a trivial discovery. Some clever someone discovered that if you reflow data by cases per million instead of deaths per million, you get an opposite result. The reasons: 1) when the Northeast experienced the height of the pandemic, there was very little testing going on, so the “outbreak” was not documented even as deaths grew and grew, 2) by the time the virus reached the Midwest, tests were widely available, 3) the testing mania grew and grew to the point that the non-vulnerable are being tested like crazy, generating high positives in small-population areas.
By focusing on the word “outbreak,” the Times can cleverly obscure the difference between a positive PCR result (including many false positive and perhaps half or more asymptomatic cases) and a severe outcome from catching the virus. In other words, the Times has documented an “outbreak” of mostly non-sick people in low-population areas.
There are hundreds of ways to look at Covid-19 data. The Times picked the one metric – the least valuable one for actually discerning whether and to what extent people are sick – in order to generate the result that they wanted, namely that open states look as bad as possible. The result is a chart that massively misrepresents any existing reality. It makes the worst states look great and the best ones look terrible. The visual alone is constructed to make it looks as if open states are bleeding uncontrollably.
How many readers will even know this? Very few, I suspect. What’s more amazing is that the Times itself already debunked the entire “casedemic” back in September:
Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.
Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time….
In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.
All of which makes one wonder what precisely is going on in this relationship between cases and severe outcomes. The Covid Tracking Project generates the following chart. Cases are in blue while deaths are in red.
Despite this story and these data, the graphic artists at the Times got to work generating a highly misleading presentation that leads to one conclusion: more lockdowns.
(My colleague Phil Magness has noted further methodological problems even within the framework that the Times uses but I will let him write about that later.)
Let’s finally deal with Salon’s attack on Great Barrington Declaration co-creator Jayanta Bhattacharya. Here is a piece that made the following claim of the infection fatality rate: “the accepted figure of 2-3 percent or higher.” That’s an astonishing number, and basically nuts: 10 million people will die in the US alone.
Here is what the CDC says concerning the wildly disparate risk factors based on age:
These data are not inconsistent with the World Health Organization’s suggestion that the infection fatality rate for people under 70 years of age is closer to 0.05%.
The article further claims that “herd immunity may not even be possible for COVID-19 given that infection appears to only confer transient immunity.” And yet, the New York Times just wrote that:
How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination.
Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.
How is it possible for people to make rational decisions with this kind of journalism going on? Truly, sometimes it seems like the world has been driven insane by an astonishing blizzard of false information. Just last week, an entire state in Australia shut down completely – putting all its citizens under house arrest – due to a false report of a case in a pizza restaurant. One person lied and the whole world fell apart.
Meanwhile, serious science is appearing daily showing that there is no relationship at all, and never has been, between lockdowns and lives saved. This study looks at all factors related to Covid death and finds plenty of relationship between age and health but absolutely none with lockdown stringency. “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate,” says the study, echoing a conclusion of dozens of other studies since as early as March.
It’s all become too much. The world is being seriously misled by major media organs. The politicians are continuing to panic and impose draconian controls, fully nine months into this, despite mountains of evidence of the real harm the lockdowns are causing everyone. If you haven’t lost faith in politicians and major media at this point, you have paid no attention to what they have been doing for the better part of this catastrophic year.
A number of teachers unions around the country have been fighting to keep schools closed despite scientific evidence showing children aren’t a source of Wuhan coronavirus spread.
Last week New York City schools, which make up the largest school district in the country, were shut down with little notice to parents.
Now, additional data continues to show the devastating impacts of keeping schools closed and details which children are most negatively affected.
Special needs students have also suffered immensely.
President Trump has advocated for months that schools should be open, with precautions taken to protect teachers.
This isn’t news to parents of school-age children, and it shouldn’t be news to education reporters. But apparently it is.
Today in 1969, John Lennon returned his Member of the Order of the British Empire medal as, in his accompanying note, “a protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria–Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.”
Californians live under some of the tightest Covid-19 restrictions in the nation. So when Gov. Gavin Newsom was recently caught without a mask at a crowded table for 12 at a posh Napa Valley eatery, he instantly became the poster boy for the “Do as I Say, Not as I Do” crowd.
He’s hardly the only one. Not long after Mr. Newsom’s visit to the French Laundry was exposed, Californians read about a delegation of their lawmakers who’d jetted to a Maui resort for a conference as everyone else was being told to avoid nonessential travel. New Yorkers earlier learned that Mayor Bill de Blasio was working out at his favorite Park Slope YMCA right as he was shutting down the city. And of course Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot made headlines for sneaking off to get their hair done when barbershops and salons were closed to everyone else.
No doubt Thanksgiving will bring fresh examples. While many citizens dutifully inform grandma there’s no room for her at the table because of new Covid-19 restrictions, someone inevitably will be caught enjoying the holiday with dozens of friends and second cousins who have flown in for some bird and gravy. And we in the press will let our righteous indignation rip.
Yours truly enjoys a good gotcha as much as the next man. And it’s easy to mock these pols for their blatant hypocrisy when they are caught. But maybe the more important lesson to be learned here is that hypocrisy is guaranteed when we impose one-size-fits-all mandates that are rigid and unworkable.
Daniel Halperin is an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. He says he understands why people get upset when politicians are caught doing something they are admonishing everyone else not to do. But as he explains in his recent book, “Facing COVID Without Panic,” he believes a bigger part of the problem has been the reliance on mandates, especially those that have only a marginal impact on the virus’s spread.
“Many of these mandates and guidelines fixate on behaviors and settings where the actual risk is very low, such as fleeting public encounters, surface-based transmission or beach visits,” he says in an email. “Meanwhile, measures which could have the greatest prevention impact, such as re-engineering buildings to improve air circulation, are still not widely prioritized—not to mention even simpler actions, such as opening windows to allow outdoor air to circulate indoors.”
Unlike the “science” invoked for some of the more dubious restrictions (e.g., broad lockdowns and school closures), concerns about large Thanksgiving gatherings are legitimate. Certainly the risk of transmission goes up with indoor gatherings that bring together people from multiple households. This is why Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order limiting New Yorkers to 10 people for at-home gatherings.
But manifestly it isn’t working. Police are making clear they can’t and won’t enforce such a ban. At a gym outside Buffalo on Friday, dozens of business owners who had met to discuss how to survive new Covid-19 restrictions chased away a health inspector and two sheriff’s deputies who had gone inside to break up the meeting because it violated the governor’s limit. It’s a good example of how relying on government edicts rather than persuasion breeds contempt for both health experts and the law.
What might have been a more productive path for dealing with Thanksgiving concerns? Certainly Mr. Cuomo could discourage large family celebrations. But he would have done better to underscore where the greatest risks are—i.e., that a Thanksgiving with a half-dozen septuagenarian uncles with diabetes and heart conditions is a far riskier proposition than a turkey dinner shared by young parents and children. And maybe put the emphasis on ways to mitigate risk, such as opening windows or moving such celebrations outside where possible.
Consider another celebrated gotcha. Recently the president of Notre Dame, the Rev. John Jenkins, was raked over the coals by students and faculty after he appeared at a White House ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett without a mask. Later he tested positive for Covid-19. It appeared karma was catching up with him.
Lost is the real Covid-19 story here: Unlike many other university presidents, Father Jenkins kept Notre Dame’s campus open this semester. It wasn’t without outbreaks and setbacks, but the university adapted and succeeded in keeping life as normal as possible. Doesn’t it suggest the better path forward is to lay out the risks and the ways to mitigate them rather than pretend risk can be eliminated with some sweeping decree?
Certainly leaders ought to live by the same rules they impose on everyone else. But as we celebrate this Thanksgiving amid the many examples of double standards, maybe we should take them as less a morality tale than a sign we need workable guidelines that even politicians could obey.
Additional evidence comes from Wisconsin, whose number of COVID cases at the start of Gov. Tony Evers’ first mask mandate Aug. 1 was 54,002. Yesterday it was 357,771.
Pessimism is to conservative politics what pumpkin pie is to Thanksgiving: It’s always on the table. Not long ago about this time of year, liberals would post articles with titles such as, “How to talk to your Uncle Jim at Thanksgiving.” Those pieces had one valid premise—that Uncle Jim would say over his turkey that the world is going to hell, yet again. And on the evidence around some tables, Uncle Jim was right.
In that grumbling spirit, let many of us who are to the right of the 2020 edition of Joe Biden admit that in the runup to the election, we thought a left-wing idiocracy was about to sweep into power. More than a few arch-pessimists believed the curtain was finally falling on Ben Franklin’s warning that the U.S. is “a republic, if you can keep it.”
At the risk of arousing the dark side, we are here to posit that the 2020 election results are reason for optimism. (For those who disallow optimism on principle, the diminished election expectations of the Democratic left offer the consolation of schadenfreude.)
Let me count the ways.
Some thought the Senate next year might have a Democratic majority of 54-46, a wipeout. You knew something was up election night when Maine’s “vulnerable” Susan Collins wasn’t swept into the Atlantic. Then Iowa’s Joni Ernst won, as did North Carolina’s Thom Tillis. It will take Republican (or presidential) malfeasance to lose the Senate deciders in Georgia Jan. 5.
After the Democrats rolled up House seats in the 2018 midterms, they expected to ride an anti-Trump wave to a bigger majority. But their majority narrowed, and the tides of history look likely in 2022 to push Nancy Pelosi into retirement. Two years into Barack Obama’s first term, the Democrats lost 63 House seats. They shed 54 seats in Bill Clinton’s first midterms. By all means, the Democrats should push BidenCare.
Mrs. Pelosi has explained away the Republican House gains as the result of President Trump at the top of the ticket. A more fine-grained explanation would look at intriguing efforts such as New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik’s E-PAC project to recruit Republican women this year.
Ms. Stefanik hit it out of the park. Notable winners over Democratic incumbents include Michelle Fischbach in Minnesota, Nancy Mace (a Citadel graduate) in South Carolina, California’s Young Kim and New York City’s Nicole Malliotakis.
Add to the success of these Republican women the crossover to the GOP of black, Hispanic and Asian voters. Democrats argue these gains are small. But the opening for the political optimism of Reaganesque (now Trumpian) private-sector job opportunity is too big to ignore.
Conventional wisdom holds, with reason, that the Republican Party is a dodo bird in California and New York. But Democrats lost House seats to the dodos in both states.
The strongest evidence that the GOP won’t be spending a generation in any post-Trumpian wilderness is the National Conference of State Legislatures’ map of partisan legislative control. It shows a lot of red now, notably total control in four states where the Democrats hoped to flip at least one chamber—Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina—as well as such important battlegrounds as Georgia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and New Hampshire.
Many of these Republican legislatures will be drawing congressional district maps next year. New York and California will each lose a House seat, the latter for the first time ever.
Yes, refugees from California and New York are turning states like Arizona and Georgia bluer, a story for another time. But speaking of refugees, if you can find one from Eastern Europe who voted for Joe Biden, let me know. Those I talked to from Albania and Romania (and as reported from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba) couldn’t fathom how anyone would vote for “socialism.” Somehow these immigrant voters didn’t get the party’s memo that Mr. Biden isn’t a socialist.
But then, what is he? A moderate with socialist tendencies?
It’s hard not to notice that the Democratic Party is having an identity crisis at the precise moment “identity politics” is ascendant. The left-wing Justice Democrats have warned the Biden team it risks fracturing the party if it makes “corporate friendly” appointments.
The second-biggest story of the 2016 election was socialist Bernie Sanders’s strong primary challenge to Hillary Clinton. In defeat, Mr. Sanders became a darling of that swath of the media committed to opening a path to power for the progressive movement by contributing free publicity for its economic and cultural goals.
Maybe it’s time to consider that the media’s moralistic biases can backfire. After absorbing the progressive policies elevated during the 2020 Democratic primaries and then the content and tactics of the post-May street protests, it looks as if America’s voters, apart from their one-off presidential decision, decided to give the Democratic Party a timeout.
What happens next with Donald Trump is beyond human understanding. But the 2020 election results in toto have given the party a historic opportunity—if it can keep it.
“It doesn’t matter who is president because Jesus is King!”
As a Christian who has been heavily involved in the political sphere for many years, I find myself deeply disturbed by these phrases.
Have you ever stopped and pondered the words that come out of your mouth and others’ during the times we struggle in this world? Is God truly in control of the affairs of this world—or is there something more that Christians are missing?
While I understand that many followers of Christ may mean well when they say phrases like, “God is in control”, the reality of the matter is phrases such as this are not only untrue, but theologically lazy as well as immoral. They create an attitude of apathy in the hearts of individuals concerning the fate of this planet. This frame of mind, if allowed to mature, will give birth to all sorts of morally repugnant theology.
God is not the perpetrator of evil, nor does He even allow it. He never did, nor does He now. To imply that God is in control of all things in this world would mean that He at least allows evil—or worse, causes evil as some part of a divine scheme. I realize some of you just read those words and thought I must have never even read the Bible, because what about all that violent stuff in the Old Testament that the writers say God did, right? Many Christians do not realize that the Old Testament writers believed that Satan was the left hand of God who dealt out fiery wrath, judgment, and condemnation. This can most famously be seen in the Old Testament story of Job, which many modern-day Christians misinterpret through centuries of misguided teaching.
When Jesus came to earth, he taught that Satan is purely evil and does not operate under the guidance or allowance of God, who is a good Father to His core. Satan is the enemy of God as Christ said in Luke 10:18, “While you were ministering, I watched Satan topple until he fell suddenly from heaven like lightning to the ground.” (TPT) (For more evidence that Satan the author of all evil, see John 8:44,Hebrews 2:14, and 1 John 2:16)
Richard K. Murray, the author of the book,God Versus Evil: Sculpting An Epic Theology of God’s Heroic Goodness, states it beautifully when he says, “Any evil that is comes from the free wills of angels or men. The misuse of free wills of angels or men, that’s what Augustine believed that’s what the church fathers believed, they did not blame evil on God. They did not say God soveriginly commanded evil events or even destructive events. They instead used something called the rule of character and the rule of character is that no matter what the Bible literally says about God’s judgment or God sending evil, it has to be reinterpreted by the love and nature of Jesus.”
In political application, if government grows due to our allowance of tyrannical elected officials either through our approval or apathy, we can’t turn around and think that God caused or allowed this as some sort of punishment, or that He allowed for tyranny to come to America. That is entirely on us as American Christians.
That is not to say that God will not hear our prayers or that He will not divinely intervene at times to correct our screwups because He will. But God will not do for us what He has given us as believers the power and authority to do in Him. Jesus said to his disciples in John 14:12-14 (AMPC),
I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, if anyone steadfastly believes in Me, he will himself be able to do the things that I do; and he will do even greater things than these because I go to the Father.
13 And I will do [I Myself will grant] whatever you ask in My Name [as [a]presenting all that I Am], so that the Father may be glorified and extolled in (through) the Son.
14 [Yes] I will grant [I Myself will do for you] whatever you shall ask in My Name [as [b]presenting all that I Am].
We must not forget that as it was in the Book of Genesis, God gave humanity dominion over this world that never changed from the beginning until now. The only thing that has changed is that He sent Jesus to destroy the barrier of sin that humanity placed between ourselves and God.
Followers of Jesus Christ are the literal hands and feet of Christ; it is high time we put away this demonically-guided theology of apathy and stop blaming God when evil spreads. It is time that we understand that it is our responsibility to purge the evil from this world with the direction and guidance of God so that Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane will be a reality, “on Earth as it is in Heaven”. We must stand against all evil in this world. We must stand against evil in all its forms. We must stand against tyrants who seek to kill, steal, and destroy in the spirit of Satan.
We can and we must rid the world of evil, and not allow those who wish to turn this world into hell to have their way. Jesus said in Luke 4:18-19 (CSB)
18 The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
We must follow His example and prevail against evil. If we do not, someone else will. The choice is ours. Will we work with Him? Or allow the consequences of apathy to take root?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 