Color Me Skeptical

Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, we all got an emergency alert on our cell phones: "City of LA: COVID cases are spiking. Get vaccinated/tested now." My immediate thought was to ask if I'd missed something -- as far as I knew, cases in the county had been slowly declining for months. I went to my computer and pulled up the graph above. Yup, same old same old. Somebody at emergency management decided maybe they could panic half a dozen people into getting the shot that way, huh?

This is a completely irresponsible way of abusing the emergency alert system, which should be used only to notify people of wildfires, flash floods, and the like. If you cry wolf once too often, people don't take you seriouly.

So over the holiday and yesterday, the big headline at all the aggregators was WORST EVER MUTATION! VACCINE RESISTANT! STOCK MAKET DRIOPS 1000 POINTS! This is panic porn pure and simple, and I guess the world was ready for it if LA City was broadcasting stale alerts about spiking COVID the night before.

I've kept checking the COVID stats. Nobody's asking some obvious questions. Below is Florida's graph:

It could hardly be more different from LA County. Its spring-summer 2020 surge was more severe than LA, but LA had an enormouss peak in late 2020, much sharper and taller than Florida. But LA had a much smaller summer 2021 Delta surge, which has now largely faded. Florida's Delta surge was the highest yet, but it'd also largely faded.

In contrast, look at Michigan:

It had no spring-summer surge in 2020, but it had a surge late that year -- but then it had a big surge in spring 2021 that neither LA nor Florida saw, while it had no Delta peak last summer, but it now has its biggest peak yet. Why is there such wide regional disparity? Shouldn't someone be looking at this? Might there be answers here? At minimum, it's hard to avoid thinking that Florida shows doing nothing is about as effective as vaccine passports, mask mandates, social distancing, and lockdowns.

I've had my two jabs and a booster. I'm not anti-vax. I just don't think any of this is working, and I think the new variant is overhyped, just like everything else.