California Update

I think it's worth focusing on California lockdowns, which are oppressive in themselves, but as they say, what starts in California spreads to the rest of the country, and as we'll see below, there are rumbles to that effect.

On December 29, when an initial double secret set of restrictions expired, California extended its effectively statewide regional stay-at-home order until mid January. These were based on an entirely new criterion, ICU capacity, and overlay an existing color-coded set of restrictions on individual counties.

The bottom line is that in most parts of the state, schools are closed to in-person instruction, school athletics are suspended, restaurants are closed except for takeout, barbershops, hair and nail salons, and gyms are closed, and retail is limited to 25% capacity. The status of churches is in litigation, with indoor worship prohibited in most areas and outdoor worship subject to numerical limits depending on civil jurisdiction. (Los Angeles County has "allowed" indoor worship subject to vague conditions, but so far the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has not reopened for indoor masses.)

Amusement parks and indoor museums remain closed. There's an unofficial and unenforced ban on "inessential" travel -- indeed, in Los Angeles, a ban on inessential walking, bicycling, or scooter riding. However, on a recnt trip through Hollywood, I saw many people riding scooters, no joke, and I frankly doubt if those were all essential trips. As the photo above suggests, scooters in LA are an upscale phenomenon, and putative restrictions on them are ignored.

So we have an opinion piece by limousine libertarian Virginia Postrel in Bloomberg News, misleadingly titled "Los Angeles Locked Down. Covid Came Anyway." But it mentions no statistics, quotes no official policies. It's a gushy, perky chick piece on Virginia Postrel.

Our pandemic experience hasn’t been that bad. My husband and I get along and like being together. With jobs we can do online and no kids to homeschool, we have it easy. Our three-bedroom condo gives us separate workspaces and room to spread out. I’ve turned our kitchen table into my own Zoom studio, complete with backdrop and lights for a 2020 book tour. I’d love to eat in a restaurant or travel cross country, but those are minor sacrifices compared with what many people are experiencing, even without getting sick.

Postrel mentions in passing the effect of the virus on her housekeeper's family, but mostly it's that her husband can't go in to the university where he's a professor, and he hasn't had a haircut, so he's growing a pony tail. This is one reason why the Recall Newsom movement has an uphill battle: as Postrel acknowledges, the elites are only mildly inconvenienced, and their lives are fine. Too bad about the cooks, waiters, and barbers, huh? Postrel, a writer, knows her audience, and she knows her market. I'm glad that I only rarely worked as one.

The political class's views have in fact hardened. Alex Padilla, designated by Gov Newsom to replace Kamala Harris in the US Senate, expressed the party line just the other day:

But again, as you said, we’ve been hearing about, whether it’s COVID fatigue, and people are maybe taking it a little — getting a little too comfortable, thinking they would be immune or that the worst of it was over when it wasn’t true. Second, California can do all the things it needs to do, but if you have people still coming in and out from other states that have been less restrictive, right? Arizona is just right next door, for example, or all the people that flew throughout Thanksgiving weekend, all that is now coming home to roost. So, once again, we’ve got to tighten the belt in terms of that mobility,

What he's telegraphing is the need for a national lockdown. Because California.

Get a scooter, folks. You'll be fine.

A Visitor Chimes In On COVID Hospitalizations

A visitor sent me an e-mail reacting to recent posts on COVID, ERs, and hospitalizations

About ER waits: We have a friend whose son is an ER nurse at Kaiser. The waits in ER are ridiculously long because people who test positive for covid are showing up BECAUSE they tested positive. No symptoms but the media has convinced us that we are all going to die of this virus that testing positive is a death sentence.

Another reason waits are long at ERs is that some people can't get regular medical care from their docs so they end up at the hospital sicker than should/would have been. True stories I've been told:

A young boy is feeling crummy. He goes to his pediatrician who tests him for covid (the only reason to feel sick, right?). The test is negative so the doc does nothing. Days later his parents are awakened with him vomiting uncontrollably & he's rushed to ER. His appendix has burst. Due to the misdiagnosis he is sicker than most with appendicitis attacks & will have to spend another week in the hospital to clear up the infection (& who knows what else).

A mom is 2 weeks overdue with her pregnancy. Her OB wants to induce her, but the hospital won't allow it because they're saving OB beds for covid overflow. Solution: break her water at the doctor's office, hoping that will start labor & then go to the ER to get admitted (which is what happened).

Our son's friend is a peds respiratory therapist in Orange Couunty [CA]. When she visited in June, she was concerned how few children she was seeing. She was worried that children who had previously been admitted for breathing treatments, etc were being ignored which would lead to bigger problems later.

Our son's co-worker can't get help for gall bladder issues because she has tested negative for covid!!

I remember back in February going to mass, when the priest remarked in his homily on the crush of people shopping for toilet paper. He said he couldn't understand why. I pretty much knew it was because people instinctively anticipated some completely arbitrary government action with unintended consequences, even weeks before governors began to order lockdowns. If there had been a way fo stockpile haircuts, they would have done that, too. People don't get enough credit for being informed consumers.

What we're seeing here, in people crowding ERs because they think a positive COVID test is a death sentence, is a result of media and politicians collaborating to create a panic with daily headlines on recordbreaking, skyrocketing "cases" without mentioning how many positive tests are asymptomatic or just false positives. I would bet they have a much better idea of the actual numbers than they'll let on, while they keep promoting the idea that eating out or going to church will result in mass graves in the public park.

There's going to have to be some major event that breaks the current panic cycle.

The Only COVID Hospitalization Account I've Seen

The only detailed account of a COVID hospitalization I've found is by a YouTuber in the Bakersfield, CA area named Mark Clay McGowan. McGowan is a retired railroader who normally posts on railroad subjects and local history, and he's a bit of a cousin in style to Mike Rowe. I followed him for that reason. However, on November 18, he put up a YouTube post from his hospital bed explaining that over the prior weekend, he'd been to the ER, diagnosed with viral pnseumonia and sent home.

But the following Monday, his family, feeling he'd worsened, took him back to the ER, where he was diagnosed with COVID and admitted. He's been in the hospital ever since, posting YouTubes of his experience avery few weeks. I tried to link his November 18 post directly here, but YouTube won't let me do it. It is in fact harrowing. Above is a screen shot, and if you have the fortitude, you can watch the whole thing via this link.

I've been hesitant to post on this, because under US law, medical informaion is highly confidential, but my view at this point is that by posting on YouTube, McGowan is making his information public on his own initiative, and there is some real value to having it. Almost no specific information on any individual COVID hospitalization, or indeed any general information on the course of such hospitalizations, is available anywhere. Since COVID left China probably more than a year ago, it's remarkable how little useful information about it has been made public. I suspect there's a certain Mike Rowe part of McGowan's makeup that's urging him to do this.

McGowan in the video linked above exhibited what are reported as symptoms of infection that would in fact warrant a visit to the ER, fever, dry cough, weakness, and confusion. However, even people who are hospitalized with those symptoms are released after a fairly short period -- the case mortality rate is generally about 1% now in the US. As of today, the cumulative case mortality rate in Kern County, CA, where McGowan is hospitalized, is .7 of 1% -- and Kern is considered a major hot spot.

So a big mystery to me is why McGowan seems to have shown little improvement over six weeks in the hospital. His most recent YouTube post indicates he has trouble breathing and is so weak he can't stand up to let the nurses change his bed sheets. He says his blood oxygen is around 90%, which is borderline fatal. But clearly only a very small percentage of COVID patients reach such a dire condition.

I went looking for web references on COVID and blood oxygen and found a study, remarkable in that it exists at all, as well as in what it contains. The study dicusses several cases of patients diagnosed with COVID who have serious comorbidities, including heart disease and multiple organ transplants, who have blood oxygen levels well below 90%, which would normally be fatal, but they're awake and chattering on their cell phones.

The Wall Street Journal considers it a medical mystery as to why “large numbers of Covid-19 patients arrive at hospitals with blood-oxygen levels so low they should be unconscious or on the verge of organ failure. Instead they are awake, talking—not struggling to breathe” (1). Science judges the lack of patient discomfort at extraordinarily low blood-oxygen concentrations as defying basic biology (2). Writing in The New York Times, Dr. Levitan, with 30 years of emergency medicine experience, notes “A vast majority of Covid pneumonia patients I met had remarkably low oxygen saturations at triage—seemingly incompatible with life—but they were using their cellphones . . . they had relatively minimal apparent distress, despite dangerously low oxygen levels” (3). Despite this extensive coverage in the news media, the topic has not been addressed in medical journals.

Yet McGowan, by his account, has COVID, but his blood oxygen is behaving normally. Low blood oxygen is more typically a result of other COPD disease like emphysema. Whether McGowan has also been diagnosed with this he doesn't mention. I wish him the best, no matter what, and I'm sorry he hasn't been posting YouTubes about trains.

But this rasies a bigger question, which the quote carefully and obliquely raises as well: COVID has been around for a year, but the public health community seems to show little curiosity about it, and it in fact pretty much insists that the models are all we need to understand it. This is looking to me more and more like a dereliction.

In fact, with a lifetime's experience of institutional dysfunction behind me, I would say that there are major disincentives to serous COVID research. Even a relatively innocuous study like the one I linked above is likely to raise questions that undermine the public consensus promoted by the Drs Fauci and Birx and the public health establishment. There likely won't be serious grant money, and it could be dangerous to careers. Now and then we see reports of doctors losing their licenses for saying the wrong thing about COVID.

I'm beginning to think this may be a bigger problem than the disease itself.

A "New Strain" Of COVID?

At right is the latest table showing LA County COVID case mortality rates from the county health department site. Click on the image for a larger copy.

One story that's come out over the slow holiday news cycle is Boris Johnson's extension of Tier 4 lockdowns in the UK and the French closing their border with the UK due to some sort of "new" COVID strain.

British officials have now estimated that “VUI – 202012/01” is as much as 70 percent more transmissible — a number that is based on modeling, but not yet confirmed in lab experiments. A later study, published on December 23, suggested a smaller, but still dangerous number: that the British mutation is 53 percent more contagious.

Though there is no evidence to-date that the strain causes a more intense illness or leads to a higher fatality rate, faster transmission does mean more cases, which can lead to a higher hospitalization rate.

Where is Peter Sellers when we need him? Only he could properly portray a UK Dr Fauci explaining how the new strain is 70% -- or maybe 53% -- more contagious than the old one, except nobody gets any sicker. I don't see how what's supposedly happening in the UK differs from what we see in the LA County data -- more and more people testing "positive" and creating "cases" (some large proportion of which are apparently asymptomatic), with a steadily decreasing percentage of deaths.

But note as well that, although "cases" have been spiking, the dark line at the very bottom of the graph, cumulative deaths, hasn't spiked at all.

I've been following this data all this month, and the county has been slow to add the downward tick in the black line on the right. It indicates a halving of the case mortality rate since the fall, implying that it's now at 1%, but the numbers have actually been running consistently under 1%. On December 23, the last day before holiday distortions, there were 16,525 new cases and 145 new deaths, giving a case mortality rate of .8 of 1%. We have to grant that "case" is a meaningless concept, since so many are likely to be false positives or asymptomatic, while deaths include thsoe from any cause that can remotely be attributed to COVID, but the bottom line is that by even the measures most favorable to the moral entrepreneurs, the mortality is declining -- and has been since the spring.

Meantime, a frenzy of testing has spiked case numbers. Again, even if these numbers can be used to incite continued panic, the most favorable interpretation for the entrepreneurs is that the disease is somehow more contagious, but it's less fatal. But this could be nothing more than a result of more testing that's showing what the spread has alwsys been in the population.

But a "new strain" can certainly be used to explain LA County data, halfway around the world from the UK. Dr Fauci has said we shouldn't overreact and ban flights from the UK,, but that's just Dr Fauci for now. Once the entrepreneurs get the idea the "new strain" has hit LA, he'll flip flop like he always does.

He'll make it sound like he was right all along and did us a big favor by not pointing it out.

California's Problem

California's problem is simple: it has at this point the strictest COVID measures in the US, but this has done absolutely nothing to control the spread of the disease. Gov Newsom and Mayor Garcetti have been making noises about even stricter lockdowns after the holidays, but barbershops, hair salons, gyms, bars, and restaurants have been closed, social gatherings forbidden, with 10 PM curfews in place, since roughly Thanksgiving. Newsom assured us at that time that these measures would "flatten the curve" but the curve just contnues to shoot upward.

This means that about the only thing the state and counties can do more is to close all "non-essential" retail, which is already at a 25% limit. LA County has allowed churches to worship on its initiative, but it could revoke this at any time, subject to court action. Closing "non essential" retail would put California with the UK's Tier 4, the strictest i n the world. I assume this would have exactly the same effect it's had in the UK, viz, none.

Meanshile, the state health department keeps issuing perky messages -- "IT'S TIME TO STOP THE CORONAVIRUS, CALIFORNIA. Can we defeat El Covid?" But all it suggests is wear your mask, maintain social distance, don't visit grandma. The problem is that everyone's been doing this since last spring,

Before Christmas, Politico took notice. "Locked-down California runs out of reasons for surprising surge."

The turnabout has confounded leaders and health experts. They can point to any number of reasons that contributed to California's surge over the past several weeks. But it is hard to pinpoint one single factor — and equally hard to find a silver bullet.

It couldn't come at a worse time, given that the Christmas and New Year's holidays have arrived, and officials fear that residents are even more likely to travel and congregate than during the Thanksgiving period that propelled the current trends.

But Poliico has the answer: it's the plebs's fault!

The state hasn't employed strict enforcement and has relied on its regulatory agencies to cite the worst-offending establishments in spot cases. But it has no real hammer against people gathering or engaging in everyday social activities, and many local law enforcement agencies have made a point of declaring they will not become the stay-at-home police.

. . . In the meantime, the state is running out of levers to control the spread, leaving public health officers little choice but to implore residents to adhere to the rules.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has said all along that the state has to rely on social pressure to keep people apart. The state, with help from private donors, has spent tens of millions of dollars on billboards and advertisements urging responsible behavior.

Well, if your sports team has a bad season, you fire the coach. If the war isn't going well, you fire the generals. This is the philosophy behind the Recall Newsom movement, but it may or may not work. It seem to me that what really needs to happen is for the politicians and media to ask what's wrong with the statistics and what's wrong with the strategy -- and maybe the solution to the problem is to let the problem disappear.

One Thing I've Noticed About Dr Fauci

He has a history of misspeaking, but every time he's caught at it, he does what narcissists do -- he tries to convince you that he didn't tell a lie, he was actually doing you a favor, but you just didn't see it.

Just before Christmas, he explanied that his latest whapper was because we aren't ready for the truth.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has long cited 60% to 70% as the level of COVID infection/vaccination the country would need to achieve herd immunity — for the disease to fade and life to return to normal, writes the New York Times' Donald G. McNeil Jr.

"I n a telephone interview," McNeil continues, "Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goalposts."

"He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks." Fauci's confession:

"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."

This is consistent with his remarks in July, when he said he'd earlier told us we didn't need to wear a mask, but it was for our own good:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, says he doesn't regret advising Americans against wearing masks early on in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell published in InStyle, Fauci defended his credibility and decision-making in response to recent attempts from the White House to undermine him.

"I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs," he said.

Fauci's main problem seems to be that, at the bitter end of his career, he's stumbled into 15 minutes of fame, and it's going to his head. The reporters fawn over him, he blurts without having anything to say, and cetainly without any reflectioni on how his renmarks may be understood. So, when he needs to, he just finds a reason to justify whatever ill-advised statements he'd blithered before.

The problem is that what he's doing now is consistent with what Newsom and other authorities are doing, which is, faced with lockdown measures that have been completely ineffective, he's throwing out entirely new sets of bogus numbers to justify sticking even more strictly with what's not working. .

And he'll have Biden's ear.

Christmas Message From The Civil Authorities

Notwithstanding, the Heritage Foundatioin has a constantly updated page with links to stories covering all known incidents of moral entrepreneurs and politicians violating their own orders.

Merry Christmas to all!

A Moral Panic Runs Its Course

I mentioned yestrday that the bad-clown-in-the-day-care moral panic, which began about1983, didn't end until the Waco massacre ten years later. This is because Janet Reno, who was Bill Clinton's attorney general from 1993 to 2001, built her career as Florida state attorney by bringing well-publicized day care toddler rape cases, and she approved the FBI's disastrous final raid on the Branch Davidian compound when she was told children were being abused inside.

The McMartin preschool case in California sticks most prominently in memory of that period, but the moral entrepreneurs and prosecutors in that case never prospered. Janet Reno was a different matter. According to Wikipedia,

During Reno's tenure as state attorney, she began what the PBS series Frontline described as a "crusade" against accused child abusers. Reno pioneered the "Miami Method,""a controversial technique for eliciting intimate details from young children and inspired passage of a law allowing them to testify by closed-circuit television, out of the possibly intimidating presence of their suspected molesters." Bobby Fijnje, "a 14-year-old boy, was acquitted after his attorneys discredited the children's persistent interrogations by a psychologist who called herself the 'yucky secrets doctor'." Grant Snowden was acquitted, retried, convicted, and eventually freed by a federal appeals court after 12 years in prison."

Reno's "model case" was against Frank Fuster, co-owner of the Country Walk Babysitting Service in a suburb of Miami, Florida. In 1984, he was found guilty of 14 counts of abuse and sentenced to prison with a minimum of 165 years. Fuster was convicted based in large part on the testimony of his 18-year-old wife, Ileana Flores, who pleaded guilty and testified against him, after allegedly being tortured. In a 2002 episode of Frontline, Flores maintained that she and her ex-husband were innocent, and that Reno personally pressured her to confess. But the number and timing of Reno's visits are in dispute. As of 2020 Fuster remains imprisoned.

In 1989, as Florida state attorney, Reno pressed adult charges against 13-year-old Bobby Fijnje, who was accused of sexually molesting 21 children in his care during church services. The charges were driven by the testimony of children interviewed by mental-health professionals using techniques later discredited. Fijnje refused plea-bargain offers. During the trial, the prosecution was unable to present any witnesses to the alleged abuse. After two years of investigation and trial, Fijnje was acquitted of all charges.

Accounts of the process by whch Reno was induced to approve the final FBI assault on the Waco compound suggest that FBI actors were aware of Reno's very recent history of exploiting child abuse and were able to use this as a lever to secure her approval. According to The Hill,

Janet Reno, the nation’s first female attorney general, approved the FBI’s assault on the Davidians. Previously, she had zealously prosecuted child abuse cases in Dade County, Fla, though many of her high-profile convictions were later overturned because of gross violations of due process. Reno approved the FBI assault after being told “babies were being beaten.” It is not known who told her about the false claims of child abuse. Reno’s sterling reputation helped the government avoid any apparent culpability for the deaths of 27 children on April 19, 1993. After Reno publicly promised to take responsibility for the outcome at Waco, the subsequent Justice Department investigation was so shoddy that even the New York Times denounced the “Waco whitewash.”

The Wikipedia article on the McMartin case indicates that by 1990, the media was having second thoughts about how it handled things, since by then the prosecution had experienced acquittals and hung juries, and the DA lost his bid for reelection. But nothng like this happened in Florida, possibly because those cases weren't as well publicized. Efforts to raise the issue during Reno's confirmation hearing as US attorney general were ineffective.

But after 1993, there were no more bad clowns killing rabbits in secret rooms. Nevertheless, a number of people had their lives destroyed in the panic, and a few remain in prison.

The McMartin and Reno toddler rape cases have provided a paradigm in discussions of recent moral panics. As I've said already, a feature of moral panics is that the perceived threat is disproportinate to the actual threat in some measurable way. But even when the perceived threat is absurd and easily disproven, like Satanic sacrifice on the altar of a local Episcopal parish, the story is remarkably stubborn and enthusiastically endorsed by media. (The rector of that parish, despite forensic tests showing no blood on the altar, had to go on disability retirement, another life destroyed by the moral entrepreneurs.)

Again, I think the COVID crisis is a moral panic with parallels to the day care toddler rape panic. In the 1980s, people drove around with "I Believe The Children" bumper stickers. Face masks amount to a similar, and much more compulsory, virtue signal, when statistics available every day show that in the affected states, well over 90% wear masks, while "cases" increase at exponential rates notwithstanding.

COVID statistics are generally acknowledged to report hospitalizations and deaths due to other causes if the patient either tested positive for COVID or was even a "probable" infection -- this includes drug overdoses, suicides, auto accidents, and deaths in hospice. Thus it likely will never be possible to make comparisons with earlier epidemics -- and this leaves out the question of how many "cases" are false positives or asymptomatic.

A very powerful indicator that this is a panic promoted in many ways cynically is the number of moral entrepreneurs, including credentialed "experts", who disregard their own draconian prescriptions. The most recent case is Dr Birx:

The infectious disease expert, 64, was outed on Sunday for not following her own travel guidance when she was joined by three different generations of family at one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware the day after Thanksgiving.

She was roundly criticized for not following her own orders after publicly urging Americans in the days leading up to Thanksgiving to limit gatherings to “your immediate household.”

As in all these cases, we must assume that if Dr Birx, a credentialed infectious disease expert, seriously believed that her elderly mother would be infected with COVID if she traveled to see her, she would not have done this. But violations of COVID protocols by the moral entrpreneurs and politicians are ubiquitous -- and somehow, none of them, nor the others with whom they associate, while traveling, while maskless, while partying inndoors, ever contracts COVID. If they had, the media would report it as eagerly as if it were the boy who skipped Sunday school to go swimming and drowned.

As was the case in the 1980s, panics persist stubbornly for years even after the measurable discrepancies between the perceived threat and reality become increasingly absurd. And many more businesses, careers, and lives will likely be destroyed in the current crisis than were in the 1980s. But it's encouraging that the crisis now does appear to be running its course.

A New, More Contagious Strain Of COVID In The UK!

News of new regional lockdowns in the UK has begun to reach US outlets. I'm even less able to talk insightfully about the UK than I am about Canada, so I don't intend to go into detail, except insofar as the UK situation gives what I think is a comparative view of the global moral panic.

But as a distant observer, it does seem to me that the UK public throughout the 20th century was willing to take a lot more abuse from its political class, from the First War, through the Depression, Second War rationing, and postwar socialist austerity than the US public would ever have allowed, and apparenly this now continues. Just sayin'.

A vistior forwarded to me a message from someone in the UK who isn't with the program:

Greetings from Tier 4. We had the body bags delivered yesterday with instructions. We have to hang a white sheet out of the window when someone dies and they will be collected. Another 5 neighbours died yesterday. The rest have left for the country. We’re holding on. The army are still delivering food parcels. They have to be disinfected and left in the garage for 24 hours before using. The schools have closed and are now temporary mortuaries. We daren’t go out now. Letter boxes have been sealed up and armed guards are stationed at the end of each road. Apparently someone tried to get through yesterday and was shot dead. Well you can’t be too careful. The electricity is now only on 3 hours a day because of the lack of staff at the powerplants. Just a matter of time I guess. I’ll update you when I can but I can’t promise. God Bless you all and for heavens sake stay safe

A UK YouTuber whom I follow ties the new lockdowns to Brexit, which confirms for me the theory I've had that COVID is a moral panic, and moral panics reflect an underlying social tension. She doesn't use the term "moral panic", but the symptoms are there as she describes them, and she definitely identifies the social tension as Brexit -- in recent posts, she's also associated those tensions with a newly nationalist northern working class that's left the Labour reservation and is demanding respect from the southern elites.

But the COVID moral panic is a global phenomenon, so it can't be reduced just to particular national issues. The Germans are locked down, too, though they seem to be taking the abuse a little bit better. Huh.

What interests me is that the US -- and not just the sansculottes and descamisados, but institutions as well, like the observant churches and synagogues, law enforcement, and the courts -- have begun to put limits on the panic. The civil authorities have simply acknowledged at this point that churches can't be shut down, and that's a major concession, since Catholics, Evangelicals, and Orthodox Jews represent "deplorable" values that are held by the folk devils of this moral panic cycle.

When the Orthodox Jews were able to show that the moral enforcers Mayor DeBlasio and Gov Cuomo were blaming the epidemic specifically on the Jews, it was game over.

I've had an inkling for a while that the moral entrepreneurs everywhere intended to renew and extend the COVID panic with a second wave over the coming winter. They've faced a conundrum, in that over the past year, they've imposed lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates as a remedy for the epidemic, but those have proved utterly ineffective, and blaming Catholics and Jews is no longer an option, either.

But if "cases" are surging, skyrocketing, record-breaking, or whatever they're doing, what do the moral entrepreneurs propose if the most draconian proposals already haven't worked? At least in the US, a range of options for the political class has now been foreclosed, which to me is a sign that the panic will run its course, at least here. But the course of moral panics is inevitably destructive, and they end destructively, too. The McMartin preschool panic ended only with the Waco massacre, which I'll discuss tomorrow if nothing intervenes.

So, What Happened?

After mass yesterday, I asked our pastor if, in response to the LA County relaxation of its prohibition on indoor worship, there were any plans afoot to resume it at our parish. (There had been no announcement about any change at mass itself.) It turns out that he was completely unaware of the situation, which is partly understandable, since the press release was issued only late Saturday. But he also said, "There's been nothing from the archdiocese."

That strongly suggests to me that the process was anything but consultative. Our pastor said, "We keep lobbying, but. . ." This seems consistent with remarks by Abp Cordileone in San Francisco that his archdiocese keeps submitting plans for safe reopening but never gets a reply. So it seems safe to assume that the county revised its decree without any sort of discussion with religious leaders, and it apparently gave them no heads-up about the change. So they could plan for Christmas, after all.

Does "Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the county health director whose portrait is above, look like someone who'd want to help churches plan for Christmas?

So this leads me to that strangely passive-aggressive press release from late Saturday. It begins with the usual hysterical headlines:

L.A. County Surpasses 600,000 COVID-19 Cases as Hospitalizations Continue to Soar

60 New Deaths and 13,756 New Confirmed Cases of COVID-19 in Los Angeles County

Then three full paragraphs follow saying

L.A. County is experiencing the fastest acceleration of new cases than at any other time during the pandemic. . . . Today, Public Health has confirmed 60 new deaths and 13,756 new cases of COVID-19. . . . Hospital capacity across the county is limited, and healthcare workers are hard-pressed to keep up with the need for care. And the only means available to improve the situation at the hospitals is to reduce the number of people becoming newly infected with COVID-19.

Then there's a paragraph favorably noting the appeals court's overruling the San Diego judge's injunction against the state and county for enforcing the restaurant closure.

A recent decision by the Court of Appeal affirms Los Angeles County's duty to prevent disease transmission and protect public health through existing Health Officer Orders, and the suspension of outdoor dining remains in effect. Public Health reminds all sectors and businesses that all other requirements, safety directives, and temporary business closures also remain in effect.

In other words, the county health department's ability to govern by decree continues unabated. Except when it doesn't. Finally, after four paragraphs, the release gets to the heart of the matter:

The Los Angeles County Health Officer Order will be modified today to align with recent Supreme Court rulings for places of worship. Places of worship are permitted to offer faith-based services both indoors and outdoors with mandatory physical distancing and face coverings over both the nose and mouth that must be worn at all times while on site. Places of worship must also assure that attendance does not exceed the number of people who can be accommodated while maintaining a physical distance of six feet between separate households.

Ferrer most definitely did not want to issue this modification. You can tell from the tone and the need to preface it with paragraphs full of hysteria -- everybody's dying, but the Supreme Court does this???

We can be pretty sure that this decision didn't come from consultation with Catholic authorities, or any other religious leaders. Those people are the enemy. Nor did it come from any particular court order. The federal judge in the Harvest Rock case is slow-walking the process in his court, and in any case, the city of Pasdadena, which is in LA County, has its own health department enforcing separate orders and is not under Ferrer's jurisdiction. Although Grace Community Church is a thorn in the city and county's side, there's been no major court action in recent weeks in its case.

So the county health department is responding to domething that isn't so specific. But whatever it was, it made Ferrer do something she didn't want to do.

My guess is that it was pressure from Mayor Garcetti, the county supervisors, and even Gov Newsom, who nevertheless are all blue and bluer. And I would put it to the Recall Newsom movement, which is gaining enough traction that it's made national news.

LA County Relaxes Church Restrictions; Pols Send Newsom A Message

Buried in a hysterical press release yesterday on "soaring" COVID hospitalizations, this appeared midway down:

The Los Angeles County Health Officer Order will be modified today to align with recent Supreme Court rulings for places of worship. Places of worship are permitted to offer faith-based services both indoors and outdoors with mandatory physical distancing and face coverings over both the nose and mouth that must be worn at all times while on site. Places of worship must also assure that attendance does not exceed the number of people who can be accommodated while maintaining a physical distance of six feet between separate households.

LA County's has been among the most stubborn lockdown regimes, but it's becoming plain that the US Supreme Court's Diocese of Brooklyn order is forcing civil authorities to pull back. The wording in yesterday's modification is vague, saying that churches "must also assure that attendance does not exceed the number of people" who can social distance indoors. I'm assuming that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles will be developing policies to implement the revised order, maybe even by Christmas.

Luckily, the weather so far has been mild. Our parish installed propane heaters on its patio for outdoor masses, but it hasn't always had to use then.

Meanwhille, two California political veterans, Democrat Willie Brown and Republicn Darrell Issa, have warned Gov Newsom that a recall petition will succeed, and he'll be removed from office, unless he finds a solution to the COVID crisis. Brown said,

Right now, Newsom’s chances of survival are tied to the pandemic. If California can get the coronavirus under some semblance of control and counties can lift economic restrictions — and here’s the big if, if Newsom can lean on teachers unions and school districts to reopen classrooms — he’ll survive any recall and all but guarantee his re-election.

If not, Newsom will be in a fight for his political life.

Brown has been pretty accurate in calling elections over the past couple of decades. Certainly schools are a big issue, as Brown says, but right now, bars and resturants are closed, and you can't get a haircut. Churches will now let you inside out of the rain, but you still can't sing or exchange the peace. As with the Viet Nam war, the only viable strategy to end it is to declare victory and get out. Since the COVID crisis is essentially a moral panic manufactured by moral entrepreneurs like Dr Fauci and maintained for the benefit ot media and politicians, Newsom's path is fairly clear.

He basically needs to announce, "The science, the data, and the models say we've beaten this thing, thanks to my foresight and leadership" and declare an end to the lockdowns. The media will then find much encouragement in the bending curves and declining case mortality.

Free Exercise Updates

Liberty Counsel has announced that the State of Colorado has dropped its suit against Andrew Wommack Ministries, which I covered as the case was under way on the old blog, back in October. This came in the wake of Gov Polis's, removal of numerical caps on worship services, which in turn was a direct result of the US Supreme Court's action in the Diocese of Brooklyn case on November 24.

On December 16, District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser relaxed the attendance cap on churches in the District following the Archdiocese of Washington's suit.

On Wednesday D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser removed the 50-person limit for religious gatherings and allowed houses of worship to welcome up to 250 people or reach 25% capacity. The Mayor’s office made the adjustment five days after the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington sued the mayor over attendance caps.

While the order eases restrictions on religious gatherings, its language emphasizes the increasing severity of the coronavirus pandemic and discourages large gatherings.

“The larger the gathering, the more the exposure,” the order reads. “A recent lawsuit appears to insist on a constitutional right to hold indoor worship services of even a thousand persons or more at the largest facilities, which flies in the face of all scientific and medical advice and will doubtlessly put parishioners in harm’s way.”

The problem continues to be that with mask and social distance orders in place over much of the US, and other draconian restrictions like restaurant closings, COVID cases increase notwithstanding. Yet the experience of California megachurches, which defy health orderw with thousands of people each week, has been that infections are minimal, and no symptoms are reported at all.

On December 15, the US Supreme Court handed down a writ of certiorari before judgment in the case of SSPX priest Kevin Robinson and Orthodox Rabbi Yisrael Knopfler, who had been attempting since last May to remove New Jersey Gov Murphy's restrictions on church attendance. I covered the original case on the old blog here. As reported here,

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court upheld the petition for an injunction and ordered the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals to decide the case in line with a 5-4 ruling the Supreme Court issued in late November in a New York lawsuit.

In that case, the court barred authorities from enforcing attendance restrictions at churches and synagogues in the midst of the pandemic.

The ban on religious gatherings in New Jersey has been a contentious one going back to before Easter. One gathering broken up in Lakewood during the initial days of Murphy's stay-at-home order in March was of a group of men who gathered for religious studies. Knopfler was arrested in mid-May following a religious gathering that drew about 20 men, in violation of what was a 10-person limit at that time.

Also on December 15, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

ruled in favor of two Nevada churches that say the state’s COVID-19 restrictions violate their First Amendment rights.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agrees with the churches in Las Vegas and rural Lyon County that the state's limits are unconstitutional because they place harsher attendance limits on religious gatherings than casinos and other secular businesses.

. . . It instructed the district judges to preliminary enjoin Nevada from imposing attendance limits for churches stricter than those for other gatherings or businesses.

However, as reported here on December 8, on December 3, the US Supreme Court sent the case of Harvest Rock Church back to the Ninth District and the circuit court for recnsideration based on its order in the Diocese of Brooklyn case. But this left room for delay.

At this point, the circuit judge appears to be slow-walking the process.

On Saturday, December 5, the district court set a hearing for December 8. However, the court then granted Gov. Newsom more time so he could file yet another brief on December 14, followed by a hearing on December 18.

As I reported in the earlier post, it could take months to get the case back to the Supreme Court.

So far, there's been no news in the case of South Bay United Pentecostal Churches' petition for writ of certiorari before judgment, which I reported here on November 29.

The reality is -- and this will be the case no matter who is president -- the moral entrepreneurs are out to extend lockdowns indefinitely. Dr Fauci is now saying things could possibly get back to normal by Christmas 2021, or maybe 2022. This is going to be a long and difficult fight.

San Diego Judge Lifts Restaurant Closings

In a development that's drawn a great deal of attention, San Diego Superior Court Judge Joel Wohlfeil on November 11

granted a request for a temporary injunction that stops “any government entity or law enforcement officer from enforcing the provisions of the cease-and-desist orders” filed against two establishments — Pacers Showgirls International and Cheetahs Gentlemen’s Club — provided both locations follow extensive measures designed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus on their premises.

At the time, this was a temporary restraining order pending the outcome of a hearing scheduled for December. Since the order, Gov Newsom issued more restrictive regional orders that closed both indoor and outdoor dining, limiting restaurants to takeout only. On December 16, Wohlfeil issued his final order:

In the nine-page ruling, San Diego County Superior Court Judge Joel R. Wohlfeil issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the cease-and-desist order from being enforced on strip clubs and "San Diego County businesses with restaurant service" from operating.

The order, effective immediately, still requires businesses to adhere to COVID safety protocols.

The county, not clear on the scope of Wohlfeil's order, requested that he clarify:

A California judge said Thursday that all restaurants in San Diego County can resume on-site dining with safety protocols, marking a setback to the governor’s stay-at-home order to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Joel Wohlfeil said his ruling Wednesday that also protected two strip clubs extended to the thousands of eateries in the county of 3 million people.

County officials had suspended enforcement of restrictions barring indoor and outdoor dining and live entertainment on Wednesday and requested the hearing to get clarification from the judge about the scope of his ruling.

Wohlfeil's ruling parallels that of Judge James Chalfant in Los Angeles County, in which Chalfant found the county health authorities could not provide evidence that anyone had contracted COVID from a church service. According to ABC News,

Wohlfeil cited the lack of evidence from the County that proves the two live adult entertainment venues would increase the risk of exposure to patrons or that the establishments have impacted ICU bed capacity throughout Southern California, “much less in San Diego County.”

“Accordingly, the Court finds that Plaintiffs have been devoid of COVID, have done nothing to contribute to the spread of COVID, and have honored their representations to Dr. Joel Day and the County,” said Wohlfeil, according to court records.

Wohlfeil said the order applies to both California state and San Diego County restrictions. The county health department would normally enforce the state lockdown in any case.

Media in San Diego have generally been hysterical, insisting that "skyrocketing", "surging", and "record-breaking" COVID cases mean Wohlfeil's order is somehow irresponsible. But the problem is that, as with the non-conforming megachurches, nobody has been able to prove that strip joints or restaurants, even those like the megachurches that don't apply ocial distancing, have been the source of any COVID infections.

Although the county is not enforcing its lockdown for the moment, both the county and state will appeal Wohlfeil's order. And Wohlfei's order does nothing more than place the county back in social-distancing conditions as they'd existed in early fall. Those in themselves are an annoying charade, but at least some people in San Diego can go out to eat, and some can work for a living.

Numbers Behaving Badly

I've been looking for good data on COVID for quite some time, and the more I look, the harder it is to find. For instance, I went looking for a rolling 7-day average of COVID deaths in the US nationally, and what I find in CDC data is at best confusing. For instance, the CDC appears to combine "deaths due to pneumonia, influenza and COVID-19 (PIC)" in its reports -- but naturally, that's not what I'm looking for. I want to know what the numbers are for COVID specifically. and I'm not sure if this is ever broken out.

A site called the COVID Tracking Project has charts that provide 7-day rollling averages for tests, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. If I google "US daily COVID deaths", I get a google site that lists one total (3611 for December 16), while the COVID Tracking project site gives a different total (3400 for December 16). The last 7-day average on the COVID Tracking Project site was 2400 on December 15.

The last rolling 7-day average case total I could find on the COVID Tracking Project site was 209,307 for December 11, But dividing the December 15 rolling average deaths of 2400 by the December 11 rolling average cases gives a US case mortality rate of 1.1%, which is consistent with various calculations I've made from different sources over the past several days. This is down by about half from the 2% case mortality rate several months ago and still generally reported. And if we take the latest 5-day rolling death average of 2400 and multiply it by the remaining 14 days in December, we get 33,600 deaths remaining for the month, far below the 250,000 Joe Biden predicted the country would have by January.

While figures like Gov Newsom continue to insist their predictions are based on "models", nobody seems to give out hard numbers since the Imperial College model predicted 2 to 4 million US deaths. Instead, the closest we've had is Biden's "dark winter" 250,000 by January, while Dr Fauci is simply telling people not to celebrate the holidays -- but the fog of numbers prevents any real ability to calculate whether the holidays have led to "surges" in statisticcs or not. For instnace,

Data from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) days prior to the holiday showed more than three million people traveled through airports despite guidance suggesting otherwise.

However, nearly three weeks later, there so far appears to be no post-holiday surge in numerous cities and states.

“We haven’t seen something significant to talk about now,” Illinois Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said, according to the Chicago Tribune. “We’ll see for sure in this coming week … We’ll keep our fingers crossed that maybe we’re not going to see a big bump.”

Nevertheless Dr Fauci is warning us against Christmas:

". . . But that’s just one of the things you’re going to have to accept as we go through this unprecedented challenging time."

Fauci, noting that many Americans ignored health guidelines over Thanksgiving, warned that Christmas cannot be "business as usual."

The problem is that the data to support his position is hard to find and unreliable, and people's experience on the ground takes away from official credibility. For instance, thousands of people attend the non-conforming California megachurches each week without masks or social distance, but almost none even test positive, much less get sick. Individual states differ wildly in their COVID regimes, but there's little difference in their actual outcomes, with the states that have the strictest regimes experiencing the worst statistics.

This is one part of corporate media's ongoing failure.

"Ambulances Waiting 4 Hours To Offload Patients"

This must be COVID related, as the whole headline on Yahoo News reads, "Los Angeles Covid-19 Update: Ambulances Waiting 4 Hours To Offload Patients As L.A. Has Just 56 Adult ICU Beds Left, Orange County Has None" The story actually makes no other mention, and gives no details of, 4-hour delays.

The first thing that puzzles me, though, is that most people with COVID don't go to the hospital in an ambulance. I follow a YouTuber sho gave, from his hospital bed, the only first-person accunt I've seen of a severe case of COVID. His experience was harrowing, but his family brought him to the ER, not an ambulance.

Those who watch Live Rescue know that people are informed consumers, and they know that ambulance rides cost thousands of dollars, and they aren't covered by medical. People go to the hospital in an ambulance only when they have absolutely no other choice --for instance, if they're in cardiac arrest or bleeding uncontrollably. Otherwise, they'll drive themselves, get someone to drive them, or forego the visit. The Yahoo story doesn't go into why, or where, the four-hour delays are taking place, but I can't imagine they're for COVID.

The next question is the hysterical assertion that LA has just 56 adult ICU beds left. I first covered this a week ago. Hospitals run near full ICU capacity every winter due to ordinary flu. I found another story on the same subject from last March 26, during the first COVID moral panic runup:

Many hospitals across the United States regularly operate with most of their beds taken by patients, limiting their ability to handle a sudden influx of folks sick with COVID-19, a new study reports.

"All indications show if the curve is not flattened, hospitals across the country will not have the capacity to deal with the surge in hospitalizations associated with COVID-19," said study author Fredric Blavin, a principal research associate with the Urban Institute's Health Policy Center.

Let's recall that in response to this initial wave of hysteria, Trump ordered two hospital ships and a field hospital to cities that would be hardest hit, only to see them go unused. Somehow the hospitals that ran near capacity, as they routinely do in the winter, weren't overwhelmed by COVID.

A San Diego reporter actually spoke up and asked the county health officer there about this very issue:

During Wednesday’s San Diego County Health press briefing, Dr. Wilma Wooten admitted that she does not even know what our hospital capacity is normally at this time of year.

Saturday via text, KUSI News asked what ICU capacity our hospitals normally operate, since Governor Newsom’s used ICU capacity to issue another lockdown.

San Diego County Health responded saying, “We will get back to you with the number. Don’t have that handy at the press conference.”

KUSI News reached out multiple times since Saturday to get the answer, but San Diego County Health never responded, so we asked again during Wednesday’s County Health Briefing.

KUSI’s Hunter Sowards asked if Dr. Wilma Wooten could compare ICU numbers to last year’s numbers at this time.

Dr. Wooten responded saying she doesn’t know. “I don’t have before me right now any data to compare where we were at the same time last year.”

No matter, it's just a good idea to shut down restaurants and barber shops no matter what. The problem is that, with the occasional exception of the San Diego news station, the media just continues to inflame the panic.

Free Exercise Updates

On Friday, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington filed suit and moved for an injunction against the District of Columbia to force it to allow indoor church attendance consistent with other indoor activities in the District.

The lawsuit argued the 50-person limits in any house of worship constitute “arbitrary” coronavirus restrictions. The suit alleged that the rules “violate the rights of more than 650,000 D.C.-area Catholics, who — at the end of this most difficult year — now face the chilling prospect of being told that there is no room for them at the Church this Christmas.”

As of this morning, I can find no updates on the progress of this case, though the archdiocese is plain that

as Christmas fast approaches, the District has imposed arbitrary 50-person caps on Mass attendance — even for masked, socially-distant services, and even when those services are held in churches that can in normal times host over a thousand people.”

Based on remarks by San Francisco Abp Cordileone in the wake of the Diocese of Brooklyn order in the Supreme Court, the US bishops appear to be proceeding based on mutual consultation. What they're asking seems to be conservative and consistent, the right to hold masked, socially-distant masses indoors under the same capacity constraints as secular indoor retail and similar activities. Abp Cordileone in his remarks implied the likelihood of similar suits. I'll report on further developments as they take place.

According to the Thomas More Society's website, a Kern County, CA superior court judge issued an injunction against the county for restricting SSPX masses there.

On December 10, 2020, a California Superior Court issued a preliminary injunction protecting Father Trevor Burfitt and his Catholic parishes. . . . The court specifically singled out the provisions of Newsom’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy and his Regional Stay at Home Order as failing to treat houses of worship in a manner “equal to the favored class of entities,” meaning “[e]ntities permitted to engage in indoor activities – also known as ‘essential businesses’ or ‘critical infrastructure’ – includ[ing] big-box retail stores, grocery stores, home improvement stores, hotels, airports, train stations, bus stations, movie production houses, warehouses, factories, schools, and a lengthy list of additional businesses.”

California county judges are clearly beginning to lose patience with state and local COVID controls. Kern County is a mountainous, partly desert, and largely rural area north of Los Angeles. Fr Burfitt us based in Los Angeles County, and it isn't clear if the judge's order applies to his parishes there and in other counties.

Although court rulings are beginning to trend in the direction of free exercise, it isn't a uniformly smooth process. According to Liberty Counsel's website,

Liberty Counsel has filed another emergency application to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry. This quick return to the High Court follows an Obama-appointed district court judge's refusal to follow the Supreme Court's [Dec 3] order.

. . . The High Court already granted cert, vacated the lower court orders involving the emergency petition of the churches and directed the district court to reconsider and apply the High Court's [Nov 25] decision granting an injunction for churches and synagogues in New York.

However, after Wednesday's hearing in district court, the Obama-appointed judge failed to abide by the High Court's instructions.

At 5:00 PM Eastern Time, December 8, the district court held a ten-minute hearing, refusing to even address the requested relief. Instead, the district court accepted the request of Gov. Newsom to kick the can down the road so that the governor could file yet another brief followed by a hearing on December 18.

I'll report on developments in these and other cases as they occur.

The Numbers Just Don't Add Up

California issued a revised and more restrictive stay-at-home order that closed restaurants and reduced capacity at many other businesses and activities over most of the state, effective November 21. According to medical.net,

. In the case of coronavirus, the incubation period is estimated to be 5 – 6 days; however, the exact recommended range is 1 - 14 days.

November 21 was more than three weeks ago, and we might expect many incubations since that time to emerge as full-blown cases -- but with the new restrictions, wouldn't we expect to see some effect in the number of new cases since that time?

On December 2, when it had been ten days since the order, I went to that day's data from the LA County Health Department to see what the actual effects of the newest restrictions might be (Click on the image for a larger copy). The data leads to several questions. First, although we might expect to have seen the newest restrictions begin to show a clear reduction in cases at that time, this wasn't showing up on the chart. The cases continued, and still continue, to spike.

Second, the "case death rate", the stepped black line lower down on the chart, notwithstanding the drastic increase in "cases" over the course of the year, had stayed steady at 2% since the summer. I went to the CDC site to get national numbers. As of that day, there were 13,626,022 "cases", with 269,763 deaths, which corresponds to a national case rate of 2%.

Los Angeles County had a total number of cases at 414,000, with total deaths at 7740, for a slightly lower case death rate of 1.9%.

Third, the cumulative deaths, the dark line at the very bottom of the LA County graph, simply haven't spiked. However, the news media keeps referring to a COVID "surge" in recent weeks, with an increase in "hospitalizations", but it doesn't appear that there's been a corresponding increase in the death rate.

But it might be objected that 2% of a continuing increase in cases is still bad -- but recent data seems to be inconsistent. The December 2 rate, according to data from the LA County Health Department was 5,987 new cases and 40 new deaths. This gave a case death rate of only .6 of 1%. Curious, I went to the November 27 numbers from the same source and found that on that day, there were 4544 new cases and 24 new deaths, giving a case death rate of .5 of 1%, again much lower than previous national and county case death rates. (Both December 2 and November 24 were midweek days, avoiding potential underreporting due to weekend delays.)

This morning I went to check the LA County daily stats again. Although weekend statistics may show a delay, yesterday, December 13, had 12,731 new "cases" reported in LA County, with 29 new deaths. I brought up my trusty calculator and found that this amounts to a case mortality rate of 0.2%, roughly equivalent to the seasonal flu. This is one tenth of the currently reported national case mortality rate of about 1.9%. I went to the Friday, December 11 stats and got 13,815 new cases with 50 new deaths, for a case mortality rate of 0.3%, not a big difference. So then I went to the November 4 statistics to see what things looked like midweek before the Thanksgiving lockdown. There were 1843 new cases and 22 new deaths, for a case mortality rate of 1%. This is still half the national rate, when LA County is said to be a major trouble spot.

On November 24, only three days after the new restrictions took effect, LA County experienced 3,692 new cases and 51 deaths, for a case mortality rate of 1.4% still well under the rate for the year of about 2% in both the county and the US.

So LA County has had a jumble of state and local restrictions that are about the most severe anywhere in the US -- outdoor dining is prohibited, for instance, when it's allowed in New York City -- while its statistics have consistently been below national levels, and one critical measure, the case mortality rate, has in fact been falling significantly. The stepped black liine on the chart above should in fact be stepping significantly down.

But another explanation for the lower case mortality rate since early November, and since Thanksgiving as well, could simply be the increased testing. But here's a question. If, as the CDC bigwig Aron Hall, whom I quoted the other day, says, the nationial case rate could be as much as a third of the population, then these people have been infected for quite some time -- and their infections have been mild or asymptomatic. So the perception of a declining death rate may be just a statistical artifact and an indication that the disease has never been that serious as a percentage of the population. Like, say, the seasonal flu.

Even so, if it's hard to avoid thinking that large numbers of "cases" resulting from increased testing are in fact resulting in a lower case mortality rate, shouldn't the political class and the moral enforcers be patting us on the head for doing a good job? And maybe, just maybe, easing some of those restrictions for Christmas?

Don't count on it.

Let's Get Real About The Election

Whatever the eventual outcome of Trump's legal efforts -- and they don't look good at all -- the biggest issue for most of 2020 was the most egregiouis human rights violation in recent times, the worldwide COVID lockdown, a phenomenon that's continuing to do incalculable economic, emotional, and psychological damage but has been feckless to control the disease.

There's simply been no proportionate payoff to the human sacrifices that people have rendered in most countries -- the disease is if anything more prevalent now than it was in March, though it's much less fatal -- but my guess is that with the new year, the authorities, seeing no effective remedy, will simply try to reimpose exactly the same lockdowns as last spring, with the same effect.

Trump, and Trumpism, were irrelevant to this problem. If Trump had been re-elected by a landslide, we'd still be facing the Cuomos, the Newsoms, the Whitmers, the Wolfs, the Boris Johnsons, the Doug Fords,with exactly the same strategies. Trump would have been no help. Rallies, as we saw over much of the fall, had no effect. And whateever Biden and the Democrats do, or don't do, in coming months will likely be just as irrelevant.

Trump was a talented political novice, but even his talents were insufficient to stop the COVID moral panic that's taken hold, and still has hold, of the public imagination.

On the other hand, the most positive development in the COVID field in recent weeks was the victory in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn's US Supreme Court case. This has clearly kept states like Virginia, Colorado, New York, and California from declaring worship services "inessential" by decree and closing churches entirely, as they did last spring. But the Catholic Church is independent of Trump and Trumpism, and its efforts will persist.

By the same token, judges at local and federal levels are beginning to deliver opinions that the health authorities are losing the benefit of the doubt they'd been given last spring, since lockdowns and mask mandates in fact haven't had the promised benefit. The effort to defeat the moral panic on a legal level, or via civil disobedience or local nullification, has been and will continue to be independent of Trump and Trumpism.

I'm a little disconcerted, and even a little surprised, at the continuing focus and hysteria about the dead kraken. the increasingly ineffectual legal appeals of the election. The biggest problem we face is the one we've faced all year, that the health authorities have a credibility crisis: the remedies they proposed to "flatten the curve" have nevertheless been ineffective in preventing a full second-wave COVID outbreak, while, as respectable parties are beginning to note, the health authorities know almost nothing more about the diseaae than they did a year ago.

Forget Biden, at least for now. There's much more important work to do.

California COVID Crazy

Now and then, my wife and I go up to Solvang, a Danish-themed tourist town north of Santa Barbara. It does a lot of Christmas business, while the temperate climate there has always allowed outdoor dining and beer drinking. Gov Newsom's order last weekend to shut down outdoor dining over most of the state threatened the town's existence, so its city council promptly voted to except itself from the ban and requested that local law enforcement not enforce it, which of course California sheriffs have generally announced they will not do.

There's another particular twist to Solvang's situation, because Newsom added an entirely new level of regional COVID enforcement based on hospital ICU capacity, over and above an existing county-level color-coded enforcement based on COVID statistics. The problem is that Santa Barbara County, where Solvang is, has been lumped into a new Southern California region for ICU capacity.

Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo counties are currently considering appealing to the state to create a Central Coast region, which would separate them from being part of the Southern California region. Seceding would also mean that these counties wouldn’t be forced to react to the higher infection rates in Los Angeles and further south, the Los Angeles Times reports.

“We believe it’s reasonable to have the Central Coast as one region instead of including our county with over half the state’s population in the current Southern California region,” said Ventura County Executive Officer Mike Powers. The three counties say they will seek separation from the Southern California region if their ICU capacity stays above 15% for the next three weeks.

But of course, that puts any remedy, if it takes place, past the Chrsitmas season, so Solvang (and lots of other places) are screwed no matter what. The problem is that Newsom is simply making things up as he goes along. Hey, the color code system isn't solving a whole new problem the models have identified, but we'll leave it in place while I impose a whole new blunt instrument to sove this whole new problem.

Meanwhile, the hysterical news stories continue:

]T]he virus continued to spread rapidly across the country. Newly reported coronavirus cases topped 231,700 Friday, a new record. Hospitalizations continued to break records, as a wave of critically ill patients being admitted to hospitals around the country strains health-care systems in many parts of the U.S. And the daily death toll surpassed 3,300.

Well and good -- but every indication is that well over 90% of the population is wearing masks and social distancing. And they've been doing it for months,

The data demonstrates very clearly that Americans have overwhelmingly exceeded the masking compliance percentages needed to supposedly “flatten the curve” and reduce transmission of the virus. The problem, of course, is that the models have not matched reality. Americans are wearing masks, but the hypothesis behind universal masking has not worked to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, Newsom bans outdoor dining, but it has no effect on the continuing surge. Just last night, Cuomo banned indoor dining (again), but hey, outdoor can continue. Why is it OK in New York but not in California? Well, I guess Cuomo can fix that soon enough.

The level of incompetence among our public officials is astonishing.

You Don't Need To Be Einstein To Figure Out A Scam

Via the New York Post,

The US topped 15 million cases of COVID-19 this week, but that number is likely exponentially higher — by as much as seven times, a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official said Thursday.

. . . “The total estimated number of infections is likely two to seven times greater than reported cases,” [CDC Suit Aron] Hall said, adding that the evidence was based on seroprevalence surveys and models.

So let's take this official's highest estimate, that the number of infections is as much as seven times greater than the 15 million reported. I brought up my calculator and found that 7 times 15 million is 105,000,000, Later, the same article says there have been 289,000 deaths to date. So I divided 289,000 by 15,000,000 and got a case fatality rate of 0.0027 of 1%. If 105 million people have been infected in the CDC's worst case scenario, but only 289,000 have died, then we definitely don't have mass graves in public parks the way they said we would back in March, right?

What's the explanatiion? 105 million is like a third of the country, but nobody's getting all that sick. And if a third of the country is infected, what's with the lockdowns and masks? Obviously they haven't worked, huh?

Curious, I looked up the daily new deaths in the US vs the daily new cases. As of December 5, there were 218,671 new cases and 2,461 deaths, which gives a case fatality rate of a little over 1%, which is consistent with the observation that the case fatality rate in the US has been steadily declining since the start of the pandemic.

Healthcare workers are now seeing unprecedented increases in COVID-19 diagnoses and hospitalizations -- but there hasn't been a congruent rise in mortality rates even as case counts set records.

That decline has no single, clear explanation, but experts have pointed to a host of contributing factors. . .

This table gives a survey of case fatality rates in various countries at all dates over the course of 2020. As of December 5, the case fatality rate in the US was 1.9%. As of June 27, it was 5.1%. The decline in rates is almost certainly an artifact of testing -- as more people test positive, but the number of new deaths remains relatively constant, the fatality rate is going to decline.

The CDC official at the New York Post link above also said "the death toll is also likely higher" than the published numbers, although it's generally acknowledged that the published COVID death totals include a large proportion of people with comorbidities. But let's examine what he's said and take the numbers for granted. He's said the actual case rate is two to seven times higher than the published numbers. So again, let's take his worst-case estimate of 105,000,000 infections.

Although the current published COVID case mortality rate in the US is 1.9%, let's round it off at 2%. So if there are 105,000,000 infections, we would in fact be seeing 2.1 million deaths, I mean right now. not next January. You'd need Ryder rental trucks to haul the dead off to the mass graves in public parks. But we aren't seeing this. Why not?

So you say OK, maybe it's unfair to take his worst-case estimate, that's way out of reasonable range. Let's take his best case estimate, there are only twice as many infections as reported. Twice 15 million is 30 million. At a 2% case mortality rate, that's 600,000 deaths, more than twice what we've seen all year. But allowing for a number of deaths that's anything like what's reported, that's an actual case mortality rate of less than 1%. The CDC estimates that the case mortality rate for the 2019-20 flu season was in the neighborhood of 0.1%.

In other words, the more COVID cases the suits at the CDC find, with deaths remaining relatively constant, the closer the case mortality rate for COVID comes to that for the flu. And I just don't see where they can find equivalent numbers of extra deaths to make up the difference. This is a guy who's apparently authorized to speak on behalf of the CDC as an "official", but he's talking the purest moonshine.

When I first talked about moral panics last week, I said that one feature of them is that the perceived threat is disproportionate to the actual threat in some measurable way. The New York Post story is an example: we have a "CDC official" saying that the number of COVID infections right now is so great that, if his estmate were true, just based on published case mortality rates, we'd be seeing Category 5 level disasters in every city.

We aren't. At least some people are beginning to lose patience. The problem for the CDC becomes how much more the rate is going to decline as more and more people are tested -- and at what point this indicates that, as a practical matter, the problem has been solved, even without a vaccine.