In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...

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 Franci...

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 a...

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 exact...

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...

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 sa...

Last week I covered Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant's instruction to the Los Angeles County health department to return to his courtroom December 8 to provide actual research on the reasons to ban outdoor dining as a COVID lockdown measure. On Tuesday, this didn't go well for the county. The judge had little sympathy for the county's arguments and sided with the [plaintff, the California Restaurant Association]. At one point, Chalfant said the county's arguments about being unable to confirm a link between outdoor dining and coronavirus might have flown early in the pandemic but not anymore. "I am shocked that in nine months, [government officials] have not looked seriously at outdoor dining," Chalfant said. "I am not laying this at the county's feet but that is a failure of government." . . . Attorneys for the plaintiffs claimed the outdoor dining ban would do little or nothing to stop the rising tide of corona...