In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The big year-end meme for 2020 was the dumpster fire, and this seems to have carried the implication that 2021 wouldn't be the same. I'm not sure why. No matter who is president, the worldwide COVID panic continues in full effect. I couln't get a haircut last week, and I won't be able to get one this week, either. And as barbers realize that government decrees make their business unpredictable, they're leaving it -- and this will be the case even after things get back to "normal". There'll simply be fewer barbers, hair salons, and sit-down restaurants. But insofar as people fought back, they made progress in 2020, and this still needs to be done in the coming year. In particular, the US Supreme Court ruling in the Diocese of Brooklyn case, while it hasn't been a magic bullet, has led to progress in free exercise of religion. We received this letter from our parish yestwrday: As you may have heard recently, places of worship are now permitte...

The new strain is about a gazilllion times more contagious than the old one, according to Boris Johnson. Actually, he didn't say gazillion. He said maybe 70%, but I don't think anyone asked him how contagious the old strain was, and nobody knows that anyhow, so gazillion is probably a more accurate indicator than 70%. The UK health toff says it's been out of control since September, and Boris put the south on Tier 4 lockdown (which is UK speak for "double secret" in the US), and you can see from the graph above how useful that's been. Except, also according to Boris, nobdy gets any sicker from the new strain than the old one. So the lockdowns are ineffective -- and if you think about it, if the new strain is even more contagious than the old one, the germs must be traveling in the breeze or over the internet or something, so if masks and social distancing weren't much help with release 1.0, how much help are they with 2.0? But the vaccine still works wit...

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 Coun...

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 ...

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 un...

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? ...

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 ...