In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Above is a typical table of the type that can be found on the LA County Health Department website. It's updated daily. It appears that LA County's policies conform with California state policies. It's plain that LA County is carefully recording race, ethnicity, and poverty data on COVID cases. In general I would have questioned this before the current crisis, but what we see in just the death data is an indication of where the problems lie. If you run vaccination clinics in poor Hispanic areas, you are going to do far more good with each shot there than in an affluenmt white area. That's all there is to it. So I quote from a recent LA County health department press release: Testing results are available for nearly 6,272,000 individuals with 18% of people testing positive. Today's daily test positivity rate is 1%, the lowest test positivity rate since the beginning of the pandemic. The test positivity rate peaked over 20% in late-December during the surge...

An item in this morning's news caught my eye: the head of Manhattan's uber-elite Dalton School is resigning, apparently due to pressure from parents who objected to his woke agenda. Keep in mind that the true indicator of social standing isn't whether you went to an Ivy, it's the private secondary school you attended. The parents of those students have money and influence. Wokeness so far has been a form of preemptive submissioin by media, university, and corporate elites. If Dalton parents are dropping the program, this is an acknowledgement that it isn't working out for those elites. In January, an anonymous group of parents wrote a letter objecting to Dalton’s new guidelines. “Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘de-centering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class,” the letter read, according to the NY Post. “Wildly inappropriate,...

Right after I posted yesterday, I found a piece on Yahoo News that asks questions nobody else has been asking. After enduring a steep, nationwide surge over the holidays — followed by a decline in cases that was just as steep and just as widespread — America has entered a strange new phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. How strange? Just look at the wildly uneven outbreaks unfolding right now in California, Florida and Michigan. Nationally, the pace of vaccinations continues to accelerate, with an average of 3 million doses being administered every day. Yet the spread of variants such as B.1.1.7 — a strain that’s more contagious and deadly than earlier versions of the virus — is accelerating too. As a result, cases have started to level off or even inch up nationally, and experts are debating whether a so-called fourth wave is upon us. It’s a race between the vaccines and the variants, they say. But the truth is a bit more complicated — and perhaps a bit less scary. Zoom...

Buried deep in a CNN story about the Michigan COVID surge , I found this: Though the virus appears to be spreading unchecked in those under age 59, those with a few months of vaccine eligibility (age 60 and up) have an impressively stable (and low) infection rate. This makes Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's plea to President Joe Biden for more vaccines all the more logical though, as the administration pointed out when they rejected Whitmer's request, giving more vaccines to Michigan will mean fewer for the surrounding (and other) states. This bears out the view expressed by the LA County health department that the vaccines are in fact highly effective. But if, as the story says, Michigan has vaccinated in the neighborhood of 25% of its population, roughly the same as other states, this raises the question of whether Michgan has been vaccinating the right people. California for the first several months of vaccine distribution specifically targeted those most likely to become inf...

I've frequently discussed the 2020 dumpster fire here as a "moral panic", an upheaval in public opinion similar to the Salem witch trials or the day-care Satanism wave of the 1980s, a widespread fear that some ill-defined evil threatens the well-being of society. Observers suggest that moral panics stem from underlying social insecurity, with particular issues and "devils" serving only as what an Aristotelian would call efficient or proximate causes, not the underlying reason. I'm now thinking that the single event that drove the whole 2020 moral panic, before the COVID lockdowns, before the George Floyd riots, was Rush Limbaugh's announcement of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Let me make it plain that, while I often found Limbaugh entertaining, I was never a dittohead, and I think in recent years he'd lost his sharp satirical edge, though he almost never had three hours of material to fill a three-hour show, and it was often padded with predicta...

Yesterday, California lifted all explicit limits on capacity and location of indoor worship in the state , although the state health department continued to say that indoor gatherings are “strongly discouraged" and advised limiting the numbers to the existing percerntages given under the state's color coded tiers. For most of the state, depending on the county, those limits are currently either 25% or 50% capacity. There is no change to the requirements for social distancing and masks, and choral and congregational singing are also still prohibited. (However, our priests increasingly pat people on the shoulders, and congregational responses are slowly returning. So far, no Karens have intervened.) Most news reports say that this was in response to the US Supreme Court's injunction this past Friday against Santa Clara County enforcing a ban on any indoor home worship. This was argued by the Center for American Liberty in the case of Tandon v Newsom . ...

I've been wondering about Michigan now for more than a week, and the COVID surge there is finally getting full media attention. Clearly the state has now emerged as the worst case in the US, with ideas from various quarters on what to do about it: COVID-19 cases have started spiking in Michigan, which currently has the highest number of positive tests per 100,000 in the nation. The state’s seven-day average is 515 per 100,000. The next closest state is New Jersey, with 300. . . . In October of 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court stripped Whitmer of the emergency powers she had assumed during the pandemic, declaring the orders an “unlawful delegation of legislative power to the executive branch in violation of the Michigan Constitution.” Now, faced with increasing COVID-19 spread, the governor is powerless to issue the same kind of restrictions she did in the past without the Republican-controlled legislature’s consent. With the friction between the branches caused by her ov...