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.