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.