So, There's This New Strain Of COVID

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 with 2.0, and nobody gets any sicker.

And now we have reprts that it's in Colorado and even in San Diego.

San Diego County officials said tests showed a 30-year-old resident contracted the strain in California’s first confirmed case of the variant, one day after the sequence was discovered on American soil for the first time in Colorado. The Southern California man had not traveled recently, officials said — a sign that despite efforts to contain the mutation in Europe, it may already be spreading locally.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the news during a virtual meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The bigger news here is that Newsom is meeting with Dr Fauci, which says he's getting nervous about the recall petition. Even if nobody asks him directly why the lockdowns haven't even flattened the curve, that's going to be at the back of everyone's mind -- and if your team isn't doing well, eventually you fire the coach.

Newsom needs Fauci to put his prestige behind the strategy that simply isn't working, and saying there's a new, even more contagious strain isn't going to help. What are we supposed to do? Maintain 12 feet social distance instead of six? Wear two layers of masks instead of one? Put up plexiglass barriers in the kitchen? Sanitize the TV remote after each use?

Has anyone thought this through?

California Update

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 County has "allowed" indoor worship subject to vague conditions, but so far the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has not reopened for indoor masses.)

Amusement parks and indoor museums remain closed. There's an unofficial and unenforced ban on "inessential" travel -- indeed, in Los Angeles, a ban on inessential walking, bicycling, or scooter riding. However, on a recnt trip through Hollywood, I saw many people riding scooters, no joke, and I frankly doubt if those were all essential trips. As the photo above suggests, scooters in LA are an upscale phenomenon, and putative restrictions on them are ignored.

So we have an opinion piece by limousine libertarian Virginia Postrel in Bloomberg News, misleadingly titled "Los Angeles Locked Down. Covid Came Anyway." But it mentions no statistics, quotes no official policies. It's a gushy, perky chick piece on Virginia Postrel.

Our pandemic experience hasn’t been that bad. My husband and I get along and like being together. With jobs we can do online and no kids to homeschool, we have it easy. Our three-bedroom condo gives us separate workspaces and room to spread out. I’ve turned our kitchen table into my own Zoom studio, complete with backdrop and lights for a 2020 book tour. I’d love to eat in a restaurant or travel cross country, but those are minor sacrifices compared with what many people are experiencing, even without getting sick.

Postrel mentions in passing the effect of the virus on her housekeeper's family, but mostly it's that her husband can't go in to the university where he's a professor, and he hasn't had a haircut, so he's growing a pony tail. This is one reason why the Recall Newsom movement has an uphill battle: as Postrel acknowledges, the elites are only mildly inconvenienced, and their lives are fine. Too bad about the cooks, waiters, and barbers, huh? Postrel, a writer, knows her audience, and she knows her market. I'm glad that I only rarely worked as one.

The political class's views have in fact hardened. Alex Padilla, designated by Gov Newsom to replace Kamala Harris in the US Senate, expressed the party line just the other day:

But again, as you said, we’ve been hearing about, whether it’s COVID fatigue, and people are maybe taking it a little — getting a little too comfortable, thinking they would be immune or that the worst of it was over when it wasn’t true. Second, California can do all the things it needs to do, but if you have people still coming in and out from other states that have been less restrictive, right? Arizona is just right next door, for example, or all the people that flew throughout Thanksgiving weekend, all that is now coming home to roost. So, once again, we’ve got to tighten the belt in terms of that mobility,

What he's telegraphing is the need for a national lockdown. Because California.

Get a scooter, folks. You'll be fine.

A Visitor Chimes In On COVID Hospitalizations

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 appendicitis attacks & will have to spend another week in the hospital to clear up the infection (& who knows what else).

A mom is 2 weeks overdue with her pregnancy. Her OB wants to induce her, but the hospital won't allow it because they're saving OB beds for covid overflow. Solution: break her water at the doctor's office, hoping that will start labor & then go to the ER to get admitted (which is what happened).

Our son's friend is a peds respiratory therapist in Orange Couunty [CA]. When she visited in June, she was concerned how few children she was seeing. She was worried that children who had previously been admitted for breathing treatments, etc were being ignored which would lead to bigger problems later.

Our son's co-worker can't get help for gall bladder issues because she has tested negative for covid!!

I remember back in February going to mass, when the priest remarked in his homily on the crush of people shopping for toilet paper. He said he couldn't understand why. I pretty much knew it was because people instinctively anticipated some completely arbitrary government action with unintended consequences, even weeks before governors began to order lockdowns. If there had been a way fo stockpile haircuts, they would have done that, too. People don't get enough credit for being informed consumers.

What we're seeing here, in people crowding ERs because they think a positive COVID test is a death sentence, is a result of media and politicians collaborating to create a panic with daily headlines on recordbreaking, skyrocketing "cases" without mentioning how many positive tests are asymptomatic or just false positives. I would bet they have a much better idea of the actual numbers than they'll let on, while they keep promoting the idea that eating out or going to church will result in mass graves in the public park.

There's going to have to be some major event that breaks the current panic cycle.

The Only COVID Hospitalization Account I've Seen

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 under US law, medical informaion is highly confidential, but my view at this point is that by posting on YouTube, McGowan is making his information public on his own initiative, and there is some real value to having it. Almost no specific information on any individual COVID hospitalization, or indeed any general information on the course of such hospitalizations, is available anywhere. Since COVID left China probably more than a year ago, it's remarkable how little useful information about it has been made public. I suspect there's a certain Mike Rowe part of McGowan's makeup that's urging him to do this.

McGowan in the video linked above exhibited what are reported as symptoms of infection that would in fact warrant a visit to the ER, fever, dry cough, weakness, and confusion. However, even people who are hospitalized with those symptoms are released after a fairly short period -- the case mortality rate is generally about 1% now in the US. As of today, the cumulative case mortality rate in Kern County, CA, where McGowan is hospitalized, is .7 of 1% -- and Kern is considered a major hot spot.

So a big mystery to me is why McGowan seems to have shown little improvement over six weeks in the hospital. His most recent YouTube post indicates he has trouble breathing and is so weak he can't stand up to let the nurses change his bed sheets. He says his blood oxygen is around 90%, which is borderline fatal. But clearly only a very small percentage of COVID patients reach such a dire condition.

I went looking for web references on COVID and blood oxygen and found a study, remarkable in that it exists at all, as well as in what it contains. The study dicusses several cases of patients diagnosed with COVID who have serious comorbidities, including heart disease and multiple organ transplants, who have blood oxygen levels well below 90%, which would normally be fatal, but they're awake and chattering on their cell phones.

The Wall Street Journal considers it a medical mystery as to why “large numbers of Covid-19 patients arrive at hospitals with blood-oxygen levels so low they should be unconscious or on the verge of organ failure. Instead they are awake, talking—not struggling to breathe” (1). Science judges the lack of patient discomfort at extraordinarily low blood-oxygen concentrations as defying basic biology (2). Writing in The New York Times, Dr. Levitan, with 30 years of emergency medicine experience, notes “A vast majority of Covid pneumonia patients I met had remarkably low oxygen saturations at triage—seemingly incompatible with life—but they were using their cellphones . . . they had relatively minimal apparent distress, despite dangerously low oxygen levels” (3). Despite this extensive coverage in the news media, the topic has not been addressed in medical journals.

Yet McGowan, by his account, has COVID, but his blood oxygen is behaving normally. Low blood oxygen is more typically a result of other COPD disease like emphysema. Whether McGowan has also been diagnosed with this he doesn't mention. I wish him the best, no matter what, and I'm sorry he hasn't been posting YouTubes about trains.

But this rasies a bigger question, which the quote carefully and obliquely raises as well: COVID has been around for a year, but the public health community seems to show little curiosity about it, and it in fact pretty much insists that the models are all we need to understand it. This is looking to me more and more like a dereliction.

In fact, with a lifetime's experience of institutional dysfunction behind me, I would say that there are major disincentives to serous COVID research. Even a relatively innocuous study like the one I linked above is likely to raise questions that undermine the public consensus promoted by the Drs Fauci and Birx and the public health establishment. There likely won't be serious grant money, and it could be dangerous to careers. Now and then we see reports of doctors losing their licenses for saying the wrong thing about COVID.

I'm beginning to think this may be a bigger problem than the disease itself.

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.