Dr Fauci Misrepresents

Yesterday on Sunday talk, Dr Fauci said US COVID-19 cases were rising again "because of infectious coronavirus variants, people traveling more, and states easing restrictions too soon."

More than 11 states have eased restrictions, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warning that "now is not the time."

As far as I can tell, an uptick in US cases is due almost entirely to New York. Here's the New York chart:

But here's California:

New York's population is 18 million. California's population is 40 million. California's COVID statistics, with LA County a key factor, have actually been plummeting in recent weeks, as I noted here yesterday. But according to the New York Post,

New York and New Jersey now have the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in the country.

The Empire State has averaged 548 cases for every 100,000 residents over the past 14 days — only surpassed by the Garden State with 647 cases.

Despite vaccination efforts, New York has not seen a dramatic reduction in infections. Daily cases have averaged about 50,000 people per week since mid-February.

And across the Hudson River in New Jersey, the number of new infections has climbed by 37 percent in a little more than a month, to about 23,600 every seven days.

In addition to California's population of 40 million, Texas has a population of 29 million, while Florida's populaiton is 21 million. None of these states has seen the plateau-cum-uptick pattern in recent weeks that we're seeing in New York. But the absolute number of cases in New York weighs against the sharply declining numbers elsewhere to create a misleading "national" total, as we see below:

Looking at the charts yesterday, I saw two basic patterns: a "Mount Everest" pattern, or at lesst a "Mount Washington" pattern, common in most US states with a sharp peak and then a decline to last spring's levels. Then there's a "Canadian" pattern, which we also see in New York-New Jersey, with a peak, a partial decline to a plateau, and then an uptick.

I certainly can't offer an explanation, except to say that the Canadian provinces and the few US states with this pattern are in fact among those with the strictest lockdown and travel quarantine orders in place. Although California's business restrictions are among the strictest, its travel quarantine is less so and basically not enforced. New York is in fact lifting its travel quarantine as of April 1. On Friday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford loosened COVID restrictions there as well.

My guess is that allowing healthy people to circulate and travel boosts immunity. But what I think doesn't matter. What the CDC and others need to do is look at the actual data in individual cases and determine what's working and what isn't. Instead, they're pushing a one-size-fits-all continued national lockdown agenda. Even Doug Ford is starting to see that's not working.

An Aristotelian Looks For Causes

I was surfing the COVID charts yesterday when I ran into the one above on the LA County health department site. The bottom line is that, as of a week ago, the 7-day average county COVID testing positivity rate was 1.60%. But putting this in the context of Gov Newsom's lockdown tiers, if the system were reimposed today with these statistics, the county would not be in the "red" tier, which is only a little less restrictive than the horrible "purple" tier. With a testing positivity rate of less than 2%, it would be in the lowest, "yellow" or "minimal" tier.

As it is, the county is still in the three-week waiting period to move down from the red, "substantial" tier to the orange, "moderate" tier. I assume that once it reaches the orange tier in a week or so, the waiting clock in orange will restart, and we'll have to wait another three weeks to move from orange to yellow, when, however, masks, social distancing, and capacity limits will still be in force. The Newsom scheme, as I've noted, never provided for a "green" tier, where we're back to the old normal, but the tendency indicates we ought to be getting there sooner than anyone realizes.

But as an Aristotelian, I have to ask what the cause is. The easy answer would be vaccinations. The charts I've been uploading here have been showing an Everest-style pattern of "cases", starting a sharp increase last November, peaking in mid to late January, and since then showing an equivalent rapid decline, to the point where the current rate falls within the official "minimal" range. But the fall that began in January was well before widespread vaccinations were made available. But also, here's the official LA County take on when vaccinations are complete, from an e-mail we got yesterday:

If it has been less than 2 weeks since your shot or you still need to get your second dose, you are NOT fully vaccinated.

Only recently has the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine been available, so most people in the county have been on the two-shot regimen. My wife and I, in the over-65 priority group, have so far not received our second shots, since we have to wait four weeks between the two. To be fully vaccinated, we'll have to wait two weeks from the time we get that second shot. So as far as I can see, even if about 10% of the population in the county has had at least one shot, a much smaller number, even now, have been "fully vaccinated".

Yet the testing positivity rate, a key indicator for reopening, has been falling precipitously, even if quite a small proportion of the population is "fully vaccinated" -- and it' been falling precipitously since before many vaccinations were being done. There must be other causes working in combination, and the best that can be said is that not even Dr Fauci actually knows what they are.

But it goes beyond that. A Canadian visitor reports that the situation over much of Canada is actually the opposite of the LA trend. Alberta is in especially bad shape. Here's the data there as of yesterday:

In other words, the situation was very similar to that in California up to March, when things began to reverse again. This simply hasn't been happening in places like Florida and Texas, which have effectively ended mask and other restrictions but have seen a continuing decline in statistics. Is it climate, maybe? But here's the same chart for Alberta's US neighbor to the south, Montana:

Montana, allowing for a smaller and more rural population, nevertheless looks much more like LA County, much less like Alberta. But Alberta has Calgary, a major city with 1.3 million, nothing like Montana. Is that the problem? But Arizona has Phoenix, a city of 1.6 million, and Arizona has also effectively dropped restrictions, while its chart is consistent with LA County and Montana.

The Canadian visitor, as well as Canadian news reports, suggests Canada is doing much more poorly with vaccine distribution, but the LA County statistics suggest vaccine isn't the only cause for its decline in cases and positivity.

The only conclusion I can draw for now is that we actually know much less about COVID than Dr Fauci lets on, and official opinions aren't worth much. Commentators worldwide are suggesting the real emerging crisis is in fact the credibility of governments.

Federal Judge Strikes Down Last US Numerical Cap On Church Attendance

Via The Federalist, I learn that US District Judge Trevor McFadden ordered Washington, DC Mayor Bowser to cease enforcing a 250-person and 25 percent capacity restriction on church attendance. Via the graphic above, which is already out of date, this was the last jurisdiction to have imposed a "maximum x and y percent, whichever is lower" type restriction, which was extremely common as of late last year. This is a continuing indication of how quickly COVID restrictions are being lifted in the US.

The suit was brought by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington. This is another indication that the successful US legal fight against limits on religious observance is being conducted entirely by Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and radical Protestant Evangelicals and Pentecostals. Main Line Protestantism is nowhere to be found, reflective of the trend Frederick Kinsman observed a century ago. It reflects similar developments among Jews. Quasi-Christian cults like Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian Scientists, however fervent their own beliefs, are also not in the picture.

Even the states with percentage limits are slowly liberalizing these limits. Maine and Washington state, as announced in the graphic, moved over the past week to 50% limits. California is in the process of moving by county to 50% limits. However, in light of the 37 states that now have no restrictions on houses of worship, the states that are still "loosening" now are in fact slow-walking the process. But it's a process. It's been forced on the relevant authorities by bottom-up resistance through the courts.

This article from six weeks ago suggests Canada is still far behind the US in relaxing or eliminating restrictions on worship. As of that time, a number of provinces, including British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick, had banned in-person worship entirely, while others had imposed numerical caps in the low double digits. I'll be interested to hear of updates from Canada. The best that can be gathered is that police officials there are polite in breaking up illegal services.

The US situation is evidence that existing COVID controls, where they persist, are being overtaken by events. It appears that vaccination efforts are having an effect on the disease greater than predicted, and the impression I have is that by and large, these are being efficiently conducted. Every indication is that the states that have eliminated controls entirely have not been "reckless" in doing so, as COVID statistics continue to improve.

I've Figured Out Gavin Newsom's Face

A visitor sent me a heads-up to a story on Gavin Newsom that broke in local media yesterday, and it's developing only very slowly this morning. Here's the latest, still from California local media:

Will the “worst-kept secret in Sacramento” blow into public view?

It’s hard to say.

The secret? That Gov. Gavin Newsom was engaged in multiple alleged extra-marital affairs over the course of 2020, a time where many of his orders shuttered nearly all personal and economic activity across the nation’s largest state.

Sources on K Street and within the Capitol complex peppered The Sun with corroborating rumors of infidelity by Newsom during the pandemic year.

One such instance allegedly occurred with a high-ranking official within his own office, K Street sources told The Sun.

The original source the visitor sent me took me back to Newsom's past history. I've got to say I wasn't paying much attention at the time, simply because Newsom was the foreordained choice of the lizard people, there was nothing I could do about it, and I had better uses for my time. But the guy has a history of this kind of thing:

Governor Newsom has established a pattern and practice of engaging in inappropriate sexual relationships with members of his staff. As Mayor of San Francisco in 2007, Newsom was caught having an affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk, his Appointments Secretary. To add to the tawdriness of the affair, the woman was the wife of Newsom’s Campaign Manager, who subsequently quit the campaign.

Newsom survived the scandal by publicly apologizing, assuring voters that he had learned his lessons, and promising that he would get treatment to deal with “problems with alcohol.”

I would guess that, given last year's party without masks, indoors at the French Laundry restaurant, where anyone could see him, the problems with alcohol are still there. And that goes to his face. Most appearances I've seen of Newsom on TV give an affectless expression something like the photo above. And it dawned on me from back in my Animal House days: the governor is normally s**tfaced. (My understanding of that term is that, when one is heavily intoxicated, one loses one's ability to have an animated facial expression. Other etymologies differ.)

But then, other photos show the governor with an extremely animated expression, a little like a wolverine that suddenly finds a wandering baby rabbit, like the one at right: Given the history we're dealing with here, in which the guy is starting to look a little like a cleaned-up Hunter Biden, I would strongly suspect that when the governor has a face like this, he's coked up.

In other words, he's just another politician working day to day under seriously impaired judgment, the tool of his handlers. COVID and the colored safe-economy tiers for California are off the radar for now and, given what seems to be looming on the horizon, they'll be off the radar for some time.

There's No Exit Plan, And It's Probably By Design

The chart above shows the trend in COVID "cases" for California since the start of the pandemic. As I noted yesterday, the authorities' response to this remarkable reversal of the disease has been extremely timid and bureaucratic, with counties moving very slowly from "tier" to "tier", each move giving very minimal relaxation: this month indoor dining at 25% capacity, masks, and social distance; next month (maybe) 50%, masks, and social distance. The most the state plan envisions for many sectors, including restaurants and churches, is under the "yellow" tier at 50% capacity, masks, and social distance.

There's no threshold in the plan for ever leaving yellow. I guess we'll just have to be grateful for the 50% they'll let us have.

By comparison, here's the same data over the same period for Texas. Although the trend in California is even more favorable than Texas, Texas is the one to say "we're done". No masks, no distance, just old-time public decorum. By contrast, at the US national level, brows are furrowing over the need for vaccine passports:

Millions of people are being vaccinated against the coronavirus every day. While that’s undoubtedly good news, this growing share of the population with COVID-19 immunity creates a conundrum for decision makers as they plan a gradual reopening of the country. On one hand, there are costs to asking vaccinated people to endure the isolation of lockdowns when they face little risk from the virus. On the other, lifting restrictions to accommodate them would put unvaccinated people in danger.

Wait a moment. This whole "conundrum" assumes a static situation where uniform lockdown controls are in place. In reality, even in the strictest places like California, people can have a beer, if only outdoors and if only with the number of seats in the bar reduced. Next month, it'll be indoors, and that's for everyone, not just the vaccinated. If the trend continues, as it almost certainly will, more and more people will be vaccinated, the statistics will keep improving, risks for everyone will be reduced (as they're reducng now), and the crisis will be effectively over long before the bureaucrats develop their passport policy and distribute said passports. I used to get in trouble as an undergraduate for asking questions like this in class.

Any attempt to "solve" a passport "problem" will just creaate a new problem and extend the existing one, which is probably what the lizard people who run the planet want.

I'm waiting to see this discussion enter the national debate, but I guess I shouldn't hold my breath. But somebody needs to start asking, for instance, why the statistics are the same for states like Texas and Florida who've said "we're done", vis-a-vis the states that are taking months and months to distinguish relaxation for tasting rooms that don't serve food vs tasting rooms that do, and whether passport holders should get better treatment in them than others.

I think things are moving way too fast for the COVID policymakers.

Overtaken By Events?

Above is the PSA that's still being put out on Facebook this morning by the US Department of Health and Human Services. It may as well be from a year ago -- the message hasn't changed. But in the last couple of months, the big issue for COVID has been vaccines, and the suggestion, which I quoted yesterday from the LA County health department, is that with only 10% of the population vaccinated, the statistics are plummeting. The health department in its latet update says this:

Today, the State released updated numbers; L.A. County's adjusted case rate dropped from 4.1 new cases per 100,000 people to 3.7 new cases per 100,000 people. The test positivity rate dropped from 2.0% to 1.8%. If the County continues to maintain current levels or declines in the case rate and test positivity rate, it is possible in early April for the County to move into the orange tier. The County needs to remain in the red tier for three weeks prior to be assigned to the orange tier.

These tier designations are intricate. For reasons not explained, LA County had to remain below target numbers for only two weeks to move from the most restrictive purple tier to the less restrictive red tier, where it sits now -- except that its numbers have been improving so rapidly that it's eligible for the yet less restrictive orange tier, or would be, except it now needs to wait three weeks to get there, not two.

I got a haircut last week. The barber shops reopened in February, when Newsom relaxed the holiday lockdown. The rules for a haircut are super-intricate. Mask. Procedure for moving elastic ear bands while cutting around ears. Only one customer per chair in the room, no waiting inside. Chair elaborately sanitized between uses. Customer temperature taken at the door. I asked the barber if there was any relaxation between life in the purple tier and life in the red tier. He said no, and probably not in the orange tier, either. But he was careful in his responses not to imply there was anything unnecessary about anything. You can figure out why.

I checked. LA County, although it currently qualifies for the orange tier, must still wait until next month for it to take effect. Here in part is what a "looser" tier still involves:

• Gatherings: Indoor gatherings strongly discouraged, allowed with modifications. No more than three households.
• Limited services: Open with modifications. [I don't know what these are.]
• Outdoor playgrounds and outdoor recreational facilities: Open with modifications.
• Hair salons and barbershops: Open indoors with modifications. [My barber is probably right, no change.]
• All retail: Open indoors with modifications.
• Shopping centers: Closed common areas. Reduced capacity food court.
• Personal care services: Open indoors with modifications.
• Museums, zoos and aquariums: Open indoors with modifications. Indoor activities max 50% capacity.
• Places of worship: Open indoors with modifications. Max 50% capacity.
• Movie theaters: Open indoors with modifications. Max 50% capacity or 200 people, whichever is fewer.
• Hotels and lodging: Open with modifications. Fitness centers can open with 25% capacity.
• Gyms and fitness centers: Open indoors with modifications. Max 25% capacity. This includes climbing walls and indoor pools.
• Restaurants: Open indoors with modifications. Max 50% capacity or 200 people, whichever is fewer.

So the differences in the various "tiers" are largely semantic, but the problem now becomes that whatever the differences, they'll be changing each month. The list above is just a summary -- the protocols for each type of activity are actually thousands of words. And it's still red light-green light. There's a yellow tier after the orange, and it still has lots of detailed controls. So far in California, there's no procedure for taking any county enterely out of the COVID tiers. Any total relaxation will still be off in the indefinite future, with no published plan for how this will take place,

Some states have actually just done away with this, or have effectively begun to bypass it. The effect of vaccinations, combined with herd immunity that the experts have pooh-poohed but seems likely to happen, will likely overtake blue-state lockdown schemes much more quickly than anyone has anticipated. In every case, these controls have been imposed by governors' executive orders. This incudes California. Newsom, facing a recall, needs to sit down with his handlers and figure out how to back himself out of this situation

The question continues to be why, with such huge disparities now among US states in restrictions vs an overall improving statistical outcome, any state maintains restrictions when states like Texas continue to improve without them.

Minnesota Ends Church Capacity Restrictions -- But Maintains The Six Foot Rule

On the heels of Dr Fauci telegraphing that the CDC may soon revise its guidelines over social distancing comes news that Minnesota has dropped all capacity restrictions for houses of worship, while maintaining that same social distancing requirement. As one headline put it, "Dominoes are falling."

"The dominoes are falling in favor of abolishing the states’ limitations on church attendance," Thomas More Society Special Counsel Erick Kaardal said in a statement. "Minnesota has abolished its church attendance limitations. Next, our plan is to similarly abolish all the other states’ remaining limitations on church attendance, which have been occurring nationwide."

The Thomas More Society was involved in a lawsuit that challenged coronavirus-related restrictions on religious services in Minnesota. The state relented last week, ending capacity restrictions while maintaining social distancing requirements.

. . . "State-imposed limits on church attendance are never constitutionally okay," he added. "Governor Walz’s requirements on churches even included criminal penalties for noncompliance with his dictates. What? Were Minnesota courts going to put all the pastors in jail for church attendance during a pandemic?"

Two things strike me about this. The first, and the best news, is that in the US, the system has been working, however slowly, to maintain natural rights protections provided in the Constitution. Governors like Walz, Newsom, and Cuomo who attempt to violate these natural rights are clearly subject to both political and legal remedies. The result has been that in the US, there have been almost no large-scale anti-lockdown demonstrations,, which have become increasingly common in Canada, the UK, and Europe, and absent a vigorous tradition of insistence on natural rights, have been pretty much feckless in those places.

The other thing that strikes me, though, is how pusillanimous the response of the US authorities has been to each reestablishment of natural-rights protection. Minnesota drops any capacity limitations on churches, but it insists on keeping social distancing requirements, no matter the shaky basis on which these have been imposed, and no matter the bleak outlook for their continuance.

A quick web serch shows that safety-sign vendors have many products available now to warn churchgoers of the need to observe the distances. These are, of course, products offered for sale by businesses, and the churches are free to buy them or not. But I assume that if those who sold them thought there wasn't a market, they wouldn't sell these things. Their tone is remarkably forbidding and stentorian. Somebody thinks it's a good idea to frighten churchgoers into martial law style regimentation. Surely someone can come up with a more welcoming, less reproving sign.

I note, in fact, that public health authorities have been very reluctant to surrender any tiny part of their emergency powers. The remarkably rapid improvement of COVID numbers in Los Angeles somehow does not make the health director happy, and relaxations of the regime are micromanaged in incredible detail:

The seven-day average number of daily cases by episode date continues to decrease, and as of March 14 is under 500 new cases per day. . . . While the majority of the L.A. County population has not yet been vaccinated, the increasing rate of vaccination likely is beginning to reduce transmission.

. . . Public Health made additional modifications to the Health Officer Order. The revised Order was issued on March 19, and took effect on March 20, with the following changes:

• Breweries, Wineries and Craft Distilleries that do not provide a meal may open for outdoor service only with certain restrictions, including:

  • All guests must have reservations;

  • Guests are limited to a 90-minute time limit for their visit;

  • Guests must be seated at tables before they place their order, and are not permitted to stand or congregate with others;

  • And hours are limited with service for on-site consumption closing by 8:00 pm.

It doesn't end there, the regulations go on and on -- in a situation where the news is steadily improving and the need for such a regime is steadily disappearing. In California, the decline in COVID numbers is resulting in counties entering looser and looser restriction tiers in a matter of weeks for each phase -- with the result that these ridiculously detailed circumscriptions will likely be moot in a few weeks time.

Still the the bureaucrats push on. But every sign is that we're entering the "morning after" phase of a moral panic. Let's pray for the time to arrive when all these artifacts are simply a historical curiosity.