Obtuseness At The Washington Examiner

While the Washington Examiner isn't quite legacy media, It's more Never Trump Republican, and I don't normally follow it. But yesterday I ran into a remarkably obtuse story on a supposed "new wave" of COVID by David Hogberg. Hogberg, I see, is a regular talking head and adjunct-freelance-whatever with a PhD in PoliSci.

I spend about three hours a day writing and researching this blog, and I don't get paid a penny. I assume Hogberg supports himself with his variouis gigs and has convinced people he's an expert, with his PhD and all. But as a retired amateur, I'm a far better writer and researcher than Hogberg. Here's what he has to say about the current state of COVID play:

The bad news is that the United States appears to be on the cusp of another wave of coronavirus infections. The good news is that hospitalizations and deaths may be much lower this time around.

Daily confirmed cases had been dropping since January, when they reached a seven-day average of almost 260,000. By March 22, that had dropped to just over 54,300. Now, the seven-day average stands at 66,000, an increase of 21% in a little over a week.

While cases may continue to rise, it is not likely to result in the same number of hospitalizations and deaths as experienced in previous waves.

“I agree that the number of hospitalizations and deaths proportionate to the number of cases will be less for this wave because the demographics of the people getting sick will be different,” said Dr. Manoj Jain, an infectious disease physician at the Rollins School of Public Health.

. . . On Wednesday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky warned that the United Kingdom variant, known as B.1.1.7, is becoming the predominant strain in the U.S. Thus far, 11,569 cases of the U.K. variant have been confirmed in the U.S., although that number is certainly low as the genetic tracing needed to identify variants is not widespread in the U.S. The U.K. variant is 40% to 70% more transmissible than the original virus, according to Imperial College London.

Really? He's citing drama queen Dr Rochelle Walensky and Imperial College, the authors of the famous model that projected millions of dead within months in 2020? In the course of part-time research for this blog, I've discovered that the CDC itself says that as far as they can determine, the vaccines are effective against all the variants, and in the LA County health department's experience, the vaccines "provide significant protection against transmission even in very high-risk settings".

But, apparently paid by the word, he blathers on with on-one-hand-on-the-other without recognizing that there are successful COVID strategies outside the northeastern US. He leaves out the case of Texas, for instance.

Nearly a month after Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX), announced he was lifting the state’s mask mandate, new daily cases in the Lone Star State continue on a downward trend, once again beating “expert” predictions of dire consequences.

When Abbott announced the end to the mask mandate, Texas’ 7-day average for new cases was at 7,259 — it’s now roughly half that. Daily cases have also declined by about half since the mask mandate was lifted. Deaths also continue to drop.

Writer Drew Holden pointed out the statistics on Twitter, noting that “when you look at mainstream media coverage about how Texas’s decision was going to be a disaster, for some reason nearly all the stories are from the first week of March, and there haven’t been really any since mid-March, before the predictions came due.”

In other words, we have a very clear situation where doing nothing was actually more effective than the policies advocated by the CDC. And this leaves out the question of why the vaccine regimens employed by the northeastern states aren't working, when California has employed a successful strategy with the same vaccines. What's different? In a few hours a day over the past week, I've found a productive line of research that's utterly eluded the beltway types.

All this is somehow eluding poor Hogberg as well. Hs Facebook profile says that while he's single, he lives in Washington, so I assume he's got at least rent and a BMW payment. If he stepped outside the one-one-hand-on-the-other mold, he might not be able to make them.

So, What Is California Doing Right?

My own takeaway from yesterday's post is that, faced with a COVID surge as bad as has taken place anywhere, California somehow turned things around in a way that few other jurisdictions have. The question of why has been pestering me for some time. I was originally gonig to post on some Canadian craziness that a visitor sent me, but I found a discussion in an LA County health department press release we received in an e-mail that goes some distance to help me understand what's happened here.

One direction my thinking had been taking was that, indeed, California vaccination policy had been aimed from the start at vaccinating the most vulnerable populations, where the outbreaks were most severe. My original sense was that this was just politcal correctness, but on reflection, while it was politically correct, it was also just good project strategy: fix the problem where it's both easiest and most visible. The press release indicates that this was in fact what the county did:

Public Health is tracking outbreaks where many people have been vaccinated at healthcare settings, skilled nursing facilities, and other long-term care and residential settings. When the surge began in late October and early November, outbreaks at long-term care facilities, skyrocketed 1,300% from 13 outbreaks the week of October 25 to 189 outbreaks the week of December 6. Skilled nursing facilities experienced a 234% increase in outbreaks during the surge, from 26 outbreaks the week of October 25 to 87 outbreaks the week of December 6 outbreaks. Healthcare settings also saw more outbreaks during the surge, from 13 outbreaks in late October to 31 outbreaks in early December.

When the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were approved for emergency use in mid-December, the County prioritized staff and residents at long-term care facilities and frontline healthcare workers as the first to receive the vaccine. Once Public Health began administering the vaccine, outbreaks at these settings plummeted, with outbreaks at long-term care and residential settings dropping from 189 outbreaks in early December to just 7 outbreaks in mid-February. Outbreaks at skilled nursing facilities also dropped significantly, from 87 outbreaks in early December to only 10 outbreaks in mid-February. Outbreaks at health care facilities dropped from 31 in early December to 1 by mid-February.

This data provides a real-life example of the power of the current vaccines; while outbreaks do decrease with less community transmission, the magnitude of these declines most likely indicates that vaccines provide significant protection against transmission even in very high-risk settings.

Just looking at the curve in the chart I posted yesterday, we see that LA County's reversal began in mid-January. The health department account above shows they had data that supported the impression given in news accounts, that the outbreaks were worst in elder and long-term care facilities. There would have been a combination of people with compromised immune systems in close quarters, with care staff in a position where they would transmit infections, whether they themselves had symptoms or not.

These populations were a very large percentage of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, and in fact, they were the 500-pound gorilla that drove the statistics.. If you attack a problem like this first, you change the statistics very quickly. In a normal project management world, this is called "going after the low-hanging fruit". (I would be criticized by bosses for doing this when I worked for a living. They'd say, "This just looks like you're fixing the problem, but you aren't. You're just going after the low-hanging fruit.")

Up to today, I'd been thinking that the peak of the COVID curve in mid-January was the result of factors other than the vaccine, but here, LA County has been saying for the past couple of days that in the real world, the vaccine has been extremely effective, and giving even small amounts of it to the most vulnerable population in mid-December had a dramatic effect within weeks. This is simply one more example of a fairly well-known project management strategy and an indication that if professionals know what the low-hanging fruit is, things can change quickly.

This is borne out by the current map of California counties by color-coded COVID tier (click on the image for a larger copy). What is remarkable is that counties like Los Angeles and Alameda, which includes Oakland, that had been among the worst-hit thoroughout 2020, have reversed course and are now in the less restrictive "orange" tier. The vaccination map shows the most effort took place in LA County, but vaccination has clearly improved the situation in both the south and the counties around San Francisco Bay.

This anwers my question of what California did right. I'm still wondering what New York, Canada, Germany, and other places are doing wrong, if it's so clearly possible to get things right. But this leaves out a separate question of why some jurisdictions like Sweden and Florida weren't hit as hard throughout the pandemic, and I'm still working on that one.

Los Angeles County News

As of this week, LA County has qualified to leave the California "red" tier of COVID restrictions, and as of Monday, April 5, it will be placed in the less restrictive "orange" tier. From the time Gov Newsom imposed the multi-colored COVID tiers last August 28, LA County had been in the most restrictive "purple" tier. Its performance during the late 2020 surge had been a virtual Mt Everest on the chart, as shown above. But for reasons that aren't completely clear, the county's numbers began a precipitous drop in mid-January 2021 and, contravening trends in places like Germany, Canada, and the US northeast, have continued to plummet.

The county left the "purple" tier, where it had been for over seven months, just on March 14, when it was placed in the "red" tier. However, it has blown through the "red" tier in the minimum time it was required to wait there, three weeks, and yesterday the state declared that it qualifies for the "orange" tier. The "red" tier allowed most indoor functions like restaurants and churches to operate at 25% capacity with masks and social distancing. The "orange" tier extends this to 50%, again with masks and social distancing.

However, these restrictions continue to be among the most severe in the US. In New York, outside New York City, restaurants may operate at 75% capacity; inside the city, 35%. But in New York, these restrictions are producing nothing like California's, or LA County's results, as shown at right. Instead of riding a snowboard down the slopes of Mt Everest, like California, New York seems to be climbing a new Mont Blanc. And New York has vaccinated 15% of its population, while California has vaccinated about 20%. It's difficult to reconcile the very different outcomes from the data we have.

A working theory I have is that California began to develop conditions of herd immunity at some point just prior to the introduction of vaccines, and the vaccines simply accelerated the improvement -- but of course, I'm an English major, not an epidemiologist. And this simply doesn't explain New York's performance even with the vaccine.

Even more puzzling is an LA county health department press release from yesterday:

In a study released yesterday of about 4,000 health-care personnel, police, firefighters and other essential workers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the vaccines reduced the risk of infection, both asymptomatic and symptomatic infection by 80% after one dose, and that protection increased to 90% following the second dose. Different from the clinical trials, which are tightly controlled, and showed that the vaccines are highly effective preventing hospitalizations and deaths, this study shows just how effective the vaccines are in preventing infections in real-life conditions. The findings of this study are significant and provide evidence that the vaccines can both reduce transmission and save lives.

Looking at California's results alone, I'd simply say hooray. But if so many people are also being vaccinated in New York and the rest of the northeast, why are their results not consistent?

And beyond that, why have states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona either explicitly or de facto relaxed all restrictions and with, at best, a vaccination rate equivalent to New York, achieved so much better results?

I think the data basically suggests that California could easily relax restrictions much mote quickly than it's doing now, but at least the restrictions, still among the most restrictive in the US, are being relaxed. And so far, the weepy appeals of Dr Walensky. and the woozy appeals of Joe Biden, for states to pause their loosening, haven't had an effect. Pray this continues.

"I'm Ready For My Close-Up, Mr DeMille!"

In a bizarre and weepy statement to the media yesterday, Dr Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, departed from her prepared statement and, close to tears, said

I'm going to lose the script, and I'm going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to so much promise and potential of where we are, and so much reason for hope. But right now I'm scared.

The first reaction I had was that leaders don't break into panic in prepared public remarks. Instead, leaders, even when things look bleak, outline a positive course of action. Think we shall fight on the beaches. But in fact, she's outlining no course of action at all, and indeed no serious understanding of the particular problem. And of course, if she thinks a spike in COVID "cases" is "impending doom", what word does she use for ebola or bubonic plague? I'll get to the over-the-top below.

Like Dr Fauci yesterday, she looks at a national total of cases without asking what the total reflects. In many highly populous states, most of which are the ones that eliminated controls, COVID cases are continuing to decline. The increases are taking place almost entirely in the northeastern US, led by New York-New Jersey. If I were CDC Director, or indeed if I were the president, I'd be asking my staff to give me serious answers for why there's such a difference in outcome between, say, Texas and New York.

The next question, which nobody pushing this current narrative brings up, is what effect vaccination is having. Just to be sure the curve wasn't suddenly turning around here, I visited the LA County health department site, and cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are continuing to decline here. Vaccination must be an important part of the trend, though as I've been saying, the sharp decline began right after the holidays and before the vaccine was distributed.

So something good is happening in California. Exactly what is it? Dr Fauci says in recent remarks, with which I assume Dr Walensky concurs, that factors in the northeastern US spike include travel, COVID variants, and states withdrawing their COVID restrictions. Are the COVID variants more severe in the northeast? According to the CDC, the vaccines should work against these as well as the common type:

Researchers are monitoring new COVID variants closely. This includes research to see whether new variants may change the protective effects of the current vaccines. So far studies suggest that antibodies gathered through vaccination with the current authorized vaccines do recognize new variants. (source – CDC) (2.8.20) Mar 15, 2021

So if authorities simply proceed with vaccinations, shouldn't this curb the "impending doom"? Neither Dr Fauci nor Dr Walensky will say. But all I can think is that Dr Walensky referred to trends in the northeast over the past several weeks, which smply aren't reflected in the continuing dramatic improvement in California, where every indication is that the population is enthusiastically getting the shots, and the authorities are capably making them available. At minimum, shoudn't her public remarks have stressed the need for people to get vaccinated? But they didn't.

In fact, I take the subtext of Dr Walensky's panic to mean that masks and social distancing aren't working. She's clearly blaming the plebs and certain unnamed reprobate governors for backsliding on the program -- except that the states that see continuing improvement are, with few exceptions, the ones that have eliminated said program, while the ones facing impending doom are precisely the ones retaining it and urging it on the plebs the more forcefully.

I think this is the source of the panic, and it's plain that there's an agenda afoot. Following Dr Walensky's peformance, President Biden went before the cameras to try to say the same things, more or less:

Joe Biden delivered remarks today in which he begged Americans to continue wearing masks. Most are; compliance is above 90% and has been for a long time.

. . . As Biden was walking away from the podium, a member of the lapdog media helpfully asked him if he wanted states that are reopening their economies to pause.

Biden paused from putting a mask on his blank face, turned, and answered “Yes.”

It's worth pointing out that dire predictions from Dr Fauci and others of post-holiday surges haven't been reliable. The early 2021 improvemeent in statistics in places like California began within ten days or so of the New Year holiday, when one would have expected the next big surge. Subsequent predictions of surges after King's Birthday, Super Sunday, and President's Day didn't take place. The current prophecies of impending doom anticipate Easter brunches, it would appear. Do not go to brunch next Sunday, people!

The panic is because the narrative is collapsing. A contributing factor is that Dr Walensky is feeling upstaged by her subordinate Fauci. But as I've said, we seem to be entering the "morning after" phase of a moral panic, and I think it will keep playing itself out. This won't end well for the moral entrepreneurs like Fauci and Walensky.

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.