The 2020 Moral Panic Was Stoked By Both COVID And George Floyd

I started following the Derek Chauvin trial without much interest or enthusiasm, but as I've heard from different bloggers and YouTube commentators, it's becoming clear that as details of Floyd's death in police custody come out in the courtroom environment, there's a great deal more to the story than the media presented ten months ago. And that brought to mind the recognition that last year's dumpster fire was driven both by COVID and l'affaire Floyd, and that in turn reminded me that the Floyd riots, stoked by media coverage, were an alliance of elite radicals and the Lumpenproletariat, a peculair mix.

I would normally look to someone like Alan Dershowitz for commentary, but although I assume he's following the trial daily, he hasn't been commenting on it regularly. His take as of last week is below:

As of then, he's mildly in favor of the defense strategy as it related to Floyd's girlfriend, who testified on Floyd's addiction, but he acknowledged that he didn't have a lot of information at that point. In the trial days this week,though, the defense strategy is becoming more plain: in cross-exmination, the defense is establishing, via prosecution witnesses, that Chauvin's actions that may or may not have resulted in Floyd's death were nevertheless within the scope of Minneapolis PD's use of force policy -- something which those witnesses were repeatedly forced to acknowledge in front of the jury.

Here's a summation from a blogger covering the trial who's a criminal defense attorney:

Today begins the 9th day of the prosecution in the Chauvin trial presenting their case-in-chief to the jury, and from the perspective of this small-town lawyer things don’t appear to have been going well for the state so far.

Indeed, things appear to be degenerating for the state, and badly.

. . . Unfortunately for the state, many of its own witnesses, especially its use-of-force and medical witnesses, whether existing MPD trainers or well-paid expert witnesses from out of town, have testified in ways that substantively undercut that narrative of the state.

So far in the state’s case we’ve heard the state’s own witnesses and experts testify that Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s back and shoulder blades, not his neck. We’ve heard them testify that not only was Chauvin’s force not excessive, he would have been privileged to use more force and declined to do so—a choice they characterized as de-escalation. We’ve seen photographs from MPD training materials showing officers being trained to place their knees on suspects in exactly the manner Chauvin had placed his knee on Floyd.None of that can be said to buttress the state’s still vague and ambiguous narrative of guilt.

. . . And the apparent trend to my eye is that the more the state talks about facts, the more their narrative of guilt begins to closely resemble the defense narrative of innocence.

It's starting to look as though, just like with the COVID narrative, the received version of George Floyd, a scandal driven by systemic racism in police departments everywhere, reflected in an in-custody death of a petty criminal, is breaking down.

This may be why Dershowitz has had little to say about this week's trial developments. From my point of view, things have gotten much more interesting.

Michigan Takes New Lead In Cases; Narrative Continues To Collapse

One thing I'm seeing in this phase of the pandemic is that, although California continues to have unnecessary COVID restrictions, its vaccination policy has been extremely effective. It turned the troubling late 2020 case surge completely around, to the point that LA County statistics are now equivalent to those of a year ago March, at the start of the pandemic.

The changes come amid a 97% drop in the number of new coronavirus cases reported each day. The seven-day average of new cases is now slightly under 400 per day, compared to 14,200 daily new cases on Jan. 5, county public health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a news briefing.

“This is similar to daily case numbers reported one year ago at the end of March, at the very beginning of the pandemic,” she said.

This reflects a statewide policy of aggressively vaccinating the populations most likely to be infected, including those in long term care facilities, their staff, and zip codes with the lowest incomes. Although this has the politically correct name of "health equity", it simply translates into "solving the problem". California, like all other states, doesn't get all the vaccine it wants. But it uses what it gets very effectively.

Michigan, as I noted Monday, continues to be caught in a surge that's increasingly unique among US states, and with New York again declining, it's taken the national lead in new cases.

The CDC said that Michigan is leading the country in new cases of COVID-19 per population.

On Tuesday, officials reported 5,177 new COVID cases and 48 additional deaths, including 20 from a Vital Records review. On Monday, the state reported 660,771 total cases and 16,034 deaths.

Gov Whitmer has variouisly blamed it on people going to Florida for spring break, new strains of the virus, and the usual suspects, people not wearing masks or social distancing. But the evidence from a full year of pandemic has been that masks and social distancing, with over 90% compliance everywhere, did nothing to avert surges. And even Drs Fauci and Osterholm acknowlege that the vaccines are effective against new strains of the virus.

In fact, Dr Fauci of all people seems to be acknowledging that the received narrative isn't explaining the current picture:

More than a month has passed since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shocked the Faucis of the world by scrapping COVID-inspired restrictions on businesses and individuals, including removing the mask mandate. The decisions prompted Dr. Anthony Fauci and legions of public health "experts" to warn about the devastating consequences - thousands of unnecessary deaths would result, they said - however, as the data show, practically every metric has shown that the Lone Star State's outbreak has continued to recede, even as blue states like Michigan are seeing a new surge in infections (believed to be driven by "mutant" strains).

. . . As experts have struggled to come up with a satisfying answer, Dr. Fauci was asked about the phenomenon during an interview on MSNBC Tuesday morning as the senior advisor to President Biden made the rounds. As MSNBC noted, "if you go to Texas...it looks like 2019... the restaurants are full...the ballparks are full..." and yet, cases have continued to tick downward.

Dr. Fauci seemed dumbfounded. He first suggested that the surge in cases simply hadn't manifested yet because of a "lag". That might have made sense if the trend had only been in place for a week or two. But a month has passed, and Texas' positivity rate - the share of new tests that yield positive results, seen as a more accurate representation of community spread - has continued to fall.

It's notable that these questions are now comng on legacy media outlets, not the fringe right. But it appears that Dr Fauci is already getting off the reservation:

Dr. Fauci has already rejected the CDC Director Walensky's "impending doom" rhetoric, and on Tuesday, he told CNBC that "as long as we keep vaccinating people efficiently and effectively, I don't think [a fourth wave] is gonna happen."

Well, if he could get away with shooting zingers at the US president, he can certainly get away with saying his boss at the CDC is all wrong. Dr Walensky already knew this when she did her little "I'm scared" drama routine last week -- that was her problem. But Fauci himself seems to be recognizing there are now limits. Things are changing daily, and the political establishment isn't keeping up.

The COVID Grifters Won't Quit

A week ago yesterday, Dr Rochelle Walensky, the CDC chief, made her teary prophecy of "impending doom" from a new wave of COVID. Almost on cue, as shown above, the New York statistics, which had been leading so-called national totals, peaked and appear to have resumed a decline.

There's nothing new about this. The Imperial College model in March of last year predicted that,

by October [2020], more than 500,000 people in Great Britain and 2 million people in the U.S. would die as a result of COVID-19.

The model also predicted the United States could incur up to 1 million deaths even with “enhanced social distancing” guidelines, including “shielding the elderly.” Imperial’s modeling results influenced British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose a nationwide lockdown and influenced the White House as well.

I don't mean to minimize the effects of the pandemic. On the other hand, at this point, we can be confident that COVID is neither the Black Death nor ebola, and the continued projections of disaster we hear from the same moral entrepreneurs at the top of the public health establishment are damaging its hard-won prestige and undermining its ability to control future disease.

Just yesterday, in researching that post, I ran across a new public health grifter who seems to have gained credibility by hitchhiking on Dr Walensky's efforts to spread panic, Dr Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. He went on this past Sunday's talks to spread the bad news:

A leading epidemiologist from the University of Minnesota says he believes the United States is in a fourth wave of a COVID-19 surge.

Dr. Michael Osterholm appeared on FOX News Sunday, where he said the spike in cases right now is due to the coronavirus variant first found in the U.K. — B.1.1.7. — which is now spreading here. It’s much more contagious and can be more serious.%;">

. . . “We are the only country in the world right now experiencing this increasing number of cases due to this variant, and at the same time opening up, not closing down. And the two basically are going to collide,” Osterholm said.

He says the good news is the vaccines in the U.S. protect against the variant B117.

As I noted yesterday with the remarks he made on an upper-midwest COVID spike that simply isn't taking place, the guy isn't in touch with the facts. The UK, home of the terrible UK variant, is actually reopening, despite his claim that the US is the only place that is. But Osterholm's record goes beyond this -- the UK variant has been his hobby horse for a while. On February 4, more than two months ago, he said on CNN

Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm compared a UK coronavirus variant to a “Category 5 hurricane” churning off the coast, saying some strains could cause a “major surge” in new cases in the US.

A mutation that could allow Covid-19 to escape antibody protection has now been found in samples of a rapidly spreading strain in the UK, according to a report. Experts say it's too early to predict whether this development will impact the trajectory of Covid-19 around the world.

“I think amongst my colleagues, they would agree that this variant from the United Kingdom, which is now beginning to circulate much more widely in the United States, poses a huge challenge to us. And that in just a few weeks, we could be seeing case numbers increase very dramatically,” Osterholm said on CNN’s “New Day.”

But "a few weeks" after his February prediction of an impending category-5 hurricane, nothing of the sort took place. In fact, with several states loosening or eliminating restrictions since then, from California to Florida, cases in those and neighboring states have oontinued to decline.

I'm not sure what the payoff is for any of these figures, Walensky, Fauci, Osterholm, or Birx. Birx in fact ended her career, forced to retire after it surfaced that she'd traveled to a vacation home to celebrate Thanksgiving with extended family after telling the plebs not to do this. Fauci, Walensky, and Osterholm have probably peaked in income, all likely making well into six figures with perks, benefits, and honoraria without the appearances on the talks, and given their age and demonstrated incompetence, they probably won't advance in the future, even if people will say nice things about them at their retirement dinners.

So why keep spreading panic instead of telling people it's time to get the shot and go back to life? My guess is it's narcissism, fed by the media, which explots them for clickbait.

Why Is Michigan Such An Outlier?

I'm continuing to look at the COVID trends for individual US states, because it's plain that the claims of people like Drs Fauci and Walensky that there is a "national" surge in cases are highly misleading. Any national increase is actually driven by a minority of states whose patterns don't reflect those of most others. Michigan's case, shown above, is a good example. CNN reports

Michigan reported 8,413 new Covid-19 cases on Saturday, bringing the state's total pandemic case count to 692,206, according to the state's health department.

Saturday's daily case count is the highest the state has reported since December 7, when the reported case count was 9,350, state statistics show.

Just eight weeks ago, state data showed the daily reported case count was as low as 563 cases.

Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, said the Upper Midwest is beginning to see its fourth surge.

But Dr Osterholm doesn't seem to be looking very carefully at the statistics. Here's the performance of Michigan's neighbor to the south, Ohio;

And here's its neighbor to the west, Wisconsin:

Both states reflect what I'm finding is actually the most common pattern among US states, a surge in late 2020, followed by a turnaround in mid-January of this year and a fairly rapid descent to moderate or minimal levels, with no significaant upticks since. California is the best example, but the performance of many other states, Nevada, Arizona, Montana, the Dakotas, and Iowa is very similar. Michigan is in fact the big exception in the upper midwest.

The LA County health department's account of its experience, which I discussed last week, suggests that even with the small initial quantities of the vaccine that were available last December, targeting their distribution to the most critical areas -- elder and long-term care facilities and their staff -- produced dramatic results within weeks. California also incentivized distribution to zip codes where the outbreak was worst, which again has produced remarkable results in places like LA County, where daily statistics are actually in the state's "minimal" range.

The LA County health department' experience has also been that the vaccines are highly effective, so that even when quantities are limited, distribution to places that produce the most statistical bang for the buck brings a very favorable outcome.

So it puzzles me that COVID hucksters like Dr Osterholm in Minnesota seem to claim there's a new surge, when in fact efficient use of the existing vaccine supplies produces very positive results.

I would even question whether political or health authorities in places like Michigan are possibly slow-walking measures that have proven extremely effective in many other areas. It's also puzzling that I've seen no mention of the acutal US state p[atterns in any media.

UPDATE: It looks like Dr Osterholm has becme the next Dr Walensky.

Fooled Ya!

I must confess that, with a surname like Bruce, I have some Scots DNA, though it comes from a single great-grandfather who seems to have been an unpleasant guy who died young. Generally I don't take to that side of the family. But I once knew a Scots-Canadian professor who was extremely fond of a story about a Scotsman who would persuade himself to eat his oatmeal by promising himself that if he did, he could have shot of whiskey when he finished it. But once he finished the oatmeal, he'd tell himself, "Ha! I fooled ya!"

He told this story so frequently, and with such loving attention to detail and accent, that I was convinced it reflected some deep part of his character, maybe Scots, maybe Canadian, maybe both.

Anyhow, a Canadian visitor sent me a link to the Archdiocese of Vancouver, BC website that seems to reflect this side of what may be the Canadian character:

As of March 29, all indoor worship has been suspended again.

B.C. health officials had introduced a one-time variance on health restrictions to allow limited indoor gatherings for religious holidays between March 28 and May 13, but they have since withdrawn that variance.

With the short notice and a flurry of communication, it can be confusing to discern exactly what is happening.

However, the provimcoal authorites have graciously permitted the following, notwithstanding:

A variance introduced March 23 allows for outdoor religious services to be held with 50 cars and their passengers and another 50 people. Those in cars must remain in them during the whole Mass.

This is a continuing problem with the whole red light-green light system of pandemic management. The short notice and confusing communication that the archdiocese noted contribute to it and enable it.

The US has been much more successful in pushing back at this sort of thing.

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.