Home » Open thread 12/7/21

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Open thread 12/7/21 — 26 Comments

  1. Tuesday covid report. Nationally, not much has changed. Still in the second smaller wave of delta cases. I’m not sure when the omicron cases will start having an influence without large scale testing using PCR as with previous versions. Serious cases still creeping up; now at 0.086% from 0.080 last week.

    State level: One thing I’ve noticed is that national reporting tends to lump multiple days of data from the states together., which is why for state data I switched to their own sites way back in May 2020. Case in point, nationally CT was reported to have over 5k cases in one day, but a look at the state site shows that this 3 days of cases from Fri-Sun. Illinois, NY, Michigan seem to lead with cases with the above caveat.

    NH hasn’t reported since Dec 2. CT cases continue to climb; now at same level as 8 months ago, but deaths averaging 5/day and not increasing. NC cases showing a bit of an uptick, but deaths at 10/day down from 12 last week. Again Florida and Georgia have reached their exponential low plateau with GA at about 550/day(0.00005/person population adjusted) and FL at 1500/day(0.00007/person). GA deaths now tied at their previous lowest point of about 7/day. Colorado cases have shown a drop over the past week; deaths maybe plateauing, but still at half of their highest level at 35/day.

    Guess I’m waiting for omicron to make its impact on cases. We’ve already had a preview of political reaction from the idiots in NY.

  2. Related:
    “Lawyer for dying COVID patient who recovered after court-ordered Ivermectin urges new thinking.
    “‘There are obviously remedies that we’re not looking at,’ attorney Kristin Erickson says. “And we need to think outside of the current standard of care.”
    https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/lawyer-dying-covid-patient-who-recovered-after-court-ordered-ivermectin

    A well-meaning but deluded lawyer who seems to believe that actually saving lives is what underpins “Biden”‘s (and “his” Covid Czar, Fauci’s) Covid policy.
    Key grafs:
    ‘…Erickson represented 71-year-old Sun Ng of Naperville, Ill., who was on a ventilator for weeks and dying with COVID-19 when his lawyer won a court order Nov. 8 to force the hospital to treat him with ivermectin, an anti-parasitic and anti-inflammatory drug long used widely in the United States to treat disease like Lupus.
    ‘Within days. Ng recovered and is now back home walking and enjoying life, Erickson said.
    ‘”After one day, he was able to do a breathing test he couldn’t do for 22 days,” she said in an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “After three days, he was off the vent for two hours. And then by the fifth day, he was off it entirely. So the hospital tried to file for, you know, a physician report, after he was off the vent, saying that ivermectin is not the reason he’s better. But clearly it is.”

  3. It is my belief that “actually saving lives” is down the list a ways for the FDA, behind, at least, making more money for favored drug companies.

  4. physicsguy,

    Thanks for the effort. Just curious what, if any, useful information can be discerned from data that is so badly flawed. Given that there doesn’t seem to be any standard for why a test is administered or how many or how often, time period comparisons are inherently apples to oranges. And that’s without getting into the problem of serious reporting corruption by hospitals.

    Is anyone aware of any discussion by the medical community to address the glaring problem of having no worthwhile definition of “case”? (or “hospitalization” or “death”?) Don’t they understand that without a standard the numbers are basically worthless? Everyone throws around lots of numbers, but they don’t have standards by which we can discern any meaning.

    One example — does a case mean someone is sick? No. Doesn’t mean any symptoms at all. Are there millions of people who likely have been exposed and might test positive if they were tested? Yes. So, the number of cases reported tell us nothing about the number of sick people and nothing about the course of the virus.

  5. An interesting article about what’s going on in S.Africa.

    https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/the-end-of-the-apartheid-alibi

    For whatever reason, black Africans are oft times lumped (by Western whites) into one category – African blacks – despite the fact there are hundreds of different (black) ethnic groups there that have their own culture and language.

    The same is done with “Latinos,” as if all of Central and S. America was one giant, homogeneous country, as opposed to the many different cultures there.
    True, they mostly all speak Spanish (excepting Brazil and a few other smaller nations), but that does not mean they do not define themselves as say, Colombian, Argentine, Chilean, Mexican, etc.

  6. Stan, “ So, the number of cases reported tell us nothing about the number of sick people and nothing about the course of the virus.”. 100% yes and true from the beginning. Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR, has said so many times, it’s an existence test for bits of viruses but tells you nothing about quantity or sickness.

  7. Just another open-thread comment about something I read.

    I don’t know what to think of this, but it sounds like it might be important:

    “With Shanghai’s launch of a data exchange, Chinese companies are starting to join government-backed platforms that aim to create open marketplaces for data. The Shanghai Data Exchange, which was established in 2017, opened for business on Nov. 25. It joins over a dozen other similar exchanges, but appears to be the first with significant amounts of non-state data on offer.”

    (https://tinyurl.com/4cczc7rs)

  8. @Cornflour:

    I think what’s up with the Data Exchange is that it’s going to be regulated and lots of government oversight (and of course tapping in at will). The CCP has the wit to grasp that either it rules or the Tech Oligarchy rules. There’s no Half Pregnant in the Game of Thrones.

    Before the usual peanut gallery jumps in calling me a China Shill… this is a simple Who Whom / Who is to Rule / Schmittian Sovereign is He Who Makes the Exception business. Feelz don’t enter into.

    In the West outside the EU(*), no Government can really decide what data about whom FB or Amazon sells to each other or anybody else. There might be some theoretical legal framework, but I think we’ve all seen just what Laws mean in the Technocratic Age.

    * Know almost nothing about the EU’s GDPR and would imagine that it’s too onerous for smaller businesses and probably a lot of regulatory capture involved in its drafting, but grudgingly have to admit that it sounds like not entirely a Bad Thing.

  9. Stan and Paul,

    I sadly reached a similar conclusion last summer. Like physicsguy I crunched the data in a few areas of concern (where my loved ones live) and did daily graphs starting in March. This site was a big help in cross verification. Others were seeing what I was seeing; the virus was nowhere near as deadly as WHO and CDC predicted and it was usually not fatal to healthy folks under age 65, or so.

    Through this site and other sources, I was reading about wanton misattribution of “death by COVID” muddying the stats as well as false positives, false negatives, asymptomatic cases and PCR tests with so many cycles almost any pathogen would eventually show up. It seemed likely the data pool was too darned polluted to warrant continued analysis and graphing.

    Most importantly was what I was seeing with my own eyes. If the pandemic was as contagious and deadly as many officials were still claiming I would have seen it in my own life by last autumn. I knew personally of a few deaths of very elderly folks and I knew of a lot of folks who had caught the disease and recovered, including myself and an Aunt in her ’80s who was not exactly a triathlete prior to infection. I personally knew of no one under the age of 50 who was impacted beyond mild symptoms. I had heard of a few hospitalizations of folks in their ’40s, but those were “friend of friend” stories; there very well could have been co-morbidities involved.

    And I know folks who wore masks and washed their hands and caught COVID (me), folks who were vaccinated and caught COVID, folks who were vaccinated, caught COVID and suffered nerve damage, folks who were vaccinated and now have tinnitus. I don’t know of anyone who suspects catching COVID from a child… I think most Americans are like me. We have nearly two years of personal data and a lot of what officialdom is stating and promoting does not correlate with that evidence.

  10. Griffin,

    Yesterday I heard Jordan Peterson state something about Darwinism in conjunction with Economics that really resonated with me. It was such a unique thought that I mulled it around and twisted it into something more that he may or may not agree with, but I do think it is consistent with his original statement. Here’s what I came up with:

    4 billion years ago when life began on this planet Nature had a problem. The Earth had been through drastic change in its nascent development and it was going to continue going through tremendous upheaval as it matured from infant planet through planet puberty and adolescence. All kinds of things could and would happen; ice ages, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, asteroid strikes, floods, droughts, hurricanes, typhoons… How to ensure life survives?

    What approach did nature take?

    High volume of differing experiments assuming a high propensity of failure.
    Don’t assume you can accurately predict the future and engineer perfectly for it.
    Build a system that keeps throwing mutations out there knowing that 90+% will fail.

    And it worked. 99.999% of species that have ever lived on planet Earth are long gone, but the species here today and well adapted for conditions as they are today. And as conditions change that continual, random, chaotic process of high volume, non-planned production will ensure future species are well adapted for what comes next.

    You’ve probably guessed where this is going.

    What’s the economy going to need next week, next month, 100 years from now? Well, we can get some big brains together in a room and try to guess, or we can make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to produce as many options as possible.

    What’s the climate going to be in 10 years, 100 years? Will greenhouse gases cause a temperature rise? Will an asteroid impact or volcanic eruption block out solar radiation? Will we continue on our continued climb out of the last ice age, or have we already hit the peak and are we heading toward the next? Well, we can get some big brains together in a room and try to guess, or we can make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to produce as many clever innovations as possible so we have whatever is needed to meet whatever climate change comes.

    In other words, the amazing success of life on Earth, and, in the past 150,000 years or so, human life on Earth, shows that independent freedom and continual innovation are the best methods to ensure life and human life thrive in the future. If we had asked Caesar or Pharoah or the Ming Emperor or Plato or Aristotle or Confuscius or Einstein or Henry Ford or Frank Lloyd Wright or Steve Jobs or Marilyn Vos Savant to design the optimal foods, products, shelters, transportation devices, stores, restaurants… they would have been wildly wrong on many important aspects of living on planet Earth in December, 2021. But we are thriving because we don’t predict, design, build and remain stagnant.

    Trying to maintain the status quo (peak oil, peak population, peak meat, peak agriculture, peak temperature…) is not only impractical, it’s a death sentence.

    Central planning kills.

    (this has been added in an attempt to avoid capture by the rogue spam filter)

  11. Rufus,

    It’s a pretty scary and troubling game to think of all the amazing inventions, ideas, etc. that would never be allowed to develop in our current times for all kinds of reasons. And that is only the past what is not coming to fruition because of safetyism or the inventor is a white male or some other BS reason?

    But we got tons of ‘experts’ so I’m sure it’ll all work out.

  12. Digging around on the various streaming services this morning to find music to tame the beast and found something. Which then got me googling and I found this discussion:

    https://harpcolumn.com/forums/topic/a-bach-fugue-for-the-harp/

    Talk about First World Problems when you already have perfectly good keyboard instruments including the proper goddamn Harpsichord as the Good Lord intended.

    If Hokusai hadn’t had such a dirty mind he could have done worse than put his octopus to work on this problem.

    So what got me off on this weird tangent? This:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz9-REG2djc

    Here’s the harpist’s website:

    https://parkerramsay.com/

    FWIW harp doesn’t work for me here. Also bit suspicious of folks with surnames for given names.

  13. Good news tonight: The Seattle Times reports that the recall against Communist-pretending-to-be-Socialist councilthing Kshama Sawant is leading with 53%.

    https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/effort-to-recall-seattle-councilmember-kshama-sawant-leads-with-53-in-tuesday-night-vote-count/

    Apparently, if the turnout is what’s expected, at this point she’ll need 65% of the remaining ballots to stay in office.

    Now, this is Seattle, so who knows what shenanigans they’ll get up to. But on top of electing the non-whackadoodle candidate for mayor, it would be a nice sign that maybe the insanity has peaked if she’s booted.

  14. @ Zaphod > “I found this discussion: – Bach for the harp”

    Getting around to this somewhat late, but thanks for the links.
    I do play (at) the harp; don’t practice enough to be more than what my teachers call intermediate, but one of our sons took a liking to it in grade school (!!) and played through HS, won a couple of awards.
    He noodled around with it in college, and finally went into computer programming instead of music as a more viable career option — a LOT of my programmer cohort in college were also musicians.
    Anyway, an enjoyable interlude among the daily crises.

  15. Neo: Thanks, it’s beautiful. Wish I was there (missing Maine-it has been a few years).

    Rufus T. Firefly: Thank you, I thought so 🙂

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