The Upcoming Sequel

The pandemic is long over. The virus itself has gone into the endemic phase, continuing to mutate into ever more variants—occasionally more contagious, but never more virulent than what it mutated from.

Therefore, the existence of more “variants of interest” ought not to be news; it just is. So when we see a rather large uptick in—not symptoms of the illness, but stories about it—that ought to gain our attention. Something’s going on that may not be a threat to your health, but is likely a threat to your well-being.

Roman Balmakov, on Facts Matter, reports on return of Covid-related mandates.
screenshot from here

The first item on my radar was the weekly county update. The total county death toll has sat at 8,680 since June 15, but last Thursday it jumped to 8,797 (and remained there yesterday as well).  Does that mean we suddenly had 117 new deaths in a week? Probably not. We haven’t had reliable death counts from day one. This might be a cumulative change since mid-June, or related to nothing actually real. This might mean they wanted to attribute some deaths to the count, so they updated a number that hadn’t on its own changed in a long time.

The Harris County COVID-19 death toll had a sudden rise
after two months of no change

The first news piece that got my attention was this one from InfoWars. I’m not a regular viewer; it was passed along to me. I don’t like the alarmist tone of Infowars and Alex Jones, but that doesn’t mean he’s always wrong. In fact, he probably has a much better track record for accuracy than the MSM. Still, one story from there isn’t going to get me worked up.

Alex Jones speculated about the reason being related to next year’s presidential election—which is only “winnable” by the cabal if they cheat, which they were able to do last time because of main-in ballots, which they were able to institute in places where main-in ballots hadn’t been widely used previously, because of fear of COVID-19. So, to repeat that “success,” they need to gin up the fear again.

Alex Jones says to spread the word so enough of us are onto their game, so we won’t comply; we won’t let them get away with it. First link below is the video, and then the link to the written story:

·      “EXCLUSIVE INTEL: Federal Officials Blow the Whistle on Biden’s Plan for New COVID Lockdowns” The Alex Jones Show, August 18, 2023 (6:00 PM) 

·      “EXCLUSIVE: Biden Admin Preparing to Bring Back FULL Covid Restrictions, Rollout to Begin Mid-September” Infowars.com  August 18, 2023. 

Here’s the beginning of that story:

Whistleblowers from the TSA and Border Patrol have raised the alarm to Infowars that the Biden administration is setting the stage for full Covid lockdowns that will begin with incremental restrictions like masking TSA employees and other government employees in mid-September.

The first source, a high-level TSA official confirmed and known to Infowars, reached out to Infowars and cited a Tuesday meeting in which TSA managers were told new memorandums & policies were being completed that would reimplement masking, starting with TSA & airport employees as early as mid-September.

The TSA official also said next week they will receive new guidelines on how the policy will escalate: by mid-October, mask-wearing will be required by pilots, flight staff, passengers, and airport patrons.

The story links to two stories about the “new Covid variant hysteria”:

·        About the Eris variant: “As the new Eris Covid variant spreads across the world, here’s what we know so far” by Jenni Reid for CNBC, August 15, 2023. 

·        About variant BA.2.86: “WHO, CDC tracking new lineage of virus that causes COVID” by Timothy H. J. Nerozzi for Fox News, August 18, 2023. 

So that was the first story that got my attention. But then the next day, I start hearing about cases increasing in Canada, and a variant they’re looking at in Israel. Joshua Philipp on Crossroads talked about that one: there were six cases worldwide. No one is saying these cases are severe or deadly, only that they are variants of COVID-19 and should be watched.

Joshua Philipp on Crossroads reports about the increased concern 
over COVID-19 variants, screenshot from here

This one, below, is from Wednesday, August 23, with a bit more updated info (behind a paywall, but may be available on YouTube or Rumble). Add another from EpochTV’s Facts Matter, also from Wednesday:

·      “Push for New Vaccines, Mask Mandates: Conservatives Call for Civil Disobedience” Joshua Philipps, Crossroads, EpochTV, August 23, 2023. 

·      “It's Really Happening: Vaccine and Mask Mandates, Contact-Tracing RETURN” Roman Balmakov, Facts Matter, EpochTV, August 23, 2023. 

As I looked at my viewing history, I came across an EpochTV Facts Matter piece from June, which gave the alert to this new attention on a variant or two, which was causing alarm for no apparent reason. It didn’t catch my attention then like the news buildup now is. He mentions that the new variant of concern is essentially the same as Omicron and other variants—like a mild cold—but with the additional symptom of pinkeye. For this, the WHO is pushing vaccine passports. He links information in the description, so I’ll include those below:

screenshot from here

·        “New COVID Variant Has Unusual Symptom; WHO Launches Global Vax Passports” Facts Matter, Roman Balmakov, June 26, 2023. 

·        Info about pink eye here and here. 

·        CDC numbers here. 

·        WHO passports here and here. 

And I came across this story about ongoing panic in schools, which never had any danger from the disease among children. In Runge, Texas, in Karnes County, not too far from San Antonio, the district had 10 cases across the district, so they shut down for the week. Imagine if you didn’t call it COVID; imagine that there are 10 cases of a mild cold in the district, so they shut down for the week. It sounds crazy.

·      “School district in South Texas temporarily closes due to uptick in COVID-19 cases” KSAT.com News, August 23, 2023. 

So there is growing concern. But not that there’s an illness about to wipe us out if we aren’t sufficiently panicked.

The concern, specifically, is that the US ruling regime (what they refer to as Democracy, but it doesn’t mean that) is getting desperate, so this is their attempt to repeat what they did in 2020. This likely ties in with the worldwide ruling elite. I should note that, as I look at these stories, nearly a year post-pandemic, they are still erroneously labeled with a warning about COVID-19 misinformation.

Tom Woods, however, believes we already have enough people awake and aware that there’s no way they could get away with it again. Who would comply after all the lying these “experts” have done?

Woods has passed along a fair amount throughout the pandemic and beyond. (This page has a lot of resources.) But it all adds to the surety of what we know. Nothing supports going back to mask wearing. Here are two of his emails from this week. The first has some charts showing the lack of evidence that mask wearing made a difference. The second is his response to someone advocating giving in on mask wearing.

·        Tom Woods email (with charts): 

·        Tom Woods email (response to masking being no big deal): 

All this means that, if authorities go back to mask mandates, it has nothing to do with maintaining public health. It has everything to do with asserting control over the people. The antidote, the cure, for what they afflict on us is to not comply.

Meme found on Facebook, shows opposition to what is coming.

Some states put forth legislation to block authorities from mandating such things as mask mandates, lockdowns, or vaccine mandates. The states who didn’t should have. But individuals can have a big influence. People have stopped shopping at Target, buying Bud Light, attending woke Disney films or even going to their theme parks. We can simply live our lives without regarding those so-called authorities.

Whether the cabal can get away with it or not depends on our willingness to give in to them. So I thought this might be a good time to remind us of what we know—most of which we knew early on but were censored for saying, but which is now widely accepted as fact.

·        Masks don’t work. (Links to data below.)

·        Lockdowns don’t work, but they cause a great deal of misery; quarantines are for the sick, not the well.

·        Contract tracing doesn’t work. It has no purpose beyond the first, earliest days of a disease outbreak in order to prevent spread; once an illness is widespread, it is pointless.

·        More people have died from the “vaccines” than from the disease, which was not a vaccine, not safe, and not effective.

·        The people who lied to us about vaccine safety and efficacy also lied about the lack of safety and efficacy of low-cost easily available well-known generic drugs, plus supplements. Doctors were fired for prescribing these remedies, and pharmacies refused to fill prescriptions.

·        Recommendations from “experts” were the exact opposite of what would have been recommended by doctors left to their own devices, and was exactly opposite of what was found to be effective.

·        The disease itself was not as deadly as the fearmongers insisted; allowing it to go through the healthy population while protecting the most vulnerable would have gotten us through the pandemic and on to endemic quickly, providing us a population with natural immunity.

·        It is hard to know motivations, but it appears those who wanted money from pharmaceuticals and/or power over the population manipulated the situation—causing millions of deaths, the vast majority of which could have been prevented.

·        If there is any use for a vaccine in such an easily treatable illness, it would be with the most vulnerable; no young healthy person should risk taking the vaccine, which is more likely to harm them than to prevent harm.

 

As Mark Twain is often quoted these days,

“It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

Or, to quote his actual words:

“How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!"

So, providing the data, the studies, the evidence of truth might not overcome the “mass formation” we witnessed during the past few years, it still might solidify us against this attempt at a sequel.

Just Facts put together a definitive collection of the studies and conclusions regarding masking—which were mostly obvious from the beginning and known by the “experts”—or should have been, if they were actual experts—from early on. This compilation is from September 2021.

·      “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Masks, and the Deadly Falsehoods Surrounding Them” by James D. Agresti for Just Facts, September 13, 2021. 

I’ve seen more data come in since then. Just Facts has this one from February 2022:

·      “Coming To Grips With the Facts About Masks” by James D. Agresti for Just Facts, February 1, 2022. 

Just to make sure you have this, the protocol for prevention and treatment of COVID-19 and associated variants is here. (For even more, see "Have a Plan," from 2021.)

Keep the data someplace handy. But know, it’s mainly for yourself and like-minded friends and family. Anyone who isn’t yet aware of the overwhelming, killing lies of the “experts” intends to keep their mind closed. But, you never know. Pray for them anyway. 

Coming to a Fortunate End

It’s only slightly premature to say the pandemic is ending. From the data we have so far, much of it from South Africa, the Omicron variant is more contagious than the Delta variant, or other variants, and is therefore likely to overtake the others and become the dominant strain. That is likely to happen in the UK in the next couple of weeks, and in the US shortly after that, and definitely within the next couple of months.

The good news is that it is very mild. There are very few hospitalized cases. About 90% of those hospitalized were incidental, meaning the patient was in the hospital for some other reason when a standard test for COVID-19 showed up positive. Of patients on ventilators, all were on ventilators for some other reason; the Omicron variant of SARS-COV-2 did not cause the need for oxygen. There have, as of this writing, been zero deaths attributable to the Omicron variant.

The Omicron variant seems to be less transmissible than the Delta variant—around R-2.5, rather than R-5. Yet it does seem to be overtaking Delta in populations. The reason seems to be that it has a greater affinity for binding with the ACE-2 receptor. If Omicron and Delta were in the same body, but Omicron gets into a particular cell before the Delta, the Delta has to look elsewhere—like a game of musical chairs—or it gets killed off by the body’s immune system. Omicron seems to be winning the game.

If Omicron continues to evidence less virulence, that is a good thing.

Dr. Mobeen Syed illustrates Omicron's doing damage to Big Pharma
screenshot from here

Doctors are starting to speculate that this could mean the end of the pandemic. In a similar way to how the Spanish Influenza pandemic of a century ago went, there was a bad first year followed by an even worse second year, followed by much milder forms, eventually moving into the endemic background illness that it continues to be. That could be the trajectory for SARS-COV-2.

Here are some sources:

·       “WHO: No Deaths Reported as a Result of Omicron Variant to Date” Nathan Worcester for The Epoch Times, December 10 (updated December 12), 2021. 

·       “Omicron Could Be Natural Vaccine for Unvaccinated—Prof. Eleanor Riley (University of Edinburgh)” Dr. Mobeen Syed discusses a UK study on his DrBeen Medical Lectures podcast December 11, 2021.  He shows why using a model for Delta looks alarming, but if Omicron is truly less virulent, that fear is unwarranted.

·       “Omicron Helping Wind-down the Pandemic—Netcare Report from South Africa” Dr. Mobeen Syed on his DrBeen Medical Lectures podcast, December 11, 2021.  He states his opinion that the pandemic is winding down, thanks to the Omicron variant.

·       “Good Fortune with Omicron” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, December 11, 2021.  He talks about current data on the virus in South Africa and the UK. He also goes over the Eleanor Riley piece that Dr. Mobeen covered.

Dr. Campbell says, in that last one,

It’s not because humans have been particularly clever. It’s not because the vaccines have been so successful that it’s eradicated the infection. It’s not because the lockdowns have worked. It’s not because we’ve been so clever. We are just fortunate that this massively communicable variant that is going to bring about huge amounts of herd immunity is doing so at the cost of absolutely minimal disease. Humanity has been indeed fortunate.”

And then he adds, “It’s almost as if there’s corrective systems looking after us. I don’t know how much philosophy or emotion to put into this, but this could have been bad….” And “Palpable relief here.” He stops just short of calling it a miraculous turn of events.

As with many other things about this virus, however, there are unanswered puzzling questions.

Evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and wife Heather Heying discuss a great many things on their podcasts. And they typically think of themselves as liberal. But this past couple of years of pandemic, they have commented frequently on the biology of the disease as well as the authoritarian response—in a way that has been getting them labeled as conservative. This past week Weinstein was commenting on the evolution of the Omicron variant. They are asked by a follower this question:

Q: Can you steel man the arguments for the various ways Omicron might have evolved from 2020 without being noticed by the medical community that has been sequencing as many variants as they find? To the naïve, “engineered” seems like a possibility. But I would like to hear other natural evolutionary solutions to the problem.

The answer, in short, is that there are too many strange things about this variant, from an evolutionary biological perspective, specifically from a phylogentic systematics perspective, which they explain. Briefly that has to do with the genetic inheritance tree of a thing, in this case a virus. They show a time-lapse animation of the phylogeny of the different strains, from someone else’s work. Here’s the discussion from that point; I’ve highlighted some key sentences:

Bret Weinstein: So, these are all the variants that are being tracked. And the line—

Heather Heying: What’s the X? I mean the X axis is presumably time, so when does it start? What’s the left most—?

BW: Zach will have to read it. I think it’s like mid-2020, or maybe it’s early 2020. (responds to technician off screen). 2019. Yeah. OK, OK. So it starts right at the beginning of the sort of named pandemic. And what you have are all of the variants and their relationships as deduced by their sequence differences. And what you saw is that Omicron pops up without any history of connection to the rest of the swarm, as if it came about somewhere March through September of 2020.

HH: 2020?

BW: Yes. So it—

HH: Not 2021? Omicron? 2020?

BW: No. It shows up in 2021; but the point is, its relationship is as if it has been frozen in time at a much earlier state and then shows up.

I looked up the chart used in the DarkHorse podcast and found it here.
I added arrows to show the beginning and current day points of the Omicron variant.

Now, the thing is, this has people over in lab leak world fascinated, because this is not the first time in history that this has happened. In fact there’s a very famous example that you may have just barely heard mentioned in the lab leak discussion about the flu of 1977. And the flu of 1977, it has been concluded—this of course could be revised if some better model emerged that was more predictive or assumed less—but, it has been concluded, for now, and with substantial evidence, is actually a lab escapee. And the way we know that is that its closest relative dates back to 1949. So it vanished from the world, and then the clock started again on its evolution in 1977. So that indicated this surely was in a fridge somewhere or isolated from the world. Whatever was happening with it, effectively time was stopped, and that effectively requires a refrigerator.

HH: In an organism or a virus that does not have extraordinarily variable mutation rates, you would not, you could not possibly expect a—whatever that would have been—a 28-year hiatus with no changes.

BW: Right. And so, the other example which we have of this, which isn’t as good, because we don’t really have a good ancestor, right, is SARS-COV-2 itself, where we suddenly have a virus that’s very very good at doing the things a virus needs to do in order to become a human pandemic, with no history of circulating in another animal where it learned those tricks, no history of circulating in some population of humans, as far as we can tell, somewhere. It just— It’s a genius right off— It’s like a child that was born speaking three languages or something, you know.

And so, anyway, this has people who are paying attention to this thinking very carefully about what could even explain this other than its having been somewhere in someone’s lab during the period of time that we would have expected it to emerge and then suddenly popping back up.

And there are other anomalies too, like things like the non-synonymous to synonymous mutation rate is way off of normal. It’s like 25 to 1. So, this is about how many alterations that have no consequence for actual protein sequence you would expect for every one that has an actual consequence, and the number appears impossible through a normal process.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
screenshot from here

Now, what the discord server [person who posed the question] has asked us to answer is the question of, well—

HH: Could it be, you know, what might explain this variant with this many changes appearing so suddenly, given a supposed background rate of so many people checking all the time for variants?

BW: Right. And so, what I think we should do, rather than search the world for crazy explanations, is just identify one— So, you’ve heard things like “immunocompromised person” in which much more evolution took place than normal, because their immunocompromised state effectively created a gain-of-function environment, a serial passage environment between tissues that was extremely favorable to variants. Now this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because— And, in fact I think the idea— So, it was originally reported that it had been isolated from somebody with HIV and diagnosed HIV; I believe that that has been debunked—although who even knows what debunked means in 2021.

But, nonetheless, these kinds of explanations have been offered before. In fact, there was one quite good paper—I thought it was dead wrong, but quite good paper—that argued that it could be that SARS-COV-2 experienced extreme evolutionary change in one of the miners who got sick in Yunnan Province, because lungs have such a large surface area.

HH: Back in 2013.

BW: Yeah. It was a very clever argument. Again, I think it’s dead wrong. But, anyway, it’s at least the kind of thought you would want to have. How could you get more evolution than you expect, right? Maybe surface area is the answer.

HH: Well, at least in that case, it— You can track the story evolutionarily. Like, the logic—each logical step is plausible, even if one or more of them may be so unlikely as for it not to have happened. So many of these stories that are charted, these explanations that are thrown out at the masses, and then the guy in effectively the white lab coat steps out to say, “I know you can’t follow this, so let me just tell you, the conclusion is...” actually just don’t even logically hold together. And we’ve sort of stopped, you and I have stopped largely on here even saying, “Oh, this thing, except it doesn’t make sense. And this thing, except it doesn’t make sense,” because it’s just coming so fast and furious. Like this— I don’t, on the face of it, the idea that immunocompromised creates gain-of-function in a body—I don’t know why that would be true. I have yet to hear the explanation for how you get from a to b. That’s just a simple a to b. Spell it out.

BW: Well, the idea, to the extent it is an idea rather than excuse, is, in the immunocompromised body, the defenses that would ordinarily silence lots of evolutionary experiments in the body tolerates them. Right? Something like that. And so you have— It’s like a big population in which processes that wouldn’t make any headway, in a small population gets a chance.

HH: So if that is true, you would expect that immunocompromised people would tend to be incubators of lots of variations in colds, other coronaviruses, or flus, or, you know any of the other things—

BW: It makes other predictions. And frankly, I don’t know whether any of those predictions are manifest.

HH: Right. That’s how you would actually follow this up with a scientific approach.

BW: The other thing would be—OK, so let’s say that this is true in the immunocompromised person and you get lots of evolution of little—you know, there are lots of foothills in the immunocompromised person that don’t exist in people with a fully competent immune system. But then, when the variant gets out into people who do have a fully competent immune system, you wouldn’t expect those variations to function very well, unless—

HH: If they only got a foothold because of immune suppression—

BW: Right. So then you would need another step to the process. And the point is, this is where you start running afoul of Occam’s razor. You’re not just hypothesizing an immunocompromised person, which provides a unique environment; you’ve got another black box that you need to fill. And at some point, it’s too many epicycles to be sustained.

So, I just want to point out, the other thing that we talked about last week that fits this category is, why did COVID-19 collapse in Japan, oh yes, after they allowed doctors to prescribe Ivermectin? And the answer was, “Oh, it became mutationally aggressive and lost its coherence.”

HH: It just did so well that it failed.

BW: Right. Something. And so the answer is, No, you need at least one more factor. You know what one factor could do it? Ivermectin could drive a virus to make some sort of a deal that it couldn’t sustain. But you can’t do it with just spontaneous mutational idiocy.

Bret Weinstein Twitter Thread
December 12, 2021

The summary of this is,

·       The Omicron variant’s history traces back to mid-2020, but it didn’t appear until November 2021. It’s as though it was kept in a lab refrigerator for a year and some months.

·       Also, it has a mutation rate that is impossible under normal processes.

·       The explanation about it being naturally developed in an immunocompromised person doesn’t hold up.

So, if you ask these evolutionary biologists, who have looked at the data and charted the history of the disease, this variant didn’t just happen naturally.

I’ve wondered about deus ex machina. Are we at a point where God has intervened and purposely altered the genetics of a worldwide plague? I’m not ruling that out; I tend to see His hand, whatever is happening.

But I am asking this additional question: If someone had a variant in mid-2020 that would be both mild and highly communicable—so that it would quickly end the pandemic through herd immunity and giTwitve people natural immunity for the future—why would such a person hold back, allowing another year’s worth of deaths to occur, before bringing it out?

And another question: Why, if the data shows this variant is likely to end the pandemic, is there so much panic and continued push to take a vaccine not designed to help against this variant, even pushing the vaccine onto children, who have always been at extremely low risk of serious illness from any variant of SARS-COV-2?

All versions of this illness have been highly treatable when dealt with early, using typically low-cost medicines and supplements. It looks like ease of treatment—or lowered need for any treatment—is nigh. As those who claim to be science keep saying while not showing any evidence of science, “Follow the science.” When you actually do that, you’ll notice that there was never any need for the vaccines, or mandates of any kind, or lockdowns. This has been a plague of authoritarians. Let us hope someone who has the power to hold off solutions for well over a year does not also have the power to spring an even more lethal virus upon the oh-too-trusting world.

Here are a few more interesting references: 

• “Live Q&A: WHO Says No Deaths from Omicron; Was Jussie Smollett ‘a Hate Crime in Reverse’?” Joshua Philipp on Crossroads, December 12, 2021.  After mentioning that there are no deaths or other worrisome data associated with the Omicron variant, he asks, then why are countries taking even harsher measures? 

• “Covid: The Path not Taken—DarkHorse Podcast with Dr. Peter McCullough” Bret Weinstein The DarkHorse podcast, December 6, 2021.  This is mostly talking about SARS-COV-2 in general, including treatments and possible vaccine dangers, rather than about Omicron. 

• “Omicron on the Move” Dr. Peter McCullough on The McCullough Report podcast of December 6, 2021. 

• “Ivermectin in Japan” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, November 23, 2021. He shows the data that seems to show cases plummeting in Japan 12 days after Ivermectin was allowed openly as a treatment. News outlets seem to be assuming this is mere coincidence. 

• “UK, 50% Omicron Now” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, December 13, 2021. https://youtu.be/XzrG3Odgf28 While noting the sharp rise in cases in the UK (and where the UK is today, the US is likely to be in January), he offers update from South Africa, where they have passed three weeks, showing only mild cases, recovery in 3-5 days, regardless of age or vaccine status; there isn’t a later cytokine storm, as some feared might come.

Coercive vs. Cautious Response

We’re seeing daylight after the onset of the pandemic now. Coming back, not quite to the normal we knew, but toward more functional than a shutdown. We don’t know all the data we would like for a complete picture, but it’s enough to conclude some things in general.

It has been a scary thing. The illness is real. It has taken many lives. But it has not taken anywhere near as many lives as we were told were likely—the scare that caused the world to shut down. In fact, the Imperial College model used to make that call was so wrong that it takes one’s breath away. Looking into it, people who do the technical work and coding for such things report they are appalled at the sloppy work and wonder how anything so full of trash was ever given credibility.

That’s a question I’d like answered at some point. How did a model by a British doctor who had been wildly inaccurate in every data model he’d ever produced—a person who violated his own lockdown protocol to carry out an adulterous affair—how did this person’s model get put forth as credible in the first place, let alone so credible that the world shut down over it?

The good news is that the virus was much less virulent than the model predicted.  And the changes society made to keep it from spreading at overwhelming rates accomplished their purpose.

But the accomplishment may not be in lives saved, but in deaths postponed. Because the virus spread slower, but not halted. Slow and steady wins the race, as the fable says. So the virus will still make it’s way through the population. The two advantages to a slower spread are preventing the hospitals from getting overwhelmed, and giving time for development of treatments.

Both of those goals are worthwhile, but it is debatable whether they have been worth what they have cost us. It isn’t a matter of saving lives vs. saving an economy. It is postponing lives lost in this particular way vs. losing lives in other ways as a result of the economic and social shutdown.

There are tradeoffs with almost any decision. Do you risk X to get Y? Do you know enough to judge whether the risk is worth it? Leaders in policy-making positions have to make this kind of decision every day.

But one thing I think we’re observing from this pandemic response is that there have been generally two categories of response: coercive or cautious. There has been very little cavalier, incautious response. So let’s look at just the two ways.

I’m in a state with a cautious response. We did do a statewide economic pause—with most businesses closed or working from home. Food, electricity, and emergency hospital care were still available. People began wearing masks a week or so into that time. And now that we’re nearly a month into slowly opening back up, most people in stores and more crowded places (by these new standards) still wear masks.

While Harris County, which contains most of Houston, has a comparatively high number of cases for the state, it has a low rate per population. Some of the darker spots in the graphic are actually smaller populations with a fairly low number of cases that wreak havoc on their stats.

Covid-19 cases per 1,000 residents in Texas, by county, as of May 28, 2020
Interactive graphic from Texas Tribune

The news from the Department of State Health Services today says that Texas is approaching the million tests milestone. With the increase in testing, positive responses are down in the 3% range. Hospitalizations for the virus peaked three weeks ago and have remained flat for a month. Active cases are down over 600. We’ve had our first two-day decline: down 391 Tuesday, down 216 more Wednesday.

In other words, even though we worried about a spike in new cases following phases 1 and 2 of opening up—which was certainly a common and logical expectation—we had a temporary rise, but that spike did not happen.

It may be that we’re coming into the hot humid weather that this virus doesn’t like. Florida's outcomes are similar to ours. 

But New Zealand, in their fall/winter season, just announced that their last Covid-19 patient left the hospital; they have zero active cases. So it may be that the virus has simply run its course, at least for now. It’s unknown whether we’ll get another surge in the fall. That will depend on whether there has been sufficient mutation of the virus to become essentially a new strain—like we get with the annual flu, which, if I understand correctly, is the ever-present remnant of the 1918 flu pandemic. So, that information is still unknown.

But, if the virus has actually been running its course, and we’ll be done with it, then some lives actually were saved by our slowing the spread. I’m open to that possibility. I know I’ve personally felt safer in public when people around me wear masks. Since I’m badly affected just by a common cold, I have to say the mask wearing and better hygiene by everyone has actually made me personally feel safer. But, I don’t think I have the right to ask everyone to wear masks forever (they’re not comfortable, and they cover everyone’s smile) just so I feel a bit safer.

So, for now I’m willing to look at mask wearing as a gesture of goodwill. But you don’t shame people for failing to step up to a particular level of goodwill just because you’re willing to step up there. Shaming is the opposite of a gesture of goodwill. And besides, you can’t coerce people into actual goodwill.

Which brings us back to the coercive version of leadership. Our county judge, Lina Hidalgo, is a handy example. She has tried mandating mask wearing—stopped by the governor. She has attempted to shut down parks. She has attempted to keep businesses closed longer than the governor’s recommendation—even though our hospitals have plenty of capacity and our population has not been hard hit. She has tried letting felons out of prison out of her compassion while simultaneously threatening to jail regular citizens for daring to go about their lives in some way she’s not willing to permit.

Last Thursday, when Mr. Spherical Model and I drove up to see our kids and grandkids for the first time in all these months, Hidalgo announced that the shutdown in Houston had to remain in effect until June 10. It took her an additional 15 hours to post the edict. Whether she has power to enforce it is another question. 

Yet we have, safe, cautious, goodwill moves to open things back up—not a sudden mobbing of the public spaces and businesses. So coercion was never necessary.

Coercion has a purpose other than our safety.

There is a direct correlation between coercion and economic damage; the harsher the shutdown rules, and the longer they are left in place, the more unemployment and economic fallout, obviously. But there is no correlation between coercive long shutdown and low death rates, at least in the United States. In fact, there appears to be almost an inverse correlation. Texas, Georgia, and Florida so far are getting great numbers after opening up. In fact, after some brief worry in mid-March, none of these states had much to worry about.

The hardest hit states seem to be those with more coercive measures.

Texas is 15th in order of total deaths. But when you take into account population, it's down near the bottom, in 41st place. 

Rate of Covid-19 cases per 100,000 population, by state, as of May 28, 2020
Original chart from Statista.com

I considered developing a graphic, to see whether there was a correlation by party and death rate. Maybe another day. I think we have the more typical urban/rural divide to explain many differences.

But I’m guessing that there are personality differences between the different reactions. People who are fearful submit more easily to more coercion. People who generally feel they’re in control of their own lives and destinies tend to resist coercion.

So, if you’re a power monger, a tyrant (or would-be tyrant), you stir up fear as a strategy to control your subjects.

Since you’re not a subject, but a citizen, you need to assert your own authority. In order to avoid being oppressed by a tyrant, you need to know as much as you can, to decide for yourself what you are willing to do for your own health and for others (two quite different values).

If you’re scared enough, you might trust government to decide for you when to attend church in person again. But if you’re capable of figuring out how to be as safe in a church as you are in Walmart or on a city bus, then maybe you don’t trust a government that keeps your church doors closed. Maybe you find something really wrong with how Chicago’s mayor sent authorities, swat style, to shut down a church. 

Or maybe you can decide, without the help of an overseer, when to go get a haircut from a stylist who wears a mask and washes everything carefully between customers. 

You might be living under tyranny if you are allowed to go to Walmart, but not to the beach and go out, alone, on a surfboard, because of the need to “flatten the curve.”

You might be living under tyranny if you’re allowed to take your family to the beach, but can’t sit on or picnic on the sand; you have to go directly from your car into the water. (Ben Shapiro suggested maybe he should use a cannon to shoot his children into the water from his car.)

You might be living under tyranny if golfing or skateboarding are considered risky for spreading a respiratory virus.

You might be living under tyranny if you’re allowed to walk on a path but not bicycle, because of the need to prevent spreading coronavirus.

You might be living under tyranny if you’re allowed to have online services broadcast from your church, but only if no one sings.

The stories pop up daily. Consider looking at each story and asking, does this make logical sense? And than ask, is this a cautious response or a coercive response?

One thing I think we’ll see is that coercive governments lead to much worse economic situations for their people, possibly combined with worse health outcomes. Again, some of the health differences will be because of urban density. And the density of Houston or Los Angeles is simply not the same as the density of New York or New Jersey. But, what if the coercive measures—for the sake of public safety—don’t actually accomplish public safety? What if your protective government enforces policies that put nursing homes at risk, and continue to run public transportation, but force you to lose your job or shut down your small business, stay in your home, and don’t leave for any reason except to get food? Are they keeping you safe, or keeping you controlled?

At what point are you willing to consider reasserting your own authority?

That’s what I’m suggesting. Breathe deep. Look at the actual real-time data for your location. Get a full picture—not just number of deaths, which goes up with no chance of going back down, obviously. But death rates per population, infection rates per population, intensity of infection for your demographic, and anything else that gives you something other than just the scariest numbers without context.

We can beat this thing. We’re doing that. And it seems to be letting up, possibly naturally without our doing anything but pray. (By the way, it looks to me that the worldwide fast day we had April 10 marked the beginning of the downward trend of the virus. Like this chart shows for Houston’s new cases per day.)

The 7-day rolling average of new cases is better than
the daily count, because testing gets reported irregularly. The upper line is
Harris County, which is much more populous than surrounding counties.
The chart is from the Houston Chronicle today, p. A20.
I added the red line to mark the date of our worldwide fast.

But can we beat the tyranny that has opportunistically used our fear for its evil purposes?

As plagues go, Covid-19 has been bad but not “Black Death” bad. But the government-caused economic and social devastation in the name of safety from the virus has been a worldwide plague not seen since—I don’t know. Pompeii? The flood?

Our recovery depends on reasserting our God-given rights to life, liberty, and property—to pursue happiness. It’s doable. Maybe in a relatively short time. But we have to throw off the fear to take away the tyrants’ power.

Breaking Out

We’re heading out to visit our kids for the first time in 2 ½ months. It was supposed to be moving day for son Economic Sphere—their first house. But an additional inspection put that off for another week. So, instead of moving the big furniture, we’ll just help pack up. And share a birthday cake. And hug kids.

I think we may end up stopping at Buc-ee’s on the way; we usually do. They were OCD about cleaning way before the lockdown; that’s what made them famous.

Found on Facebook. Source unknown.

Is it safe to go out? I think so. The grandkids haven’t been anywhere to see anyone, and they’re in a rural county with single digits of active cases. The other kids have been working at home or away from the public.

And we’re pretty certain we’re not spreading anything to them. We’re coming from a zip code with a total of 70[i] cases (no known deaths) in a population estimated at 37,146[ii], so I do the math and only 19 per 10,000 people have been infected—that is, have been tested and confirmed. Some unknown number of these 70 cases are no longer infectious. Infection rate in the population is likely several times higher, but since that is not increasing the death rate, it’s only relevant to show that the death rate is even lower than reported. Anyway, the stats available say I need to come into contact with 1,000 people to have the likelihood of running into anyone with the virus. I’m not that sociable.

We get a daily count in the Houston Chronicle of cases so far. And we get a total death count. But we don’t get how many of those accumulated cases have recovered. I found some data from a few days ago that listed those recovered[iii]. So I subtracted deaths (90) from total confirmed cases (3958), and then used the number recovered (2484) to learn that 64% of cases are no longer infectious. We have 1,384 known active cases in a population of 4.6 million. That’s .03%. Your odds of randomly running into an infected person in the county are about 3 in 10,000.

And, among that number are those who know they’re ill, so, unless you’re caring for them, you’re not coming into contact with them. That means for the average person in the county, only the asymptomatic spreaders are a risk. It would be nice to know how many of those there are. But, for those of us who haven’t known anyone who has Covid-19, this is why.

What we do see, three weeks into Texas’s slow reopening, is no spike.

Chart from a Sean Trende tweet a week ago
found here

Florida hasn’t seen one either. Neither has Georgia, which has had a full month of opening up to see that data pop up. Governor Abbott won the internet with this chart he tweeted:

Tweet from Texas Governor Greg Abbott
(Note: pretty sure he means "mortality rate," not "morality rate.")

Worldwide, there’s reason to think the lockdown is not only no longer necessary, but maybe it never was. There’s this data, coming out of The Netherlands, showing odds based on age. Co-morbidities (other conditions) are not separated out, so healthy people in any of these groupings are better off than these numbers show.

 

Dutch data, charted by Daniel Horowitz; found here

Notice that, of people age 80-85, 91 out of 100 who get the disease will recover without hospitalization. If you’re 80-85 and you get the virus, you have a pretty high fatality rate: 7.836%. But that means 92.164% do not die from it; they live. The more risk factors, the more likely in that list of those who don’t make it. But all things mixed together, 92 out of 100 in that age range get through it.

If you’re in your 30s, only 3 in a thousand who get the disease end up hospitalized, and only 8 in 100,000 die. If you have no additional risk factors, the odds are even more in your favor. This chart from Massachusetts shows just how skewed the data is toward that upper age range:

Massachusetts government data,
also provided by Daniel Horowitz, here

Here are some more Dutch projections, charted by Daniel Horowitz, for the younger to middle age groups. Notice how likely that an infection is mild or asymptomatic:

Dutch data gathered from 4000 blood donors,
chart by Daniel Horowitz, found here

The math is pretty uplifting.

If we had taken care to protect those two 70+ age ranges, our national death rate would be so much lower that it would be on par with a bad flu year. Again, that’s not a zero risk; that’s on top of flu and all other risks.

But, except for the elderly and those with conditions that really need to stay away from this, Covid-19 would have passed through the population without much notice—except for the lockdown, which has meant economic catastrophe and plenty of other health and life issues.

We couldn’t imagine that our elected officials—and not just local, but national, and in countries around the world—would impose these severe measures on us unless the risk merited it. We didn’t have good data to say otherwise.

The panicked response had me picturing lines out the door of hospital ERs. Of course that never happened here. It didn’t happen really anywhere in the US outside of New York and New Jersey, and they never got so overwhelmed that they couldn’t provide care.

But they did send nursing home patients who still had the virus back into their nursing homes—where so many of the deaths happened. They only lifted that insane policy earlier this month. Also, they kept public transportation open—with its enclosed spaces for long enough periods of time for spread to happen. They didn’t even start wiping them down at night until a couple of weeks ago—and they still don’t do that between trips during the day.

There’s so much we didn’t get right. Some of it, common sense should have resolved.

Daniel Horowitz, in a piece with plenty of links to support his claims, lists these six things we got very wrong: 

1.       Covid-19 death numbers were inflated.

2.       States with longer lockdowns had worse results.

3.       Outside nursing homes, the fatality rate never warranted such action, even if it would work.

4.       Outside New York, this is barely worse than bad flu seasons.

5.       Excess deaths are from the lockdowns, not the virus.

6.       Social distancing was invented by a high-school kid and politicians, not scientists.

Let’s do a hypothetical. Suppose a population like the rest of the country (without NY or NJ), with less population density, much less mass transit. And let’s say we looked at the data early enough to recognize the need to protect the elderly. Such a population may have wanted to take some precautions, but we never needed to lock down. We didn’t need to close schools or parks.

Maybe some adjustments were needed for restaurants and other places where we spend time close together. Maybe it was wise to shut down large events until we learned what we were dealing with. I’m not willing to use too much 20/20 hindsight and say we should have known never to shut down. But this has taught us a couple of very important things:

·       Don’t trust someone else’s experts; do your own homework in your search for truth.

·       Don’t trust a politician who takes away your liberties, calls it keeping you safe, and ignores the data when it says we’re safe enough making our own risk decisions.

My concern is that this crying wolf scenario we’ve lived through will keep us from ever trusting anyone who cries wolf again. Once in a while there is a wolf. But then, we can probably figure out how to handle a wolf without being forced to cower in our caves. And now we’ve had a clear view of the leaders who’ve said, “Stay afraid; let us keep you safe by controlling you.” Those aren’t leaders; they’re tyrants.

So, we’re starting to break out of our confinement.

Mr. Spherical Model, whose ankle has healed enough that he can drive now, has had two trips for physical therapy this week. And a haircut (they worked around a required facemask). And he went to lunch with a friend for the first time since early March. The guys sat at an actual table to eat wings at a little place that deserved their patronage.

A new report says that—all that worry about groceries, packages, and mail bringing viral contamination into our homes has been unwarranted. That’s a great relief to me. I’ve been kind of paranoid since watching this video (well-meaning, I’m sure) on how to decontaminate your groceries and food orders as you bring them into your home.

Also, playground equipment, out there in the sunshine, has been safe all along. And gyms, while sweaty and icky all the time, would probably never have been viral hot spots. It really does take mainly direct contact, and probably prolonged contact (several minutes of an infected person breathing in your face, or talking with some spittle emission, or coughing on you). There needs to be some minimum amount of viral particles that get inside you, or else your body just does its normal protective thing.

My rational side says not to fear—and has said that all along. My naturally worried side will have to work through the anxiety for a while. But seeing family in person is going to help with that. I think breaking out is long overdue.

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[i] I got the count by zip code at the Harris County Public Health site, here.

[ii] I got this population data at ZipDataMaps.com for my zip code.

[iii] That data is from KPRC News.