The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

Synergy: The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.

New York is in the unenviable position of having to deal with the perfect storm of not one awful politician, but two! Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have conspired, through sheer force of stupidity, venality, anti-Semitism, and raw desire for power to kill more New Yorkers than all but one other single event (the Civil War), even World War II!

New York has 6.2% of the confirmed cases of Wuhan Flu in the United States, but 15.5% of the deaths! How can that be? Fredo Cuomo's equally stupid older brother tells us that he is a man of science; a man who can be trusted to do the right thing for the people of New York State! And his even stupider anti-Semitic partner Mayor de Blasio squawks much of the same drivel, that he is acting on solid scientific information and he knows what's best for the people of the nation's largest city.

Oh...Governor Phil - Goldman Sachs - Murphy of New Jersey may be worse. NJ has 2.74% of the cases but a whopping 7.6% of the deaths, all the while wearing the mantle of a logical actor, simply following the data.

Of course that is all arrant nonsense. They flexed their executive muscles because the exercise of power arouses them and confirms their positions in the hierarchy of the elite; no matter that their actions have resulted in much higher than expected deaths, and a near total destruction of the economies of their states.

Florida, with 9.4% of the cases has only 6.9% of the deaths, and TX is similar: 10.3% and 7.5%. Even insane California is better, with 11% of the case but only 7.5% of the deaths.

I can suggest a bunch of reasons why NY and NJ have failed so miserably at protecting their most vulnerable citizens, but the drive to return COVID patients to the nursing homes and assisted living facilities is undoubtedly the primary driver of the high death rate. And the near-total lockdowns prevented herd immunity from developing as quickly as in other states, and created conditions that were impossible to manage. "Universal precautions" simply don't work. The time and effort and money should have been spent on protecting the most vulnerable and allowing the rest of us to get on with our lives. Once it became obvious that hospitals weren't going to run out of ventilators (the wrong therapy anyway) and ICU beds, that triumvirate of evil fools should have modified their plans. But being a leftist means never having to admit your mistakes, and they are fine examples of the species.

One example that stands out is the closing of schools. The data are clear; the risk for America's youth is trivial, and closing the schools simply made no sense. But as a power grab it was nearly perfect! It stroked the teachers' unions by giving their members ridiculously light work loads; essentially months of vacation. It scared the soccer moms and disrupted the work schedules of millions of parents. Pretty much a leftist wet dream!

But the biggest canard of the entire sordid process was the suggestion that by government edict they could prevent people from contracting Wuhan Flu.

No, they can't. Absent a vaccine, many people will get it, just like they would get the flu or the many varieties of rhinoviruses. The virus isn't going anywhere, and preventing herd immunity from developing in the less vulnerable means that there will be more cases among the more vulnerable.

I was in a market yesterday, and while waiting for a woman with her toddler in her cart to choose...whatever...I looked over at her child. Normally the kid would have looked at me and I would have smiled or made a silly face or some other human contact. But we were both masked, and that made me sad. It was one bit of human interaction that the child can never replace, and she will be worse off because of it. We are social animals, and isolating in our homes and wearing masks that hide our expressions does very little to protect us, but quite a bit to damage us.

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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