The Chinese COVID vaccine is a giant nothing burger in Chile

The Chinese COVID vaccine is not preventing much of anything in Chile after three months.

84% of the COVID vaccine doses administered in Chile to date have been Chinese. The effort began in earnest in early February.

44% have received at least one dose of any COVID vaccine in Chile since that time.

Unfortunately, daily new cases per million is still up 44% since the vaccination effort began in early February. And daily new cases per million remains highly elevated compared with the lows of last November, achieved naturally long before any vaccines were available.

Why isn't vaccination producing a low rate similar to that?

Meanwhile deaths per million is still up, 17% since early February when the vaccination effort began. The rate is more than twice as high as it was last November when no vaccines were available at all.

Yet China is distributing these things like hotcakes, over 100 million doses so far, and the WHO is authorizing them for emergency use for the first time.

WHY?

Good a day as any to remember that Alan Greenspan in 2007 explicitly advocated for immigration to suppress the wages of skilled laborers

Greenspan: Let more skilled immigrants in :

"Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world," he said. "If we open up a significant window for skilled workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income."

Yeah, the problem isn't millionaires and billionaires concentrating wealth in their hands, it's the goddamn skilled laborers who must be stopped, the engineers, scientists, doctors and teachers, the crane operators, CDL truck drivers, machinists, drafters, plumbers, craftsmen, cooks and accountants.

 

Quaility Check, Vern: Even the ads at Drudge are misspelled

 

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Correlation is not causation: Daily new cases of COVID-19 fell 75% anyway in Africa even though barely 1% of the continent is vaccinated

The claim that COVID-19 vaccines save lives is not substantiated by declining cases and deaths.

Africa is a good example because it's the least vaccinated continent.

Daily new cases per million fell from 24 in January to 6 now, 75%, even though just 1% of its 1.34 billion people have been vaccinated with one dose.

Cases: Africa

Vaccinations: Africa

Compare North America, population 0.592 billion, the most vaccinated continent.

Over the exact same time period, daily new cases per million have fallen 79%, only just slightly more than in Africa.

The shape of the case graph is damn near indistinguishable from Africa's. You don't have to accept that it's even good data in Africa. Even its bad data, if it is bad, is a mirror image of so-called good North American data.

The idea that North American cases have fallen is because 31% have been vaccinated is preposterous.

Seasonal factors likely play the dominant role in this pandemic, and everything we do to influence it is just pushing on a string.

Cases: North America

  

Vaccinations: North America

You can now by-pass the entire medical bureaucracy and test yourself for COVID-19 easily, cheaply, and quickly right at home

 

Johns Hopkins: 580k US COVID deaths as of Thursday May 6, 2021

 

Climate Update for KGRR: April 2021

Climate Update for KGRR: April 2021

Max T 80, Mean 79

Min T 16, Mean 22 (14th coldest on record-tie)

Av T 48.5, Mean 46.5

Precip 1.91, Mean 3.3 (18th driest on record)

Snow 0.3, Mean 2.4

Heating Degree Days 491, Mean 553

HDD season to date 5863, Mean 6395 (8.3% warmer than mean to date; season set to make the top 20 warmest on record)

Cooling Degree Days 3, Mean 5

Climate Update for KGRR: March 2021

Climate Update for KGRR: March 2021

Max T 74, Mean 66

Min T 13, Mean 7

Av T 41.2, Mean 34.1 (eighth warmest on record-tie)

Precip 1.51, Mean 2.45

Snow T, Mean 9.0 (second least snowy on record)

Heating Degree Days 728, Mean 952 (eighth warmest on record)

Cooling Degree Days 0, Mean 0

IHME in Washington State estimates US COVID-19 dead at 905k, world dead at 7 million

Some countries evidently are lying to save face, others are simply overwhelmed:

Covid-19 deaths in India, Mexico, and Russia — countries with the second, third, and fifth highest tolls (the U.S. has the number one spot) — were also vasty undercounted. ... Researchers additionally found that the tolls in Japan, Egypt, and several other countries are 10 times higher than the reported numbers.

Mediaite has the story here. 

The left is furious that it can't control VAERS

So it's smearing it.

You shouldn't let bogus reports filed with VAERS by malevolent individuals stop you from using the system to report an adverse event you experienced.

 

Mark Krikorian hits on the sorry truth about Trump and Elise Stefanik

MAGAworld pans Stefanik :

...

“She ties with a couple other Republicans for the worst career voting record on immigration in New York,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the anti-immigration Center on Immigration Studies, ticking off a few of her previous positions: a yes on H-2B visas, the Farm Workers Modernization Act, and the Hong Kong Refugee bill, and a no on Trump’s child border separation policies.

“Obviously, Republicans in New York are likely to be more liberal, just because that's the environment they're in,” Krikorian said. “I think everybody understands that. But even by the standards of New York state Republicans, she's bad on immigration.” ...

Krikorian, whose institute is not weighing in on the conference chair election, noted that while Cheney’s downfall was sparked by her criticism of Trump, what had truly tanked her was her ideology, bolstered by her family name: The Wyoming congresswoman’s neoconservative beliefs have no place in today’s GOP.

Stefanik’s positions weren’t much more palatable to the party base, in Krikorian’s view.

“Trump, in his gut, does think we should get out of Afghanistan, he does think there's too many illegal aliens coming over the border,” he observed. “It's not that he doesn't believe any of that stuff. It's just that he's kind of a narcissistic guy. And if people flatter him, he's for them, regardless of what they believe. And so the question is: Do you go for Trumpism? Or do you go for Trump?” 

The system which protects us from tyrants has done so only because we are, when all is said and done, still loyal to it. There was never any danger of a tyranny from Trump, who was easily the weakest president in living memory.

But Trump's character is clearly of the sort Aristotle warned us about. The thing is, we do little worrying about the proliferation of wretches like Stefanik who eventually make the rise of actual tyrants, dangerous men of strong, determined, and ruthless character, more likely.

"And for this reason tyrants always love the worst of wretches, for they rejoice in being flattered, which no man of a liberal spirit will submit to; for they love the virtuous, but flatter none."

Full-time employment as a percentage of civilian population climbed to 48.1% in April 2021

It's a long way from 2019, let alone from the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era.

If 50.4% had a full-time job in April 2021, 6 million more people would be working full-time than do.

 

The rental vacancy rate in the US turned sharply upward beginning in July 2020 and continues higher in 1Q2021

 

The home vacancy rate in the US in 2020 hit a new all-time low of 1%

 

The ratio of owner-occupied to renter-occupied housing soared in 2020 as pandemic hysteria gripped the US and people sought refuge

 

The on-going housing bubble

I checked the value of my home on Zillow today.

It's nuts.

After 13 years the estimated price is up 6.5% per annum.

On the other hand, the house I previously owned and sold is up only 0.8% per annum over the same period.

Two entirely different houses, two entirely different locations, two completely different histories. What seems like a bubble living in my current house wouldn't seem like one living in my old one.

The best way I've found to think about this is to ask, How much of a house will my income buy? For bubble purposes nationally, even though housing is a regional and local matter, use median household income and median sales price.

Here's the chart of that data as currently available.

In 2020 the Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States (MSPUS) averaged a new high of almost $337k. We don't yet have the median household income figure for 2020, but it's likely to be bad news, skewing the graph lower again as less income buys a smaller share of increasingly expensive housing.

As you can plainly see, the trend for the percentage of a house purchased by an income has been all downhill since the end of Reagan Bull in 2000. The percentage really fell a lot during the housing bubble which peaked in 2005-06, helping precipitate GFC1. Incomes fell a lot after the Great Financial Crisis because people lost their jobs by the millions and never got them back and so less income purchased less house. Housing prices bottomed in 2012 and then rebounded slowly. Incomes did not, however, and what you made just kept buying less in the low range of 19%. 

That all sucked. Obama really sucked. Sucked historically bad. Record-setting bad. 

You'll notice things really improved in 2019, however. That's because median household income shot up $5k to over $68k (Trump tax cuts), and the median sales price of a house actually fell $5k to $320k. Your higher income bought more of a slightly cheaper house, not as much as the good old days, but more.

Unfortunately in 2020 median sales price shot up almost $17k while millions upon millions lost their jobs. The feds enacted foreclosure forbearance so that 2.3 million homes whose owners lost their jobs never came onto the market. But desperate people who wanted out of cities snarfed up inventory. Demand far exceeded supply, so prices went up. 

But even at 21.5% in 2019 housing was nowhere near affordable like it was from 1987-2001. It was a nice, hopeful moment, while it lasted.

I'm guessing it's going to be quite a while, though, before we ever see even that again. 

Intersectionality means blacks never having to say sorry for calling NYC "Hymietown"

 Don't let me down, Hymietown.

Breaking News: Judge Demands A Cusser!

 

She could pass for a guy, to be honest

 

Linebacker, I'm thinking.

Probable deaths from COVID-19 globally might be 10 million, not 3.2 million?

 This guy is doing a post-doc at Brown University.

He has a long thread on excess death estimates which support his conclusions.

Is this crazy? 

The US CDC has put excess deaths from all causes in the US in 2020 at ~561k (bottom of the range, too). That's 0.17% of total US population of 331 million.

Global population is 7.8 billion, X 0.17% = 13.26 million.

But 13 million is probably an underestimate, probably by a lot.

If the rest of the world had health care available as in the US, 10-15 million excess deaths would actually be in the ballpark. The thing is that assumption obviously isn't warranted.

Population data gathering over the coming years is going to show huge deficits which researchers will realize cannot be explained but by pandemic deaths. India, for example, and to its credit, is underreporting COVID deaths because it insists on having actual COVID diagnosis. The funeral pyres for cremation in India are working round the clock, but those numbers don't jibe with officially reported COVID deaths in many jurisdictions, by large margins. 

When the history of this thing gets written in ten years, the numbers are going to stagger.

H1N1 suddenly appeared in 2009 and then basically went away all by itself: The vaccine rollout took too long, underdelivered, and flopped

There are no outbreaks of H1N1 at the scale of 2009 in the years following. It basically subsided by itself before the vaccine was ready, and when it was, people pretty much ignored it:

In the U.S., the Health and Human Services Department estimated in July 2009 that 120 million doses would be available by October. By late October, only 17 million doses had been shipped — and fewer than that had been administered. By the time vaccine was becoming available, infections had peaked and flu activity was declining sharply.

 

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COVID-19 in the largest countries by population: Update for Sun 5/2/21

Countries with 200 million population or more: China, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria.

Data isn't available in all categories for all countries, and data quality varies dramatically.

One should assume figures in the Big Seven are more or less gross underestimations except in the USA. 

China in particular is a JOKE. Why anyone takes them seriously as a "global partner" is beyond me. Show me an honest communist and I will give you six free winning lotto numbers.

Hospital reporting is the worst. Very few countries report the data at all, which tells you they are neither motivated nor equipped to do so even though this is a pretty serious situation which is over one year old. Given how important that data is in judging the progress and severity of the pandemic, it is more than discouraging. The top five for hospitalizations are all US and Europe, the difference between true civilization and the rest being that we know the numbers at all.

The situations in Brazil and especially India are alarming given the high positivity rate in India and the high death rate in Brazil. Reports concentrating on India underreporting deaths (from Reuters and the like) in recent weeks are a sick joke compared with neighboring China which the charts say is a COVID utopia. India is a developing nation struggling to cope under an enormous strain while still remaining part of the free world, but journalists would rather criticize it than question China's glaring effrontery. The myopia is damning.

These Big Seven represent 4.065 billion of the world's population of 7.79 billion, 52.2%, and we don't have a clear picture of what's really going on with them.

What reason would there be to think positively?

Daily new cases, and deaths, per million in the US are still at last summer levels and have not made new lows. Same with hospitalizations. Case positivity is rising again and is actually at 5.8%, provisionally, in this data. Previous very recent levels in the 7s, however, have simply vanished from the record. Why? Johns Hopkins is currently showing 4%. What to believe?

Vaccinations still can't be pointed to for lowering the US numbers because the numbers remain too high. I'm sure they'll point to them once they decline as evidence for vaccine efficacy. Seasonality will be ignored. I will leave a vaccination horror story update for a separate, future post.

Why have cases and deaths and hospitalizations ebbed and flowed in the past in the absence of vaccines? I predict they'll never really say, same as we hear no good explanation for why H1N1 from 2009 simply dropped off the radar. Why did it go away despite the vaccine against it turning into a giant flop? 

They can't predict pandemics' comings and goings anymore than they can predict global cooling in the 1970s, global warming in the 2000s, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 or the end of the Reagan Bull in 2000.

Man is a worm, according to the Bible, a poor player upon the stage, according to Shakespeare, an idiot whose tale is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nothing!

 

daily new cases per million

daily new deaths per million

case positivity rate

share of population vaccinated usa v world

Top five countries for C19 hospitalizations

share vaccinated in the largest countries by population

 

daily new deaths/million

daily new cases/million

LOL, SpaceX Crew-1 Commander Mike Hopkins, first out, didn't need no stinkin' ramp to exit Dragon, did a little dance too afterwards

Second out, pilot Victor Glover, on the other hand . . ..

Well, it was Glover's first spaceflight.

SpaceX cut away before Glover got all the way out and didn't show the egress of the two others.

Watching the whole thing, one sees the SpaceX team install the ramp for Hopkins, but when he exits suddenly it's not there. Then they reinstall the ramp for Glover.

Listening to the color commentary, the narrators had indicated we would not see egress by any of the crew members but then you do. 

Hopkins no ramp

Glover, ramp and stretcher

Glover, ramp and stretcher

Glover ramp, stretcher close by

Glover ramp, feed cuts away

Glover ramp

Hopkins no ramp, no stretcher

Hopkins no ramp, no stretcher

Hopkins, fist pumps, dances, walks away

Cool visuals of SpaceX Dragon nighttime splashdown 11:56pm off Panama City, Florida Saturday, May 1, 2021

Time from undock from ISS to splashdown was fewer than seven hours.

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Racist FDA is going to ban menthol cigarettes

I never thought I'd admit that there is, in fact, systemic racism in America, but there it is.

What's next, fried chicken and watermelon?

Story.

Ain't it great to be a Democrat?

Ann Coulter's best tweet ever

 

"America is an idea, not a place, not a people" is the BIG LIE mantra of neo-conservatism and libertarianism. 

If that's true, one should be able to explain it, write it down, teach it, and put it into practice successfully anywhere. No need to come here for it.

And of course it isn't just an idea. Millions come here and never come to learn it anymore. Millions more aren't taught it in school anymore, and don't see it in practice at home anymore.

That's why the country is a mess.

A famous Italian-American once had it figured out, as I, a German-American, once had it figured out. He starts in, in earnest, at about minute ten:

Ice-Out in Nenana Alaska happened and I didn't even realize it

When I checked the Nenana Ice Cam yesterday the Tripod was still standing on the ice, but I didn't realize the event was already over.

It seems the ice broke up just enough to allow the Tripod to move a short distance to trip the clock in the tower it is attached to by a long cable.

The hitch was most of the ice was still in the river, and the Tripod evidently flowed upstream only just a little, which is to the right on the screen, and very odd. Normally it flows downstream, obviously.

I should have realized something was up because the flag rope was down, lying on the ice.

When I checked a few hours later the Tripod was gone and the water was flowing and I realized I had missed it as the ice cam page had the message:

THE ICE OFFICIALLY BROKE AND THE CLOCK STOPPED ON APRIL 30TH, 2021 AT 12:50 PM AST. THE 2021 JACKPOT IS $233,591.00 

Should have looked for that message the first time.

The Washington Times had the story here.

So add another Ice-Out to the period April 30-May 7 when the vast majority of them have occurred anyway since 1917. The National Weather Service pretty much nailed it predicting April 29-May 5.

Hard to go wrong with that in any year, to be honest.