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Monday, May 17, 2021
Sunday, May 16, 2021
Bathroom transmission of COVID-19
From: Preventing Fecal-Oral And Fecal-Aerosol Transmission Of Covid-19
Though the main way Covid-19 spreads will always be from person to person, exposure to infectious waste and sewage has a part to play in starting outbreaks, especially in apartment buildings or schools where many people share close quarters at regular intervals of the day. ...
Fecal-aerosol transmission, according to a research paper published in Annals of Internal Medicine in December 2020, was suspected to be the cause of a Covid-19 outbreak in a high-rise apartment building in Guangzhou, China that infected at least nine people across three separate households. ...
Almost all of the environmental samples that came back positive were from the master bathrooms, giving the researchers reason to believe that the drainage pipes connecting the three units were to blame.
US Covid-19 update for Sunday May 16, 2021: With nearly 47% of the population vaccinated with one dose, no metric has beaten lows achieved without vaccines
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| still 2k higher in May 2021 than Sep 2020 |
Click on any chart to enlarge.
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| same as in Sep 2020 but not a new low |
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| bouncing off 4% without equaling the Jun 2020 low |
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| mortality still has a ways to go to equal Jul 2020 |
Why no one can get a fair trial in increasingly libertarian America
If justice stood on the side of the single person, it ought to give good men pleasure to see that right should take place; but when, on the contrary, the commonweal of a whole nation is overborn by private interest, what good man but must lament?
-- Jonathan Swift
Friday, May 14, 2021
Now that USA CDC has said people vaccinated against COVID-19 can stop wearing masks, let's acknowledge how well masks worked
In Africa.
The continent was a veritable beacon of mask requirements from the Med to the Cape of Good Hope.
And Africa has the COVID-19 case graph to prove how successful this was!
Cases per million in Africa never topped 25! Whereas in North America the metric hit nearly 475/million.
Those dang libertarians really screwed things up big time in El Norte with their "We don't need no stinkin' masks!"
For true conservatism which actually works, look to Africa.
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Thursday, May 13, 2021
This has to be the dumbest blackout story ever written: The crisis is entirely of their own making
Blackouts Threaten Entire U.S. West This Summer as Heat Awaits :
States shuttering coal and gas-fired power plants simply aren’t
replacing them fast enough to keep pace with the vagaries of an unstable
climate, and the region’s existing power infrastructure is woefully
vulnerable to wildfires (which threaten transmission lines), drought
(which saps once-abundant hydropower resources) and heat waves (which
play havoc with demand).
Well don't shutter 'em then!
Bunch of idiots.
I'm so old I remember when AIDS was going to wipe out America
"In 2017, 16,358 people with HIV died, and 5,534 of those deaths were from HIV-related causes."
COVID-19 has wiped out that many since April 18th.
A gasoline pipeline hack, inflation, and Liz Cheney are bigger news.
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Daily new COVID-19 cases per million fell 62% in South Korea in the two months before vaccination began on Feb 25, and rose 70% in the two months after
South Korea, which has 7.2% of its population vaccinated with at least one dose, uses the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on its frontline medical workers and the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on the more numerous population in the long-term care arena:
By the end of March, authorities plan to complete injecting the first doses to some 344,000 residents and workers at long-term care settings, who will receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, and 55,000 frontline medical workers, who will receive shots developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
COVID-19 cases fell without the aid of vaccines in South Korea, and rose again despite them.
Since vaccination began on Feb 25, deaths per million stands today only where it was when the effort first began two and a half months ago.
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Sunday, May 9, 2021
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.
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.
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| Cases: Africa |
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| 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.
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| Cases: North America |
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| Vaccinations: North America |
Saturday, May 8, 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.
Friday, May 7, 2021
Mark Krikorian hits on the sorry truth about Trump and Elise Stefanik
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“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."
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