Well… it’s not just COVID, obviously. People have gone crazy on a bunch of issues, but with COVID, as a topic, data is involved, which really ought to make it easier to pull everybody into productive discussion. Unfortunately, it’s not often working out that way (at least among those I encounter).
The latest example to flitter across my screen comes via a tweet by the Roosevelt Society linking to a Daily Mail article that makes the headline claim, “Unvaccinated people who catch Covid are 60 TIMES more likely to end up in intensive care, new research reveals.” Reading the article, however, this claim simply isn’t accurate. Even in the first paragraph, one gets the almost imperceptible adjustment that it’s “up to 60 times.” What’s the difference? Well, read on to paragraphs seven and eight:
Figures from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC), which covers units in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, show that between May and November the rate of admission for double-jabbed Covid sufferers in their 60s was just 0.6 cases per 100,000 people per week.
But among people of the same age who remained unvaccinated, the rate was 37.3 per 100,000 per week – equating to a relative risk about 60 times higher.
So, the 60-times measure only applies to those in their 60s. After a bunch of charts, images, and videos, we learn that the rate is halved (to 30-fold) for those in their 50s and, oddly, in their 70s. It more than halves again for those in their 30s and 40s (10- to 15-fold).
Yes, those are still big spreads, but look more closely at the numbers in the blockquote. If we convert the numbers to percentages, the intensive-care risk for unvaccinated 60-somethings is 0.04%. Sure, that’s a bigger risk than 0.0006% for the vaccinated, but is it reasonable for the Health Secretary to be chiding unvaccinated residents to “think about the damage that they are doing to society” because only 99.96% of them will avoid intensive care if they catch the disease?
As I said, people have gone crazy. I don’t know how the odds that you’ll be hit by falling space debris change when you step outside, but it’s probably a pretty big increase in your risk, relatively. But the danger is still miniscule.
If we can’t agree that the risk from COVID is so minimal already that anybody who doesn’t want to be vaccinated can simply live with it, could we at least agree on some threshold at which we can feel safe? The standard that we can only feel safe when there is no way to feel safer just doesn’t work.
Featured image by Marcelo Vaz on Unsplash.
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With Rhode Island’s politics-watchers all atwitter and fainting over a white woman’s expression of regret about a lost friendship that seems to her to have been related to differing races, the need for context seems urgent. For comparison, consider this story out of London:
The attack, which took place at 7.20pm on December 2, happened as the victim left West Hampstead Underground Station after work. His alleged attacker was desecrating a public menorah, erected to celebrate Chanukah, when he approached his victim and asked: “Are you Jewish?”
He added: “I want to find a Jew to kill.”
The attacker chased the victim into a local store after the police told the latter that his situation “did not warrant a priority response.” In the store, the attacker beat the man expressing his intention to murder him. It appears he pulled out a knife, and the police eventually were persuaded to travel to the scene, although the order isn’t clear.
Whatever those details, we should keep this incident on the board for comparison with the outrages of the day in Rhode Island.
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Somehow, one still sees comments from people who seem oblivious of the effects that our anti-COVID measures are having on children. College professor Glenn Reynolds mentions the experience on his campus:
I was talking to a couple of freshman advisors from UT, and they noted that our freshmen had crucial years of their educations and development done online, which leaves them socially and intellectually behind in many ways. And the mental health problems, already bad pre-pandemic, are much worse.
This is in response to worries from the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy that the experience of the COVID years has amplified a trend that was already underway. That this is not a bigger part of the conversation in Rhode Island and elsewhere shows either that the COVID response is mostly political or that, deep down, the people making decisions don’t believe they’re up to the challenge of making real tradeoffs in the face of real risks.
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A while back, I saw a short article about an incident in which the Providence police saved a woman from suicide.
Police went to the scene at 9:26 a.m. Some officers tried to calm her down and coax her off the ledge, Verdi said. But at one point the woman became despondent and a crisis negotiator thought she was disconnected.
She began to panic while looking down from the ledge, Verdi said.
While such incidents can be traumatizing for all involved when they go the other way, when they turn out well, the job can be extremely rewarding.
Broadly, this is a point people don’t consider often enough, whether they’re citizens engaging in public policy debates or my small business clients figuring out how to structure their employee compensation. Cash (including, for my purposes here, financial benefits) is only one consideration as people decide whether something is worth doing, and it can probably be thought of as a final filler.
When people say they love or hate their jobs, they tend to have the nature of their jobs in mind, and pay can (or has to) adjust accordingly. If a job is highly rewarding and fun, people will be more likely to do it as long as the pay covers their basic needs. If a job is demoralizing or dangerous, then higher compensation is needed. This point is relevant when journalists fret that non-profits can’t keep up with market pay, but thinking about police officers suggests a different angle.
Police are paid reasonably well in Rhode Island and the United States, but in a less rewarding setting, the pay would have to go up. Of course, the anti-police sentiment of the past couple of years counts in this calculation, but the topic broadens if we look at a different context: when police function as enforcement for a nasty dictator.
Sure, some people will find the ability to lord it over others as a rewarding perk, but that is less common than novelists and screenwriters tend to imagine. More often, I think, the mechanism is relative. The dictators make life so difficult or painful for the masses that the relative liberty, security, or compensation of police makes up for the pain of moral qualms. It could be, therefore, less that the dictator needs the police state in order to oppress the people than that the dictator’s oppression of the people makes it easier to compensate those who sustain his or her rule.
In any case, the on-the-job satisfaction of police might be one factor to track while assessing the civic health of our society.
Featured image by Fred Moon on Unsplash.
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Here’s the comment of Est Providence Representative Brianna Henries on today’s biggest news in RI:
gob·smacked
/ˈɡäbˌsmakt/ adjective
INFORMAL•BRITISH
utterly astonished; astounded….however I’m not surprised. I can’t even fathom meeting this level of racism with a clever quip, it does not merit that. This is the reality of our world. We simply must do better.
Marvel at how wonderful and fair-minded a world one must inhabit for Morgan’s statement to seem like the height of racism. Unfortunately, lots of money and political power is invested in the lie that America is a racist country, so we’ll keep seeing this nonsense. They need to divide and scare because otherwise people might think about how devastating their worldview is for our country.
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Geena Pham is a progressive candidate for state senate and a public school teacher. Here she is tweeting about Patricia Morgan’s controversial comment:
Delete your fucking Twitter, Patricia. You’re a disgrace to Rhode Island.
Honestly, a world in which a public school teacher running for political office tweets such a thing is exactly a world in which Morgan’s comment is 100% justified.
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Republican state representative from West Warwick Patricia Morgan has gone viral with the following tweet:
I had a black friend. I liked her and I think she liked me, too. But now she is hostile and unpleasant. I am sure I didn’t do anything to her, except be white. Is that what teachers and our political leaders really want for our society? Divide us because of our skin color? #CRT
In a mature and sane society, this might be an open door for heartfelt discussion (which people would pass by if they weren’t going to take it in that spirit), but we don’t live in a mature and sane society. Instead, Morgan’s lament attracted satire from an original Star Trek crew member.
After all, she provided an opportunity for mainstream progressives to feel superior while advancing their preferred narrative. Naturally, the Boston Globe has dressed that effort up as a straight news report (just reporting the reactions, donchaknow).
Black Lives Matter RI PAC wants Morgan removed from committees to prove racism “can no longer be tolerated.” The Globe gives other politicians the field to insult and condemn Morgan, and House Speaker Joseph Shekarchi “issued a statement, saying, ‘There is no place for divisive remarks by any House member.'”
That’s interesting. Very interesting.
What gives the whole disgusting game away, however, is when Boston Globe journalists Brian Amaral and Edward Fitzpatrick give the floor to far-left state Senator Tiara Mack:
Senator Tiara Mack, a Black Providence Democrat, said, “I don’t think Morgan is respected nor a thought leader. I think tweets like these are sensational for her base but not grounded in reality. I also wonder if her ‘Black Friend’ would consider her association with Morgan a friendship.”
Honestly, the first thing that came to my mind upon seeing the mainstream machine revving up on social media was this Tweet from Senator Mack back in November:
My standards for white people was always high AND it just got higher. If you aren’t actively confronting how you uphold white supremacist systems I don’t have time for you.
As I suggested at the same time, this is straight-up racism. The bottom line is that anybody reacting to Morgan’s tweet who didn’t respond to Mack’s is a fraud. Maybe they’re deceiving themselves, but they’re still frauds.
It’d be nice to live in a world where we could put the two tweets next to each other on the table and discuss what, together, they say about our current society, but people are making lots of money and getting lots of self-affirmation by preventing that world from existing.
Featured image by Clay Banks on Unsplash.
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I’m with Ed Driscoll in finding it political that CBS would edit out its reporter’s complaints about the harm of COVID restrictions on kids:
Longtime CBS reporter and chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford went viral on Sunday and Monday on social media following comments, meant to air on Sunday’s Face the Nation, that slammed our elected officials and public health experts for “the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had on young kids and children” and the subsequent mental health crisis. However, CBS News kept her comments out of the actual show.
Frankly, it’s this sort of stuff that makes me less willing to consider mainstream calls for control measures. I just don’t believe that the people providing information to the majority of citizens are telling the truth.
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There’s something actually amazing about this transcript from a news segment on NPR. From the perspective of people who see the world with the same eyes as the host, Melissa Block, and her producers, the piece will appear coherent and reinforcing. From the perspective of those who don’t see the world with the same eyes, it looks like a big bundle of propaganda and lies.
Start with the headline:
Biden aims to help hospitals by sending military doctors and nurses to help
This is written in the “Dear Leader” voice. The subject is the ruler. The verb is his good intention (“aims to help”). An armchair psychologist might make much of the fact that the headline repeats the phrase, “to help,” as if it is a comforting mantra.
More significantly, however, the interview really isn’t about what Biden is doing; it’s about what Rhode Island hospitals are experiencing. That is, National Public Radio’s purpose for the story is clearly different from what the story is. This disconnect has two implications. First, NPR wants anybody who is just skimming headlines to know that Biden is helping, not that Rhode Island is struggling, which is what the story describes. Second, NPR thinks that Rhode Island’s struggling is actually about Biden’s helping. In other words, the Ocean State supports the notion of Biden’s goodness and justifies his position.
Of course, any good ideological propaganda about government trying to fix problems that government has either caused or been unable to handle has to have a scapegoat, and in this case, the finger points at the unvaccinated.
Block draws Kent Hospital Chief of Emergency Medicine Laura Forman into recitation of the proper narrative without extracting a single confounding fact or challenging a single assertion. Listening to the segment or reading the transcript, one would conclude that RI hospitals are filled with unprecedented numbers of COVID patients, but they’re not.
The day before this segment aired (which is the last day for which the state has currently provided data), there were 273 people in the hospital testing positive for COVID. On the same date last year, the number was 486. Vaccines may or may not deserve credit for this decrease, but you can’t blame people who have not been vaccinated for the fact that hospitals are unable to accommodate 44% fewer patients.
Adjusting one’s perspective accordingly casts a different light on this portion of Dr. Forman’s testimony:
The situation right now in the hospital is worse than I’ve seen it in the last two years. The onslaught of patients with COVID right now is unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s relentless. At this point, I’m surprised if a patient tests negative for it. Even patients who are coming in after car accidents or with ankle sprains are testing positive. The community spread here is nothing short of wildfire at this point. And it’s overwhelming the hospital. We are routinely running out of beds. We’re running out of IV pumps. We’re running out of pillows. In 20 years in emergency medicine, I’ve never seen anything like this.
Above all, Forman’s claim is demonstrably false. A year ago, Rhode Island hospitals went ninety days with more COVID cases than they have right now. Again, if the situation is worse right now, it isn’t because the flow of COVID patients is “relentless.”
Read more deeply, however. Apparently, Kent Hospital is testing every patient who comes in, whatever the reason for admission. The problem is not COVID as an illness, but COVID as a test result. Ankle sprains are not overwhelming the hospital. Enhanced precautions for people with no symptoms, a shortage of nurses (which, we’ve been told, was a pre-existing condition in RI), and supply chain problems having to do with economic shutdowns, stimulus-driven inflation, and plain poor government management are the factors overwhelming the hospital.
If the virus is spreading like “wildfire” but producing nearly half the hospitalizations, one has to wonder: so what? The more mild variants become, the more they can be seen as natural vaccines. If vaccinated people are catching it without serious complications, it’s essentially a natural booster. And if a little bit of honest analysis shows that precautions and undue fear are really the cause of Rhode Island hospitals’ apocalypse, then it is insanity to resort to fear to beat the public into compliant submission in the hopes that it will drive down the hospitalization numbers even more.
Featured image by AdhySavala on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The harm of mandates
- The dropped ball of testing
- The nursing crisis
- Some political predictions for 2022
Featured image by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.
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