So far, no deaths are apparently attributable to the Omicron variant of COVID-19:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has informed The Epoch Times that it has not documented any deaths from the Omicron variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.
According to the WHO, “for Omicron, we have not had any deaths reported, but it is still early in the clinical course of disease and this may change.”
When reached for comment by The Epoch Times, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent its report on the Omicron variant in the United States from Dec. 1 through 8. It shows that there were no documented deaths from Omicron during that period.
It won’t be long until it’s utterly ridiculous to be basing our panics and continuing government superpowers on case numbers. (I mean, I’m already there, but at some point even the more-timid will have to acknowledge reality, won’t they?)
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Lean back a moment and clear your eyes. If you’re older than thirty, recall lessons you learned when you were young — that it is always wrong to discriminate against people based entirely on the color of their skin. Now read this short paragraph:
One of the [Providence school] district’s current incentives, which will continue next school year, is up to $25,000 in loan forgiveness for educators of color. The money is provided by the Rhode Island Foundation.
How is it Constitutional for a government agency to use a private activist organization’s dark money to provide different employment benefits to different teachers based on race? How does anybody see that as okay?
Worse, the paragraph appears in an article about the dire lack of teachers in Providence schools, forcing the state (which is currently running the district) to offer a variety of financial incentives. Well, the teacher shortage can’t be too much of a crisis if promoting the racism of Rhode Island Foundation donors is more important than hiring qualified teachers.
Light-skinned teachers may be thinking twice before binding their careers to an organization that prioritizes racism. Sure, the signing bonuses are piling up across the board, but it’s clear that white teachers are considered to be of lower value than their peers of color. (Perhaps “peers” isn’t the correct term, because they clearly aren’t seen that way.) Any given year, this attitude could result in a policy that makes the discrimination more pronounced and impossible to live with.
Moreover, this sort of favoritism often comes with a danger for the disfavored that they’ll be targeted for one wrong word or targeted for personal reasons but with race as the excuse.
What sort of group mania has captured us that such policies hardly raise an eyebrow?
Featured image of whiteboard harassment of former Providence teacher Ramona Bessinger.
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Given the dramatic way in which my tastes and my morality have changed in the last 20 years, I expected (when I finally got around to watching it) that I’d appreciate the dark artistry of the D.C. movie, Joker, even as I was repelled by its nihilistic framing. As dark art (so to speak), it wasn’t as good as I’d been led to believe. In fact, at its closing scene, I wondered whether our culture (at least in the mainstream) has become so soulless that it can’t even make evil compelling. Now I wonder if all the buzz around the movie wasn’t just more play-acting of a rebellion that our society can’t even muster in earnest, now that the rebels control the heights.
The creators of our culture are so disconnected from depth that they can only mimic the forms that used to, in their own time, trade on the depth of that which they were destroying. Honestly, I didn’t think darkness could become so insipid.
If I thought the movie was meant as an ironic reflection of that point, I might think it brilliant, with the image of plastic clown masks in emulation of true evil, but I don’t think it was that clever.
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The latest argument, if I’m understanding this correctly, is that we all have to mask because the people who run Rhode Island’s health care system (including regulators and legislators) are incapable of maintaining a workforce:
Facing a debilitating staffing shortage and climbing cases of COVID-19 and hospitalizations, top doctors at Rhode Island’s largest health system are expressing support for reinstating an indoor mask mandate.
“Each of the previous surges was challenging throughout the nation and challenging in Rhode Island,” said Lifespan executive vice president and chief clinical officer Dr. Kenneth Wood during a Zoom press conference held Thursday. “The difference this time is we are doing it in a setting of far fewer staff.” …
“This is one of those circumstances where I think we are somewhat obligated to try and do everything we can to try and turn the curve and flatten the curve of transmission,” said Chief Medical Officer Dr. Dean Roye.
From conversations I’ve had, my understanding is that the latest surge in COVID cases and the slip in nurse numbers has merely tipped a long-building problem over the edge. Thus far, I haven’t been able to find a convincing story in the data, but some early observations are worthwhile.
Let’s start with the COVID numbers and the state’s “new positive cases” chart. Despite near-total vaccination in 2021, the chart shows very limited reduction in new cases from this time last year. (The caveat, here, is that there were a handful of days last year that spiked much higher, and we don’t know, yet, if we’ll have those days this year.)
Yet, the ratio of cases to hospitalization has improved. If we look at new positive tests over a two-week span and compare that with new COVID-positive hospital admissions over a two-week span (with a one-week lag), the trend has been downward. Last year, new hospitalizations were about 6% of new cases. Right now, they’re a little higher than 4%. The percentage of hospitalized people in intensive care or vented is about the same as last year, but obviously, that’s a smaller number.
In short, we shouldn’t be having any panic over hospital capacity.
An interesting interactive tool from the Akron Beacon Journal indicates that there’s room in total inpatient beds, although ICUs are in the red in two counties (suggesting opportunity for resource or patient sharing), but let’s take the hospitals at their word that we’re at “crisis” levels. Why might that be? The issue, we hear, is one of staffing, most importantly of nurses.
According to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), Rhode Island currently has 27,086 people with active registered nurse licenses issued by the state. Around this time in 2018, that number was 23,242, so it’s grown 17% in three years.
Another angle to consider, long-term, is people who pass the required test for a nursing license. The NCSBM shows 583 test takers in 2011, with 532 passing, in 2011. In 2017, it was 773 and 681. In the latest year available, 2020, the numbers were 777 and 682. So, the total was up from a decade ago, but about the same from 2017.
So what’s the problem?
I’m still working on the answer, but one obvious piece of the puzzle that local journalists haven’t been putting front and center is the governor’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. Boston Globe journalist Alexa Gagosz tells me that Lifespan lost 1% of its workforce over the mandate, and 11 were lost to Landmark hospital. Without context, we can just write these off as insignificant numbers, so we have to dig a little.
California has the only mandate for a nurse:patient ratio in the country, and it requires one nurse for every two intensive care patients and 1:5 in most wards. Thus, by this extreme standard, every nurse lost (either layoff or never bothered to apply) reduced the number of ICU beds by 2 or non-ICU beds by 5. In Kent County, 2 more ICU beds would be a 21% increase. Statewide, it would be about a 1% increase for every nurse. That is not a negligible number in a crisis, and as a reminder, this is assuming California’s extreme limit isn’t crazy restrictive.
But that isn’t the end of the obvious regulations.
In 2018, the state government of Rhode Island declined to update its laws in order to maintain its membership in the Nurse Licensure Compact. Consequently, nurses in 38 other U.S. states must go through the licensing process in Rhode Island in order to work here, which directly has an effect on their ability to fill gaps and surely affects families’ decisions about where to move. I’ve requested some numbers to help quantify the effect, but we can assume it’s not nothing.
That’s not all. Don’t forget that earlier this year the General Assembly passed and Governor McKee signed the most demanding minimum standard for nursing home coverage possibly in the entire world. That means a greater demand for nurses within the Rhode Island market. People I know in related businesses have complained that they can’t hire nurses because other organizations are offering so much more money. A candidate will accept the job and be gone as soon as somebody else offers more money.
So, at the same time Rhode Island state government is restricting who can work as a nurse, it is mandating an increase in the number of nurses needed, even as they burn out from COVID demands or directly lose their jobs because they are reluctant to be vaccinated (perhaps because they know they’re already immune from having recovered from the virus). Although I haven’t identified them, I’d wager other contributing regulations could be found, if anybody cared to look.
And for this reason, the “experts” want you and your children to mask constantly in the hopes that it will help a little. There’s socialism in a nutshell: the experts can’t manage the variables, so the people are blamed for insufficient compliance.
We should respond with the obvious truth that government can’t simply will things to be. Management means accepting reality and responsibility.
Featured image by Vladimir Fedotov on Unsplash.
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Perhaps no aspect of the public health response to COVID has increased my skepticism more than the insane and dogged practice of ignoring the immunity that people can gain from having and recovering from COVID-19. Whether researchers conclude that it is insufficient, too brief, or whatever, credibility required that it be treated as a real thing, and it wasn’t.
Unfortunately for them, information has a way of getting out:
Immunity people enjoy after recovering from COVID-19 is better than the protection bestowed from vaccination, according to a new study from Israel.
Researchers analyzing data from the county’s health database from August to September found both COVID-19 infections and severe disease were higher among the vaccinated than those who recovered from the illness, also known as people with natural immunity.
For instance, the naturally immune had a 10.5 per 100,000 infection rate four to six months following their recovery, versus a 69.2 per 100,000 rate among the vaccinated.
I’ve been pointing out for months that naturally acquired immunity appears to be stronger than vaccination, but that vaccination improves odds even more if you’ve recovered from the virus. But (again) the numbers are so low that having had it, being vaccinated, or being young and fit are all sufficient.
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Attitudes like this, from former Providence Journal reporter and University of Connecticut journalism professor Mike Stanton fascinate me. Commenting on Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee’s hesitance to impose a statewide mask mandate, Stanton writes:
Yes, poor leadership. Because it’s contrary to what the doctors & experts recommend.
I went to PPAC the other night; they required masks.
I went to a college basketball game Sunday; they required masks.
What do they know that the governor doesn’t?
A political science class could make an entire project out of dissecting these sentences. What is one to make of the assumption that leadership means doing whatever “the doctors & experts recommend”? That’s a very Rhode Island attitude right there. Many in the Ocean State actually do believe representation — whether of a group of voters or a group of stakeholders, like small businesses, for example — means being the one who convinces the people that they should go along with the conclusions of the powerful.
Some of us think representation ought to go the other way. In that view, leadership would be something more like: “Despite what the self-reinforcing ‘experts’ say, the people I represent don’t want this or think they need it, and as the one responsible for making the decision, the situation would have to be overwhelmingly dire to impose this on them.”
If I were to write a paper on Stanton’s tweet, however, my area of focus would be on the nature of his evidence. He doesn’t testify that he went to public places only to see sick people coughing on each other in close quarters. No, he went to two places where people were gathered in large numbers inside and the were wearing masks without the government requiring it.
This is exactly in line with my political spectrum design (reproduced in the featured image of this post). To folks like Stanton, government ought to be the repository of truth and morality, putting him on the Left side of the spectrum.. Private organizations’ imposing mask mandates doesn’t prove that our society is managing the disease organically, with a balance that accommodates group interests with individual freedom. Rather, it proves that masking in public is good and right, which must therefore be reflected in the law, whether by statute or decree.
Furthermore, his trust in the ability of “experts” to contrive a policy that suits the needs of millions of people suggests a belief in human perfectibility, otherwise he might hesitate to proclaim it obvious that the governor should impose a blanket mandate with the stroke of a pen. Thus, with no surprise, we can confidently label Stanton as a “progressive.”
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There he is again. Marc Parlange is in the Boston Globe stumping for the Democrats’ biggest legislative priority with “Build Back Better can pull Rhode Island out of the pandemic — if we invest in the Blue Economy.”
Why did the University of Rhode Island hire a lobbyist and ideologue instead of a leader?
Yeah, sure, the university stands to get a check from amidst the trillions of dollars in waste the Democrats want to foist on future generations, but shouldn’t our standards be a little higher? The leader of a major university should be able to understand that the ill effects of such a mammoth of social engineering and opaque-yet-gargantuan spending could easily outweigh the effects on his institution than a few crumbs upfront.
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Robert VerBruggen’s response is perfect to a chart showing how the average disposable income in most European countries is poverty by U.S. standards:
This is why people love using “relative” poverty measures. It’s basically dividing by how awesome America is, to make America look un-awesome.
The mind-blowing thing is that most European countries could easily move closer to the U.S. standard by liberating their people. Instead, an entire political party in the United States is dedicated to making our results more like theirs!
People should ask themselves what such people stand to gain by that absurd move.
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The headline that the Providence Journal gave to Mark Patinkin’s latest column puts things in a useful context: “It’s just a cold, right? I thought a booster made me invulnerable — but I got COVID.” If we step back a pace and look at things objectively, we might indeed wonder what makes COVID something other than or, more relevantly, something more ominous than “just a cold.”
Amidst personal details about family members and descriptions of his journey to a positive test result, Patinkin provides the answer:
I wasn’t careful enough when I first felt a “cold” come on. There’s a reflex to tell yourself it’s just that, a cold. So I didn’t quarantine away from my son, as well as a close college pal of my daughter who has been staying with us in our home.
Thankfully, both of them avoided the virus, with repeated PCR tests negative. But it still meant they had to miss work for ten days because they were exposed. The state only asks that such folks test; but their jobs asked that they quarantine. …
For 18 months, I told myself that risking COVID is mostly my own peril. I’m now far more clear at how disruptive we can be to others — even if they don’t get it.
What makes COVID more ominous than “just a cold” — or “just the flu,” in acknowledgment that it can produce worse outcomes than head colds — is the wall of rules and restrictions that authorities are imposing, whether governments or employers. It’s not the virus causing the problem, now; it’s us. Patinkin goes on to describe how he directed the icy glare of the state (in the person of the “caring, professional” Nick) toward everybody with whom he had interacted. No doubt their phones soon rang with horror-movie music in the background.
As a parent, I’ve been watching the dread of restrictions transfer to ordinary illnesses. Schools seem willing to let children get away with the sniffles, but if the congestion creates a cough (which congestion tends to do), then that’s two symptoms, which requires a test. Meanwhile, the state is taking up to four days to return the results that count as a get-out-of-jail ticket. For kids, in other words, “just a cold” means the better part of a week out of school. It’s no longer only COVID that can disrupt others’ lives.
As a society, we’ve reached the point of having to ask ourselves whether this is where we want to go. Are we going to be so nosophobic that we accept a standard of zero preventable spread of any disease, no matter how mild?
The alternative to allowing fear of COVID to infect our reaction to more-familiar illnesses is to go in the other direction and finally expand our perspective on colds and flus to cover “the novel coronavirus.” That is, we can acknowledge that it’s simply part of the human experience and go about our lives — not taking unnecessary risks, but not imposing the unnecessary side effects of excessive caution.
Sure, for a professional columnist, fear of COVID may only mean giving up theater tickets, but the consequences are much more dire for most people, especially children, who (let’s not forget) have proven mostly immune to bad COVID anyway. Perhaps our more-senior citizens will be beyond caring when our country has to learn the lesson of fear’s effects, but if we’re wise, we’ll account for them, now, in our cultural responses.
Featured image by Brittany Colette on Unsplash.
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This suggestion from Nicole Solas has stayed near the top of my “to post” list for a month because it gets to an important strategic discussion too often rushed through on the Rhode Island right.
Nicole retweeted the picture used as the featured image of this post, which was posted by Kara. The “thank you” card reads, “Get the hell out of NK + stay in Coventry where you belong.” Nicole suggests:
If u receive notes of harassment & intimidation from political opponents, report ur legitimate, good faith basis of harassment, stalking, or intimidation to the police. Leftists files reports of fantasy thought crime in “bias reporting” systems & then uses those fake reports to justify more oppressive bias reporting policies like KGB General Garland’s memo marking parents as domestic terrorists. Unlike the lying left, conservatives actually are being harassed, and we need to file every single report of harassment to fight back.
We need to adopt leftist tactics to beat them at their own game. Leave no stone unturned. Answer them blow for blow. Every leftist misstep needs a formal complaint whether it’s filed in the school district, police station, ethics commission or court of law. Fight fire with fire.
The reason this is an important discussion to have is that we’re on a spinning wheel. In Rhode Island, and even within my own town, I’ve watched newly engaged people push back in exactly this way and ultimately burn out without having accomplished the needed correction. The primary reason it fails is that such solutions require some semblance of fairness in the news media, the police, the attorney general’s office, and the judiciary, and Rhode Island is just too far gone.
I brought a giant stack of harassing messages from one person to our local police, who seemed to agree they were, on their face, cyberharassment — targeting my children and actively using social media and other methods of online communication to get organizations to intimidate me and deprive me of employment and recognition. We can debate whether cyberharassment ought to be a crime, but if it is a crime (which it is) this was definitely it. The solicitor who handles local police prosecutions rejected the complaint, and there was no investigation.
Look at Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots versus January 6 at the Capitol. Although the incidents are usually less profound, the double standard is even more pronounced at the state and local level. Leftist outrages are excused or ignored, but if you’re a conservative, your (much less aggressive) response will be treated as the greatest of offenses.
As this plays out, your supporters will become frustrated, and most will give up, either returning to their lives or even leaving the state. Those of us who stay engaged, having learned from our mistakes, look up from our recovery and see a group of newly engaged people insisting that the solution is to push back and fight fire with fire. Been there, done that.
I could definitely be wrong, here; it’s possible this new wave will accomplish something where others have failed. But I think Nicole’s advice will prove wrong. The sheer volume of the offenses will work against you. One formal complaint is news (or maybe not, in our current environment). Dozens are noise. The media and the Democrats in power have no sympathy for you. Most think you deserve to be harassed, if they’re being honest.
On the other side of the question, there are many Rhode Islanders who are not that far gone. The problem is that they believe (and deeply need to believe) that the system is fair. So, when your formal complaints go nowhere, they’ll count that against you. They’ll assume there’s something they’re not seeing that made your complaint frivolous or the circumstances different than they thought. I mean, the Attorney General of the State of Rhode Island wouldn’t ignore (say) a library board’s obvious violations of open meetings laws in order to enforce partisan differences in who can use public property, right? (Not a made-up example.)
If formal complaints are a potential liability, however, informal ones can still have power. Conservative Rhode Islanders need to keep track of these incidents in some centralized, easy-to-find place and spread awareness. People need to make up their own minds without reference to our corrupt authorities, because you’re not going to stop the harassment, much less turn it into a political advantage, by appealing to the most corrupt and harassing among us.
In fact, the only way you’ll stop the harassment is by making it obvious that it’s giving you political advantage. You have to appeal to your neighbors.
