Russell Roberts's Blog, page 192
January 2, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
If you ring in the New Year with a raised drink, Edward Slingerland would like you to show proper reverence to the liquid in your glass. Alcohol is not just a tool for celebrating the end of a year, whether pleasant or miserable. It doesn’t merely give you and your friends a pleasant communal buzz. No, what you hold in your glass is the elixir that started civilization and has been essential ever since in enabling human societies to flourish (while, admittedly, enjoying a pleasant buzz).
In Drunk, a witty and erudite homage to alcohol, Slingerland offers a novel explanation to an old evolutionary puzzle: Why do we keep drinking? “Humans are the only species that deliberately, systematically, and regularly gets drunk,” he writes. “The rarity of this behavior is not surprising, given its costs.” The downsides of alcohol have always been obvious: impaired motor skills, wretched decision-making, excruciating headaches, and assorted long-term damage to body and soul. Logically, a society of teetotalers ought to be so much more productive that it would long ago have conquered its drunken neighbors and eventually the rest of the planet. Yet from the ancient world until today, from the wine sipped at Greek philosophers’ symposia to the champagne toasts on New Year’s Eve, the richest and most dynamic societies have given alcohol a central role in their cultures.
Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph Sternberg predicts – hopefully accurately – that 2022 will witness the end of many “climate ambitions.” Here’s his conclusion:
The net-zero gimmick will be with us for a long while yet, alas. The green true believers (or are they bitter clingers?) are busy devising rear-guard actions by which to insulate environmentalism from real-world political pressures, not least by enlisting gullible or cynical titans of finance to do via pension-fund investment allocations what can’t be done honestly via legislation. The political class remains rhetorically wedded to its earlier foolhardy promises, and the media is too enamored of reality-detached activists such as Ms. [Greta] Thunberg.
All the smarter then for politicians to resolve to discuss the matter as little as possible in the year ahead. As starving the atmosphere of carbon dioxide becomes a political liability, starving the issue of political oxygen will become the electoral tactic of choice.
From the mid 1960s until at least the 1980s, the UCLA department of economics occupied a unique and important niche in the evolution of economic thought. The UCLA school—led by Armen Alchian, William Allen, Harold Demsetz, George Hilton, Jack Hirshleifer, Benjamin Klein, and others—didn’t just present interesting, provocative research, they advanced a way of thinking about social organization. They showed us what questions are really interesting and how their approach to economics can help find the answers.
The best thing about David Henderson and Steven Globerman’s book (even better than the fact that it’s well-written, interesting, and offered at zero price) is the way it connects research that came out of UCLA to broader ideas. The book is much more than a collection of abstracts from a few dozen books and articles. It is an advocacy for a unifying approach to economics. And ‘advocacy’ is the right word here: both Henderson and Globerman are very much products of the UCLA school, and they very much believe in that worldview.
Say! I think that Pierre Lemieux is on to something, really!
Phil Magness talks with James Harrigan and Antony Davies about critical race theory.
Michael Huemer reveals the illogic of logical positivism…. but see Arnold Kling.
But Neiman Marxists who donate their excess income will still live decent lives. Our point is not that they ought to immiserate themselves to become martyrs for their cause. We claim only that they should give away the amount that they themselves regard as appropriate to tax away—money which, by their own standards, they shouldn’t have in the first place. (In 2018, Sanders deducted $18,950 in charitable donations—just 3.3 percent of his total income.)
Lastly, it is especially wrong for someone to usemoral posturing to become rich and famous, and then, instead of avoiding the behavior they claim is wrong, to revel in it or engage in it far more than others. There is something ridiculous and rotten about the fundamentalist Christian pastor who becomes famous for condemning extramarital sex but who also employs a harem of prostitutes. Or consider government leaders who demand social distancing and masking for the masses but have large, unmasked parties while their states are on lockdown. Or the public intellectual who decries the commodification of everything but demands $30,000 and first-class airfare to give guest lectures on commodification. When the disconnect between personal behavior and expressed ideology is this dramatic, and when the person gets rich and famous for expressing that ideology, we have to wonder whether he was ever sincere or was instead merely trying to promote himself.
The reality is that for many people, publicly expressing ideology is not about trying to say what’s right and wrong; it’s about trying to look good to others. It’s moral masturbation, not moral theory. Rather than helping others—which might cost them something!—they advocate helping others. Rather than ameliorating some of the bad effects of injustice—which might cost them something!—they advocate for justice. They then consume the warm glow of cheap altruism and earn the admiration of like-minded peers, all while living a self-centered luxury lifestyle.
Paul Marshall explains that Progressives are emphatically not liberals. A slice:
What we are seeing today being enacted in the name of liberalism is not liberal at all. Instead, let’s call it by the name which its proponents are prepared to use — progressivism. This is the creed which unites Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, most of the US Democratic Party, most of the British Labour Party and the New York Times. These are not traditional Liberals in any understanding of the term. They are Progressives. They believe humankind is on a permanent upward path of progress. They believe in the rule of experts and in the authority of “the science”.
So where do genuine classical liberals go, faced with the corruption of the creed? Ironically, the attacks on our most ancient freedoms such as freedom of speech, conscience and assembly, make it more important than ever to assert the foundational understanding of liberty. “Classical liberals” need to unite and stand up for their tradition. It has never been so relevant.
Also calling for a reinvigoration of classical liberalism is John O. McGinnis. Here’s his opening paragraph:
The scale of classical liberalism’s retreat became ever more visible in 2021. Its recession is global—spanning the Americas and enveloping Europe and Asia. It is pan-ideological: not only are free nations becoming less free, unfree nations are becoming more unfree. It is not only that the left is moving farther left but the parties of the right, currently the best political hope for classical liberalism, are turning to various forms of illiberalism. And the results for policy have been comprehensively deleterious, threatening to reorient everything from free trade to competition law to social insurance in a more statist direction.
Oliver Wiseman sees ominous signs in the Democrats’ response to the failure of Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. Here’s his conclusion:
Biden himself is certainly capable of overblown rhetoric about the future of American democracy. But so far he has mostly resisted calls from Democrats to go nuclear and change the rules that govern Washington to favour his own party. That refusal grows harder by the day.
Many in his party are rightly concerned that their country is stuck in a downward spiral, but they cannot see their own part in the process. Increasingly, both sides view anything other than victory for themselves as illegitimate. A party that responds to its own perfectly normal legislative woes by doubling down on an all-out battle to rewrite the rules of the system in its favour is not serious about ending that descent into anarchy. And so, the more impotent the Democrats feel, the more dangerous they become.
My GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Pete Boettke riffs on “pandemic productivity.”
Here’s a wish-list, from scholars at the James G. Martin Center, for higher education in 2022.
Some Covid Links
In response to the American Medical Association’s amicus brief – accessible here – filed in support of Biden’s abominable private-sector vaccine mandate, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
This stunningly ignorant amicus brief, filed by medical organizations in favor of the OSHA vax mandate, is the end of the credibility of public health. Is it really possible that scientists in those organizations are so unaware of the underlying science about which they write?
Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson tweets, quite appropriately:
We salute the great @MartinKulldorff @DrJBhattacharya and @SunetraGupta who never foreswore the principles of epidemiology to fall in line with a cowardly and hysterical anti-scientific consensus.
History will restore them to their rightful place.
Public health officials and the media have employed an interesting strategy for the almost two years of this pandemic: lie to and manipulate the public to try to elicit their desired behavior. Some are better at it than others, who don’t realize they’re not supposed to say the quiet part out loud.
“Pediatric hospitalizations are becoming an increasing point of concern,” NBC New York reported Wednesday, a day after Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the state has 184 child COVID hospitalizations, 109 of them in Gotham.
“Dr. Mary T. Bassett, the state health commissioner,” NBC continued, “said pediatric COVID hospitalizations have doubled in the last three weeks. In New York City, they’ve quintupled in that time span.”
Here’s the quiet part that NBC New York knew to keep out of its reporting but Bassett volunteered during the same hearing: “The numbers that we gave on pediatric admissions weren’t intended to make it seem that children were having an epidemic of infection. These were small numbers that we reported in our health alert. That was based on 50 hospitalizations, and I’ve now given you some larger numbers, but they’re still small numbers. It really is to motivate pediatricians and families to seek the protection of vaccination.”
A leading expert on pediatric vaccination, Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, explained on “The Today Show” Tuesday, “It’s winter, and this is a winter virus, and this Omicron is particularly contagious, so I think you were going to see an increase anyway.”
He went on: “We test anybody who’s admitted to the hospital for whatever reason to see whether or not they have COVID, and we’re definitely seeing an increase in cases. However, we’re really not seeing an increase in children who are hospitalized for COVID or in the intensive care unit for COVID.”
Writing in Canada’s National Post, Sabrina Maddeaux explains that “[l]ockdowns are killing young Canadians.” (HT Lowell Epp) Two slices:
A pandemic that disproportionately kills the elderly is undeniably bad, but just as tragic is a response that disproportionately kills the young. As time goes on, the latter is claiming more and more Canadian lives.
In a devastating year-end update on COVID-19’s social and economic impacts, Statistics Canada estimates there were 19,884 “excess deaths” (more deaths than what would normally be expected) in Canada between March 2020 and May 2021. While excess deaths early in the pandemic largely occurred among seniors and were attributable to COVID-19, such deaths rose significantly later on among younger Canadians and were not caused by the virus.
Approximately 35 per cent –– or over 7,200 –– of total excess deaths occurred among those between 45 and 64 years old despite the demographic accounting for only seven per cent of COVID-related deaths. Perhaps even more disturbing, approximately 15.6 per cent –– or about 3,100 –– of Canada’s excess deaths occurred among those younger than 44, even though that youngest cohort accounts for only 0.7 per cent of the country’s COVID-19 deaths.
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Many proponents of harsher restrictions prefer to present this cost in economic terms, framing the choice as being between lives and dollars. This has the benefit of bestowing their views with moral righteousness while painting those who disagree as deranged Scrooge McDucks. We now know this is a straw man argument. There are lives on the other side of the scale, too, and they’re excessively young.
It’s a painful question to ask, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. At what point do COVID hospitalizations and deaths among older generations stop justifying the growing sacrifice of Canada’s young? If people aren’t willing to consider this question, and publicly justify their answers, they shouldn’t be in the business of recommending further lockdown measures.
Inspired by Maddeaux’s piece, George Leef, writing at National Review, observes that:
Government policies almost always have unseen, unintended, and unhappy consequences. Frederic Bastiat said that good economists would contemplate such eventualities before advocating government action whereas bad economists thought only about the immediate and visible consequences.
That’s as true about Covid policy as anything else. Those who demanded and got heavy-handed lockdowns and vaccine mandates never bothered to think about the possibility that their approaches might have severe adverse consequences. They were (and remain) hostile towards anyone who argued that they were doing more harm than good.
. A slice:
When constructing clinical practice guidelines, the AAP states: “For each key action statement, the quality of evidence and benefit-harm relationship were assessed and graded to determine strength of recommendations. When appropriate, parents’ values and preferences should be incorporated as part of shared decision-making.”
Yet neither the CDC, AAP, state or local public health have done any of this with respect to COVID policies imposed on our children. Where is this quality of evidence that mandating masks in school or rushing to vaccinate children prevents either infection or transmission while also satisfying the benefit-harm relationship?
Left-Libertarian Lockdowners, October 2020: “Twitter, Facebook, and Google are private companies, and if they want to suppress the GBD that’s their right! It’s not censorship unless the person doing it is the government!”
LLLs, December 2021: “So what if Collins and Fauci tried to suppress the GBD! They were right to do so!”
(DBx: For the record, I – I think unlike Phil – endorse the Left-Libertarian Lockdowners’ October 2020 claim. But certainly like Phil, I reject their December 2021 claim. And regardless of whether I’m correct or incorrect to endorse the October 2020 claim, Phil is definitely correct to call out the LLLs for their inconsistency. [As Phil tirelessly documents, the LLLs are not an intellectually impressive bunch.])
I hope that Telegraph columnist Janet Daley is correct when she predicts that
Lockdowns are over. This is not only because they do devastating economic damage – which the Left obtusely believes is of concern only to rampant capitalists – but because they are now clearly seen as a danger to our fundamental constitutional principles.
Putting an entire population under house arrest, intervening explicitly in the most intimate areas of private relationships, and prohibiting personal contact of the kind that was once believed to be essential to normal life, is now seen by virtually everyone who is not an aspiring totalitarian as unacceptable.
Steve Brine explains that humanity has much further to go before its Covid policies are rational. A slice:
More fundamentally, if we are serious about living with endemic Covid, it is surely time to start rethinking mandatory isolation for those who have tested positive for Covid. In the first year I was public health minister [in Britain], just over 20,000 people sadly died of flu (despite us having a vaccine) yet it has never been a legal requirement to stay at home if you have flu.
A barrier to Chinese economic growth is indeed Beijing’s insane and tyrannical pursuit of zero Covid (but even without this deranged policy, also stymying economic growth in that country is its retreat from market-oriented policies).
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) HT Jay Bhattacharya, who tweets:
If there was ever a time to speak for educational investments in poor kids, it’s now as lockdowners agitate for closing schools again. The closures harmed them last year. Doing it again now will amplify the damage.
The idea that Covid is spreading because we didn’t lockdown, mandate, contact trace or mitigate enough is farcical. Never before have people complied with more public health edicts. In good faith, people did its part. It was the ineffective and damaging policies that failed.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 169 of Alan Macfarlane’s vital 1978 book, The Origins of English Individualism (footnote deleted; link added):
But he [Montesquieu] was certain that whatever the roots, the legal system and customs in England were peculiarly favourable to individual liberty; ‘their laws not being made for one individual more than another, each considers himself a monarch; and indeed, the men of this nation are rather confederates than fellow-subjects.’ In other words, they had formed an association of equal, independent individuals, rather than forming a basically hierarchical and subservient nation of the ruled.
January 1, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is this tweet, from yesterday, by Jay Bhattacharya:
Lockdowners lament that we do not live in an authoritarian society focused on the control of a single infectious disease. Normal people fear that we do.
Some Covid Links
…. while Jack Butler reports that bad news that Washington, DC’s, temporary bout of sanity has come to an end. A slice:
But now the D.C. city government, led by [Mayor Muriel] Bowser, has thrown all that out the window in the face of Omicron panic and is set to head into 2021 as one of the most biomedically tyrannical environments in the nation. On December 21, Bowser announced a reimposition of a citywide indoor mask mandate, about a month after lifting the previous mandate. And starting on January 15, “restaurants, bars, gyms, and music venues, and certain meeting spaces” will require proof of vaccination to enter. Moreover, Bowser stated yesterday that “we expect that schools and classrooms will need to transition to situational virtual learning throughout the semester, especially in the coming weeks” (with additional testing rigmarole merely to allow students back into the classroom in the meantime). Translation: Expect a return of remote learning en masse sometime soon.
A Wall Street Journal headline: “South Africa Says Its Omicron Wave Is in Retreat.”
Philip Klein ponders the pros and cons of refusing to comply with Covid diktats. Two slices:
In my own case, I have chosen to be vaccinated and receive a booster, because I believe the shots are perfectly safe and there is ample evidence that they reduce the risk of getting severely ill. I am perfectly comfortable with that being the extent of the precautions I take against Covid. So I struggle with how to respond to mask mandates that I deem to be oppressive and unnecessary. I don’t really care if some people are “used to” masks. I hate wearing them, they fog up my glasses, and they are an added inconvenience in daily life. We have blown past so many off-ramps to this policy and some are trying to turn it into a permanent fixture of public life.
I have, at various times, embraced the “Do Not Comply” approach. But in practice, what it means is that if I have a limited amount of time to run errands, I have to budget extra time to deal with protesting masks in an area where I know I will be the only one raising a fuss. That has involved: arguing with people in stores about mask wearing; being told to leave stores for not wearing a mask; and going to multiple stores for the same product until I find a retailer that doesn’t enforce the mask mandate. So at a certain point, I have found that jumping through so many hoops becomes more of a burden than simply slapping on the mask.
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Put another way, you can let Anthony Fauci run your life by slapping on a mask when you go grocery shopping. Or you can let him alter your life by having to take extra time to do errands, to keep your kids home from school, to live in a place you wouldn’t have otherwise wanted to live, or budget time for long road trips to avoid airplane travel.
Criticizing California strongman Gavin Newsom and praising Colorado governor Jared Polis, Steven Greenhut applauds federalism. Here’s his conclusion:
It’s time for Americans to grow up. If you refuse a vaccine, that’s fine. Just deal with any consequences. To be clear, I have taken the COVID-19 situation seriously since the outset—especially given that I have an elderly mother who lives in an independent-living facility with other older people. I definitely don’t want to be Typhoid Mary, who spreads a potentially deadly disease to vulnerable people.
Some pushback against vaccines and masks has been zany, but I can’t blame people for skepticism at this point, as evidence pours in about the mental-health and economic effects of the lockdowns. Fortunately, 50 states are free to chart their own post-pandemic future. Colorado proves even Democratic states can try something different.
Dr. James Kildare decries the pandemic-era self-inflicted damage suffered by the medical profession. A slice:
As a society, we must ask ourselves how we will gauge the efficacy of a policy, be it vaccines, masks or lockdowns. By making such things mandatory, it becomes very difficult for us to critique them impartially. If we have destroyed the lives of millions of people by lockdowns, how will politicians be able to be honest if it is discovered they don’t work? For us as medical professionals, if we endorse vaccine mandates, how will we be able to impartially discuss the risks of such interventions?
What is more, the fact we have belittled and silenced minority voices means that we are setting up a scientific paradigm within which we stop questioning ourselves. Similarly, we stop addressing patient concerns, and our studies run the risk of confirming their own biases. Indeed, if we cannot make the case for a voluntary intervention, it should be an indication that we are doing something wrong. Such changes undermine the moral basis for the medical profession.
This happens directly, as we are externally pressured by government agencies to be vaccinated ourselves, as well as indirectly when our sense of moral self-righteousness is given free rein to belittle people who disagree with our advice. In this, we forget the fact that because someone may have a medical degree that doesn’t give them a greater morality in weighing public policy.
(DBx: I think that the author of the above is really named “James Kildare” – a fact that is notable by Americans my age and older.)
Scott Morefield tweets out a clip of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary describing the response to omicron as an overreaction. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
In fact, the entire language of Covid has changed in a more fundamental way, even as the threat of the virus diminishes. When the Alpha variant arrived a year ago, followed by Delta, we carried on talking about the more generic Covid. But if you’re in government, and need people to steel themselves for another round of restrictions – sorry, protections – then you might want to shake things up. Covid was frightening in March 2020. But 20 months later, familiarity, while not quite breeding contempt, has certainly created a shrug and a ho-hum.
So, once a new variant came along, the language changed. Now we rarely hear Boris Johnson and his ministers talking about Covid. It’s always Omicron, in a way that never happened with Alpha or Delta. And where the government leads, the big broadcasters follow, with the rest of us tagging along behind. A friend of mine here in Kent contracted Covid last Christmas. A year on, and several more friends speak of picking up “Omicron”.
The “precautionary principle” is essentially a principle for making decisions radically affecting people’s lives without adequate evidence. Its rejection was a heartening development from which other European governments could learn.
There is just one problem. We are still being told that the Government will do whatever is thought necessary to “save” the National Health Service. The idea that we must – at whatever human cost – keep the transmission of Covid at a level within the NHS’s capacity to cope is taken for granted by many people. It is one of the sacred cows of modern Britain. It is time that we started questioning it.
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Epidemics of respiratory disease have regularly exceeded hospital capacity before anyone had heard of Covid-19. Asian flu (1957-8) and Hong Kong flu (1968-9), although less serious than Covid-19, swamped the NHS. Ordinary winter flu regularly overwhelms it. It happens roughly every two to three years, most recently in 2014-15, in 2016-17 and again in 2017-18. People died, sometimes in large numbers.
So when governments tell us that we must behave in a way that “saves” the National Health Service, what they really mean is that we, the healthy and the vulnerable alike, must “save” it from the choices made by those same governments.
Of course, we are where we are, and many people will say that we have to address the current health emergency regardless of how it came about. But that is only a rational point of view if one accepts its implications.
Of course we should spend more on the NHS, but spending more will not avoid the dilemma. Either we must prioritise health spending over everything else, to a degree which no government in the world has ever attempted. Or else we must allow governments to put our lives on hold with annual lockdowns and the like as a way of limiting public expenditure on emergency facilities in the NHS. The rational alternative is to do what human beings have done from time immemorial, namely to take periodical epidemics of potentially mortal diseases on the chin.
An overwhelmed health service is a bad thing. We can all agree on that. But it is not the worst thing that can happen to a society.
The worst thing that can happen to a society is that its members use the coercive powers of the state so as systematically to stunt their own lives and those of their fellow citizens.
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The economic implications of lockdowns and other measures of compulsory distancing will be with us for many years. In the long run, no country ever improved human welfare or even public health by making itself poorer.
The NHS is a facility, not a regulator. It is there to enrich and not to impoverish our lives. It exists to serve us, and not the other way round. We need not blame the epidemiologists. It is their job to think about nothing but epidemics. But this is not a sensible priority for government or for the rest of us.
We have lives to live, and there is more to life than the avoidance of death.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 468 of my emeritus colleague Vernon Smith’s profound 2002 Nobel Prize lecture, “Constructivist and Ecological Rationality in Economics,” as this lecture appears in the June 2003 issue of the American Economic Review (footnotes deleted):
In market experiments – where cooperation can occur through the coordination function of prices produced by, but simultaneously resulting from, interaction with individual choice behavior – the results are more commonly in accord with standard competitive models that maximize group welfare. This professional victory is hollowed by the failure of standard theory to predict the “surprisingly” weak conditions under which the results obtain.
DBx: Vernon here reports on the results of decades of his (and many other experimental-economists’) experiments. The ‘surprise’ to which Vernon refers is a surprise experienced chiefly by mainstream economists – economists whose training leads them to believe that markets work well only if and when there apply in reality such ‘strong’ assumptions as perfect knowledge and many traders on both sides of the market. Experimental economics has discovered – and economic history has repeatedly confirmed – that many of the assumptions that mainstream economists specify as being necessary for the successful operation of markets are, in fact, generally unnecessary.
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Please join me in wishing Vernon a very happy 95th birthday. He was born on New Year’s Day, 1927, and is today going as strongly and as creatively as he was when I first met him in the mid-1980s. (Vernon is pictured above, in Stockholm in December 2002, with his amazing wife and one of my dearest friends, Candace.)
December 31, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
But it’s long past time to take life back from the hypochondriacs.
Kim Iversen and Robby Soave…
… rightly decry, among other Covid hysterics, Francis Collins’s and Anthony Fauci’s medieval attempt to discredit the great Great Barrington Declaration and its three co-authors.
Some Covid Links
New York’s policy makes confinement in quarantine turn substantially on economic or political considerations. That isn’t science; it’s central planning.
If a shorter period is medically acceptable, it should be the default, not a government-bestowed privilege. Public-health agencies have no expertise in making determinations about what makes the economy tick. To the extent quarantine decisions are demonstrably influenced by nonscientific factors, the protective bubble that constitutional doctrine has placed around them should be weaker.
The jobs New York deems “critical” go far beyond those necessary to sustain human life. Bartenders, movers and law professors may return to work after five days under New York’s new guidance. People providing services to “government owned or leased buildings” are essential—but those doing the same for private buildings aren’t.
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The New York quarantine guidance is another step toward general governmental authority to determine who gets to work and who doesn’t. The process began during the lockdown phases of the pandemic, when states across the country issued lists of exempted “essential” jobs—with no intelligible principle determining what made something essential. (New York had such exemptions from its quarantine policy for interstate travelers, which Gov. Andrew Cuomo lifted in April 2021.) Gossip columnists were “essential” in many states. So were marijuana dispensaries, illegal under federal law.
In response to BJC Health and Washington University School of Medicine adding fluvoxamine as treatment for COVID-19, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary tweets:
If Dr. Fauci, with his platform, would have ever mentioned this treatment once, many hospitalizations could have been prevented.
2 favorable trials reported in JAMA & Lancet in the spring & fall (one showing a 91% reduction in Covid deaths). No study to the contrary.
As COVID-19 cases soared to new highs in Florida and the nation on Wednesday, South Florida children’s hospitals reported record numbers of pediatric patients visiting emergency rooms and urgent care centers — with the vast majority of those children being sent home with mild to moderate symptoms, doctors say.
The surge in cases, much of it driven by the highly contagious omicron variant, is producing a rise in hospitalizations among children and adults. A total of 3,836 people, including 109 pediatric inpatients, were in a Florida hospital with COVID-19 as of Wednesday morning, according to hospital capacity data reported by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Few of those inpatients are severely ill or progressing to the intensive care unit, and many are finding out that they’re positive for COVID-19 after being admitted to the hospital for other medical reasons, such as appendicitis or a broken bone, doctors say.
Yet despite what appears to be less severe illness, there has been a crush of pediatric patients at emergency rooms, accompanied by parents who want their children to be screened for COVID-19. The demand is stretching hospitals thin and leading physicians to plead with the community to stop going to the ER to get tested.
(DBx: A grave danger is Covid hysteria itself. To everyone who tolerates draconian Covid restrictions as a means of reducing the risk of hospital overcrowding – or who think nothing of failing to accurately report the risk, and risk profile, of Covid – I ask: What should we do about prominent “public health” officials, such as Anthony Fauci, whose actions arguably also raise this risk?)
We hope this isn’t forbidden to report by the public-health pessimists, but there’s some good news about the vaccine defense against the Omicron variant. A pair of separate studies—from the Netherlands and South Africa—have found that T cells mobilized by vaccination reduce the severity of the disease.
The vaccines generate antibodies against Covid, but those defenses have been found to be less effective over time. T cells, a type of white blood cell, are a second line of defense that have held up better. The Dutch study found that while antibody responses fade against Omicron, the T cell response remains robust.
Vinay Prasad makes the case against vaccine mandates for domestic commercial flights. Here’s his conclusion:
On balance, vaccine passports for domestic travel will have limited upside, and serious and unpredictable downsides. The policy may result in net harm to some fliers (young men compelled to receive second or third doses in short course). There is no way to know the gains will exceed downsides. This policy likely represents a failing attempt to ignore the truth: the virus is endemic, all people will be infected, and reinfected many times in their lives.
John Podhoretz applauds the CDC for finally recognizing “the costs of its top-down dictates.” A slice:
And what about children under 5, who cannot get vaccinated? Even COVID hawks like Dr. Paul Offit are not seeing an increase in the threat level: “We test anybody who’s admitted to the hospital for whatever reason . . . and we’re definitely seeing an increase in cases. However, we’re really not seeing an increase in children who are hospitalized for COVID or in the intensive care unit for COVID.”
Because we have vaccines to save us from the worst of COVID, because we’re weeks away from a pill that will treat COVID and because Omicron is both more contagious and less harmful, there is no longer any case to be made for avoidance as a public-policy approach.
To read a Tuesday headline at NBC, for example, is to learn that “Child Covid hospitalizations are up, especially in 5 states.”
To read eight paragraphs down, however, is to learn doctors are, “really not seeing an increase in children who are hospitalized for Covid or in the intensive care unit for Covid.”
Further, to read the D.C. Public Schools website is to learn they expect to once again close schools to in-person learning.
To read the Centers for Disease Control website is to learn that those with symptomless cases – or simply declining symptoms and no fever within 24 hours – need quarantine only five days.
To turn once more to the D.C. Public Schools, is to learn they no longer respect the science: “Students,” a Wednesday email reads, “who test positive must isolate for a minimum of ten (10) days from the onset of symptoms or their positive test result if asymptomatic.”
And just what, again, separates this new variant from any other winter illness? Beyond fear, control, and lockdowns? Beyond Anthony Fauci’s floating head blathering on about this emergency measure or that emergency measure on TV news all day? Nothing.
Michael P Senger tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Psychologically, it’s extremely difficult for public health to admit COVID isn’t that dangerous because they have tons of excess deaths to account for—and if they can’t attribute them to COVID, then they have nothing to attribute them to except their own lockdowns and mandates.
Toby Green tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
189,000 cases/day.
So not 2 million cases a day in the UK by New Year, then, as SAGE predicted on Dec 18 without further curbs: https://theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/18/uk-scientists-curbs-covid-infections-omicron-deaths-restrictions-sage….
Serious question: why is anyone still even listening to their models?
Omicron, with its transformative consequences on this pandemic, has only heightened the stakes. We know how fast it spreads, the numbers speak for themselves, but we also know that the severity of the symptoms appear to be significantly milder. Consequently, the much lower demand on global healthcare systems may be a pathway for the virus to become endemic. The specifics are yet to be determined, but what is clear as day is that the way we are currently dealing with the virus is having devastating consequences, self-isolation rules being among the most egregious examples of this.
If all we cared about was slowing the spread of the virus, we would lock people up for a month. This would certainly reduce case numbers, but obviously also cause far more damage than it prevents.
Over the pandemic, we’ve moved from fourteen days of isolation to seven. What will be the next step? The Centre for Disease Control in the US have boldly settled on five days, with precautions required, to alleviate pressure on the economy and society. To me, that seems like a conversation we need to have now. At some stage, the number must reach zero.
As things stand, the most immediate threat to the NHS is not the number of Covid patients, it’s the number of health staff being forced to isolate. Reducing the self-isolation period would free up thousands of people to carry out their life-saving work. Removing two days would mean countless hours back into the system. Would that allow the virus to spread more? Perhaps, but we must find a balance. How many lives would be saved or prolonged by those extra staff being available to the NHS?
Across our Rutherford private healthcare network, we’ve had oncologists, radiographers, technicians and even me sitting at home unable to work, despite feeling perfectly healthy. With the cancer backlog as devastating as it is, can we honestly say that’s the best use of time? And it’s not just healthcare. Just look at HGV drivers, teachers, refuse collectors, pilots, engineers and the police, to name a few. The damage of significantly reducing these services is immeasurable.
Glenn Reynolds insists that “we must make public-health authorities accountable for their lies.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 73 of the late UCLA economist Jack Hirshleifer’s April 1963 paper “Disaster and Recovery: An Historical Survey,” as this paper is reprinted in Hirshleifer’s 1987 collection, Economic Behavior in Adversity:
The endogenous causes of disaster or collapse are more subtle, in as much as no obvious destruction of resources may be visible. Those observed here were dissolution of or threats to the institution of property, and disruption of the mechanism of monetary exchange.
DBx: No surprise.
The calamities uncorked by threats to the institution of private property are obvious to any and all thinking persons. Equally obvious should be the dangers that inevitably follow from the “disruption the mechanism of monetary exchange” – disruption of the sort caused by inflation, by price controls, and by lockdowns.
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