10 thoughts on “The Lockdowns”

  1. We never really had lockdowns because people were still running around all over getting groceries, going to home depot, or whatever else people wanted to do, like riot and protest. Since the end of May, we have had daily or weekly race riots and protests with hundreds to the hundreds of thousands in the streets. Is there a state where people actually stayed home?

      1. That doesn’t answer Wodun’s question.

        Yes, people were prohibited from carrying out their business or trade, and people are still prohibited in many instances.

        Wodun’s remark was that the lockdowns were leaky, and with what appears to be a highly infectious virus, there may not have been that big an effect. The reason I say “appears” is that everyone these days appears to be an expert in virus epidemiology.

        With respect to the Conservative/Libertarian/Right skepticism if not downright hostility to either lockdowns/business restrictions/face masks, does anyone think that mass gatherings, whether football games or protests, are a good idea at this time? The people who do contact tracing have hypothesized “super spreaders” like that woman who attended church in South Korea or someone attending a scientific conference in the Northeast in spring?

        I kind of, sort of regard mask mandates as “contagious disease theatre.” You see people wearing them leaving their nose expose, and you see a lot of people wearing porous fabric face coverings of various kind. Even the 3-layer surgical-style mask said to be particularly effective leaks around the nose evidenced by glasses fogging, no matter how you adjust or pinch the wire form.

        I don’t buy the argument that the virus is much smaller than the pores on any mask because the virus rides on much larger vapor droplets. Is there any evidence that naked virus particles are transported? I get the sense that the “evidence” in support of mask effectiveness is largely based on fluid-particle visualizations of test subjects breathing through masks and not based on solid virology or epidemiology?

        The other concern I have about masks is that wearers think they are wearing one of those isolation suits from The Andromeda Strain and that they can come close to you. Maybe “social isolation” is also “virus theatre”, but in the mean time, stay away from me, even if you have a mask on.

        The question I have about hate on masks, there is an element of “muh Murrican rights” about it, and it doesn’t appear to be just Republicans or Trump supporters. I can understand lockdowns harming people, but I don’t see any harm in wearing a mask apart from “and then the Karens win.”

        What forms of mandated social conformity would people accept in furtherance of public health?

        1. Is there a rational middle ground when it comes to masks or any other anti-plague measures or have people just settled into what ever is politically acceptable to the party they most identify with?

      2. Some people weren’t, which is/was terrible as those jobs belong(ed) to people who are less able to withstand prolonged time off. There is a lot of favoritism in who got shut down, like they didn’t shut down liquor or weed shops. My point was there wasn’t a society wide shutdown and there were a lot of social interactions taking place, especially after the race riots.

        TBH, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Democrats organized the mass gatherings in order to get more people sick, by any means necessary and all that.

  2. I am not buying it. Paul. All this furor over a virus with a 99.9% survival rate. After the initial numbers started to gel and it became obvious that it was not anywhere close to what they told us it was, it devolved into politics, both partisan and practical, as those who had given the draconian orders had to “prove” they were right to do what they did before the next election.

    Wearing a mask just became a shibboleth, proving to the world that you, your faction, or your corporation, were in alignment with all “right-thinking” people. In the real world, pre-March, wearing a mask and quarantining was something done by the sick and the at-risk, not the general populace. I am sure there are many reasons why this has historically been the case.

    In any case, if you are the one who is so afraid of this anemic pandemic, it is up to you to stay away from me, not vice-versa.

    2. Wretchardthecat had a good tweet early on that said something like, “You can be statistically correct but personally a victim.”

      It is a highly contagious virus with a low death rate, and we are learning how to treat it better. But the people who get sick and die would still be here today if the virus didn’t exist. A good analogy are the crimes committed by illegal aliens. Sure, illegal aliens could engage in crime at a lower rate than the native population but those crimes would not have happened if the illegal immigrants were not here.

      Just to head this off, the co-morbidities that people have aren’t death sentences, people live long full lives with them.

    3. Yes, John, I share your view of the ‘anemic pandemic’ and the politicization of facial coverings. From my perspective, in the beginning of the virus spreading, no one was really sure what to do, so facial coverings were ‘expected’ then mandated. I thought it was mainly to prevent sick people from coughing, sneezing and spreading the virus to others, not for healthy people to keep them ‘safe’.

      The joke really is that the masks, unless it is a tight fitting N95 are useless in preventing the spread of infectious disease. If one reads the labels on the paper surgical masks box, it clearly discloses that their masks ‘do not prevent infectious diseases, whether bacterial or viral’ (paraphrasing the warnings label, but it does let the wearer know that they are not protected). As far as those cute, designer masks that people are making, that’s an even bigger joke….ie it’s where fashion meets politics and sidelines medical health!

      It’s all a charade, like wearing a flag to prove one’s affiliation with a group. I find the entire mask mandate to be an insidious ploy to get people accustomed to complying to mandates designed to keep people separated and muzzled. It also gives the ‘virtuous ones’ something to use to intimidate those who don’t comply, like a weapon for the righteous ones to use emotional blackmail for shaming others. Could it be that ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ has infected the population, not the virus?

      I think that the long term, psychological effect of the lock downs and mask mandates on people and especially children is to impede and destroy interpersonal communication and individual identity; promote isolation; and FEAR of others who do not comply.

      I think mask wearing should be voluntary…wear one if you feel the need for such security or if you are sick…..don’t wear one if you feel confident of your own health and aren’t sick. Personal responsibility should not be a political issue.

      The Great Barrington Declaration should be better publicized, unfortunately, the MSM news outlets are useful idiots for spreading fear and even more divisive politics.

      We are entering flu season and from what I understand, there will be no distinctions made in reporting regular seasonal flu infections from COVID infections. So no one really will know the truth. Sounds like the perfect psy ops to me.

  3. Even President Trump, especially President Trump explained to reporter Bob Woodward, “this is more deadly than even a strenuous flu.”

    President Trump also told Mr. Woodward that he has trying to avoid stirring up panic and to balance the control measures against the cost in lost jobs, lost income, lost dignity and lost lives from other causes.

    For all of this, the Left denigrates him as an un-read, un-tutored boob. The Left also denigrates the president and in turn the American people, making claims of the number one status in deaths among our trading partners. Yes, US cases, it appears, are on a vigorous rise, but cases in Europe among the right-thinking Europeans are rising too. The disease is real, and it is inexorable and you cannot blame everything on Mr. Trump.

    This illness does not have a 99.9% survival rate among those identified to have the virus. It may have a 99.9% survival rate among everyone infected, but the odd thing about this virus is the claimed asymptomatic carriers along with the seeming long time between catching it and getting ill. A .1% death rate is still rather high for flu-like illness. Even if “COVID-19” is a garbage-bag catch-all medical-payment-seeking diagnosis on a death certificate, there is evidence of a non-trivial number of excess deaths.

    Yes, it is up to me to stay away from you, and I don’t go to restaurants, I don’t attend funerals in the extended family right now, I don’t invite guests or even family members into my house and I don’t visit their houses. I do, however, shop for food.

    Whereas I go alone, go as early in the morning as possible and don’t join family members in stores, the stores where I shop have signs indicating they require masks, often times employees standing outside at the door checking on this, and signs indicating the “social distancing” they expect of their customers. The owners of those stores might be virtue-signaling “cucks”, but these are still privately owned, and is it too much to follow the rules laid out by these establishments?

    By the way, my intuition as a research engineer in a discipline completely unrelated to virology and epidemiology is that this epidemic will be largely over by the time a vaccine becomes generally available. The mechanism is not “herd immunity”, which is really a term-of-art with respect to a vaccine. Rather, spread from one person-to-the-next will have mutated into a less dangerous form, by a process of creating a natural live-attenuated-virus vaccine.

    For now, I stand by President Trump on the need to take this disease seriously, to be balanced with restoring our economy. Do you?

Comments are closed.