Robert Prost emails:
The Republican dominated legislature in Wisconsin is suing Governor Evers to end his lockdown of the state. Evers’ authority to mandate a shutdown ends May 11 but he wrote lockdown orders that extend until May 26.
Perhaps feeling the pressure, the Governor has pulled a very old trick announcing a program that does the opposite of what its name would imply.
The governor proudly announced the “Badger Bounce-Back Plan” to reopen the state. So Evers is using “science” to free us all. Not exactly.
The state cannot be fully reopened until all three phases of the Plan can be completed. The state remains in lockdown until the step 1 criterion is fully met.
Here is that criterion:
“Downward trajectory of influenza-like illnesses (ILI) reported within a 14-day period.”
Source: https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/covid-19/prepare.htm
Huh? From my years of experience in a major teaching hospital, I would hazard a guess that virtually 50% of all patients who show up at the ER have some symptoms in common with influenza cough, sore throat, fever, runny nose…
Step 1 criteria are unlikely to ever be met, allowing the governor to hold the state hostage to his dictatorial whims for as long as he likes.
If the state supreme court cannot halt this madness, I fear the state will fall prey to the socialists.
Previous emails from Robert Prost:
It’s not as if the legislature were filled with experienced lawyers who could craft a law that would restrain the governor’s emergency powers.
Governor has pulled an old trick
Obliviously no one in the legislature was familiar with it.
Hire idiots to write laws, get idiotic laws. Duh.
The politicians in the legislature apparently relied on the good will of the politician in the governor’s mansion not to abuse the law. [Gales of riotous laughter]
And the people suffer.
The last elite this corrupt, this venal, this contemptuous, this dim was executed in the public square. And they richly deserved it. And so do…..
I will tell you from anecdotally speaking with my customers and friends that most of these new orders are getting ready to be ignored en masse in around a week or two. An employees father had a heart attack and he can’t visit him in the hospital. There are three covid cases at that hospital. In a county of five hundred and sixty five thousand people.
Drove around southern Arizona this weekend. Traffic is getting back toward normal.
My neighbors are walking dogs or jogging and have been for three weeks or more.
Shopping at Safeway ever few days. The store is better stocked and about 1/4 of the customers, but all employees, wearing masks.
Texas will open somewhat Friday, Theaters, restaurants, most stores. Barbers and hairdressers on the 18th. Already a lot of push back on the last. Abbot had better look pretty shaggy to avoid a mutiny. more “abundance of caution” BS in the face of blind ignorance of the actual conditions.
It’s the same situation in Pennsylvania. Majority of the state is fine. Urban areas are not doing as well. 3 Phase program that it will be impossible to meet. They keep the data to themselves and when questioned will not release it. Recently had a few state coroners come forth and state they are lying. They had to change 200 + deaths previously attributed to Covid-19. Initially I wanted to believe this stuff was necessary but have come to see it’s a scam being perpetuated by a corrupt party with another agenda. I have a highly technical career and work with data every day. It’s pretty clear to me that the statistics are not being manipulated.
All of our neighbors that we have spoken to in San Antonio are very pleased with Gov. Abbott loosening the restrictions – although one elderly couple with underlying conditions are still a little worried. Roman the Neighborhood Handy Guy says that he is working, non-stop, on new and old construction and yard maintenance projects. He agrees with me that dine-in restaurants and movie theaters will take a hit. But generally, everyone else who still has a job and a business wants to go back to work. Traffic is up … and Lowe’s parking lot is packed.
The situation is much the same in Maryland. I’m seeing more traffic on the roads every day. People are reacting to government overreach the same way they did to Prohibition, only a lot faster. As for Wisconsin, I was born and raised there, and support the mutinous dogs who are opposing another governor who is “acting for their own good.” My children who were born there? Not so much. They put it very bluntly: “Dad, we love Wisconsin in the summer, but we’ll never go back there to live.” Wimps!
@ Mike K – because of C19 Geisel school/DHMC has opened up more of its archives. A large archive of Grand Rounds are now available on video if you are interested.
http://video.dartmouth-hitchcock.org
AVI, I was mostly affiliated with an institute that was not directly connected with Dartmouth-Hitchcock.
It has a different name, The Institute for Health Policy and blah, blah, blah.
A complete twit, Elliot Fisher, is now head of it. His father was a Harvard law professor with a couple of books. He was a junior professor when I was there.
Jim Weinstein was in my class and stayed on He is a good guy.
The other good guy was Paul Batalden who had a favorite sentence. “Every process is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
Very true and not just in medicine.
Regards politics here in the Badger State it is well to recall (heh, unconscious pun there!) that Scott Walker was initially elected because he said the Blue State Dream of a high speed rail line from Madison to Milwaukee was a ridiculous money sink that would be an ongoing festering sore financially.
If projected ridership was a thinly disguised work of fiction then, imagine what it would look like today!
In the post covid era we will be reassessing many things. Sure, much will be lost, and some of it precious. But the exposure of some really frivolous nonsense to harsh reality should put paid to a fair amount of dross as well.
Should.
TW
Wisconsin, this is what you get when you vote Democrat. Please try to remember.
But..”it’s not the flu!!!!”
https://www.maciverinstitute.com/2020/05/dhs-new-covid-19-model-used-in-supreme-court-case-already-collapsing/
“There is no quantitative method for forecasting the COVID-19 outbreak over a six-month period; the JHU-IDD report states that its collection of scenarios is ‘not a forecast,’” according to the DHS document.
And yet, DHS officials presented this model to the State Supreme Court as an indication of things to come.
“Johns Hopkins University’s analysis shows that ending the Safer at Home order prematurely would produce a large peak in cases requiring hospitalization that exceeds current capacity. If the order is lifted and not replaced with a (still developing) containment strategy, the DHS modeling data suggests that peak hospitalizations in Wisconsin could exceed 25,000 patients during the summer””far exceeding capacity,” DHS wrote in its legal defense.
In its report on the JHU model, DHS acknowledges its numbers are far more alarming than other widely used models like those from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). According to that model, Wisconsin reached its peak need for hospital resources on Apr. 11th, and the state’s death toll peaked on Apr. 5th.
“We note that the JHU-IDD scenarios suggest a more significant number of cases than does the Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model. We strongly prefer the JHU-IDD scenarios based on our independent calculations,” DHS reports.
It is important to note that those independent calculations are not publicly available.
It is also important to note, again, JHU-IDD’s predictions for May 1st have been disproven as of today – May 1st. The JHU-IDD model predicted a possible May 1st death total of 1,600 – 7,500. IHME predicts 336 will ultimately die of coronavirus in Wisconsin. The actual numbers show a death total of 316 on the morning of May 1st. DHS insists this is no time to relax the shelter-in-place order and reopen Wisconsin.
“Given that the result of under-estimating cases is more Wisconsinites losing their lives, it seems prudent to be cautious,” DHS states.
Even though this second model is already falling apart, DHS needs it because the first model has already played out and also fallen apart.
That first model predicted 440 – 1,500 deaths and 22,000 positive cases by Apr. 8th unless Wisconsinites followed Evers’ Safer at Home order. That model has largely been discredited by Palm’s own statements.