COVID-19

So I heard today that Bill DeBlasio (since he’s so smart and has done such a great job) is only letting people who can produce some sort of proof of vaccination into certain places like a gym or a bar. Other cities are probably doing the same or will before too long. Outside of instantly making business owners some sort of arbiters/law enforcement officials, having to decide what is proof and what is not, etc., this is just preposterous. What a stick in the eye to a person who actually has a religious belief that they shouldn’t get vaccinated. Or someone with a medical condition where this type of thing isn’t the best idea. Or someone who just says “hey, I don’t want it”.

I’m thinking that this is the point where actual guns may begin to come out and we will see things get a little “physical”. I’m hoping not but I can’t see any way around this. I’m vaccinated but won’t be patronizing any business that voluntarily does this.

The press is in full ramp up mode to sell ads and clicks with the new and improved delta variant of the commie crud (copyright Sgt. Mom on that term). Many localities are making people bring out the masks again. Here in beautiful Dane County, Wisconsin we have as of yesterday a “recommendation” that everyone wear a mask in a public place. Naturally, this is the first step to a new mandate. Same thing in Chicago and IL.

While cases are up here, hospitalizations, the key metric to me, are flat. From the Dane County commie crud dashboard, you can see that hospitalizations (as of this writing) sit at 23 people. It has been around there for many months now – sometimes under 20, sometimes it gets up to around 25. I check every day.

We have had one death due to covid in Dane county in the last two months. For those number geeks like me, that is eighteen ten thousandths of the population of Dane County that have died due to covid this Summer (so far).

If people aren’t in the hospital, why is everyone getting tested and causing the positivity rate to move up? All of the local big testing centers closed long ago. The only thing I can imagine is that people who are in for other things like a physical, or a knee replacement or something else are getting covid tested and coming up positive. And that would prove that most people, as many have been saying all along, are going to be just fine, even if they get the commie crud.

I decided to look at some stats for Los Angeles county to see what all the hubbub was about. Around eight hundred as of this writing are hospitalized with commie crud. Sounds like a lot, but still below the 14 day average. And far below January when there were 8,000 people in the hospital. Four people died yesterday, which is one one millionth of one percent of the population. I’m fairly certain that covid accounted for fewer deaths than traffic, crime, overdose, or any of a number of other ways to die in LA. So this is the deadly delta variant? Color me unimpressed.

And remember that a lot of these stats are probably wrongly recorded, as the old saying goes people dying with covid vs. from covid. But the data is the data. And still, (even with the cooked books) the number of people, for all of the yelling and screaming, that seem to be affected seems ridiculously low.

Keep calm and carry on.