From the archives: Moving the goalposts -- or just moving

August 8, 2020. [NOTE: Not that long after this post, both Cuomo and DiBalsio were out of office, Cuomo quite unceremoniously.

For those who have already forgotten the miasma of March and April, recall that the 'flatten the curve' mantra permeated every element of the lockdown. More important, remember the two key metrics -- hospital bed use (including intensive care) and Covid deaths -- that were predicted, tracked and reported with the solemnity of a daily funeral, and it was, with as many as a thousand people dying with Covid on a single day in New York.

Dr. Fauci and said that masks were not necessary. Pols in New York and San Francisco encouraged super spreader events, be they a Chinese New Year street festival in New York or Nancy Pelosi encouraging people to turn out in force in Chinatown restaurants in San Francisco. In northern Italy, hardest hit early, an Atalanta soccer match became a super spreader event, where the fans went home to their three-generation households in the air-polluted northeast, and the virus overwhelmed the elderly, with an average age of eighty among those dying in the industrial north. Meanwhile, the politically correct mayor of Firenze (Florence) encouraged a 'hug a Chinese' theme, for all the imported Chinese laborers in those northern Italian factories -- and the death count grew quickly.

Few if any people were being tested for Covid. If you were very sick with symptoms, what would be the point? Just assume that it was Covid. Worse, if the person then died, assume it was Covid that killed that person, no test needed, and no attention to numerous possible alternative causes of death, e.g., diabetes, obesity, old age, lung problems, hypertension. And there were not many test kits. And they were slow, unreliable, and often useless. And with a shortage, only those with symptoms could get a test. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans were contracting the virus and showing no symptoms, and probably not passing on the virus, but since they did not show up at the hospital or die, they were not considered or counted.

New York screamed for ventilators and hospital beds. They found a thousand of the former, only they had been in storage and had fallen into disuse. An auto factory was converted to make ventilators. In any case, doctors found ventilators to be not very helpful and sometimes deadly. Meanwhile, the Jacob Javits Center in NYC had 2,500 beds, with few of them used. The Navy sent the hospital ship, Mercy, to New York at the governor's request and the president's orders, and doubled their bed capacity. Within a month, the ship left New York, again with very few of its beds used. Meanwhile, governor Cuomo sentenced infected elderly nursing home patients to an almost certain death by returning them to their nursing home, where they died by the tens of thousands. [By the way, eighty percent of the first 150,000 US deaths were among those over age 65, a demographic that traditionally saw 170,000 deaths a month. Most Americans die in a nursing home or in hospice. Are, the latter usually following the former. I was unable to confirm a claim that half of new nursing home residents die within six months of entering a nursing home.]

But back to the goalposts. The theory of flattening meant to spread out demand for hospital beds. It was not a method to prevent the virus from spreading. We would need a vaccine for that. Rather, it was to reduce the number of hospitalizations and deaths. Meanwhile, Dr. Fauci published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. claiming a mortality rate close to that of the seasonal flu, and an infection rate five to ten times that of the positive test count.

So people screamed for more tests. often as a method to screen people who wanted to visit the vulnerable elderly in nursing homes, or simply to prove that they were not currently sick. But the Covid test predicts or prevents nothing. By testing more people, and using the raw number of positive tests as a measure of failure in curbing the spread, mayor, governors and other fools changed the goalposts, counting positive tests rather than hospitalizations or deaths. As the positive test count increased, hospitalizations and deaths have decreased.

It didn't help that the next scare was the positive test cases among the relatively invincible young, those under forty with negligible mortality rates. Worse, when doctors endorsed large public protests -- super spreader events all -- those hypocritical doctors also told everyone else to stay home, and if they went out, to wear edible masks and to maintain credible social distance. Instead, the positive tests among the under forty crowd increased. Three months ago, this demographic was not encouraged and, in many cases, not allowed to be tested. Antibody tests show that huge numbers of people had the virus and have developed at least a form of immunity -- herd immunity -- while in a state like Wisconsin, the percent of tests showing negative results fluctuated at around six percent quite constantly, at least within a reasonable confidence level, with 57,000 positives after a million tests. And that does not even capture incidents such as the report that Madison had failed to post 19,000 negative test results over a short period of time, really inflating the positive test percentage.

And labs had every incentive to file insurance claims for tests that they may not have even run, and if they did conduct the test, the false positives and false negatives could hit forty percent. Some labs actually reported 100% of tests as positive, straining all credibility for the lab.

Meanwhile, the governors imposed face mask mandates while the research repeatedly showed them to be unhelpful for the most part and possibly harmful. Wearing face mask has become the new virtue signaling. Even masks for healthcare workers have come into question. But the progressive pols push on with their tyrannical fascism. [Oh yes, fascism is from the left, not the right. Hitler and Mussolini were socialists, not capitalists.]

Some good may come of this process of Mother Nature 'thinning the herd.' While I don't think that the pope's claim that this is Mother Nature's angry response to human-caused climate change, clearly the virus has impacted marginalized groups the most -- the poor, the sick, the crowded, the elderly. What it hasn't done is much impact the health of Millennials, while it did effectively destroy job prospects, especially for those debt-laden twenty-somethings with meaningless, expensive college degrees and dubious majors from marginal colleges. Colleges are bing forced to re-examine what they can and can not do, instead of assuming that they can do whatever they want, charge whatever price they choose, and rely on government or ill-informed, wealthy, liberal parents to bail them out. Many colleges have chosen not to re-open, primarily due to anxiety over the new location of the goalposts -- positive test counts -- while simultaneously abandoning testing people for college potential and surrendering serious studies, course, majors and fields to 'woke' courses and programs, adding to the costs for both students and the schools while reducing the value of the college degree.

Meanwhile, the rich have left New York City, many of them for good, along with up to 500,000 other New Yorkers. Neither governor Cuomo or mayor DiBlasio are doing anything to bring them back. The top one percent of NYC taxpayers pay fifty percent of the city's income taxes. As with most liberal, progressive cities, socialist mayors have created some of the greatest inequalities in the country and have ignored recognizing who is paying the bills to fund their mayoral foibles, and those who do fund have the option to leave the city. So instead of moving the goalposts, the rich people have simply moved, and taken their tax revenues with them. And why should they come back? The cultural venues and restaurants they love are closed. Professional sports have no fans in the stadiums or arenas. Crime of all sorts has 'spiked,' and not just in the tradition, crime-ridden sections. Policemen who were deemed heroic figures on 9/11 are now demonized, and they are well-advised to not intervene in the crime sprees. And if progressive defunding of the police goes through, there will not even be any police available if needed.

The next three months will be very interesting. The election is an impossible call, with major social disruptions, problematic voting procedures, and the silencing of the voices of more than half the population in favor of the mob. Is this Nixon's 1968 or Orwell's 1984? Or the French Revolution? Ask me again in three months.