Speaking at a press conference, [Florida governor Ron] DeSantis quipped that he would be a “pretty doggone wealthy man” if he “had a dollar for every lockdown politician who decided to escape to Florida over the last two years.”
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Unfortunately, DeSantis did not expose the “lockdown politicians” he said have been traveling to Florida.
However, one such incident made national headlines in May.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), who enacted intense COVID restrictions, traveled to Florida in April despite blaming travel to the Sunshine State for a wave of COVID infections in Michigan. Whitmer claimed she traveled there to visit her sick father.
If I can make one claim proudly, it is that I quickly recognized that COVID was a disease that was moving and spreading both regionally and seasonally. The entire reason that I do my monthly data posts in several rough regions of the United States was to demonstrate this fact. It is, in my opinion, impossible to understand COVID by looking at voting patterns or mitigation regimes or by setting two regionally disperse states against each other, especially if we’re looking at metrics within a narrow time window. We have to look at this as a sickness that hits region-by-region and is in line with seasonality changes that drive people indoors.
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Things that are “impossible to ignore” when [Paul] Krugman decided to use a single week of data have become incredibly easy for him to ignore when a different week no longer makes his point. A metric is found that supports a narrative; in this case, the narrative of “Republicans are the cause of COVID”. But when that metric doesn’t support the narrative, it is the data that is abandoned, not the narrative. The narrative lives on and the people committed to the narrative will find a different context-less metric that helps them tell the story they were always going to tell regardless of the data.
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There was an occasional hint of self-awareness, like when a data journalist from The Economist asked why Florida was getting hit so hard despite high vaccine rates.
The answer (which is growing tedious with repetition) is that Florida was part of a region that was having a severe COVID surge. The really important question here is “wait, if vaccines rates are as protective at a state population level as these charts imply, why *is* Florida having such high COVID rates?”
This was an important question that was largely ignored. So powerful was the narrative that vaccines would stop all COVID surges in their tracks that there has sprung up a conspiracy theory that the only possible explanation for this is that Florida is faking their vaccine reporting rates. This is nonsense, but it’s evidence of how strongly a narrative belief guides people’s view of the world.
there is, simply put, a class of people here who do not want to go back. this purported crisis has given them meaning and elevated their long simmering social fears and barely suppressed panic/safety seeking instincts into what they mistook for virtue.
the fact that others followed them in this mistake allowed it spread and has given it range and duration previously unimaginable.
all perspective was lost to hobgoblins and we surrendered to the neurocracy: rule by the most neurotic; and those who have been atop this newfound karentopia would like to stay there.
Basic food supplies and patience are running low in Xi’an after two weeks of lockdown.
Confined to their homes since December 23, residents in the Chinese city famous for its Terracotta Army have been reduced to bartering for food with cigarettes and electronics as they complain on social media over the lack of essential supplies.
For Chinese president Xi Jinping, who is expected to claim another five years in an unprecedented bid for a third term later this year, it is a faltering start to a crucial 2022.
Omicron and China’s inadequate vaccine against the fast-spreading variant risks pushing the country’s zero-Covid strategy to breaking point, as it runs out of time to stamp out cases ahead of athletes arriving for the Winter Olympics next month.
(DBx: Of course, the people who suffer, and will continue to suffer, most from Beijing’s totalitarian Covidocracy are the Chinese. But we in the rest of the world will suffer also as our commercial and cultural contacts with the Chinese will be severely reduced. National conservatives in America, along with Progressives in America, will applaud the severing of commercial contacts with the Chinese as being an alleged source of greater American prosperity. But they are mistaken – just as mistaken as they’d be if they argued that, say, a severing of the commercial connections between Americans east of the Rockies with Americans west of the Rockies would enrich Americans on both sides of the Rockies.)
Prime minister Jean Castex called the suspension of the debate ‘irresponsible’ but that perhaps was a more apt description of the remarks made by Macron to a French newspaper that were published last night. In an interview with Le Parisien, the president explained why he wanted the vaccine pass bill implemented: ‘I’m not trying to make life difficult for the French,’ he said. ‘But the anti-vaxxers, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this – to the end.’
This would be achieved by making their lives a misery. ‘I won’t send [unvaccinated people] to prison,’ said Macron. ‘So we need to tell them, from 15 January, you will no longer be able to go to the restaurant. You will no longer be able to go for a coffee, you will no longer be able to go to the theatre. You will no longer be able to go to the cinema.’
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary, after writing this excellent piece for the New York Post, protests the derangement over Covid now fueling utterly calamitous policies on college campuses. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
The frenzy about testing everyone, everywhere, at all times, including low-risk people in low-risk settings, was incorrect, illogical, and harmful.