Some Covid Wowies
Some stuff that made me say, "Wow," (among other things) and which might do the same for you.
Of Course It’s California:
Recall that it was just a year ago that the CDC advised against N95s for the public because they’re too difficult to breathe in.
Also: One month ago today, Gavin Newsom reinstated the mask mandate in California in order to “proactively” prevent cases from rising.
Since then, cases are up 1,850% and have more than doubled in the 9 days after the rule was reimposed:
Oh, Okay. Makes Sense.
So cruises, which tend to be overwhelmingly geriatric and thus veritable floating vessels of risk, will pursue a voluntary mitigation strategy while schools filled with kids — the segment of the population least at risk from covid — and vaccinated (and often “boostered”) teachers continue with maximum mitigation, which has massive downsides for kids’ educational development.
People, folks, nation…listen. If you’re still having qualms about kids and covid, and you’re wary of the information I’ve recently imparted because I’m just some random dude (understandable), then I encourage you to read this article from the Intelligencer (NY Magazine), which, I might add, is a publication that has always tilted a strong left on the ideological litmus test.
It may sound strange, given a year of panic over school closures and reopenings, a year of masking toddlers and closing playgrounds and huddling in pandemic pods, that, according to the CDC, among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu. The risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same.
This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic — indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease.
Obesity
Those who have been hospitalized by covid have been disproportionately obese. As in nearly 80%. Think about that.
A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took a closer look at young people who were hospitalized for COVID-19 in July and August, while the delta variant wave took hold, and largely found that healthy young people continue to mostly evade the worst of COVID-19.
The study found that most young people who suffer severe COVID-19 outcomes had underlying health conditions. The most common, especially for teenagers, was obesity.
"Among patients aged 12–17 years, 61.4 percent had obesity," according to the study, "60.5 percent of whom had severe obesity."
1.6 Billion Disposable Masks Entered Our Oceans in 2020
52 billion disposable face masks were produced in 2020 (this includes N95 respirators and surgical masks).
It’s estimated that 1.6 billion of these masks ended up in our oceans.
This equates to roughly 5,500 tons of plastic pollution.
It will take 450 years for the masks to biodegrade.
“Be Reasonable”
Your writer still cannot wrap his head around the about-face the Biden administration recently pulled.
In less than two weeks, the White House went from demonizing the unvaccinated (nothing new) and issuing what can only be described as legitimate propaganda given that it’s so exaggerated and was obviously meant to keep the perpetual hysteria machine going ("For the unvaccinated, you're looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm."), to quite literally saying just 10 days later that the federal government can’t, or even shouldn’t, attempt to stop the pandemic, and requested that we be reasonable moving forward. As if those of us who actually have prefrontal cortex activity haven’t been advocating for this from the start. But okay.
