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Earlier: John Derbyshire Is Still A Coronavirus Agnostic, But He’s Wearing A Mask
We all have our inclinations and tendencies, deriving ultimately, I suppose, from genetic predispositions.
I was, for example, deeply unsurprised to see that Lady Ann published a fine spirited skeptical piece about Coronavirus on March 25th here at VDARE.com:
We’ll get no BREAKING NEWS alerts for the regular flu deaths (so far this season, more than 23,000, compared to 533 from the coronavirus).
Nor for the more than 3,000 people who die every day of heart disease or cancer. No alerts for the hundreds who die each day from car accidents, illegal aliens and suicide.
Only coronavirus deaths are considered newsworthy.
The opinion cut about the Coronavirus pandemic—red v. blue, gentry v. proles, cloud people v. dirt people, Tutsis v. Hutus—is as plain as it can be. The best evidence of this is a chart produced by the polling company Civiqs, reproduced in the March 21st New York Times.
Red vs. Blue on Coronavirus Concern: The Gap Is Still Big but Closing, by Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy, March 21, 2020
The chart shows the proportions of people, broken out separately by Democrat and Republican, who are “extremely concerned,” about a coronavirus outbreak. It shows the proportions for each state, from late February through to late March. So there are 100 lines on this graph: fifty for Democrats, fifty for Republicans, one line per state in each case.
All the lines trend upwards, with both Tutsis and Hutus getting more “extremely concerned” through the month.
What jumps out at you, though, is that the fifty red lines, for Republicans in the fifty states, are bunched down in the five-to-fifteen-percent zone; while the fifty blue lines, for Democrats, occupy a totally separate space up in the twenty-to-sixty-percent zone.
The most worried state for both Democrats and Republicans, was Washington State: 62 percent of Democrats, 20 percent of Republicans.
I’m amazed the pollsters could find any Republicans up there in the Tutsi heartlands of the Northwest.
The least worried Democrats were in Minnesota, 42 percent; the least worried Republicans in Arkansas, eight percent.
I’ll confess that my own temperamental leaning is towards skepticism. After all these years of observing and commenting on Western society, it’s hard not to see the news as just a succession of hysterias.
We live in a hysterical age, the more so since social media came up. When suddenly something new is filling the airwaves—MeToo, Russian Collusion, Black Lives Matter—my default response is: “Oh, here’s the latest hysteria. Who’s whipping up this one?”
The answer in every case, of course, being the Tutsi Power Structure.
However, I try at the same time to be a good empiricist, holding firmly to the belief that some things are true even though the enemy says they are true.
I live just thirty miles from Elmhurst Hospital in New York City, tagged on Wednesday this week by the city hospitals administration as “the center of the crisis.”
That was after thirteen people died there in a 24-hour period. We’re getting harrowing reports from medical staff in the city. [Coronavirus: ‘Hell’ at New York’s COVID-19 ground zero, By Alistair Bunkall, Sky News, March 26, 2020].
As of March 26, around half of all confirmed coronavirus cases were in the New York City area.
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Use this link to determine the closest cases to you.
As best I can judge from the mess of data, and making due allowance for the level of hysteria that underlies all news reporting nowadays, we are looking at something unusually nasty here, and the extreme social distancing being urged on us is justified.
It’ll be a whole lot more justified if we can localize and refine it; but for that we need a better quality of data than we’ve had so far.
The people in charge seem to understand this; so after a couple more weeks of one-size-fits-all lockdown, we’ll move to something more targeted and loose.
I hope.
The Southern Hemisphere bears keeping an eye on. There is a general expectation up here that as the weather warms through April, the virus will quiesce, perhaps bouncing back again in the Fall. That’s a Northern Hemisphere-supremacist point of view, though. As our hemisphere warms up, the folk down in Argentina, Chile, Australia, South Africa, etc. are cooling off into their fall and winter.
The next few weeks should give us a clearer idea about how much this new coronavirus minds the weather.
It looked for a while as though Brazil might offer us a test-bed for total government inaction. Jair Bolsonaro, the president of that country, is an extreme virus skeptic, out there with Lady Ann. On March 20, he called COVID-19 “a little flu.” [Brazil’s Bolsonaro again says coronavirus concern overblown, by David Biller, AP, March 24, 2020]
Brazil's Bolsonaro again says coronavirus concern overblown (from @AP) https://t.co/i8iQuCBSoH
— Mauricio Savarese (@MSavarese) March 25, 2020
Brazil’s politicians and health officials, though, beg to differ. They seem to be going with the international consensus of quarantines, social distancing, and the rest. [Where Is the Coronavirus in Latin America?, Americas Society and Council of the Americas, March 27, 2020]
Reading that report on Brazil’s response, my attention got snagged on this sentence:
On March 24, Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta announced the government would start to roll out a plan that will distribute 2.3 million testing kits to states across Brazil. The Ministry also plans to import over 1 million rapid tests from the United States in April.
So the U.S.A. is sufficiently over-supplied with testing kits we can export a million of them to Brazil next month!
Good to know.
Dear Derb,
We are across the water from you, similarly distant from the piled corpses and lampshades under which Manhattan Island is apparently now buried. It would be interesting to see a more granular breakdown of concern levels, focusing on just the fifty-mile radius around the apocalypse.
Relaxed Republicans tend to own single-family homes with land they can putter around on. Today I sat in the back yard, took off my shirt and collected some vitamin D in the sunshine. Yesterday I walked four miles for exercise. I wonder how many city Democrats can do these things now?
We always keep a rotating supply of non-perishable foods and household supplies in a basement room. Never getting to hot or cold, it is always good for about of three months if the SHTF. We really don’t have to go anywhere, but today I put on an N95 mask and went and bought a few things anyway. Hardly anybody else was wearing a mask.
The American norm of single family homes with property that belongs to the residents is superior. Period. Lately it has been under attack from the Tutsis for everything from global warming to being too white. F-’em all. They are just envious.
Could the huge red-squad vs blue-squad divide reflect their living conditions with R’s much more likely to be living in exurbs or rural areas and D’s in the cities? Obviously, living in close proximity to other people is a legitimate cause for concern, and then there is the stressed-out-city-dweller paranoia factor. As has been almost always the case for the last decade, I’m with Ann on this.
As far as the large amount of contagion in NY City itself (home to lots of blue-squad members), they do have a huge number of Chinese people, many who were going to and coming back from China during the Spring Festival. I don’t know if you’ve read Paul Kersey’s post about it, but having a big rally back in early February, to show support and yell “Be Strong, Wuhan!” is the kind of thing that you hesitate to have a belly laugh about, but then you do anyway.
So the U.S.A. is building a southern border wall. Good to know.
Obviously we are in pretty good agreement, Buzz. I just wanted to say that I wrote my comment before yours was up, in the initial new-post-period when the comments don’t appear until a certain number or a certain time, not sure which.
We are usually in pretty good agreement, I notice. Thanks. No doubt there are many, many more.
Follow the money. It is all about the money. The old money (dead Presidents, in green, on linen paper, which are legal tender for all debts public and private) and it’s attendant accounting and distribution has been set aflame. We are all locked down (especially New York, Dollar trading Capital) so that the fire can grow to burn all the money, so the dumb dirt people (95 % of us) will be desperate enough to do anything for some of the new scrip they have planned.
Derb used to write advice fr young people entering the job market. He said ‘Get a government job!!”. I wonder how well that is going to hold up over the next 2 years (hard winters?) or so.
Your comment is excellent.
Medical professionals sceptical of this whole affair, are coalescing into ‘physicans and experts for coronavirus truth’
Much good professional medical material collated by ‘A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19’, and summarised here:
Today I sat in the back yard, took off my shirt and collected some vitamin D in the sunshine.
Yesterday I walked four miles for exercise. I wonder how many city Democrats can do these things now?
Anyone can run or walk who wants to, in my Manhattan experience. So far. Too cold to take your shirt off.
“So the U.S.A. is sufficiently over-supplied with testing kits we can export a million of them to Brazil next month!”
Yeah, see….they aren’t needed here anyway. The numbers are pulled from the butts of those reporting them. We don’ need no steenkeen test kits.
A friend of mine said that someone he knew had just died in the nursing home from the coronavirus. Once I expressed my doubt that the corona virus confirmation was valid, I turned out to have one less friend. People get really honked off if you doubt their latest fear.
As Derb so very often and correctly points out, the GOP are the Stupid Party, and last time I looked they were “running” the Executive Branch, the Branch actually charged to make things happen … or not.
I would prefer to think of it as evidence that the US still has some small functioning part that is not centrally-planned, where businesses take and fulfil orders in a ‘cab rank’ way, and live up to the expectations of people who think contracts matter (even if the client – being a government – is made up of people I would gladly sent to the camps).
Hospitals are for-profit businesses: they shouldn’t get away with trying to source useful shit by government interference, just because they failed to adequately stock up when they were pocketing monopoly-like profits because of the well-understood ‘principal-agent problem’ that applies in insurance.
They’re still pocketing monopoly profits for that same reason, but the useful shit got a bit scarcer. Fucking diddums.
Plus: hospitals are the prime focus of the 3rd or 4th greatest cause of death in the US – medical error.
I have yet to see a single hysterical person. Or hear of one. Here in Mexico you see clerks in masks, hand sanitizer dispensed at entrances to stores, that sort of thing, but everyone is perfectly calm. I grant that I am a bit of a fossil, but from a generation that thought is a good thing to know what words mean. Now telling a dirty joke is violence, reporting a brutal murder is racism, and washing your hands is hysteria. Sigh.
NYC is one place in the US right now that might live up to the hype. Stay safe, grumpy old bastard.
Sometimes that is the case for those with cherished beliefs. For example I met a Jewish woman at a university summer school on the Russian language in 1982. We met up occasionally on my visits to London but mostly kept in touch by letter – we never exchanged phone numbers but correspondence by letter or postcard was OK as we were both pretty literate, even if in hindsight it was old-fashioned. In 1988 I criticised Israel mildly in a letter and she never replied. We lost touch. I looked her up in Google around the start of the millennium and she was living in Israel although perhaps only temporarily.
Thanks for posting this, Brabantian.
Everyone should read it, and it shouldn’t be hidden behind a MORE.
You have one less friend because you were simply speculating, and essentially referring to your friend as someone who is other than honest. Of course we need tests by medical professionals for Covid-19. It is amazing how ignorant you are on these matters.
Industry is churning out test kits but the bottleneck is having enough qualified people ( basically nurses) for those nose and throat swabs and they need full PPE to do it and both are in short supply.
In Wuhan something like 1/3 of the bat stew flu patients were healthcare workers. Sticking tubes down the trachea of an infected patient is a high risk procedure so we really need to get a pharmaceutical treatment going. As far as I am concerned, given the mortality rate for high risk patients needing ventilators the FDA ought to dispense with clinical trial protocols and start using these people as guinea pigs. It can only help them as 90% are going to die anyway,
Bat stew did not cause a virus with AIDS transmission DNA in it.
It’s not uncommon I suppose, but that was the first time anyone had ever done that to me just for making an observation. If that’s all it takes to end a friendship, then I have to wonder how good a friend I just lost.
In my case the friendship seems to have been less profound than the other person’s commitment to Zionism. Oh well.
My friendship was apparently less important than the other guy’s commitment to TV news. Oh well indeed. ahaha
Anatoly Karlin is a complete idiot. I don’t think the usually clear-headed and erudite Steve Sailer should believe a damn thing he writes.
Where are the giant piles of bodies? Here in Florida, a state with a population of more than 20 million, full to the gunwales with sick old people, as of today a grand total of 71 deaths.
Even more puzzling, a grand total of TWO deaths of people 55 and younger from this hideous disease, killing all in its path.
We shut down the entire state, trashing thousands of businesses, and putting millions out of work for this? Seems a pretty steep price.
Perhaps, but if this pandemic/hysterical outburst takes out Orange Man and ushers in full-blown Socialism, the dead and unemployed can be considered martyrs for the cause.
It’s a little more complicated than that. The corridor that runs from the Canadian border down to around Olympia is left-leaning, but the rest of Washington state is pretty conservative, especially the eastern part of the state around Spokane. Even the counties across the sound from Seattle have a different vibe.
Please stay in Mexico with all the Mexican rapists and drug dealers you swear don’t exist but whom you also think are such harder worker than Americans, ya traitorous bitch.
Mr. Derbyshire, I’d say you are a skeptic, or an agnostic, if you will. You know enough to be one. I might even agree Ms. Coulter could, possibly, be one. But I would not say Mr. Bolsonaro is a skeptic. He’s something else, though I’m not sure what.
Eastern Washington went for Trump, as did upstate New York and inland California. In the Evergreen State, it’s left-wing atheists on the coast, right-wing atheists in the hills.
They have their share of religious fanatics.