Posted on 03/27/2021 8:57:07 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I'm sitting at a bar in Texas, surrounded by maskless people, looking at folks on the streets walking around like life is normal, talking with nice and friendly faces, feeling like things in the world are more-or-less normal. Cases and deaths attributed to Covid are, like everywhere else, falling dramatically.
If you pay attention only to the media fear campaigns, you would find this confusing. More than two weeks ago, the governor of Texas completely reversed his devastating lockdown policies and repealed all his emergency powers, along with the egregious attacks on rights and liberties.
There was something very un-Texan about those lockdowns. My hotel room is festooned with pictures of cowboys on horses waving guns in the air, along with other depictions of rugged individualism facing down the elements. It’s a caricature but Texans embrace it. Then a new virus came along – as if that had never happened before in Texas – and the new Zoom class took the opposite path, not freedom but imposition and control.
After nearly a year of nonsense, on March 2, 2021, the governor finally said enough is enough and repealed it all. Towns and cities can still engage in Covid-related mischief but at least they are no longer getting cover from the governor’s office.
At that moment, a friend remarked to me that this would be the test we have been waiting for.
A complete repeal of restrictions would lead to mass death, they said. Would it? Did the lockdowns really control the virus? We would soon find out, he theorized.
I knew better. The “test” of whether and to what extent lockdowns control the virus or “suppress outbreaks” (in Anthony Fauci’s words) has been tried all over the world. Every serious empirical examination has shown that the answer is no.
The US has many examples of open states that have generally had better performance in managing the disease than those states that are closed. Georgia already opened on April 24, 2020. South Dakota never shut down. South Carolina opened in May. Florida ended all restrictions in September. In every case, the press howled about the coming slaughter that did not happen. Yes, each open state experienced a seasonality wave in winter but so did the lockdown states.
So it was in Texas. Thanks to this Twitter thread, and some of my own googling, we have a nice archive of predictions about what would happen if Texas opened.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said that opening Texas was “absolutely reckless.”
Gregg Popovich, head coach of the NBA San Antonio Spurs, said opening was “ridiculous” and “ignorant.”
CNN quoted an ICU nurse saying “I’m scared of what this is going to look like.”
Vanity Fair went over the top with this headline: “Republican Governors Celebrate COVID Anniversary With Bold Plan to Kill Another 500,000 Americans.”
There was the inevitable Dr. Fauci: “It just is inexplicable why you would want to pull back now.”
Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke of Texas revealed himself to be a full-blown lockdowner: It’s a “big mistake,” he said. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s also a cult of death.” He accused the governor of “sacrificing the lives of our fellow Texans … for political gain.”
James Hamblin, a doctor and writer for the Atlantic, said in a Tweet liked by 20K people: “Ending precautions now is like entering the last miles of a marathon and taking off your shoes and eating several hot dogs.”
Bestselling author Kurt Eichenwald flipped out: “Goddamn. Texas already has FIVE variants that have turned up: Britain, South Africa, Brazil, New York & CA. The NY and CA variants could weaken vaccine effectiveness. And now idiot @GregAbbott_TX throws open the state.” He further called the government “murderous.”
Epidemiologist Whitney Robinson wrote: “I feel genuinely sad. There are people who are going to get sick and die bc of avoidable infections they get in the next few weeks. It’s demoralizing.”
Pundit Bill Kristol (I had no idea that he was a lockdowner) wrote: “Gov. Abbott is going to be responsible for more avoidable COVID hospitalizations and deaths than all the undocumented immigrants coming across the Texas border put together.”
Health pundit Bob Wachter said the decision to open was “unforgivable.”
Virus guru Michael Osterholm told CNN: “We’re walking into the mouth of the monster. We simply are.”
Joe Biden famously said that the Texas decision to open reflected “Neanderthal thinking.”
Nutritionist Eric Feigl-Ding said that the decision makes him want to “vomit so bad.”
The chairman of the state’s Democratic Party said: “What Abbott is doing is extraordinarily dangerous. This will kill Texans. Our country’s infectious-disease specialists have warned that we should not put our guard down, even as we make progress towards vaccinations. Abbott doesn’t care.”
Other state Democrats said in a letter that the decision was “premature and harmful.”
The CDC’s Rochelle Walensky didn’t mince words: “Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained. I am really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19.”
There are probably hundreds more such warnings, predictions, and demands, all stated with absolute certainty that basic social and market functioning is a terrible idea. The lockdown lobby was out in full force. And yet what do we see now more than two weeks out (and arguably the lockdowns died on March 2, when the government announced the decision)?
Here are the data.
The CDC has a very helpful tool that allows anyone to compare open vs closed states. The results are devastating for those who believe that lockdowns are the way to control a virus. In this chart we compare closed states Massachusetts and California with open states Georgia, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina.
What can we conclude from such a visualization? It suggests that the lockdowns have had no statistically observable effect on the virus trajectory and resulting severe outcomes. The open states have generally performed better, perhaps not because they are open but simply for reasons of demographics and seasonality. The closed states seem not to have achieved anything in terms of mitigation.
On the other hand, the lockdowns destroyed industries, schools, churches, liberties and lives, demoralizing the population and robbing people of essential rights. All in the name of safety from a virus that did its work in any case.
As for Texas, the results so far are in...
I’m making no predictions about the future path of the virus in Texas. Indeed for a full year, AIER has been careful about not trying to outguess this virus, which has its own ways, some predictable and some mysterious. The experience has, or should have, humbled everyone. Political arrangements seem to have no power to control it, much less finally suppress it. The belief that it was possible to control people in order to control a virus produced a calamity unprecedented in modern times.
What’s striking about all the above predictions of infections and deaths is not just that they were all wrong. It’s the arrogance and confidence behind each of them. After a full year and directly observing the inability of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” to manage the pathogen, the experts are still wedded to their beloved lockdowns, unable or unwilling to look at the data and learn anything from them.
The concept of lockdowns stemmed from a faulty premise: that you can separate humans, like rats in cages, and therefore control and even eradicate the virus. After a year, we unequivocally know this not to be true, something that the best and wisest epidemiologists knew all along. Essential workers still must work; they must go home to their families, many in crowded living conditions. Lockdowns do not eliminate the virus, they merely shift the burden onto the working class.
Now we can see the failure in black, white, and full color, daily appearing on our screens courtesy of the CDC. Has that shaken the pro-lockdown pundit class? Not that much. What an amazing testament to the stubbornness of elite opinion and its bias against basic freedoms. They might all echo the words of Groucho Marx: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
Where are your proofs?
Or are you working on an assumption because it seems logical to you?The libs screamed bloody murder about Sturgis becoming a super spreader event and it was nothing.
I know people who did all the “right” things when exposed to someone with COVID and they still got it. And there are reports here on FR of people who were exposed with no precautions who didn’t.
So how can you prove your assertion?
Based on what? Stats from a PCR test which give a 90% false positive and was never intended as a diagnostic tool in the first place?
Remember the Super Bowl “super spreader” event touted by the media. That never materialized either. When the media’s dire predictions don’t pan out, they’re never mentioned again and they just move on to the next hysterical prediction with no remorse, no self reflection, on their earlier failed prediction.
SPOT ON. = The HYSTERICS on the FAR LEFT & in the “main-SLIME media” think we are all STUPID & are unable to remember their last FOOLISH prediction.
(Fwiw, I’m too old of a bunny to get all upset over predictions of DOOM & GLOOM.)
Dear HENNY PENNY: The sky is NOT falling.
TRUMP 2024!!
Yours, ex-cadet
USA, Retired
;D
Preach!
And that’s the plane and simple truth.
“you?The libs screamed bloody murder about Sturgis becoming a super spreader event and it was nothing.”
The person you are posting to is a lib.
The people who promoted the scamdsmic should be breaking rocks in striped PJ’S for the next 50 years
.
“Stats from a PCR test which give a 90% false positive and was never intended as a diagnostic tool in the first place?”
Scamdemic promoters don’t care unless Fauxci says it.
Dial down the PCR cycles, stop vaccinating and the cases will still evaporate.
Gov Abbott should make vit D and zinc readily available to every Texan, for free. Bannon’s War Room is already doing this. They know.
Then incinerate the gene therapy vials. Watch the common cold, flu and “scamdemic flu” crater.
Check out the NM prison guard lawsuit over mandatory vax. It says right there in the attachments that the cv19vx’s are investigational. They cannot be forced, under federal law. Our FR MDs have been lying about it.
I read the news about people having to wear masks and lockdown in other states and think I'm reading about another planet. We haven't had that around my part of the country.
People walk around without masks, go to stores without them and eat in restaurants without them. It's pretty much business as usual where I live and has been for some time now.
Which leads me to the same conclusion I have had since the beginning, masks don't work, lockdowns don't do anything to stop the virus and all of these onerous mandates in other states has more to do with totalitarian political science than real science.
Not unlike the climate change scam the democRATS have been trying to pull on us for decades now.
There is always another agenda going on than what they are telling us. They always have ulterior motives in mind.
Watch what they do, not what they say. They have perfected their "smoke and mirrors" strategies down pat.
We have been conned yet again by the Left's "don't let a crisis go to waste" mentality.
You are no more convincing about this than you were about cannabis. Your authoritarian desire to scare people is duly noted. Thankfully you and your ilk have failed again.
It was the only way the Democrats could bailout their dying cities and states after the planned racial riots and defunding police and opening jails.
And I will repeat: the democrat party and all who vote for democrats are the enemy. They all demand government smite, control, arrest, tax, steal from or murder the people that the democrat party voter hates.
What is/are the cycle threshold/s used to determine positivity?
Are repeat positives of the same patient being counted as new cases?
Are probables being counted as new cases?
The answers to those question matter.
And until we know them those stats are crap.
Better question - why are not all “homeless” dead by now?
If the virus was so dangerous how is it that those that ignore most societies “rules” seem to be thriving.
My wife and I celebrated our second vaccine injection on Friday by having dinner at San Antonio’s Riverwalk. We kept our masks near by, but didn’t wear them. The San Antonio mayor has said he is keeping the mask mandate in the city, yet few on the crowded Riverwalk were wearing them.
Our dinner table overlooked the water. At first, all of the “Go Rio” boat riders going by were wearing masks. It was obvious the boats weren’t allowing any one on without a mask. Our restaurant had a sign demanding masks, but it was not enforced. Yet, about half way through our meal, a boat went by with with only one or two of the two dozen plus riders with masks on. After that, the boats were the same. It seemed like the mask mandate for the boats had been lifted.
I have been expecting an increase in covid cases in Texas. It’s not from the lifting of masks and lockdowns. Rather, it’s from the hoards of covid sick illegals that Biden has invited to cross our borders.
It appears that not even the flood of Wuhan flu infected illegal aliens has had an affect on Texas cases. (yet?)
BINGO!!!!!
And yet, where does the blame get laid? At the feet of people who don’t want to wear masks or be locked down.
How despicable.
So the guy who caused the pandemic because of his Gain Of a Function research can’t figure it out
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