Wednesday, July 08, 2020

Of Viruses And Parasites

Viruses


Ohioan at Heart has a typically thorough blog post up discussing the latest Wuhan Flu idiocy in California. Here's a sample.
When Goober Newsom allowed the various counties around CA to 'open up' (albeit slowly), he put some 'metrics' in place to monitor the counties behavior/results.  Now at first blush this seems a reasonable and responsible action.  However, the metrics (set in mid April) have not been modified to account for the changing reality, and as a result are now being applied, I believe improperly, to shut businesses down in San Diego County (and I must wonder if in other counties as well).  I have been saving lots of the historical CoViD data for San Diego County and I dug into it to determine if they are comparing apples to oranges.  And the result is (drum roll)...

They are comparing apples to squirrels.  The data today simply can not be compared in a straight forward way to metrics based on data from back then for a myriad of reasons.  I will now attempt to convince you, dear reader, that I know what I'm talking about.
Which he does. Read the whole thing.

Twitter user Gummi Bear tweeted an excellent and very long thread showing that there is a standard progression to the Wuhan Flu and that we're on the downside of it. I unrolled the thread for you to make it easier to read. Here's a sample.

California is doing exactly the wrong thing with the renewal of the lockdowns. That's no surprise. We specialize in doing the wrong thing. As for sending the kids back to school in the fall, on Tucker's show last night, he pointed out that the Europeans sent their kids back long ago and have seen no problems with it.

Parasites


This morning, I read an excellent essay from Victor Davis Hanson on the Year Zero aspect of our current insurrection / revolution. I'm still processing it, but I keep going back to my Nazi analogy. A new parallel occurred to me today, one of parasitism.

The Nazis saw the Jews as parasites, feeding off of the labor of German workers. In effect, that's the same sentiment as white privilege and the oppression of people of color today. Whites are parasites who owe much of their status to the consumption of what people of color produce.

Yay?

Mistletoe is a parasite, too. It leads to sexual assault and misogyny around Winter Solstice.

1 comment:

Ohioan@Heart said...

Thanks for the link. I also gave Gummi Bear's info a good look. Makes a lot of sense. It implies that 1) the undetected cases run around 5 or 6 times the detected ones (so an apparent 15% infection rate jumps to more like a herd immunity number of 75-90%), and 2) the actual deaths will top out at no more than about 600 / million. If we apply these to California (population about 39.74 million) we expect just under 6,000,000 cases and a bit under 24,000 deaths (currently 295,000 cases and 6,700 deaths). Those are only 1/20 of the cases, but already 1/4 of the deaths, so I am not sure how to reconcile those. In any case, that means we have a long way to go.