From the Tom Woods Show:
Two items for you today.
First, I couldn’t resist this Politico headline from last week: “Locked-down California runs out of reasons for surprising surge.”
After all, they’ve been among the most brutal, if not the most brutal, of the hard lockdown states.
And yet they’re claiming that their hospital system is on the verge of collapse.
And for those trying to pretend that it’s noncompliant Republicans driving the surge, why did the numbers shoot up in heavily leftist San Francisco as well?
“Nationally, there has been a kaleidoscopic application of every imaginable type of lockdown order with California being the most restrictive and inflicting the most devastation on small businesses and the most economically vulnerable service workers. And still, we are none the better as far as COVID is concerned,” said California Restaurant Association President and CEO Jot Condie. “In fact in L.A., where indoor and outdoor dining are completely shut down, with indoor dining [closed] since July, the virus rages on.”
Excellent point, which means California will ignore it.
Second item:
Most people reading this will be familiar with the Great Barrington Declaration, written by professors at Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford, urging a rejection of lockdowns in favor of keeping the elderly and immunocompromised safe. “Focused protection,” they call it.
According to Harvard Medical School’s Martin Kulldorff, this is actually the majority opinion among infectious disease epidemiologists, even though it’s portrayed in the media as dangerous extremism.
And before everyone decided to throw previously existing science out the window in 2020, it seemed obvious even to those who now favor ruining people’s lives.
Take, for example, Jeremy Samuel Faust, emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.
One of my friends just pointed out that in early March, Dr. Faust wrote the following in Slate, if you can believe it, in an article called “COVID-19’s Mortality Rate Isn’t as High as We Think”:
“This all suggests that COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported. Given the low mortality rate among younger patients with coronavirus—zero in children 10 or younger among hundreds of cases in China, and 0.2-0.4 percent in most healthy nongeriatric adults (and this is still before accounting for what is likely to be a high number of undetected asymptomatic cases)—we need to divert our focus away from worrying about preventing systemic spread among healthy people—which is likely either inevitable, or out of our control—and commit most if not all of our resources toward protecting those truly at risk of developing critical illness and even death: everyone over 70, and people who are already at higher risk from this kind of virus….
“In particular, we need to focus on the right people and the right places. Nursing homes, not schools. Hospitals, not planes….
“Healthy people who are hoarding food, masks, and hand sanitizer may feel like they are doing the right thing. But, all good intentions aside, these actions probably represent misdirected anxieties. When such efforts are not directly in service of protecting the right people, not only do they miss the point of everything we have learned so far, they may actually unwittingly be squandering what have suddenly become precious and limited resources.”
Focused protection, in other words.
Since early March, the trend has been entirely downward in terms of the fatality rate of the virus. It is far less lethal than initially feared. And yet the panic and the willingness to abandon this initial common-sense approach has skyrocketed. You’d think it would be the opposite, but you’d be wrong.
I’ve sometimes mentioned the Central Florida Metal Fest, which was scheduled to take place in my area in March. At first, people on the Facebook event page scoffed at the virus. We’re metal people, they said. We’re not afraid of any virus!
But months later, when we learned that the virus was far less lethal than we first thought, the very same people were urging everyone to stay home, even if it meant destroying the very venues that play the niche music those people enjoy.
The less reason there is for alarm, the greater the panic. Truly bizarre.
Now, on a somewhat but not entirely unrelated matter:
I’ve been gently suggesting, dear reader, that the lunacy of 2020 is a good reminder of the wisdom of building a way to support yourself that doesn’t require Dr. Fauci’s permission.
So:
I recorded a 30-minute over-the-shoulder video in which I give the basic overview of what a simple online business looks like. This is the model most of my friends follow in one form or another, and you’ll recognize what I do in it as well.
The video doesn’t cost anything, and I won’t be following up with you afterward to buy my $2000 program (I don’t even have one, trust me!). But it will help you:
http://www.tomwoods.com/crashcourse