Tag: lockdowns

COVID Lockdowns Have No Clear Benefit vs Other Voluntary Measures, International Study Shows

Anew study evaluating COVID-19 responses around the world found that mandatory lockdown orders early in the pandemic did not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than other voluntary measures, such as social distancing or travel reduction.

The peer reviewed study, which was conducted by a group of Stanford researchers and published in the Wiley Online Library on January 5, analyzed coronavirus case growth in 10 countries in early 2020.

The study compared cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the U.S. – all countries that implemented mandatory lockdown orders and business closures – to South Korea and Sweden, which implemented less severe, voluntary responses. It aimed to analyze the effect that less restrictive or more restrictive measures had on changing individual behavior and curbing the transmission of the virus.

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Montreal woman says officer insisted on searching her lunch bag during curfew stop

Sarah Vresk was heading to work at around 4 a.m. Tuesday when she was stopped near her home by Montreal police and asked to prove she had the right to be on the road during curfew.

“I got my letter out of my glove compartment and he asked for my ID. I gave him that,” said Vresk. “He then asked me what was in my bag.”

Vresk demanded to know why that mattered, and why she wasn’t free to go after showing a letter from her employer stating she works for a snow-removal contractor and needs to be on the job during curfew.

The officer questioned the validity of that letter, saying it’s just a piece of paper, and threatened to give her a ticket anyway, Vresk said. The officer accused her of delaying detainment by not co-operating and showing the bag’s contents.

Vresk finally gave into the officer’s demands, allowing him to inspect her lunch bag.

The officer then returned to his cruiser to check her credentials while his partner took over questioning. Finally, Vresk was let go without a ticket.

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Police chief calls for power of entry into homes of suspected lockdown breakers

The government should toughen the lockdown by giving officers the right to force entry into homes of suspected law breakers, a policing leader has said.

David Jamieson, the police and crime commissioner for the West Midlands police, England’s second biggest force, said: “For the small minority of people who refuse entry to police officers and obstruct their work, the power of entry would seem to be a useful tool.

“I have raised this issue with the policing minister previously and clarity on the power of entry would help police officers enforce the new Covid regulations more easily.”

As the third lockdown comes into force in England at midnight on Wednesday, the rising infection rate is also causing increasing absences from the ranks of officers needed to help enforce the lockdown.

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Virus Avoidance Is Not the Whole of Life

Lest you were hopeful that some semblance of normal life will return in 2021, either due to the development of vaccines or the pandemic fizzling out on its own, the New York Times and 700 epidemiologists have news for you. An article that appeared in the paper on December 4, 2020, entitled “How 700 Epidemiologists are Living Now, and What They Think is Next,” with the subheading “They are going to the grocery store again, but don’t see vaccines making life normal right away,” reveals that most in the profession, or at least the vast majority of those interviewed for the piece, believe that masks and some form of social distancing should continue for years, if not forever. 

As an aside, I wonder how these scientists believe groceries arrive at their doorsteps, if not by another human being whose safety is, apparently, less worthy of consideration.

While a minority of epidemiologists interviewed for the article believe that “if highly effective vaccines were widely distributed, it would be safe for Americans to begin living more freely this summer,” these relative optimists are vastly outnumbered by those who think that life should not return to normal for many years, if ever. Indeed, only one third of the 700 plan to “return to more activities of daily life” once vaccinated. The others intend to severely restrict travel, gather only in small groups with close relatives, work from home at least part time, avoid crowded places, and wear a mask, all indefinitely, because they are concerned about the efficacy of a vaccine, as well as issues with respect to distribution and reluctance to get it. 

One epidemiologist declares that “[b]eing in close proximity to people I don’t know will always feel less safe than it used to.” 

I may not have a background in psychology or psychiatry, but I am fairly confident that before March of 2020, this mentality would have been recognized as some form of ailment of the mind warranting intervention. These epidemiologists implicitly embrace the principle that virus avoidance is a singularly important goal. If not life’s sole priority, it is certainly among its most crucial objectives. 

This is a dogma that should be resoundingly rejected. As I (and many others) have written before, there is no reason to assign SARS-CoV-2 a special status as a killer virus, or to view it as significantly worse than many other of the world’s problems that typically go largely unnoticed by educated professionals in the developed world. Over the past year, around 1.5 million deaths worldwide have been attributed to SARS-Cov-2. On average, 1.35 million people die in traffic accidents, 1.7 million people die of AIDS, and 1.4 million of tuberculosis, each year (We know that the counter to this — that if we did not take extreme mitigation measures, the virus would spiral out of control and bodies would be falling in the streets — is not borne out by the reality).

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How Democrats and Beltway pundits just helped Mitch McConnell undermine Bernie Sanders’ push for direct aid to millions of Americans facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy.

It was always a possibility that Democrats would get too scared to halt a major Pentagon bill in order to help millions of Americans get $2,000 survival checks — in fact, as wewrote earlier this week, it was very likely that they would back down the moment any bad-faith critic so much as waved a flag and said “support the troops.” 

And capitulation became even more likely when Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, corporate Democratic pundits and billionaire-owned elite media outlets began parroting a series of eerily similar let-them-eat-cake talking points against the survival checks — which McConnell promptly used to bludgeon proponents of the bipartisan initiative. 

But even appreciating all of this — and also knowing that many Democratic leaders still cling to an outdated austerity ideology — the sheer scale of Wednesday’s Democratic surrender was truly a sight to behold. And it probably ended the chance for more immediate aid to millions of Americans facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy. 

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Democratic New York County Executive Filmed Playing Hockey Two Weeks After Shutting Down Ice Rink For Hosting Scrimmage

A New York county executive was filmed shooting hockey pucks at a public skating rink with at least 10 others less than two weeks after his department of health temporarily shut down a separate ice rink for hosting a hockey scrimmage, according to the county’s comptroller.

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz, a Democrat, acknowledged Monday on Twitter that he “skated alone for the most part” at the Northtown Center at Amherst sports facility on Sunday morning. Poloncarz also posted a selfie he took on the ice rink dressed in black and not wearing full hockey equipment “to show me alone” that morning.

However, Erie County Comptroller Stefan Mychajliw, a Republican, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that he obtained and published video footage of Poloncarz sharing the ice and shooting hockey pucks at the sports facility Sunday morning with at least 10 other individuals. At multiple points in the video, an individual wearing all black and not wearing full hockey equipment is seen fist-bumping others on the ice rink.

“You see him giving everybody fist bumps and then he hops off the ice. That’s the county executive,” Mychajliw said of the individual in the video wearing all black.

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2020: The Year In Which Comforting American Myths Were Ravaged

Thanks in large part to Covid lockdowns, this year has left vast wreckage in its wake, with ten million jobs lost, more than 100,000 businesses and dozens of national chains bankrupted or closed. Up to 40 million people could face eviction in the coming months for failing to pay rent, and Americans report that their mental health is at record low levels. But the casualty list for 2020 must also include many of the political myths that shape Americans’ lives.

Perhaps the biggest myth to die this year was that Americans’ constitutional rights are safeguarded by the Bill of Rights. After the Covid-19 pandemic began, governors in state after state effectively placed scores of millions of citizens under house arrest – dictates that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly compared to “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery. Politicians and government officials merely had to issue decrees, which were endlessly amended, in order to destroy citizens’ freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of choice in daily life. Los Angeles earlier this month banned almost all walking and bicycling in the city, ordering four million people to “to remain in their homes” in a futile effort to banish a virus.

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