Views from the Outside

 I started this tedious series of posts with a look at other Government-sponsored health initiatives.  The Physical Activity Guidelines and The Dietary Guidelines . I highlighted the fact that both claim to reduce the risk of various conditions by around 20%, and I made a case that a 20% reduction is significant in aggregate but maybe not so significant for a specific person, given the low risk that some of the conditions already have.  I also ran down the basic requirements for a successful public health initiative namely: the initiative has to be easy to understand, easy to follow, widely communicated and medically effective. Regarding the "Easy to understand" requirement, these non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) would clearly get an "A".  "Wear a mask", "Wash your hands", "Stand six feet apart" and "Stay home" are about as simple as you can get. Regarding "Easy to follow", the grade is a bit lower.  "Sta...

 This one, along with facemasks is actually part of the CDC's recommendations for flu outbreaks in nursing homes.  Though the CDC also wants staff to wear gloves.  That's obviously not practical in an everyday setting, so for the coronavirus, it was recommended to wash your hands frequently (including videos to show you how) and use hand sanitizer even more frequently.   I never did. I'm unaware of a single person who studiously followed all the recommendations.  Partially (but only partially) it's not my fault.  Hand sanitizer sold out in many stores and the FDA, living up to it's goal to keep life-saving products away from Americans at all costs, put numerous roadblocks in the way of liquor companies hoping to repurpose their unsold booze as hand sanitizer.   Until they were stopped .  Partially. But mostly it's just laziness.  I simply didn't feel like carrying hand sanitizer around with me (when I could find it). But the nonsense over ...

The term "Social Distancing" was unheard of before February 2020 and I hope the day will come I never hear of it again.  I never really understood what it means.  What is means, of course, if you were supposed to stay 6 feet away from everybody.   But that's hardly "social".  I always thought "physical distance" made more sense, but I suppose "social" may mean that you have to stay 6 feet away from people not animals or things. Of all the restrictions in place, I'd estimate this one was the least followed.  Though in my mind it probably stood a chance of being more effective than some of the others.  I think the practicality of the spacing simply got in the way.  If you're going to let people together in a place you can't really keep them apart.  You can put circles on the floor but you can't force people to stand in them.  Though birds seem to comply easily. Note that in the images above, the lines and circles are out...

 In an earlier post I talked about the lockdowns and I expressed the view that I think it's very unlikely that stay-at-home orders like those issued in Early 2020 will ever be imposed again.  In this post I'm talking about masks and I'll start with the opposite conclusion: it's very hard for me to see a time when masks are not required (or at least the norm) in at least some circumstances. The mask orders came about several months after the "social distancing" and hand-washing recommendations.  Together, these formed the unholy trinity of covid response and any deviation from their teachings was regarded as heresy. Well, not really,  Of the three, masking is by far the most controversial, and it's also the most visible.  No can really tell if you are washing your hands frequently enough, or even correctly.  I personally never washed my hands more that usual.  And social distancing is kind of obvious but kind of not.  Are people standing in line at...

 Before I get too much farther into the government and pharma responses to the coronavirus, I want to further flesh out some details about how viral spread has been measured and reported. When talking about a virus, most people would be concerned about getting it, but they'd be really concerned about needing hospitalization or even dying from it.  Depending on one's state of life and attitude towards hospitals, the concerns may not even be in that order. But they are obviously related.  You have to catch the virus before you can die from it. The non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were mostly concerned with limiting the number of people that get infected, though some claims were made that some or all of them would result in a smaller viral load so you might get less sick even if you got infected.  But I've seen no evidence that this is true. So let's start getting some numbers.  Early on in the virus, about twenty percent of people with the virus ended up in...