Superspreader!

At the end of this post, I'm going to identify the true superspreader of the covid pandemic. But please don't read ahead; that would spoil the fun. Along the way, we're going to identify events that the "experts," media, and politicians claimed would be superspreaders, but were not. We're also going to look at what's been done to mitigate the spread of the virus, and how effective those measures have been. Then, we'll look at the real superspreader.

Caveat: I write this not as an epidemiologist, virologist, or infectious diseases specialist. In my defense, there have been a lot of "experts" claiming to be among those professions who were not, who have offered their "expertise" regarding all things covid. A lot of otherwise intelligent people have been sucked in by them, because their narrative spoke to those people's pre-conceived notions. At the same time, there have been bona fide, credentialed members of those professions who have offered their expertise who have been dead wrong, including those who have advised our government and others'.

I am, however, a data and math guy, better-versed in those disciplines than most. And I'm a student of logic. So I write from the perspective of applying those disciplines to what we all can observe. And the empirical data is pretty conclusive.

The inspiration for this post was the recent revelation that, in the communities where the 2021 college football season opened to packed stadiums full of maskless students and other fans, screaming their boisterous heads off for several hours at a time, the number of covid cases actually declined in the two weeks following the home opener.

That's right, declined. By numbers large enough to be statistically significant. Like about 15-20%, in just one example.

Now, this happened in spite of the dire warnings of the "experts" - including Dr. Anthony Fauci - that these large events would be "superspreaders." Before the season began, in interview after interview (dear Lord, the man does love a camera, doesn't he?), Fauci cautioned people against having fun. The guy makes the Taliban look like KOOL and the Gang.

It also happened in southern states where the vaccination rate is relatively low, like Mississippi (42.6%) and Tennessee (44.7%); in states where the vaccination rate is closer to the national average, like Texas (50.6%); but also in northern states where the rate is relatively higher (Wisconsin, 55.9%).

In other words, it doesn't seem to matter what the heck the vaccination rate is. The numbers are dropping, in spite of the crowded stadiums, with no other apparent mitigating factors. Why? I'll opine on that later.

As an aside, we should be surprised that Fauci was so wrong in his dire prediction that these games would be superspreader events. You'd think he'd have a better understanding of the virus that his sponsored gain-of-function research created. Then again, he's been wrong about everything else related to covid.

What about other events that were feared to be superspreader events? Well, how about the Sturgis motorcycle rally? That's another large, outdoor event that Fauci grumpily warned about. Nope. Neither the 2021 rally, nor the 2020 event, turned out to have produced large numbers of cases, in spite of false media reports in 2020 claiming the contrary (which were immediately debunked, and resulted in those reports being quickly dropped).

And, during the 2020 Presidential campaign, we were told that the large Trump rallies would be superspreader events. Yet they weren't. Not one of them. (Of course, poor Joe Biden couldn't get more than about a dozen people to one of his events, so there was no risk there. In fact, more pro-Trump hecklers - the "chumps," as Joe-the-uniter called them - showed up for his events than his own supporters.)

To be fair, let's also note that the riots (no, Pollyanna, they weren't "peaceful protests") of the summer of 2020 also didn't turn out to be superspreader events. Nor did the Lollapalooza concert in Chicago in the summer of 2021, which produced about 203 cases out of 385,000 attendees, a .05% infection rate (and really, is there any way of being sure that those people contracted the virus at the music festival, and not at the supermarket?). Nor did former President Obama's maskless birthday bash on Martha's Vineyard; though a "spike" in cases on the island did follow the event, the population of that tony enclave is probably lower than that of my neighborhood, so the numbers are statistically meaningless.

Even the free flow of more than a million illegal immigrants across our southern border, from countries with very low vaccination rates and high infection rates, many of whom we know had covid when they came here; even with their free dispersion throughout the U.S., courtesy of our own government, which bussed and flew them across the country to destinations untold; even with the recent heavy concentration of 15,000 immigrants under a single bridge on the border from a country with a vaccination rate less than 1%; has not resulted in a traceable spike in coved cases.

So we can conclude that there really hasn't been a single event - concert, sporting event, motorcycle rally, birthday party, border crisis - that has turned out to be a superspreader event.

Nor, for that matter, has a day in school been a superspreader event. Let that sink in.

Now, what has been done to mitigate the virus? One hundred years from now, assuming the study of history hasn't been completely eradicated by the Thought Police, children will study the attempts to mitigate covid-19 as one of the great foibles of humankind. Let's start from the beginning, and I'll focus on the U.S.

First, we shut down a good chunk of the economy, as part of "Fourteen Days to Flatten the Curve." Well, that 14 days stretched into two months, during which time covid cases increased, then remained elevated, and only began to come down after those portions of the economy that had been closed were allowed to re-open.

(It still sticks in my craw to say "allowed to re-open," as if a free people and free enterprise need to meekly await the permission of the government officials they elect to exercise the freedom that, according to the Constitution those officials swear an oath to uphold, is bestowed by a higher authority.)

So we clearly established that shut-downs don't work. And lest the lesson didn't stick, idiots like Gavin Newsom and Andrew "McFeely" Cuomo tried it again last winter, with the same effect: cases spiked in their jurisdictions after they shut down again, then came down again after they re-opened.

Back to May of 2020, after the 14-days-cum-two-months to flatten the curve. Cases began rising again into the summer months, so governors across the U.S. imposed mask mandates. What happened?

Cases kept rising. Then, in the fall, they started coming down. And the governors said, "See? The masks work!" And the Faucis of the world backed them up, even though they had originally said that masks are ineffective against virus, which is too small to be stopped by a mask that is intended to protect against much larger bacteria.

Then - "just like that," as Forrest Gump would say - cases started back up again in November, mere weeks after they had come down. Yet, the mask mandates were still in place. Oops.

And mandates resumed as the Delta variant took hold, yet cases continued to rise. Oops again. Recall the definition of insanity.

Anecdotally, I have friends who were militant about mask-wearing. (Maybe I should say "former" friends in some cases, as some of them no longer speak to me over a three-inch by five-inch piece of cloth. It may not be powerful enough to stop a virus, but apparently it's powerful to end a years-long friendship. Sad.) Interestingly, those friends contracted covid.

On the other hand, I must confess I wear a mask as little as I can get away with. If I know a store isn't going to enforce the mandate, I pull it down, or don't put it on at all. If I'm flying, I try to eat and drink throughout the flight, and I find the flight attendants don't really care. Same with walking through an airport, or sipping water while seated in the gate area waiting to board. Yet somehow, in spite of having been on 32 flights since the pandemic began - many of them full; in spite of having been in seven airports, including the second-busiest airport in the world numerous times, and one international airport; in spite of shopping at least a couple of times a week; in spite of dining out at least a couple of times a week; and in spite of generally not changing my lifestyle much at all due to covid; I've managed to avoid being infected.

Whether one looks at the macro data, or individual anecdotal cases, there just doesn't seem to be much correlation between mask mandates or fastidious mask wearing and reduced transmission of covid.

There have been other mitigation measures, like social distancing. Well, cases were spiking when restaurants were open at limited capacity, and they came down when restaurants were fully open. There was the case of the apartment building in New York City where none of the residents left the building for a period of time in the spring of 2020, and a large number of them became infected. Ventilation may have played a role.

Back to flying. From the time flights resumed in May or so of 2020 (that's when I took my first post-pandemic business flight), middle seats were blocked, and they remained so until September or later, depending on the airline. Now, all seats are open, and many of the flights I've been on have been completely full. Yet I've heard of not one case resulting from a packed airplane. Again, ventilation may be key, as air circulation on planes makes them one of the safest places you can be.

But the bottom line is, social distancing doesn't seem to be any more effective than shutdowns or masks in mitigating the spread of covid. Maybe it works if I distance myself from someone whom I know is infected, and is sneezing all over the place, but in normal settings, not so much.

Now, I'm going to turn my attention to what has become the elephant in the room: vaccines. This is perhaps the most polarizing topic of our time, in no small part thanks to shaming and ridicule (from those on both sides of the topic) and mandates. It has replaced talking about religion and politics around the Thanksgiving dinner table as the topic most sure to start an argument among otherwise friendly people.

Here's the bottom line: vaccines will not prevent one from contracting the virus. Nor will they guarantee that, if you do contract it, you will not become seriously ill, or be hospitalized. Nor will they guarantee that, if you do contract it, you will not die. Especially if you are elderly or immunocompromised.

However, my anti-vaccine friends need to understand something. You have always trusted my analysis of data, right? Whether it's economic data, or market data, or data related to covid cases, or anything else data-related, you have read what I've written and understood that I have a solid grasp of data, and you've trusted my analysis. I go to the source, look at the raw numbers, make my calculations, and draw my own conclusions, without the influence of politicians, "experts," or the media. I assume that, if you've read this far, you're in agreement with what I've written thus far in this post.

Well, know this: I have looked at the data regarding the covid vaccines. Not what Fauci says, or Walensky, or for God's sake Biden or Psaki. No, I've looked at the actual raw numbers, and drawn my own conclusions, as I always do. And this is what I know:

The vaccines do reduce one's chances of contracting the virus. They do reduce the chance that, if you contract it, you will become seriously ill, or be hospitalized. And they do reduce the chance that, if you contract it, you will die, whether you are in an at-risk population or not. (When I say "chance" here, I'm talking about statistical probability.)

You cannot refute this. The data are incontrovertible. If you choose not to believe me on this, then you have to choose not to believe me on anything data-related that I write. You might as well stop reading.

Now, you have your own reasons for choosing not to get vaccinated, and you know I support that. I have my own reservations as well. You may feel that your odds are about the same either way, given your overall health; that's a very valid argument for most people. You may have natural immunity from a previous infection, and feel that's superior to immunity from a vaccine, which I would agree with. You may fear unknown long-term auto-immune effects. Heck, you may think the vaccines contain microchips that will be used to track your movements by Big Brother, or worse. I don't care what your reasons are, they're your reasons, and that's good enough for me.

But you can't reasonably count among them that the vaccines don't reduce the chance of infection, serious illness, or death, and no amount of conspiracy-theory youtube videos will change that.

At the same time, for my gung-ho, vaccines-are-the-end-all-answer friends: vaccines do not prevent infection, in spite of the silly claims you've authoritatively made for lo these many months. They do not prevent it, nor do they prevent serious illness if you do get infected, nor do they prevent hospitalization or death. So while they do improve one's odds, they don't prevent a damn thing. In that regard, they're better than shutdowns or social distancing or masks or any other foolhardy effort at mitigation that's been tried to date, but they're no panacea.

So - we've established that there haven't really been any superspreader events that we can identify; that in fact some events that were predicted to be superspreaders were actually followed by a decline in cases, like the recent college football games; and that nearly all efforts at mitigation have failed miserably, resulting not only in no correlation with declining cases, but in many cases in a correlation with rising cases after the mitigant was implemented, and falling cases after it was removed. (I work in the risk management world, and in the face of that kind of evidence regarding risk mitigation ... well, we'd have a pretty good idea of what to do and what not to do when it comes to mitigating a threat.)

What, then, can we conclude is the real covid superspreader? To what can we attribute the fact that it has overwhelmed all of these mitigation efforts, and spread throughout the U.S., indeed the world?

A number of years ago, when the Mississippi River was flooding its banks in the St. Louis area, my wife and I were watching news coverage of a small river town whose residents were frantically packing sandbags along the riverbank. And my wife, who is probably a genius (hey, she married me, didn't she?), made the following astute observation:

"That river's been going wherever it wanted to go for millions of years, and it's going to keep going wherever it wants to go, in spite of what anyone does to try to change that."

And so it is with covid. It's the Mississippi River of viruses - or maybe it's not. Maybe it's just another virus, and maybe all viruses are like the Mississippi River. And masks, social distancing, shutdowns, and all the other ridiculous notions that fools like Fauci can come up with are just so many 100-lb. sandbags against a river whose flow rate reaches nearly 600,000 cubic feet per second.

So it is with all of Man's efforts to mitigate things that come from Nature: the course of the Mississippi, climate change, covid. The same is true of other phenomena that occur naturally, such as things that exist in the economic realm. In the early 2000s, several Democrat lawmakers decided that, with the aid of the capital markets, they could influence the homeownership rate, a naturally mean-reverting data series. The result was the 2008-09 housing crisis and the Great Recession. Did those politicians pay the price? No. We did. Just as the Faucis and the governors and the mayors (most of whom don't follow their own mask requirements when the cameras are off) don't pay the price for their failed mitigation efforts: we do.

Now, why did cases decline after those crowded college football games a few weeks ago? Simple: because cases are declining overall. Is it because the vaccination rate is increasing? Well, maybe, but it's highly doubtful: the two-week change in the overall vaccination rate in the U.S., or in any one state, for that matter, is less than 1%. And, the increase in the vaccination rate is glacially slow in comparison to the decline in cases in the U.S. Look at the most recent data below:

No, it appears that, as was the case in India, we're seeing the naturally-occurring decline in cases that seems to be a part of the Delta phenomenon.

What's the upshot of all of this? It's very simple.

The superspreader - the only superspreader - is the virus itself. And nothing we try to do to mitigate it is going to be very effective, other than learning to live with it and letting it run its course. Yes, we should take precautions, like practicing good hygiene and being as healthy as possible. Good ventilation, spending time outdoors, soaking up or supplementing with vitamin D, all seem to help. (And while good hygiene is just a good idea in general, we've pretty much debunked the surface spread notion, so stop disinfecting those groceries, already.)

And yes, we should protect the most vulnerable among us. From everything, because let's face it, they're susceptible to darn near everything, unfortunately. If we're in a vulnerable category and can do something about it, we should. If I'm 85, I can't make myself younger. But I can lose weight, or stop smoking, or get outside more.

Finally, we should make a concerted effort to figure out how this damn thing got unleashed to begin with; prosecute anyone who was involved with intentionally or carelessly unleashing it, if that was the case, to send a clear message; and figure out how we can prevent a similar event from happening again.

Beyond that, we're going to have to live with this coronavirus, the way we live with its cousins, including the common cold, and other viruses, like the flu.

Because the virus is the superspreader. And virus gonna virus.

What Do You Do With a General?

The title comes from a song by the same name from the excellent Christmas movie musical, White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. I watch it every year, because it reminds me of my Dad, who was a WWII vet. It should be on your Christmas movie list if it isn't already. It'll take you back to a better time, when we were all Americans, regardless of political ideology.

My Dad served honorably, unlike Mark Milley. We now know that Milley, prior to the 2020 election, called his counterpart in China, our most dangerous enemy, and told him that he'd warn him in advance if then-President Trump decided to attack China.

Let that sink in a minute.

This was before the election. President Trump was Milley's Commander-in-Chief, his direct military supervisor in a chain of command that, above all, is not to be breached. Whether he thought Trump was acting erratically is of no relevance. Whether he thought Trump would actually attack China is of no relevance. Whether he thought Trump would win the election is of no relevance.

Although it raises a curious question, does it not? Did Milley expect Trump to behave erratically after the election, because Milley had advance knowledge of the outcome of the election, and thus felt compelled to warn China? Inquiring minds would love to know.

The chain of command is sacrosanct in the military. That's taught in boot camp, and reinforced daily. And Milley violated it, at the highest level. Never mind that we've since learned that he had 15 people in the room; that only makes his act of treason all the more brazen and audacious - and, it means that he compelled 15 other people to commit treason along with him.

Many are now calling for Milley to step down, to resign. Sorry, Mark (he no longer deserves the respectful title of "General" or "Sir"), you don't get off that easy. See, colluding with our enemies is treason, and under the law, there's a pretty clear path of dealing with that.

You face a court-martial. You are stripped of your rank and dishonorably discharged. And then you are hanged.

Now, there are a lot of liberals who are saying that Milley was a hero, because Trump was erratic, and that Milley may have saved us from a nuclear war.

Let me be clear to those who may be reading this, and think that way: I don't give a rat's hindquarters how deep your Trump Derangement Syndrome runs; if you believe that Donald Trump would have attacked China after the 2020 election, you are a drooling idiot who should be institutionalized for the safety of yourself and those around you.

Milley acted not as a military man, but as a partisan civilian (recall that he was also in contact with Trump's political enemies during that time, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, two other boils on the arse of humanity).

So everyone's aware of this by now; everyone knows it's treason, even though any liberal reading this will give Milley a pass for it, just like they gave James Comey and Peter Strzok and Lisa Page a pass for breaking the law while employed by the FBI, even while they watched today's Judiciary Committee hearings over the tragic Olympic sex abuse scandal that the FBI failed to prosecute and even covered up, and demanded that FBI agents be jailed. What fresh perspective on the Milley affair does The Curmudgeon bring?

This: among all the other institutions that have failed us - yes, the FBI; our Congress; our courts; our election system - we now have to add our military.

That's it - we can no longer trust or have faith in our military (and Milley proved that further by his feckless leadership of the Afghanistan withdrawal, because he cares more about white rage within his ranks than about radical Islamic rage against America, woke liberal that he is). Oh, I have nothing but respect for everyone I know who has served and is serving, and I know a member of the planning cell for Operation Geronimo, which took out bin Laden, as well as the Commander of the SEAL team featured in the movie, Lone Survivor.

However, they ultimately take their orders from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And the current holder of that title, undeserving as he is, is a traitor to the country of which I'm a citizen.

So I don't know when he'll give the order to come to my house and haul me off for my political beliefs, or because I'm suspected of white rage. And because the brave men and women I know who serve today do understand the chain of command, they will obey, just as the soldiers who stood down inside the gates of the Kabul airport, even though you know they wanted desperately to go out and fight to rescue more Americans and Afghan friendlies, obeyed.

Thus, The Curmudgeon's key takeaway: this, boys and girls, is why we need the Second Amendment. This is why citizens must have the right to keep and bear arms. And this is why it's so important that those arms include weapons that can compete with those that could be used against us by a military led by a general who has gone off the reservation, behind his Commander-in-Chief's back, and conspired with our enemies for political purposes. A general who would go after those whose political views differ from his own and his party bosses'.

The scoffers always point to the brave boots on the ground and tell us we don't need protecting from them, because they're protecting us. And they're right. But we do need protecting from men like Mark Milley, who would leave Americans behind in the hands of the Taliban, or conspire with our greatest enemy behind the back of the Commander-in-Chief. And who views an idiot prancing through the Capitol wearing a Viking helmet as a greater threat to national security than people who fly planes into buildings, because of his partisan beliefs.