Some of the armed COVID-19 shutdown protesters likely have a year’s supply of nitrogen-packed legumes, MREs, and weapons they’ve stockpiled to survive doomsday, a well-prepared friend mused. But a few weeks’ worth of social distancing and no paychecks and they’re the first in the streets whining that they can’t take it anymore. She says it’s because the doomsday they’ve prepped for involves shooting people and they can’t shoot a virus.
The protesters are being spurred on by a pro-gun family from Iowa (among others), reports the Des Moines Register:
Aaron Dorr, executive director of Iowa Gun Owners, and several of his brothers created Facebook groups to organize the protests in those states and elsewhere. The Dorr brothers — Chris, Ben, Aaron and Matthew — have made themselves known among conservatives for their profitable anti-establishment Facebook groups that are pro-gun and anti-abortion. Their anti-quarantine pages were developed with the same private registrar, according to an NBC analysis, and the brothers are reportedly listed as administrators on those state-specific anti-quarantine pages.
The Dorrs’ Facebook groups have functioned as a digital hub that has elevated misinformation, such as alleging that health officials are intentionally inflating COVID-19 death tallies and comparing the new virus to the flu, ABC and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported.
They are not the only ones pushing back. In a March 27 video that came over the transom, Peter Robinson of Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institute asks Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD and professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine, why in his March 24 Wall Street Journal commentary he questioned whether “coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines.” It’s because without adequate testing, we don’t know how many have been infected. We don’t know the denominator to get the death rate from infections: deaths over infections. We’re guessing.
Robinson seems more concerned about the economy than about the number of deaths. In a followup interview (4/17), Bhattacharya explains he ran a drive-through antibody screening in Santa Clara County (the Bay area and Silicon Valley). His sample of 3,300 volunteers (not without flaws) suggests the infection rate is vastly undercounted, meaning the death rate is not ten times that of the flu. Without initially disclosing his role in the study, Andrew Bogan issued a April 17 WSJ commentary suggesting, “If policy makers were aware from the outset that the Covid-19 death toll would be closer to that of seasonal flu … would they have risked tens of millions of jobs and livelihoods?”
Robinson says [timestamp 16:00], “You’re telling me that we shut down the American economy for the flu.“
Bhattacharya balks, “No, because we don’t have a vaccine for this thing.” Many more people would have died without the shutdown. It’s not for nothing.
About half the population gets a flu shot every year. That’s why the CDC estimated only between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010. After about two month of social distancing, the US is on track to exceed the number of deaths in the Vietnam War by the end of this month.
A chart created by the San Francisco Chronicle (at top) demonstrates the effect of early actions to impose social distancing. Santa Clara and surrounding California county health officers issued a stay-at-home order March 16. Contrast the Bay area curve infections with the rest of the US.
Rachel Maddow Thursday night interviewed Santa Clara County public health officer Sara Cody on the impact of early action in minimizing the pace of infection there. Her early action may have saved countless lives.
This is serious. Unprecedented. Many people infected are dying before they can get to the hospital, unaware of how sick they are until it is too late to save them. In New York, “cardiac calls” to emergency services spiked in March:
On March 23, EMS call volume started rising to record levels, from 4,000 on an average day to more than 6,500 calls a day.
The fire department’s chief of emergency medical services, Lillian Bonsignore, said at the time, “I’ve been in this profession for about 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this in my whole career — or in my life, for that matter.”
From March 1 to April 13, poor neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens recorded two to three times the number of cardiac calls compared to the same period in 2019, with three to five times as many patients dying.
Maybe the death rate, unchecked, is lower than previously thought. We don’t have all the data we need. That’s still coming in. We don’t know enough about how this virus kills. What we do know is they are digging mass graves on an island in Long Island Sound and bodies are stacking up in refrigerated trailers outside New York City hospitals.
Don’t let the Midas cultists sacrifice your life on the altar of an economy that cares not one whit about you.
UPDATE: About that “not without flaws” Bhattacharya study.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.