[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Do you miss having a blue rag clamped over your mouth and nose? Frowns from the people wearing masks? Having to shuffle six feet apart from the line at the supermarket counter?
In Governor Gavin Newsom’s California, the local health officials have you covered.
Across California, ‘health officials’ are calling for bringing back masks. They’re describing a “summer COVID wave” in September (trust the science) before a predicted “winter wave” and warning that everyone will either be dead or masked by the spring.
“California is experiencing a summer COVID wave,” Dr. Aimee Sisson, the health officer for Yolo County, claimed in a press release, and recommended that everyone over the age of 2 in West Sacramento “wear a mask when they are around others in indoor public spaces.”
Why do we have to mask children? Because it’s fun for the whole family. And for that most useless and destructive element of California officialdom: the professional health official.
How much COVID is there really in Yolo County? It’s hard to say because the databases that were urgently tracking COVID gave up once there was no longer any bad news to report.
The latest figure in Yolo is from July which records 0 deaths. Last year there were 0.4 deaths and we must offer our condolences to the 40% of the one person that was deceased. There’s still no word on where the other 60% of him, her or xer is, but hopefully that 60% is doing well.
Sisson had formerly left her position in Placer County once it declared that there was no longer a COVID emergency because she claimed that the lack of a state of emergency “made it clear that I can no longer effectively serve in my role as Placer County Health Officer and Public Health Director.” If you can’t mask 2-year-olds, how are you supposed to do your job?
The San Francisco Department of Public Health is also calling for masks, not when passing the piles of human waste outside, but in indoor spaces. Conveniently enough, SF’s DPH ‘paused’ COVID hospitalization data in July “to assess data quality and completeness”.
Back in July, a total of 53 people were admitted to San Francisco hospitals who tested positive for COVID. If you’re going to argue for masking everyone, it’s understandable that you would want more “completeness” than less than two people a day coming to the hospital.
But in more media friendly news, the number of people testing positive for COVID jumped from 7.4% to 12.3% at the end of August. Those numbers however fail to mention the sample size.
The number of tests had dropped from 310 to 163. The question of how many people actually tested positive for COVID is left as an exercise for the reader, but the full total should be able to fit into one of those San Francisco micro-apartments marketed to starving tech workers.
Test positivity rates are one of the most common measures still being used to calculate COVID risks even as the number of people actually taking COVID tests dramatically declines.Far fewer people take the tests and those who do are more likely to be sick. Sample sizes this small are all but worthless, and yet continue to be used to calculate risks across entire counties.
How many people actually died in San Francisco in August? One.
San Francisco has a population of 827,526. That’s a COVID death rate of 0.0001208%.
There have been 428 drug overdose deaths in San Francisco so far this year. It’s projected to hit 706 by the end of the year.
In July, 2 people died of COVID and 51 died of overdoses. Over the course of the year, 23 people have died in San Francisco of COVID. That annual toll is less than half the overdose deaths in one month. (And that’s even if we assume that the numbers are correct and that these don’t represent elderly people in nursing homes or the homeless who may have died of other causes but tested positive for COVID as has happened all too often in the past.)
San Francisco doesn’t have a COVID epidemic, it does have a drug and crime epidemic.
But the same Democrats who think nothing of masking toddlers to fight 1 death a month are determined to keep drugs legal and plentiful on the streets no matter how many die of overdoses or shootings. And they’re also going to keep criminals out of jail and out roaming the streets even as bodies pile up in the morgues.
Jose Gomez Bustamante, who got drunk and allegedly stabbed a man to death at a station in August, killed as many people as COVID did. The local health authorities would save more lives if they insisted on locking up criminals (instead of freeing them) instead of trying to bring back masks for little kids.
But what about Los Angeles County, the home base of the Los Angeles Times, which decided to once again promote masking? The county of nearly 10 million had 5 COVID deaths. By which they mean 5 death certificates where COVID-19 was listed as “the underlying or contributing cause of death.”
To put that into context, 182 people were murdered in the city of Los Angeles this year alone.
The COVID wave is a manufactured crisis based on “wastewater testing” and a limited shift in “positivity” results from a small sample of COVID tests. There is no crisis of mass deaths. The real crisis is that the same health bureaucrats who were able to terrorize California under Gov. Gavin Newsom are trying to once again make another bid for relevance and importance.
California isn’t suffering from a COVID crisis: it’s suffering from a government crisis.
When one death and dozens of positive COVID tests in San Francisco lead to a call for universal indoor masking from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, while 428 drug overdose deaths lead to no action against drugs, that’s not science, it’s political science.
The only masks still being worn are those covering the faces of the activists playing doctor.
