Your family’s share of federal red tape last year was… ($16,016 )

By Jeremy Lott & Ryan Smith of CEI.

"Most people can see taxes on their pay stubs, but there’s another sort of tax that’s much less visible: the cost of government regulations. These costs don’t show up on receipts or annual statements. Instead, they’re built into the prices we pay for goods and services.

The costs also show up indirectly in things like lower returns on retirement accounts and more time spent on paperwork. Just how much more will be the subject of a future Ten Thousand Commandments Index update.

CEI’s estimate for the total cost of federal regulations in 2024 was $2.15 trillion. Spread across 134.6 million US households, that means families pay $16,016 annually in regulatory costs. That amounts to roughly 16 percent of the average household’s pre-tax income.

If you said to yourself, “You know, that looks like a huge hidden tax on American families,” then full marks, Mr. Bond…buyer.

This regulatory tax is second only to housing among major household expenses, behind only the costs of mortgages and rents. In some states, the cost of federal regulations likely outpaces even housing costs. It is higher than the median annual rent costs of 28 states and the median annual mortgage costs of Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia according to Business Insider.

Housing in some states aside, the regulatory burden costs more for households than what they pay annually for health care, transportation, or even food. While these costs aren’t as obvious as taxes, they hit your wallet just the same."

Long lockdowns a ‘failure of policy’, says WHO envoy on COVID

By Chip Le Grand of The Sydney Morning Herald. Excerpts:

"A leading figure in the international response to the pandemic has described repeated use of lockdowns during the first two years of the COVID crisis as a failure of narrative and policy.

Dr David Nabarro, the World Health Organisation’s special envoy on COVID-19, says lockdowns were an effective way for governments to buy time to prepare their health systems at the start of the pandemic, but should not have become a default response to outbreaks.

n an interview for Lockdown, a new book by this reporter that examines why Melbourne spent longer under stay-at-home orders than any other city in the world, Nabarro said a “middle path” was open for governments to suppress the spread of the virus through less-restrictive public health measures.

“We just couldn’t understand why so many countries were see-sawing between what was sometimes called freedom and lockdown,” he said. “That is not the way. You keep your number of cases down by having really good surveillance and detection and isolation.

“I just thought the narrative was wrong. Why on earth are people always going on about lockdown as though that is the best thing a government can do when, in my judgment, it was a failure of narrative and a failure of policy?

“There is a huge cost to this 100 per cent lockdown approach.”

During an expansive interview, Nabarro did not directly criticise the Andrews government or Australia’s pandemic response.

He said the socio-economic impacts of lockdown were more pronounced in developing countries and that, as an island nation, Australia was able to contemplate an approach not open to countries with porous borders."

"Nabarro compared Melbourne’s pandemic experience with that of Uganda in East Africa, where schools were shut for the best part of two years, along with nightclubs, bars and cinemas. He warned of the social fractures that protracted restrictions can cause.

“You might want to restrict movement a lot at the beginning because you are trying to reduce the spread of the thing, but the key thing is not to do it for too long,” he said.

“Where it goes wrong is where people can’t make sense of it, get angry and feel they are being pushed around. You can lose the trust of people very quickly.”"

"Nabarro, the chair of global health at the Imperial College’s Institute of Global Health Innovation in London, said the WHO never believed COVID-zero was feasible.

“Just as we didn’t like 100 per cent lockdown because of its destructive nature, we also didn’t like zero COVID. Our line was stick with the basic public health principles of alert, detect and respond, rather than go for zero tolerance.

“There is a middle path between zero COVID and letting the virus just do what it wants. That is, keeping it at bay through good quality public health services but, most importantly, with people and the state being on the same side.”"

How big government ruined the Sri Lankan economy

See A Ruling Family on the Run as Sri Lanka Plunges Into Economic Ruin: Once empowered by triumphant ethnic nationalism after a brutal civil war, the Rajapaksa dynasty has been undone by what its own allies call incompetence and denial Mujib Mashal and Skandha Gunasekara of The NY Times. Excerpt: 

"Over a period of decades, the small island nation of 22 million people had built a bloated state sector, robust social welfare programs that exceeded the country’s means, a large military and an elaborate series of postwar construction projects. As economic growth slowed, it kept borrowing to pay.

The economic stress increased as pandemic travel restrictions dried up tourism dollars. Then came a disastrous ban on chemical fertilizers, as the Rajapaksa government pushed organic farming at a time when climate change was already threatening harvests and food security.

As it became clearer that the government needed help from financial bodies like the International Monetary Fund, the Rajapaksas dragged their feet. Used to easy loans from allies like China, they were daunted by the strict expectations that come with such packages, officials and diplomats said."

The Delta Variant and Beyond: Learning to Live With Covid

Cases are dramatically up again, but simple protective measures can still control the disease if we deploy them flexibly

By Tom Frieden. Excerpts:

"I believe the good news far outweighs the bad. Our vaccines are stunningly effective and remarkably safe. The mRNA vaccines, in particular, are preventing severe illness and death, even from Delta."

"in places with high vaccination rates, including much of the U.S., the worst is over: There will be many breakthrough infections, but 80% of the most vulnerable Americans are fully vaccinated, which means that the death rate will be much lower than it once was. Although Covid will remain a deadly threat for the unvaccinated, for the vaccinated—unless more dangerous variants emerge—Delta will have a risk of death roughly similar to that of flu."

"Covid is likely here to stay. It will almost certainly become endemic, continuing to spread and to flare up at different times and places for many years."

 

Masks Are a Covid Distraction

The CDC should scrap its confusing guidance and make vaccination the only priority.

By William McGurn of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Ben Wakana of the White House Covid-19 Response Team called the Times out, saying “vaccinated people do not transmit the virus at the same rate as unvaccinated people and if you fail to include that context you’re doing it wrong.”"

"Ditto for stories such as the NBC Newsheadline “Breakthrough Covid cases: At least 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans have tested positive.” Only the subheadline notes that these cases “represent less than 0.08%” of vaccinated people. NBC cites a death count of 1,400—less than 0.001% of vaccinated people—and many of them tested positive before dying of causes other than Covid.

In short, even the Provincetown outbreak confirms that prioritizing vaccination is the right way to go. Only a handful of people were hospitalized, and there were no deaths. In other words, vaccines might not prevent you from getting the Delta variant, but it’s pretty good at keeping you alive if you do."

A few hours into the blackouts, The Public Utility Commission of Texas took the unusual step of abandoning the market-based pricing mechanism

See Texas Opts Not to Fix $16 Billion Power Overcharge: Utility commission says repricing power markets too difficult, despite recommendation that overcharges during storm be reversed by Russell Gold of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"The Public Utility Commission of Texas on Friday signaled it didn’t intend to reverse $16 billion in electric overcharges that an independent market monitor had flagged as stemming from the state’s weeklong blackouts."

"A few hours into the blackouts, the utility commission took the unusual step of abandoning the market-based pricing mechanism and ordering wholesale power prices to be at the $9,000 cap until grid-ordered blackouts ended.

The grid operator complied and kept prices at the cap price after it stopped ordering blackouts, but at that time local electric companies were still struggling to turn the lights back on and some continued to have widespread blackouts.

The extended four days of $9,000 prices—an exponential increase over the normal prices in Texas, which last year averaged $22 a megawatt hour—took a massive financial toll on some market participants.

Vistra said it sustained losses between $900 million and $1.3 billion. Many wind farm operators, which needed to purchase electricity because of hedge contracts, are in financial distress. A major electric cooperative has filed for bankruptcy protection."

"Sen. Nathan Johnson, a Democrat from Dallas, said he considered the agency’s decision a mistake. He said he would have supported a clawback to ease concern among power generators and retailers about regulatory intervention in setting market prices.

“That would have sent a stronger market signal,” he said."

New Study Confirms Lockdowns Don’t Reduce Covid Deaths

By Will Jones of Lockdown Sceptics.

"Studies which show social restrictions do not lead to lower Covid mortality and infection rates are numerous (see this collection of 31 from AIER, which is kept up to date).

We now have another paper to add to the collection. Published last week in Scientific Reports in Nature, it looks at whether the extent to which people stayed at home (measured using Google mobility data) is associated with Covid mortality in different countries. Doesn’t look like it, they conclude. Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:

Countries with over 100 deaths and with a Healthcare Access and Quality Index of at least 67 were included. Data were pre-processed and analysed using the difference between number of deaths per million between two regions and the difference between the percentage of staying at home. … After pre-processing the data, 87 regions around the world were included, yielding 3,741 pairwise comparisons for linear regression analysis. Only 63 (1.6%) comparisons were significant. With our results, we were not able to explain if COVID-19 mortality is reduced by staying at home in around 98% of the comparisons after epidemiological weeks 9 to 34.

The authors add:

We were not able to explain the variation of deaths per million in different regions in the world by social isolation, herein analysed as differences in staying at home, compared to baseline. In the restrictive and global comparisons, only 3% and 1.6% of the comparisons were significantly different, respectively.

They explain that this is in line with the findings of others, and criticise the model-based studies which come to different conclusions.

Our results are different from those published by Flaxman et al. The authors applied a very complex calculation that NPIs would prevent 3.1 million deaths across 11 European countries. The discrepant results can be explained by different approaches to the data. While Flaxman et al. assumed a constant reproduction number (R_t) to calculate the total number of deaths, which eventually did not occur, we calculated the difference between the actual number of deaths between two countries/regions. The projections published by Flaxman et al. have been disputed by other authors. Kuhbandner and Homburg described the circular logic that this study involved. Flaxman et al. estimated the R_t from daily deaths associated with SARS-CoV-2 using an a priori restriction that R_t may only change on those dates when interventions become effective. However, in the case of a finite population, the effective reproduction number falls automatically and necessarily over time since the number of infections would otherwise diverge. A recent preprint report from Chin et al. explored the two models proposed by Imperial College by expanding the scope to 14 European countries from the 11 countries studied in the original paper. They added a third model that considered banning public events as the only covariate. The authors concluded that the claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated since inferences drawn from effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification.

The same explanation for the discrepancy can be applied to other publications where mathematical models were created to predict outcomes. Most of these studies dealt with COVID-19 cases and not observed deaths. Despite its limitations, reported deaths are likely to be more reliable than new case data. Further explanations for different results in the literature, besides methodological aspects, could be justified by the complexity of the virus dynamic, by its interaction with the environment, or they may be related to a seasonal pattern that was, by coincidence, established at the same time when infection rates started to decrease due to seasonal dynamics. It is unwise to try to explain a complex and multifactorial condition, with the inherent constant changes, using a single variable. An initial approach would employ a linear regression to verify the influence of one factor over an outcome. Herein we were not able to identify this association. Our study was not designed to explain why the stay-at-home measures do not contain the spread of the virus SARS-CoV-2. However, possible explanations that need further analysis may involve genetic factors, the increment of viral load, and transmission in households and in close quarters where ventilation is reduced.

No doubt it is counterintuitive that people staying at home more does not significantly reduce transmission of an infectious disease. This is one reason the sceptical case can be hard to make and sound to lockdowners like sophistry. They may assume there must be some hidden variable we haven’t accounted for, or that we are just exploiting the notoriously slippery nature of statistics. Indeed, for many sceptics (myself included) we originally expected that lockdowns would “work” in terms of suppressing the spread, but just thought they were pointless in that they delayed the inevitable and thus were harmful and unethical. The idea that lockdowns didn’t even manage to achieve the one thing they were supposed to came as a surprise to many of us, and the data had to convince us of something that at first seemed unlikely.

Why does lockdown not significantly suppress the virus? One suggestion is that people are already voluntarily social distancing sufficiently, so Government diktats don’t add anything. But the present study looks at whether people are actually moving around less, not just whether Government tells them to, and finds no relationship with Covid deaths. So that seems to rule that one out.

One reason will be that much of the spread, particularly which leads to serious disease and death, occurs in hospitals and care homes. Forty per cent of Covid deaths in England and Wales in spring were care home residents, while Public Health Scotland found that between half and two thirds of serious infections were picked up in hospital. PHS also found that shielding – essentially an extreme version of lockdown – was ineffective, largely because of household transmission. But that prompts the question of where, under lockdown and social distancing, other household members are picking it up from?

In terms of community transmission, even during a stringent lockdown such as in the UK this winter, around half the workforce are travelling to work, while only around a third work exclusively from home. Add to that that many people still use supermarkets and other shops, and many children still attend school (even where the schools are only open for key workers’ children), and that’s a lot of social interaction. It appears that this level of interaction is enough to allow the virus to reach about the same number of people, particularly among those who are susceptible to serious illness, regardless of what other interaction is avoided.

Masks, of course, have little or no effect on transmission, mainly because they do not (and cannot, since people must breathe) prevent virus-carrying-aerosols from filling the air in a poorly ventilated space such as most rooms we spend any amount of time in (we are after all trying to keep them warm). Breathing such air is the main mode of transmission.

It might be thought that it is asymptomatic carriers who are spreading it unawares, since that is the message the Government has been pumping out. However, contrary to early reports from China, recent studies suggest that, as with other viruses, asymptomatic carriers are barely infectious and account for just 0.7% of transmission. This means community transmission must be being driven by symptomatic people who are not currently self-isolating – perhaps because they cannot, or cannot afford to, or because they think it is just a mild cold.

Whatever the reason, the data is consistent and clear. Lockdowns (including voluntarily staying at home) are not associated with reducing Covid mortality or infection rates. This new study is just one more piece of research evidence testifying to that fact.

Stop Press: Yesterday an “Editor’s Note” appeared on the paper, suggesting some people are not happy with it.

Readers are alerted that the conclusions of this article are subject to criticisms that are being considered by the Editors. A further editorial response will follow once all parties have been given an opportunity to respond in full.

That’ll be an interesting one to watch out for."

The answer to the Texas grid problem is more free markets, not less

The outages are indication of an imperfect system, so let’s fix the market

By Bruce Bullock and Robert Lawson. 

"The lights are back on and the heat restored in Texas. Pundits, politicians, the media and many so-called experts are playing the blame game in everything from Tweets to tense statements before legislative hearings.

Unfortunately, very few of the accounts paint an accurate picture of the role free markets have played in meeting Texas’ growing need for affordable power that its citizens and businesses thrive on while emitting some of the lowest emissions in the country.

The power disruptions are evidence of an imperfect system. We both sat in the cold and dark for several days along with the rest of our fellow Texas residents, and we have the plumbers’ bills to remind us of the personal cost of losing power. But market-based incentives can address the problems more efficiently and rapidly than many of the top-down, regulatory prescriptions we see being proposed.

Texas began a deliberate and measured approach to electric power reform in 1995 culminating in what we call “deregulation” of wholesale and retail power markets in 2007, with transmission and distribution remaining a regulated industry overseen by the state’s Public Utility Commission. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas was created not as a regulatory agency but rather as a planning and operations agency much like an air traffic control system. Today, ERCOT is responsible for directing 90% of the state’s electrical load.

Contrary to national media reports, data from the state’s Public Utility Commission and the Association of Electric Companies in Texas clearly shows that ratepayers in Texas enjoy lower rates than prior to deregulation. When adjusted for inflation, the lowest fixed-price contracts available this past fall were approximately 50% less than December 2001, prior to the deregulation. Formal academic studies have confirmed this fact.
 
Texas’ population has doubled since 1980 from roughly 14 million to 28 million, along with the migration of a significant number of businesses and the expansion of the state’s manufacturing base. These dynamics have resulted in significant increases in the state’s electric load. A regulated system requires endless arguments with state bureaucrats over capacity needs and rates, and inevitably involves long delays that our fast-growing state cannot afford.

Market-based incentives have and will continue to address many of the problems that surfaced. The current system relies on rising prices during peak periods to encourage power providers to build and maintain enough capacity. Texas’ market compensates generators for generating electricity only, not for investing in capacity to generate.

The Texas Legislature and Public Utility Commission should put in place capacity markets, or so-called forward markets, to provide incentives and long-term price signals to generators to stimulate investment in generation capacity. These forward markets operate much like existing current-day and day-ahead markets but have a three-year horizon. Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states served by the PJM system operator have a capacity market and were among the very few regions that had excess capacity during this storm.

Policymakers should also make use of the state’s vast smart meter system. Dynamic pricing works most of the time on the supply side, but it can also work on the demand side. Blackouts are a sledgehammer tool to reduce demand. Dynamic pricing combined with the state’s smart meter system could be more of a surgeon’s knife.

For example, ERCOT should be given the authority to institute retail price surcharges during emergencies announcing these price changes to customers via email and text messages. This would not be a radical price, but a level that would encourage conservation. Rather than relying on the goodwill of people to reduce power use, consumers would be incentivized to reduce consumption, say by running the heat but not doing laundry or using the oven.

Even modest 10% to 20% reductions in usage would have prevented much of the hardships we all endured during the storm. Further, during peak periods, consumers should be allowed to sell their conserved capacity back to the grid. In the hot summer months, a family may decide to power down and go see a ball game or spend a day at an amusement park and could be paid for not consuming power.

Electricity is central to modern life and the reliability and resiliency of the grid is not optional, but neither is affordable power for Texas’ growing number of consumer and business customers. Market-based mechanisms have historically proven to be better allocators of resources than regulators. We believe it’s important for Texas to maintain, and expand, its reliance on markets so we don’t freeze in the dark again.

Bruce Bullock is director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business.

Robert Lawson is an economics professor and director of the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at SMU’s Cox School of Business."

More Green Blackouts Ahead

Biden’s regulators are ignoring the electrical grid’s vulnerability

WSJ editorial. Excerpt:

"You’d think the Texas blackouts would trigger some soul-searching about the vulnerability of America’s electrical grid. Not in today’s hothouse of climate politics. The Biden Administration is already moving to stop an examination of grid vulnerability to promote unreliable renewable energy sources.

Regulators have been warning for years that the grid is becoming shakier as cheap natural gas and heavily subsidized renewables replace steady coal and nuclear baseload power. “The nation’s power grid will be stressed in ways never before experienced” due to “an unprecedented resource-mix change,” the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) warned in 2011.

It added: “Environmental regulations are shown to be the number one risk to reliability over the next one to five years.” But the Obama Federal Energy Regulatory Commission(FERC) refused to consider how climate policies would affect reliability. Since 2011 about 90 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity have shut down, replaced by some 120 GW of wind and solar and 60 GW of gas power capacity.

But renewables don’t generate power around-the-clock as gas, nuclear and coal do. Gas plants depend on just-in-time fuel deliveries, which aren’t reliable in extreme weather. Government-made pipeline bottlenecks constrain deliveries in the Northeast. Liberals also say Texas could have better weathered the Arctic blast if its grid didn’t rely almost entirely on in-state power.

But the Southwest Power Pool, north of Texas, and the Midwest power grid—both of which rely heavily on wind backed by gas—also experienced power outages last week due to surging demand, declining wind production and gas shortages. California relies on gas and imports to back up its solar power. But last summer California couldn’t get enough power from its neighbors amid a heat wave that strained the entire Western grid. Hydropower from the Northwest and coal from Utah couldn’t stop blackouts.

The wind lobby says Texas should have required thermal (nuclear, gas, coal) plants to be weatherized to withstand single-digit temperatures. Perhaps, but wind still performed the worst during the blackout, generating power at 12% of its capacity compared to 76% for nuclear, 39% for coal, and 38% for gas, according to a data analysis by the Center of the American Experiment.

The ice-cold reality is that grid regulators across the U.S. are struggling to keep the power on during extreme weather. They have been able to avoid more blackouts by ordering energy conservation. But Texas shows that conservation isn’t enough, as government mandates make America more reliant on electric power for everything from heating to cars.

Most Texans use electricity for heating. Many pipeline gas compressors are electrified due to federal emissions rules so the blackouts limited gas deliveries to power plants. They also shut down water pumps and treatment centers.

Yet progressives want to make Americans even more dependent on the grid by banning gas hookups in homes and mandating electric cars. This is a recipe for blackouts nationwide as coal and nuclear plants retire because they can’t compete against subsidized renewables. New England’s grid operator in 2018 predicted outages in the winter of 2024-2025 in most cases it analyzed."

The Texas Public Utility Commission stopped relying on the deregulated market

See Amid Blackouts, Texas Scrapped Its Power Market and Raised Prices. It Didn’t Work: The Texas Public Utility Commission hoped its move would spur generation. Retail providers say all it did was generate billions in added bills. by Russell Gold and Katherine Blunt of The WSJ. Excerpt:

"Hours into widespread blackouts in Texas last week, the state’s power regulator took an unusual step: It stopped relying on the deregulated market to set electricity prices and did so itself.

The Texas Public Utility Commission said it raised prices to a market cap of $9,000 per megawatt hour during a six-minute emergency meeting Feb. 15, up from recent prices as low as $1,200 a megawatt hour, because the computer that was supposed to help match supply and demand on the power grid wasn’t working properly, and it needed to intervene to relieve a growing crisis.

But the higher prices didn’t result in additional power production, because many generators were dealing with frozen equipment or fuel shortages, and were unable to deliver more megawatts, no matter the price. Some electric-market participants now say the commission’s action turned an energy crisis into a financial catastrophe for many electricity buyers, who were left paying billions of dollars more for the same limited supply of electricity as before."

Asymptomatic Spread Revisited

By Jeffrey A. Tucker.

"The phrase “fog of war” is attributed to Carl von Clausewitz. It has come to refer to the confusion and uncertainty felt by everyone in the midst of conflict. It is often unclear who is making decisions and why, and what the relationships are between the strategies and the goals. Even the rationale can become elusive as frustration and disorientation displace clarity and rationality. 

In 2020, we’ve experienced the fog of disease mitigation.

The initial round of lockdowns was not about suppressing the virus but slowing it for one reason: to preserve hospital capacity. Whether and to what extent the “curve” was actually flattened will probably be debated for years but back then there was no question of extinguishing the virus. The volume of the curves, tall and quick or short and long, was the same either way. People were going to get the bug until the bug burns out (herd immunity).

Gradually, and sometimes almost imperceptibly, the rationale for the lockdowns changed. Curve flattening became an end in itself, apart from hospital capacity. Perhaps this was because the hospital crowding issue was extremely localized in two New York boroughs while hospitals around the country emptied out for patients who didn’t show up: 350 hospitals furloughed workers. 

That failure was embarrassing enough, given the overwhelming costs. Schools closed, commercial rights were vanquished, shelter-in-place orders from wartime were imposed, travel nearly stopped, all large events were cancelled, and so on. Clearly there needed to be a good, solid, science-based reason for why the politicians and their advisers had, on their own, decided to take away much of what we once regarded as human rights. 

Talk about this began in March but faded. Sometime in summer, the idea of asymptomatic spread started to trend, bit by bit. It finally went to an explosion of interest in the first week of June. It trailed off again until very recently. 

Asymptomatic spread was the answer given to the great question: I’m not sick so why should I have to be locked down? Why are we quarantining the healthy? And what possibly could it mean, in any case, to be sick without symptoms? Why are half the PCR-positive tests assigned to people who otherwise seem to be perfectly fine? 

All these valid questions came to be answered by this one phrase: asymptomatic spread. You might not feel sick. You might not ever have symptoms from SARS-CoV-2. Still, you could be an even worse super spreader without knowing it, infecting people all around you who will carry it to people who will die from the disease. This was also the moment when, subtly and imperceptibly, we were being asked to think of our fellow citizens not as human beings with dignity and rights but pathogen-carrying disease vectors. We had to be masked, all of us, because we are secretly filthy and unclean: we cannot be allowed to breath near others, so even with a mask we must stay 6 feet away. 

(As I type these words, I feel sure that if anyone reads them in ten years, the reader will assume I’m writing fiction or engaged in wild hyperbole. To the future reader: this is all true.) 

On June 7, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, told a press conference that from the known research, asymptomatic spread was “very rare.” “From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual.” She added for emphasis: “It’s very rare.”

There was an understandable explosion of fury on all sides. People against lockdowns were screaming all over Twitter that if this is true, the rationale for the lockdowns mostly disappears. We can go back to our normal lives. We can open up everything again! 

I wrote at the time:

What this suggests, of course, is that there is nothing mysteriously magical or insidious about this new virus. It behaves like the viruses that scientists have been studying for one hundred years. What we do with a normal virus is be careful around others when we have symptoms. We don’t cough and sneeze on people and generally stay home if we are sick. That’s how it’s always been. You don’t need lockdown to achieve that; you just proceed with life as normal, treating the sick and otherwise not disrupting life. 

If that is the case with this one, everything we’ve done over the months – the mask wearing, the grasshopper dance not to be next to people, the canceling of everything, the wild paranoia and premodern confusions – has been a calamitous and destructive waste of time, energy, and money. 

On the other side, there was the predictably pro-lockdown mainstream media which decried her heresy. The cry was so loud that the WHO immediately started walking back the claim, mostly with hints and suggestions that did say untrue things but did not repudiate the initial claim either: “There is much to be answered on this. There is much that is unknown. It’s clear that both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals are part of the transmission cycle. The question is what is the relative contribution of each group to the overall number of cases.”

Following that, the question seemed to fade. We went back to assuming that potentially everyone had a disease, enabling fellow citizens to become virtuous enforcers of mask wearing, staying home, and separating, screaming and yelling at others for failing to comply. The science on the question was unsettled, we were told, so let us go back to wrecking life as we once knew it. 

The fog of disease mitigation, indeed. But as with most of the “science” throughout this ordeal, it eventually came to be revealed that good sense and rationality would prevail over implausible claims and predictions that led to experiments in social control without any precedent. 

In this case, the carrier of rationality is a gigantic study conducted in Wuhan, China, of 10 million people. The article appears in Nature, published November 20, 2020. 

The conclusion is not that asymptomatic spread is rare or that the science is uncertain. The study revealed something that hardly ever happens in these kinds of studies. There was not one documented case. Forget rare. Forget even Fauci’s previous suggestion that asymptomatic transmission exists but not does drive the spread. Replace all that with: never. At least not in this study for 10,000,000.

Stringent COVID-19 control measures were imposed in Wuhan between January 23 and April 8, 2020. Estimates of the prevalence of infection following the release of restrictions could inform post-lockdown pandemic management. Here, we describe a city-wide SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening programme between May 14 and June 1, 2020 in Wuhan. All city residents aged six years or older were eligible and 9,899,828 (92.9%) participated. No new symptomatic cases and 300 asymptomatic cases (detection rate 0.303/10,000, 95% CI 0.270–0.339/10,000) were identified. There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases. 107 of 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19 patients tested positive again (re-positive rate 0.31%, 95% CI 0.423–0.574%). The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan was therefore very low five to eight weeks after the end of lockdown.

One might suppose that this would be huge news. It would allow us to open up everything immediately. With the whole basis for post-curve-flattening lockdowns crumbled, we could go back to living a normal life. The fear could evaporate. We could take comfort in our normal intuition that healthy people can get out and about with no risk to others. We could take off our masks. We could go to movies and sports events. 

From what I can tell, there was only one news story that was posted about this. It was on Russia Today. I’ve not been able to find another one. People not following the right accounts on Twitter wouldn’t even know about it at all. 

We keep hearing about how we should follow the science. The claim is tired by now. We know what’s really happening. The lockdown lobby ignores whatever contradicts their narrative, preferring unverified anecdotes over an actual scientific study of 10 million residents in what was the world’s first major hotspot for the disease we are trying to manage. You would expect this study to be massive international news. So far as I can tell, it is being ignored. 

With solid evidence that asymptomatic spread is nonsense, we have to ask: who is making decisions and why? Again, this brings me back to the metaphor of fog. We are all experiencing confusion and uncertainty over the precise relationship between the strategies and the goals of panoply of regulations and stringencies all around us. Even the rationale has become elusive – even refuted – as frustration and disorientation have displaced what we vaguely recall as clarity and rationality of daily life."

 

 

Stanford doctor: 5 reasons to stop panic, end total isolation

By WND Staff.

"Officials ignoring empirical evidence, fundamental principles of biology

Government authorities, advisers and analysts who are calling for a continuation of the near-total lockdown of the economy are ignoring five key facts, contends a former top health official at the Stanford Medical Center.

Dr. Scott W. Atlas, now a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, argued in a column for The Hill that Americans "are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts."

"Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function," wrote Atlas, the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.

The first fact, Atlas said is that the "overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19."

He pointed to a recent Stanford University antibody study that estimates the fatality rate if infected with the coronavirus is likely 0.1% to 0.2%.

The World Health Organization estimate of 3.4% that prompted the isolation policies worldwide was 20 to 30 times higher.

The rate for people 18 to 45 years old in New York City, which accounts for one-third of all U.S. deaths, is 0.01%, or 11 per 100,000 in the population. For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000.

Fact No. 2: "Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding."

In New York City, which has more than 34,600 hospitalizations, the rate of hospitializations from the virus for those under 18 years of age is 0.01%. Even for people ages 65 to 74, only 1.7% were hospitalized, Atlas argued.

Fact 3: "Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem."

Atlas noted that decades of medical science shows that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response, controlling the spread in the population by "herd immunity."

"Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunization in other viral diseases — to assist with population immunity," he said.

"In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected," he said. "It is so mild that half of infected people are asymptomatic, shown in early data from the Diamond Princess ship, and then in Iceland and Italy."

The asymptomatic population has been "falsely portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation," he said.

"In fact, infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity," Atlas wrote. "By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat.

"Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing," he argued.

Fact 4: "People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections."

Atlas noted that states and many hospitals abruptly stopped "nonessential" procedures and surgery.

"That prevented diagnoses of life-threatening diseases, like cancer screening, biopsies of tumors now undiscovered and potentially deadly brain aneurysms," he said.

Fact 5: "We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures."

"The overwhelming evidence all over the world consistently shows that a clearly defined group — older people and others with underlying conditions — is more likely to have a serious illness requiring hospitalization and more likely to die from COVID-19," he wrote.

Therefore, the appropriate policy, "based on fundamental biology and the evidence already in hand," is "a more focused strategy."

That would be to "protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions."

"This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation," he said.

"Let’s stop underemphasizing empirical evidence while instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter.""

New York’s Misdirected War on Ride-Sharing Will Only Hurt Consumers

By Andrea O'Sullivan. Excerpt:

"The claim that these policies will meaningfully reduce congestion is similarly dubious. To vet this contention, we can look to a report commissioned by the mayor’s office in 2016. The study shows that city congestion started to creep up in 2010, before the advent of ride-sharing, and continued to climb until 2015. There is no significant uptick in congestion after ride-sharing became more pronounced in the last decade. Rather, increased pedestrian traffic and tourism—arguably good “problems” to have—are the real culprit.

Will limiting ride-sharing significantly improve the congestion picture? It is doubtful. Instead, policies that improve the affordability and accessibility of substitute transportation options, like public transit, may do more good.

There is another reason that the New York City Council might seek to crack down on ride-sharing companies, and it has little to do with congestion. Money raised through the sale of taxi licenses constitutes a significant bulk of the revenues generated by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission each year. Once a hot commodity topping $1 million in value, the market price of a medallion has fallen beneath $200,000 since ride-sharing offered an alternative, and the city has halted plans to offer more medallions in response. So there is an element of self-interest on the part of the city as well.

There are better ways to balance the competing interests in New York City. As Mercatus scholar Veronique de Rugy outlined in her recent policy briefing, public entities can reduce congestion by creating a level playing field of user fees. Indeed, Uber itself has come out in support of road pricing as a solution to congestion.

While the cap on ride-sharing is more likely to punish select companies than reduce traffic, user fees and privatization can leverage market forces to lower congestion without discouraging innovation. This was the approach taken in São Paulo, Brazil. The city initially attempted to clamp down on ride-sharing in a harsh way like New York before they realized that a lighter-touch road use fee would alleviate concerns about congestion and revenue while leaving room for innovation. The results are promising, and New York should consider a similar approach.

Protecting all drivers, ensuring fairness, and reducing congestion are worthy goals. But a cap on innovative services will not achieve them. New Yorkers deserve the best transportation options available; they will only have them with full access to ride-sharing."

How Greece’s archaeological authority slows development

See In Greece, the Authority Investors Fear Most: Its Archaeologists by Nektaria Stamouli of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Greece’s archaeology authority is among the most feared bureaucracies in a country notorious for red tape, capable of tying up investment plans for years on the mere suspicion that antiquities might lie beneath a proposed development.

As Greece seeks to emerge from years of depression, the need to protect the country’s priceless antique heritage is colliding with its desperate need for investment. Compounding the problem, the archaeology authority is trying to pursue its mission with a budget and staff sharply reduced under austerity, leading to long delays.

In Greece, highways, sewers and other public projects are frequently postponed, redesigned or pushed way over budget by the cost of dealing with buried artifacts. New residential buildings often lack underground garages because developers fear uncovering ancient ruins that can halt the project for years.

The subway in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, still isn’t finished after three decades of work, in part because of the discovery of an ancient town that some archaeologists compare to Pompeii in Italy. The excavations brought to light pre-Byzantine buildings, roads and hundreds of thousands of artifacts. As a result, one station had to be redesigned and part of the line remains unfinished."

Hellinikon represents a large piece of a multibillion-euro privatization program Athens has promised its creditors it will complete. The plans call for hotels, museums, theme parks and research facilities, making it one of Europe’s biggest development projects.

The archaeological authority delayed the project’s start for more than a year, even though archaeologists hadn’t expressed reservations before the site was used for sports facilities during the 2004 Olympics. An ancient cemetery and an aqueduct had been found and bracketed out of the 1500-acre area, but the authority delayed construction on the prospect that more findings could be there.

“There is no balance,” said Aristotelis Panteliadis, managing director of a supermarket chain that underwent five years of archaeological reviews over its request to expand a single store in the Peloponnese. “Keeping every ancient object in the spot it was found, even if it’s a small pile of stones from 500 years ago, and blocking investment because of lack of funding for excavations shows an authority with the sole purpose of saying ‘Do not touch anything.’”