[conspire] (forw) Re: (forw) COVID at the beginning of 2022

[Rick Moen]

Yes, we're very much still friends, and talk frequently.

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2022 13:56:28 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Ruben Safir <mrbrklyn at panix.com>
Subject: Re: (forw) [conspire] COVID at the beginning of 2022
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Ruben Safir (mrbrklyn at panix.com):

[contact tracing:]

> that has been one of my major beefs.  These bastards are lazyt and would
> rather just lock everyone up that get off their asses and actually trace
> infection and force localized quananteens as needed.
> 
> I took the Bloomberg sponsored traceing class and to my knowledge, there
> has been no jobs.

Thank you for trying.  I sent up an alarm about this catastrophic error
way back around February 2020.  The Bay Area counties put out big press
releases about a major staffing-up to do serious contact-tracing.  I had
a bad feeling about that, immediately, because there was an ominous
silence about where funding would come from.  The PR campaign urged
applicants to go to new application Web pages, so, to test my suspicion,
I did (e.g., for Santa Clara County’s site).  The application process
went through some reasonable preliminaries, but carefully concealed from
general public view, and also from job applicants until the end of the
process, that well, this was a “job” that you would be doing without any
compensation or benefits.  

In other words, the most important fact about the “major hiring effort”,
that there was no funding and no plans for any, was simply omitted and
concealed.  Behind the scenes, cash-strapped county health departments
were appealing to other county and city governments to please
temporarily reassign to them workers sent home during the lockdown, but
frankly admitting to them (as never was admitted to the public) that the
health departments were asking for this on a charity basis.

Later, when I saw people bitching that it was irrational for other
department stores to be ordered closed but (say) Target stores allowed
open because they included a grocery department, and that county health
departments should have been out there policing people away from the
non-food parts of the store, I’d reply “Do you really not understand
that the Dept. of Health has almost no budget and a laughably inadequate
level of staffing?”  Spoiler:  They didn’t.

[Crowds of New Year's Eve party-goers indoors in Palo Alto restaurants:]

> those idiots are living their lives.  Nobody gets any days back - let
> alone weeks or months or years.  TIME is not a renewable resource.

I am unconvinced that living requires throwing a pathogen-exchange
indoor party on New Year's Eve during the growth phase of a historically
fast surge.  (BTW, estimated R-eff for this county keeps climbing
steeply day by day, and is now well over 2.)

It’s telling that you’re back to throwing ideological posturing at me.
That never ends well.

[unsettled question of whether Omicron will produce strong and durable
disease-conferred immunity:]

> that probably doesn't matter.  What matters is that omnicron out
> competes more deadly variants and pushes them to extinction, which
> seems likely

Maybe yes, maybe no.   That’s not yet entirely clear.  On balance, I
hope this is correct, as we’ve discussed.

[ongoing meltdown of hospitals and urgent-care facilities:]

> and that is the fault of the healthcare system, not the public
> response to the virus.  Hospitals have not been prepared for their
> primary mission for more than 20 years as they keep closing them,
> centralizing them, and socializing the economics to the Government or
> to single private plan payers.  

We could have a long discussion about crony capitalism in the hospital
industry, where regulators fail to look after the public interest, in
part because they keep going through the revolving door in and out of
that industry — and that private-industry owners of most hospitals
deliberately keep them so tight on supplies and staffing that they
bounce, because that’s how to extract profit — but no such discussion
would help the present tactical situation, even if we were in charge,
which we are not.  

Also, irrespective of how thinly provisioned hospitals are, and the
dynamics that got them there, the "fault" of them being overwhelmed, if
it needs to be assigned at all (and the framing of "fault" is yours, not
mine), properly should be assigned to all the countries including ours
that utterly failed to take known-effective measures to drive down the
spread around the world and greatly reduce the opportuntty to mutate new
variants.

Instead, we've done this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVTz_XrsIwc


----- End forwarded message -----