Corona-zona

  The recent Republican primary nominated people like Qrazy Qari Lake for governor and goat roper Mark Finchem for Secretary of State. This makes it tempting to conclude that they have drunk the Kool Aid and gone all-in to nominate the most extreme MAGA crazies they could find. But there are at least some exceptions. Ron Watkins (another goat roper) came in last in the District 2 primary.  They also rejected   Shiry Sapir (link may be paywalled) as their candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction. The latest results I can find show Tom Horne leading her by 9%. Sapir is a Scottsdale real estate broker/investor who became a "parent activist" after she became enraged at school closures and mask mandates during the pandemic. Besides wanting to expose kids to more disease, her ambition was also to prohibit a list of topics like slavery and LGBTQ rights from being taught in schools.  I'm unable to find Horne on-record about pandemic measures. But he  s...

  Image by  cytis   from   Pixabay Last week most people were focused on hearings about the former president's (FP's) corruption and malfeasance with respect to a plot to overturn then 2020 election (until the Supremes cancelled a constitutional right on Friday). But there was another hearing going on. On Thursday the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis held a hearing on the FP's corruption and malfeasance in the pandemic domain. It featured Dr. Deborah Birx, his lead on the pandemic response. I blogged about Dr. Birx earlier this year on the anniversary of the FP's inject-them-with-disinfectants  comment. I noted how she was soldiering when she failed to call-out his crazy ideas and suggested this is a good reason not to have ex-military people in positions like hers.  That notwithstanding, she was very qualified for her job. She coordinated responses to other epidemics, including AIDS, Ebola, and Avian Flu. The hearing made it clear she k...

Yesterday's New York Times had a  story about people circumventing U.S. restrictions on testing for people traveling home from abroad. They are exploiting a loophole in the laws that requires tests for people entering the country by air but not by land.  So people who go abroad and test positive change their flights to arrive in Canada or Mexico then drive across the border. Because they have, y'know, shit to do ! One woman at least gave some consideration to her state of health and whether she might be infectious, but ultimately said she didn't follow the rules because she thought they were dumb: I had zero symptoms, no fever, nothing. I felt fine and when you’re stateside, the C.D.C. says you can end isolation five days after testing positive, so the same rules should apply when I’m traveling. It makes no sense that I can go to a wedding five days after a positive test in Miami, but if I catch the virus when I’m on vacation I can’t fly home. That should be illegal. She ...

  A couple weeks ago, I blogged about some pro-pandemic laws passed by the legislature and signed by the governor. They were "do overs" of the legislature's failed attempt to attach similar measures banning mask and vaccine mandates to a budget bill last year. Last Friday (classic timing to limit news coverage) the governor signed another bill tying the hands of his successors (but not himself!) with respect to pandemic emergencies. This one would limit the duration of an emergency to 120 days unless extended by the legislature. That doesn't sound so bad, I suppose. They could have passed a law—which Ducey would probably have also rubber-stamped—prohibiting future governors from declaring any public health emergencies.  But you've got to wonder what these politicians are thinking by passing this and the previous measures. They amount to constraints on what the government can do to combat a disease outbreak.  These measures are reactions to the current emergency...

Arizona is on course to pass two laws to make pandemics spread more efficiently (HT @willhumble_az on Twitter). They appear to be do-overs to compensate for the legislature's fail   at attaching similar measures to a budget bill last year. One bans mask requirements in schools.  H.B. 2616   Prohibits the state or a political subdivision, governmental entity, school district or charter school from requiring a person under 18 years of age to wear a mask or face covering without the express consent of the person's parent or guardian.   And that's it. It doesn't matter what the circumstances are. Some virus could come along that spreads like measles and kills three-quarters of the people it infects. Schools would be powerless to prevent its spread. What breathtaking stupidity. The other, H.B. 2498   Prohibits the state or any political subdivision that receives or uses tax revenues (governmental entity) from requiring an Arizona resident to receive a vaccinatio...

  Just when you think people can't get any crazier, there's this. Mask-hole parents are bombarding schools with fake notices of claim, threatening to file them against their surety bonds if the schools don't do what they want. This includes ending masking policies and various other things. They're being egged-on by a website and Telegram group called "Bonds for the Win." The website is run by this fruitcake woman in Scottsdale named Miki Klann who thinks the Earth is flat and that AIDS is a hoax. Here is an example of one of their documents served in Michigan. It lists 15 violations of state, federal, and international law—including the Nuremberg code, naturally—that the school has supposedly committed. All legal experts agree that these claims are 100% bullshit. This type of bond fraud   is a form of paper terrorism and was innovated by the sovereign citizens movement . They flooded courts with invalid pseudo-legal documents claiming they are not subject t...

  Almost a year ago I blogged about the governors failing a marshmallow test  by rushing to end pandemic restrictions.  It was a reference to a famous study  done Stanford about self-control in kids. Basically it looked at kids' ability to forego a small immediate reward for a double reward after a delay. For context, at that time we were coming off a third wave of the virus (graph via Google/NYT): For the most part it was the usual-suspect COVIDiot governors in places like Texas, Mississippi, and Arizona who took this as a green light to end all pandemic restrictions. But there were other liberal states like Massachusetts who did the same (maybe other places too). I compared this to failing the marshmallow test because public health officials were saying it was too soon . As you probably remember and can see from the graph, they were right. Later that year we encountered a new Delta wave, followed by an Omicron wave. Now history is repeating itself. Republicans are ...

A recent study has concluded that lockdowns don't work. It is being bandied-about by conservative media as proof that other pandemic mitigation measures like masks don't work either. The study  is a meta-analysis, which statistically combines the results of other, smaller studies to gain  power to detect differences. It was done by some some economists—not epidemiologists.  It was published in a journal that is not peer-reviewed and was founded by a coauthor of the paper. That guy also happens to be a fellow at the arch-conservative Cato Institute. Talk about motivated reasoning. Public health experts criticized the study , saying it used an squishy definition of lockdowns. It also did not properly account for complex disease processes such as the wide variation in time it takes for infected people to die. Despite this, Rand Paul wasted no time taking the study at face value, claiming that lockdowns do more harm than good. He also said that masks don't work. Wait...wasn...

  Here are some updates on previous Corona-zona posts. COVID Dick is Real In July of last year, I blogged about a reason males should be afraid of COVID-19: Erectile dysfunction. At that time the reports were anecdotal. Not anymore. This report from Gizmodo covers all the latest research, and the short story is that it's real. Not only can in infection impair one's ability to get it up even after recovery, it can also shrink your member. Yikes! Also there have been reports of sexual dysfunction in women. Disappointing Arizona Booster Uptake That update makes it even more puzzling that booster shot update in Arizona is so low.  Back in December, I reckoned that only about 11% of Arizona residents had gotten their booster shot (depending on what you used as the divisor). Now AzDHS is reporting actual numbers and they are not much better. Only 37% of eligible people have gotten their third jab. Why would you get two shots then skip the third?! Urine Drinker Lives by His Own R...

I've been doing this blog for just about a year now. The first regular post was January 6, 2021. I'll reflect on that in a few days. Meanwhile, what kind of a media outlet would this be if I didn't do a year-in-review post? Looking back over the year's posts, it's amazing how much has been going on, and how much there potentially is to review. I can't spend all day on a detailed summary.  So I will try to focus on a bird's eye view. Vaccines & Anti-Vaxxers Vaccines have to be the biggest topic on this blog over the past year. Vaccines were very hard to get this time last year. A lot of people wanted them and the distribution was just getting started.  People had to navigate really crappy systems, like one in Arizona , to make reservations. There were " vaccine tourists " who would travel from other states and even countries in an effort to get jabbed.   Then, around March last year, those who wanted the shots had largely gotten them, and incre...

 A couple quick updates on two recent Corona-zona posts. Brynovich Has to Start Over About six weeks ago I blogged about how AZ Attorney General was pandering to the MAGA crowd by filing suit against upcoming vaccine rules by the Biden administration. This week a federal district court judge  denied  his request for an injunction.  Basically the court ruled that he jumped the gun by filing the suit before the actual rules were formulated. Now if he wants to persevere he will have to start over and and include those in a new complaint. This guy is not a very good lawyer. Also the link above describes the rules as a vaccine mandate. But damn it, it's not a vaccine mandate. It's a rule that you must either get vaxxed or be tested regularly (if you work for a company with over 100 employees). That's a choice, not a mandate. The press should stop framing this in a way that is both misleading and helpful to the COVIDiots. Rodgers Sort of Tries Apology, Gets Slapped on F...

UCLA health policy researcher and physician  Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis has appointed a new surgeon general , Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo. He came from California where he was a UCLA health policy researcher and physician. Dr. Lapado is right there with his boss in terms of questioning the effectiveness of vaccines and the value of mandates and other mitigation measures. He complained that people are "being forced to, you know, to sort of put something in their bodies that we don't know all there is to know about yet, no matter what people on TV tell you."  That's a variation of the "I need more time to see if it's safe" excuse routinely used by anti-vaxxers. Can you blame them for having doubts? The vaccines have only been proven safe and effective 6.82 billion times  so far. He also questions whether the vaccines work. "So sure they reduce the likelihood of transmission, and even that is sort of questionable depending on how far out y...

  You may recall that this summer Arizona Governor Doug Ducey tried to take federal money intended for COVID-19 relief and spend it on tax cuts for the wealthy. Because of course he did. That's the way he rolls. The feds said no . The Arizona Attorney General sued, because ensuring that money is spent for the purpose intended by Congress is somehow unconstitutional. Naturally,  he lost .   A responsible leader would take that as a sign and spend money within guidelines. But not Ducey!  He hatched a new plan to misspend relief money. He would distribute it to schools only if they complied with his public illness orders  by not requiring students to wear masks. There was a separate plan to give families $7000 each to move their kids from schools that require masks to ones that don't. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what public health considerations—not to mention common sense—say he should have done. Now the Treasury Department has been forced to ...

  This literally just in: A Superior Court judge has ruled in favor of plaintiffs in their lawsuit to void elements of budget reconciliation bills passed this summer that banned virus mitigation measures by Arizona schools. This is a ruling that should surprise no one. Plaintiffs argued that the restrictions violate the Arizona constitution two ways. First, bills must be about one thing. The legislation in question, containing both budget and public illness measures, are about more than one thing.  Second, bills must clearly describe their purpose in the title. Legislation labeled "budget reconciliation" don't make clear that it also contains public illness measures. Arizona Public Health Association Director Will Humble thinks Attorney General Mark Byrnovich will surely appeal to the Supreme Court. And he probably will, to further burnish is credentials as a public servant who is stupid about the pandemic. But I predict he will get nowhere on appeal because the facts ...

  This blog has featured lots of coverage  of Florida and its reckless pandemic behaviors and policies. I never thought any state could challenge their position as the Top COVIDiot State. But Idaho is making a serious run at it.   According to data from the last seven days compiled by the NY Times, Idaho ranks 9th worst among states with 68 cases per 100K, a 19% increase over the previous week.  It ranks 12th worst with 37 hospitalizations per 100K, a 29% increase over the previous week.  And it ranks fourth worst with 1.22 deaths per 100K (no change info given).  Here is a comparison table: Florida is still beating Idaho on hospitalizations and deaths. But don't let that get you down, Idaho! Florida's case and hospitalization trends are downward whereas yours are upward. You can still take the lead! I am gratified to see that Arizona is doing so well in this comparison. Our governor is fighting like hell be as pro-disease as his counterparts in ...

  The Lincoln Project has a new spot out "honoring" COVIDiot AZ Governor Doug Ducey for his Orwellian plan to funnel COVID-19 relief funding to schools that are not relieving COVID-19.

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is busy tying up loose ends in his public illness campaign. This time, he has issued an executive order threatening city officials with arrest and prosecution if they require vaccines for their workers.   Because of course he has. We mustn't force people to take a vaccine that has been proven safe and effective over 357 million times in the U.S., including 7 million times in Arizona, and is the only thing known that can bring the pandemic to an end. Tucson Mayor Regina Romero isn't having it. She issued a statement that is worth quoting at length: Governor Ducey is paving the way for COVID-19 to spread uncontrollably throughout our state, and attempting to impede those of us who believe in science-based solutions at the local level. After consulting with our City Attorney, it is clear that this Executive Order is legally meaningless. The action that Mayor and Council took last Friday will remain in full effect.  Governor Ducey must stop prior...