This Isn’t a ‘Positive Scenario,’ It’s a Disaster

This essay from The Covid Underground offers three plausible positive endgames for the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the three ‘positive’ scenarios includes this:

In the next three years, the majority of the world population will be infected 6 or more times.

That leaves billions of survivors biologically aged, brain-fogged, bedbound, and betrayed by weakened immune systems. As in past pandemics, the millions of dead and disabled will create a labor shortage that empowers surviving workers.

Those who manage to minimize our Covid exposure will have the advantage in pushing for these changes.

We will start to see our numbers grow as more see the wisdom of avoiding reinfection.

I agree that this is a plausible scenario. Highly unlikely, but plausible. But to me it’s not a ‘positive’ endgame, it’s a nightmare.

I just don’t see how a future in which ‘billions’ of survivors are brain-fogged and bedbound is positive. Sorry.

When You Reward Reckless Banking, You Get More Reckless Bankers

Adam Levitin says, “The new Fed facility allows banks to borrow against their Treasuries and agencies at par, not at market value. That’s a way of extending support to banks that have failed at Banking 101 and mismanaged their interest rate risk.” In other words, the government is subsidizing bankers who were so incompetent they didn’t come up with a system to deal with the Fed increasing interest rates, even though increasing interest rates is a normal thing which sometimes happens.

I urge you to read Adam Levitin’s full blog post.

Basically, the government is loaning money to Silicon Valley Bank based on the nominal value of the bank’s treasures, not the real market value. Imagine that a house burned down, but instead of borrowing against the market value of a plot of land with a burned-down structure, someone let you borrow against the value the property had before the fire. That’s what’s going on here. No reasonable financial actor would let someone put a burned-out house as collateral as if it had the value of an intact house—they would only do so as a subsidy. The government claims this isn’t really a ‘bailout,’ that taxpayers aren’t paying for it. Narrowly true in the sense that taxpayers won’t pay through taxes. Instead, the funding for the ‘bailout’ will come from payments made by banks (including the responsible banks which are well-managed), and the banks will pay for this by charging their customers more money. We’re going to pay the taxes to the bank rather than the government.

I’m Confused About What’s Going on With Covid

Time Sensitive: If you live in California, Oregon, or Washington, and want to keep the mask mandate in healthcare settings, you can participate in West Coast Covid Action. (I know that some people in healthcare settings who wear masks now would stop wearing them in the absence of a mandate, and that this change would cause some deaths and disability from long covid which would otherwise not happen, and thus it’s worth fighting to keep the mandate, but given how hard it is already to find a set of doctors and nurses who follow the mask rules, not to mention that they often use leaky masks instead of respirators, I admit I’m dispirited about this).

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In this blog post, I said, “It’s possible that the last wave is over… but I won’t believe it until we go through a winter with low death and low hospitalization rates.”

Well, winter is almost over.

I didn’t define what I considered to be ‘low.’ I think what I anticipated was either a surge (like the Omicron wave in the winter of 2021/2022) or, if that didn’t happen, a clear decreasing trend. I can tell you I didn’t expect the plateau in covid deaths we’ve had for months (a plateau visible in both official covid death counts and excess deaths).

Since I didn’t anticipate this plateau, I lack ready explanations. I’m confused.

Covid Infection Isn’t Inevitable

About a month ago, I got the result from my covid nucleocapsid antibody test: negative. The lab couldn’t detect any nucleocapsid antibodies in my blood.

The covid vaccines available in the United States don’t trigger the production of covid nucleocapsid antibodies, so the only people who have them are those who got certain vaccines available elsewhere or who’ve had at least one covid infection.

Nucleocapsid antibodies wane over time, but according to this study, 92.6% of people still have nucleocapsid antibodies 400 days after a documented covid infection. Thus it’s a reliable measure of whether I’ve been infected within the twelve months prior to the test (excluding the most recent month, since it sometimes takes 30 days for n-antibodies to reach detectable levels).

Yes, a false negative is possible, but I believe this is a true negative, and that didn’t have a single covid infection in the calendar year of 2022, the year of omicron. My respiratory health had been excellent all year, and whenever I had the slightest suspicion of a covid infection, I got tested (all my rapid antigen and PCR tests came back negative).

It IS possible to evade covid.

If We’re Talking about Bowdlerizing Roald Dahl, Why Not Talk about Danny, Champion of the World?

In case you don’t know, the new UK editions of some Roald Dahl books have some new edits suggested by sensitivity readers.

What I find most remarkable is that nobody has mentioned Danny, Champion of the World. Nowadays Danny is far less known than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, etc. Danny is the only Roald Dahl book I’ve read as an adult, so though I’m not sure if it’s as good as the more popular Dahl books, I assert it’s a well-written children’s book which can delight people of all ages, except…

… except Danny glorifies poaching.