Episodes
Monday Aug 30, 2021
Episode 11 - Masks
Monday Aug 30, 2021
Monday Aug 30, 2021
Episode 11 – Masks
Welcome to Strange Times in New Boston, and welcome to this the eleventh episode of this podcast. I am Glen Dickey and will be your guide as we explore these “Strange Times”. If you have any comments or questions about the podcast, please send them to me at StrangeTimesInNewBoston@hushmail.com.
This evening I want to wish a speedy return to all Americans and allies still in Afghanistan. Our thoughts are with you.
Recently the New Boston Central School had a vote on masking and decided to implement mandatory masking while, and I think I am quoting from the board meeting of 8-18-21, Hillsborough County, the Town of New Boston, and the Town of Goffstown is in substantial rates of transmission. I think that’s what they voted on. I watched the video at about 3 hours and 12minutes a couple of times. And I think that is what the school board voted to do. I should note that I was not able access to the matrix of Dr. Chan’s that is referred to in the school board meeting.
Just to be clear and boring at the same time a substantial rate of transmission is defined as 50-99.99 cases per 100,000 population OR the positive rate of 8-9.99% from COVID tests. I think that’s the definition. If my math is right then that a positivity rate of 50/100,000 or .05% for the low end, and 99.99/100,000 or 0.099% for the high end. I don’t really think that any of this is particularly significant as you will see but let’s lay it out there just the same.
Now you may be asking yourselves; Why on earth do I not think it matters? That’s easy. Because of the chances of children having serious health effects without underlying comorbidities even if they get COVID-19 is very low. Statistically you would be better off worrying if the flu or our poor driving habits are more likely to hurt our children than their contracting COVID-19. The simple facts of the data are that even if your child catches COVID-19 they are very unlikely to require hospitalization, and even more unlikely to actually succumb to the illness UNLESS they have underlying comorbidity. The number of cases in children isn’t irrelevant but is probably mostly irrelevant in terms of effects on the children themselves. If anyone would like to dispute that the CDC own study found this to be case I would be curious to hear upon on what statistical ground it is founded.
The study even cites that among elementary age children the rate further declines from 8 per 100,000 to 6.4 per 100,000. We are not talking about deaths either, were talking about hospitalization. The numbers are hard to assemble so let’s make comparisons; In 2016 the New England Journal of Medicine reported that based on CDC Wonders data that there were 15.9 per 100,000 child or adolescent deaths in the category “All Injury Related”. Your little bundle of joy is almost twice as likely to DIE from you wrapping that new Volvo around a tree as they are from only requiring hospitalization for COVID-19.
Statistically speaking your elementary aged child is at the same risk from DEATH via drowning or a motor vehicle accident as they are of being hospitalized with COVID-19. The CDC’s own data in the dataset the “Underlying Cause of Death, 1999-2019 Results” shows that in in only one year there were 37,334 deaths of persons under the age of eighteen. In a different dataset entitled “Provisional COVID-19 Deaths: Focus on Ages 0-18 Years” the CDC reports that in the period April 2020 to August 2021 there have been a total of 430 deaths in that period. 134 in the age group 0-4, and 296 in the age group 5-18. Think I am reading the data wrong? The CDC datasets are complex and it’s easy to manipulate data incorrectly. NPR, that bastion of liberty and freedom, reported on August 5th in a piece entitled “Serious Cases Remain Rare, But Coronavirus Infections In Children Are On The Rise” the following;
“Since the pandemic began a year and a half ago, approximately 4.2 million children have tested positive for the coronavirus. The good news is that severe illness and death are still uncommon for children who contract the virus. In states reporting, children accounted for fewer than one-quarter of 1% of all COVID-19 deaths. Seven states reported no child deaths, while other states reported 0-0.03% of all child coronavirus cases resulting in death. As of July 29, a total of 358 children have reportedly been killed by COVID-19 in the U.S.”
Children dying is a serious matter, and I don not mean to be flippant about it. If it is your child is dying, then that is a terrible trial to endure. I love my child more than the light of the sun as the Greeks used to say and I cannot imagine what that is like. I would like to live in a world where no child dies, and I think that world may be achievable through Technology and Science. Call me an optimist but considering the changes of the last hundred years a day may come when this is achieved. Until that day comes though we need to realistic about what truly poses a danger to our children and not react based on emotions.
While we are on the subject, I don’t particularly trust the CDC any longer. I don’t trust it to produce Science untainted by politics. It is ultimately a human organization and subject to the same effects as every other human organization. It isn’t exempt from political pressure. So I wonder if even the number I cite above are correct, maybe they are inflated or deflated but I have no way to know. Even if I don’t know if the numbers I cite are slanted for political gain, I still strongly suspect that they could be. I suspect no one listening this podcast knows whether they are either. NPR was always on the Left but after the way they behaved during the Trump Administration I really don’t believe their reporting any longer. I think I am like a lot of Americans. Still these sources are believed by a lot of people so I will let them stand, believe them or not.
Hopefully all of this will be received as good news to parents and children. Even at our most cynical, we can believe that if there were thousands and thousands of children dying from COVID the media would be telling us how it was President Trump’s fault, and they haven’t done that yet on this topic. Unless your child has an underlying health issue / comorbidity they are probably as bullet proof as they can be even without a vaccine. Yes, your child could get COVID. No, your child will probably not need to go to the hospital. No, your child, even if they go to the hospital, is unlikely to die. If anyone has a different dataset that contradicts these numbers, I would like to see the data. No TimeCube stuff please.
In watching the NBCS Board meeting of August, the 21st one board member expressed an opinion that once the vaccine was “approved” for children that this issue would disappear. Whoa. Why would I inject my child with a newly developed vaccine for a disease that my child is not at risk for? All vaccines have side effects, all vaccines have some number of cases of very severe reactions to the vaccine. That the number is very small is irrelevant. My child, your child, unless they have an underlying health isn’t at risk from COVID, but they might be at risk from the vaccine. Why would I incur any risk to the health and wellbeing of my child for no gain? It isn’t like once you are vaccinated you can’t get COVID, which is kind of the situation a healthy child is in now. It is hard for me to understand why any parent of an elementary aged child, and cognizant of the facts, would be an early adopter of the child “approved” vaccine. My child, your child, without underlying health issues, is simply not at much risk from COVID according to the government’s own numbers. I don’t want to give the impression that I am anti-vaccine. I am not. I have received both required vaccinations and I support adults without underlying health concerns getting vaccinated as soon as possible, but I am an adult. And furthermore, I am an adult with the experience of having tolerated the numerous and repetitive vaccinations required to be the child of an overseas military officer in the 1970s, and then as a soldier overseas in the 1980s. I have a history of tolerating vaccinations, my kid though… Why would I do this? It seems some one will need to manufacture data or at least a reason why I would expose my 11 year old to a cure of some risk without cause.
“Being strong everywhere” is a military mistake usually due to the lack of a real strategy. It is a classic move of militaries establishments that don’t know what to do, and I think it is analogous to the strategy we have been pursuing in response to COVID. This isn’t 2020, we have some idea what we are facing, and with that in mind we need to stop protecting the healthy and start focusing on those who really are at risk. Children come from many kinds of homes, and some children come from families with members who are vulnerable, and even if the child would not be at risk, the child could act as a disease vector to the vulnerable family member. Other children might have underlying health issues that make COVID a real threat to them. It is on the vulnerable that we should extend additional resources, not on the children that are not vulnerable. In military terms, wasting resources protecting the places you are unlikely to be attacked, saps resources that could be better used at the places where you are likely to be attacked. And let’s be clear about why we are following the anti-strategy of “Be strong everywhere” instead of something more appropriate, the reason that we pursuing mandatory masking is because of three votes on the school board. It wasn’t the school administration that proposed mandatory masking, it a board member who was supported by two other board members, to be specific the motion was proposed by Samuel Perron, seconded by Wendy Lambert, and voted for by Kary Jencks. And why should we be surprised by any of this? Two members are registered Democrats and the third is an undeclared who shares a family name with only registered democrats. Modern psychological research in areas like Moral Foundations Theory indicate that the people on the Left ethically reason using almost exclusively the moral axes of Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating. The Liberal perspective used to use include the Liberty/Oppression axis but much of that has gone by the wayside now-a-days. The ACLU just ain’t what it used to be. Our school board members that voted for mandatory masks, if running true to their Liberal sympathies, might not even believe that the argument that infringing our children’s liberty with masks is an argument. That might sound like crazy talk to talk to them. The current research indicates that because the Liberal viewpoint relies so extensively upon the two moral axes, they have much less room to maneuver intellectually and stay in the good graces of their peers. I can think of no better illustration of the drifting divide between American ideological perspectives than this school board vote. If we continue to elect a bunch of Left Liberals to the school board this is what we are going to get. I hope that anyone who was upset by the vote will bottle up all that frustration until the next election and then turn out and vote for real change.
Please don’t go out and heap any abuse upon these board members who voted for masks. Demeaning and abusing people you disagree with politically might rally your base but to people on the outside it looks petty and small. I know some of these people a little and I don’t think their monsters they just don’t reason ethically like we do.
On the flip side I would like to give a shout out to school board members Robert Witt and Bill Schmidt. They opposed the mandatory mask policy, and it was good to see someone speaking up for a more balanced view.
One final thought; How Long? Remember “15 days to slow the spread”? We are going on Year Two. So how long? Three years? Five years? What if COVID becomes a new part of the natural landscape? What then? Some of us might have been willing to look the other way for fifteen days but after two years… I didn’t vote for this. I don’t consent to this continuing. How long? How long? If your answer to that is open ended, I wonder we have to talk about. I am not going to surrender my form of government and way of life just because a bunch of risk adverse elites wave the magic covid wand, and neither should you.
Live Free or Die.
Notes
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932e3.htm
https://wonder.cdc.gov/Deaths-by-Underlying-Cause.html
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/nejmsr1804754
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/05/1025011194/serious-cases-remain-rare-but-coronavirus-in-children-on-the-rise-too
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