Shutdown Diary
The latest statistics from Washpo:
In the past week in the U.S. ...
New daily reported cases fell 18.8%
New daily reported deaths fell 3.5%
Covid-related hospitalizations fell 4.2%
Among reported tests, the positivity rate was 5.3%.
The number of tests reported fell 17.6%
At least 140 million people have received one or both doses of the vaccine in the U.S.
This includes more than 94.8 million people who have been fully vaccinated.
So we see nearly half of the American population is partially vaccinated and almost a third fully vaccinated. We are now under 70K cases a day which we haven't seen since around November. The positivity rate remains stuck above my 5% heuristic I still see testing as a surrogate for doctor trying to confirm a diagnosis although testing is often done proactively for job/sports purposes, contact infections, etc. So testing count decreases we would expect to correlate with declining cases.
I have touched on political issues in the segment series, including "First Dose First"; to be honest, I've worried about Big Tech censoring my blog if I got more involved, as say Tom Woods does. Just in distribution of vaccines, I've been quite critical of the government bureaucracy, e.g., Cuomo threatening to go after distributors who would vaccinate others rather than lose available doses; ironically everyone in my RN sister's family got vaccinated before me, including my 3 nieces (two teachers and an RN) and my brother-in-law, who coaches high school girl's soccer, all younger with minimal health risks. In contrast, my local county was still in a backlog for people in the 75+ age group last month. More recently we saw a Kabuki dance over less than 2 dozen patients over millions of recipients of the J&J vaccine and purported blood clot issues. which led to a national pause in vaccination. And AstraZenica's vaccine, approved in Britain late last year, is still awaiting US approval. I believe the national/state government distribution caused more issues that it solved and a free market approach would have been vastly preferable. For more on a free market perspective, see here and here.
Biden's First 100 Days
There is little doubt from any familiar reader that I vigorously opposed the Biden Presidency. Do I miss the Trump soap opera? No. But the wild spending spree of the post-Trump stimulus and the infrastructure boondoggle (where Biden reinvents "infrastructure" like Trump defined "emergency"), not yet approved but in process, will not end well. I particularly loathe Biden's transfer schema of taxing the well-to-do to fund government spending programs, including investment taxes, goes beyond economic idiocy. Among other things, capital gains capture nominal, not real income, and a lot of that is capital reflecting inflation, not income. Second, spending programs are easier to start than stop, and investment taxes and high business taxes not only profoundly retard economic growth but usually capture less than expected, meaning the government will look for other funding for its programs. Don't believe this "free lunch" promised by Biden.
Entertainment
Well, there has been a hiatus since Ronda Rousey jobbed her title to Becky Lynch at Wrestlemania. At the time it was rumored that Ronda wanted some time off to start a family. We now know why Ronda didn't return as rumored earlier this month. Congratulations to the couple!
