Jim Bovard warns against politically motivated statistics. A slice:
Federal agencies don’t count what politicians don’t want to know. President Joe Biden and other Democrats perennially invoke “science and data” to sanctify all their COVID-19 mandates and policies. But the same shenanigans and willful omissions that have characterized COVID data have perennially permeated other federal programs.
Jeffrey Tucker talks with Knut Wittkowski.
Will the Gray Lady ever move on? Yes, cases are “ticking up” in parts of the city, but COVID hospitalizations have averaged only 20 a day over the past week and have been dropping; deaths have averaged just three and are also decreasing. Scaring the public might sell papers and attract clicks, but at some point even the Times needs to acknowledge the pandemic is over.
With supporting data, Martin Kulldorff tweets:
Scandinavia have had fewer Covid restrictions and lower Covid mortality than the rest of Europe.
Covid hysteria appears to be ramping up again in Philadelphia. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
“Boris Johnson admits Covid lockdowns are STILL on the cards: PM says he ‘can’t rule out’ draconian stay-at-home restrictions in future – despite promising the route back to pre-pandemic normality was ‘irreversible’.” (DBx: This totalitarian attitude is now, unfortunately, perhaps baked in to many countries; it was baked in by the overwhelming tolerance of authoritarian Covidocratic diktats.)
Karol Sikora reports that “[l]ockdown has stretched cancer services to breaking point.”
“Corgi beaten to death in Shanghai over fears it might spread Covid.” Two slices:
Outrage has erupted online after a video of a corgi dog being beaten to death by a Shanghai healthcare worker went viral, over unfounded concerns that the pup could be infectious after its owners tested positive for Covid.
The corgi’s owners said they let their dog out after being sent to a quarantine building in the hopes the animal would be better off fending for itself in the streets, rather than risk starving to death at home without anyone to look after it, according to screenshots of a group chat shared online.
“We hoped to let him outside to be like a stray dog. We didn’t want him to starve to death,” the dog’s owner said on the group. “As long as he could live, it would be ok. We never expected that he would be beaten to death.”
It is the latest example of pets including dogs and cats being killed by Chinese healthcare workers over unfounded concerns they might infect humans with coronavirus.
Another dog was beaten to death with a crowbar after it was discovered alone during disinfection of a flat in Jiangxi province, while in Hong Kong, authorities threatened to cull thousands of hamsters over Covid fears.
For many Chinese, however, the fate of their pets is just one of the many worries they have to deal with if forced into quarantine facilities by the government.
Young children have been stranded home alone after parents were carted off to quarantine, while others have taken to the internet to seek help for their elderly parents in isolation.
…..
Chinese authorities are continuing with drastic measures given its “zero-Covid” policy. About 1,000 people were locked down at a mall in Hangzhou, a city near Shanghai, overnight this week after it was discovered that two women from Shanghai had visited the centre.
A supermarket chain in Shanghai was forced to shut down after an unexpectedly large number of people showed up with fake passes sold online by scalpers. Lockdowns mean most people are stuck at home and going hungry while waiting for government rations to be delivered.
