Category Archives: COVID

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Yup, Andy Beshear regrets having to call a special session of the General Assembly! The state representatives and senators did the will of the people who voted for them

I asked yesterday if Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) would regret calling a special session of the General Assembly to deal with his COVID-19 programs now that the state Supreme Court has ruled that the injunctions against the General Assembly’s restrictions on his authority had to be dismissed. The Governor got the extension of his state of emergency order for which he asked, but the mask mandate he wanted, and said he would impose if he could? Not just no, but Hell no!

    KY lawmakers override Beshear’s vetoes and end all statewide mask mandates

    By Jack Brammer and Alex Acquisto | Updated: September 10, 2021 | 12:17 AM EDT

    The Republican-led Kentucky General Assembly soundly rejected Gov. Andy Beshear’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic late Thursday night, overriding his vetoes of two bills that stripped the Democratic governor’s ability to issue statewide mask mandates in schools or anywhere else.

    The action came as lawmakers ended a special session of the General Assembly just before midnight. The session, called by the governor to comply with a Kentucky Supreme Court decision last month that said the legislature must approve the governor’s emergency orders, began Tuesday.

    Both the Senate and House late Thursday overrode Beshear’s vetoes of Senate Bills 1 and 2, which he had issued shortly after the bills were initially approved by lawmakers. Senate Bill 1 would nullify emergency regulations mandating masks at public schools and daycare centers, leaving that decision to local officials and business owners. Senate Bill 2 bans any type of statewide mask mandate until June 2023.

    Beshear has said he needs that authority to fight the coronavirus, which has claimed the lives of more than 7,800 Kentuckians and is leaving hospitals severely strapped for staff and resources.

The Senate overrode SB1 21-6, and SB2 23-5. The House overrode the veto of SB1 69-24 and SB2 69-22. The reason that Republicans have such huge majorities in the General Assembly was the Governor’s mask mandates in 2020, when 100 state House and 19 state Senate seats were up for election.

The bills outlaw statewide mask mandates by the state government, but do not prohibit local school boards or districts from imposing their own mandates within their jurisdictions. Mr Beshear had asked local school boards to impose such policies, but most declined to do so, so he got angry and made it an order.

The Governor rescinded his mask order following the state Supreme Court ruling, but by then had persuaded the state Board of Education to issue such an order lasting through the entire school year. The Governor needed his emergency declaration extended — it would otherwise have expired today — but by calling the special session, he lost the state Board of Education’s mask mandate. Whether the state Board’s order was covered by the Kentucky Supreme Court’s August 10 decision is legally up in the air, but it would at least have lasted longer if it had to be adjudicated; now, it’s history, or at least it will be in five days, to give local Boards of Education time to meet and take their own decisions. It is expected that at least the large districts in Fayette and Jefferson counties will impose their own mask mandates, but smaller districts in more rural counties might not. In the Bluegrass State, local Boards of Education are elected, and the Board members must be responsive to the wishes of the voters.

Parents can, of course, tell their children to wear masks even if the local school district does not.

It’s amusing to see the reader comments on the Lexington Herald-Leader article cited above, all claiming that the General Assembly was gambling with the lives of students, but the facts are plain: the members were doing the will of the voters who elected them.

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Comment rescue from Patterico To me, the far, far greater danger is the mortality rate to our constitutional rights, to our liberty and our privacy.

Factory Working Orphan wrote:

    As (Time123) pointed out, the fact that the postal workers have been exempted from this shows that this isn’t about enforcing a public safety edict to prevent the spread of a highly lethal contagion. It’s about the cabal trying to take advantage of the situation to grab as much power as they can, so that the tool always stays in the toolbox for when they think it’s needed.

There have been several pushes to repeal the Patriot Act, mostly by libertarians like Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, and Rand Paul.

But a “highly lethal contagion”? Being the [insert slang term for the rectum here] that I am, I did something really radical like actually do the math.

The New York Times had a story with the headline and subhead, “One in 5,000: The real chances of a breakthrough infection.” You have to actually read the story to discover that the 0.02% chance of a fully vaccinated person contracting a breakthrough COVID infection was 1 in 5,000 per day, which means 31 in 5,000 per month, or 365 in 5,000 per year.

I compared that with the published statistics in Fayette County, Kentucky, and found that the breakthrough rate in Fayette County was a bit higher, 0.0290% per day, but not significantly out of line. Then I used the same set of numbers for the unvaccinated or partially vaccinated population, and found an infection rate, in the same community, of 0.0905% per day, 3.121 times that for the fully vaccinated, but still not even a thousand to one chance that an unvaccinated person will contract the virus on any given day.

Yes, it makes sense to get the vaccine, because it cuts the chances that if you do contract the virus, you’ll actually get sick. But that raises an obvious question: if the vaccine helps keep those who contract the virus from getting sick, or as sick, as those who have not been vaccinated, are the asymptomatic but vaccinated population being tested at significantly lower rates?

Highly lethal? With 40,870,000 total cases in the US, and 659,231 COVID deaths, that works out to a mortality rate, under American medical care, of 1.61%. Worldwide, 219,000,000 cases and 4,550,000 deaths, the mortality rate works out to 2.08%. This ain’t the bubonic plague (mortality rate 30 to 60%) or smallpox (30% mortality rate).

To me, the far, far greater danger is the mortality rate to our constitutional rights, to our liberty and our privacy. Though I suspect that nk was kidding — at least to some extent — when he said that he “would hope that the government would have a database (that he) could easily access,” I’m fairly certain that there are a lot of souls on the left who really would want just that. We already know that far, far, far too many people have accepted “Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen!” as perfectly reasonable and normal.

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Scratch a liberal, find a fascist

It seems that President Biden believes he has the authority to order people to get the COVID-19 vaccines:

    Biden expresses frustration over the unvaccinated, says ‘a distinct minority’ is keeping the U.S. from overcoming the coronavirus

    By Annie Linskey, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Seung Min Kim and Lisa Rein | Thursday, September 9, 2021 | 5:52 PM EDT

    President Biden announced sweeping new vaccine mandates Thursday that will affect tens of millions of Americans, ordering all businesses with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be inoculated or face weekly testing.

    Biden also said he was requiring all health facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding to vaccinate their workforces, which the White House believes will impact 50,000 locations.

    And the president announced he would sign an executive order that would require all federal employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus — without an option for those who prefer to be regularly tested instead — in an effort to create a model he hopes state governments and private companies will adopt.

    The cluster of new policies comes as the country grapples with the highly contagious delta variant, which has sent cases surging to more than 150,000 a day and is causing more than 1,500 daily deaths. The White House has struggled to convince hesitant Americans to get vaccinated and has been increasingly shifting toward requirements.

    In remarks from the White House, Biden took a more antagonistic tone toward the unvaccinated than he has in the past, as he turned from cajoling toward compulsion and blamed those who refuse to get shots for hurting those around them.

Yeah, that’s going to persuade people who haven’t wanted to get vaccinated to do so!

There’s more at the original, but the Washington Post article never stated under what legal authority the President claims he can order private businesses to do this. The New York Times said that:

    The requirements will be imposed by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is drafting an emergency temporary standard to carry out the mandate, according to the White House.

An obvious question: if getting vaccinated is so important, why did Mr Biden only order it for companies with 100 or more employees?

There’s at least one more day of the special session of the Kentucky General Assembly; I would suspect that the legislators would quickly put together a bill banning all state employees from in any way assisting OSHA in enforcing this order of the President’s/

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Will Andy Beshear regret calling a special session?

As we have previously noted, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) really, really doesn’t like the state legislature, but he didn’t have much choice but to call a special session of the General Assembly. Getting the General Assembly involved is something the Governor very much did not want to do. On July 10, 2020, Mr Beshear stated that he wouldn’t involve the legislature because he believed that they wouldn’t do his bidding.

    Beshear was asked at Friday’s news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

In the Bluegrass State, the legislature’s regular sessions are restricted by the state constitution, to sixty days, the last of which cannot go beyond April 15th in even numbered years, and thirty days, not to run beyond March 30th, in odd numbered years. The Governor, however, can call the legislature into special session, and he has the power to set its agenda during a special session. The General Assembly cannot call itself back into session outside of the constitutional restrictions.

But, with the COVID-19 state of emergency that the Governor declared in March of 2020 set to expire on Friday, September 10th, thanks to the state Supreme Court’s decision on the laws reining in the Governor’s emergency authority, Mr Beshear needed the special session to extend that. The General Assembly voted for an extension of that until January 15th, at which time the legislature will be in its regular session.

However, the Republican-controlled legislature hasn’t been doing much that the Governor wanted. We had previously noted that the Governor had asked school districts to put mask mandates in place, but most districts made them optional. The Governor then got pissed off, and made it an order.

    Bill ditching KY school mask mandate approved by House committee on the second try

    By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Updated September 8, 2021 | 7:15 PM EDT

    It took two attempts, but the House Education Committee on Wednesday passed a bill that would eliminate the state’s mask mandate in K-12 schools and specifies when districts could close to in-person learning.

    The House Education Committee first met at noon Wednesday, when House Bill 1 failed because it only got 11 of the 12 yes votes it needed to win approval in the committee of 22. There were seven no votes and three pass votes.

    Later, a second meeting of the House Education Committee was called for 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. At that meeting, the committee quickly reconsidered and approved the bill. It now moves to the full House of Representatives, and similar legislation remains alive in the Senate. The second vote was 16 yes votes, 2 no votes and no passes. . . . .

    At the second meeting, several lawmakers said they were changing their vote so that the legislation could be heard in the full House. Others said they were afraid if the bill died, schools would miss out on the help the legislation could provide. One provision makes it easier for retired teachers to return to the classroom to ease staff shortages.

There’s more at the original.

The Governor had already said that he would reimpose his despised statewide mask mandate if he could, and when the state Supreme Court ruled that his authority had been limited, he ran an end-around, to get the state Board of Education to issue one, a mandate lasting for the entire school year. I had been noting for awhile that the Governor was looking for an excuse to reimpose the mask mandate, and he admitted it, stating that the high number of COVID-19 cases and hospital staffing shortages would have spurred him to enact a statewide mask mandate for indoor settings.

However, under the proposed bill, local school boards and districts would still have the authority to issue mask mandates for their jurisdictions.

The truth is simple: it was the hated statewide indoor mask mandate which was the primary impetus for voters in the Commonwealth to give Republican legislative candidates such huge majorities in the 2020 elections.

The bill also includes language to allow schools more flexibility on ‘non traditional instruction’, NTI, days. In the regular session last winter, the legislature, fighting the closure of schools and long term use of remote instruction, mandated that no schools could take more than ten NTI days without having to make them up in in-person days. As several districts, at least 38 of them so far, have had to close down due to COVID, those days, normally used for snow days during the winter, would quickly get used up. The legislature is still looking at limits, but with more flexibility for schools who confine NTI to those students or classes which must be quarantined, rather than entire school systems. We do not yet know what the final form will be.

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics

We recently noted the statistics provided by the Fayette County, Kentucky, Health Department regarding COVID-19 cases in the Bluegrass State’s second most populous county. The Health Department tell us that, in one of the few charts accompanying the graphs, that in August there were a total of 5337 cases, 3746 of which were among the non-vaccinated and 1708 are ‘breakthrough’ cases among the vaccinated, 31.3%.

The population of Fayette County is 323,200, and the total fully vaccinated population is 189,750. Those numbers are important, and I’ll come back to them later. From The New York Times:

    One in 5,000

    The real chances of a breakthrough infection.

    by David Leonhardt | September 7, 2021

    The C.D.C. reported a terrifying fact in July: Vaccinated people with the Delta variant of the Covid virus carried roughly the same viral load in their noses and throats as unvaccinated people.

    The news seemed to suggest that even the vaccinated were highly vulnerable to getting infected and passing the virus to others. Sure enough, stories about vaccinated people getting Covid — so-called breakthrough infections — were all around this summer: at a party in Provincetown, Mass.; among the Chicago Cubs; on Capitol Hill. Delta seemed as if it might be changing everything.

    In recent weeks, however, more data has become available, and it suggests that the true picture is less alarming. Yes, Delta has increased the chances of getting Covid for almost everyone. But if you’re vaccinated, a Covid infection is still uncommon, and those high viral loads are not as worrisome as they initially sounded.

    How small are the chances of the average vaccinated American contracting Covid? Probably about one in 5,000 per day, and even lower for people who take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.

There’s more at the original, but note the specified risk: one in 5,000 per day. It’s that ‘per day’ factor that needs to be noted.

August has 31 days, and there were, according to the Fayette County Health Department, 1,708 cases of COVID-19 classified as ‘breakthrough’ cases, occurring among the fully vaccinated. Doing the math, 1705 cases divided by 189,750 vaccinated people yields an incidence of 0.900% of the vaccinated population contracting COVID-19 over a 31 day period. Divide that by 31, and the rate becomes 0.0290% per day. One out of 5,000 works out to 0.02%, so the Fayette County rate isn’t terribly out of line.

But let’s do the unvaccinated population as well. 3,746 COVID-19 cases out of 133,450 unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people yields a rate of 2.807% over the 31 days of August. Divided by 31 again, that comes out to a 0.0905% per day, 3.121 times that for the fully vaccinated, and not even a thousand to one chance that an unvaccinated person will contract the virus on any given day.

Yes, it makes sense to get the vaccine, because it cuts the chances that if you do contract the virus, you’ll actually get sick. But that raises an obvious question: if the vaccine helps keep those who contract the virus from getting sick, or as sick, as those who have not been vaccinated, are the asymptomatic but vaccinated population being tested at significantly lower rates?

If you’ve ever had a COVID-19 test, you already know: it’s not much fun having a nurse stick a swab all the way up your nose and into your sinuses. So, if you are completely asymptomatic, and you have a choice, why would you ever volunteer for that test?

There are two problems here:

  1. We do not know the real percentage of the fully vaccinated to contract the virus; and
  2. The numbers we do have are being politicized to death.

When The New York Times runs a headline, “One in 5,000: The real chances of a breakthrough infection,” and you have to read down to the end of the fourth paragraph to find out that number is per day, you are seeing propaganda, you are seeing politicized numbers.

Yes, I believe that getting vaccinated is the smarter thing to do, but am very much opposed to vaccine mandates or vaccine passports. But trying to make cases for vaccination by using politicized numbers only makes your case weaker when someone, someone like me, spots what has been done to politicize the numbers.

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Andy Beshear hates the state legislature, but he had no choice but to call them in

Most of my articles on Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) are primarily sourced from the Lexington Herald-Leader, but he wrangled an invitation from NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, and came to the attention of The New York Times:

    Kentucky governor says the state’s Covid surge is ‘dire.’

    by Melina Delkic | September 5, 2021

    Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY)

    Kentucky’s Democratic governor on Sunday described the state’s surge of Covid cases as “dire,” and pointed out that Republican state lawmakers had limited his options to control the record wave of infections there.

    “If I had the ability to do it right now, we would have a masking order when you are in public and indoors,” said Gov. Andy Beshear, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” news program. “We know that’s a proven way to slow the spread of the virus and ultimately help our health care capacity.”

Right: if the Governor had the authority to issue a statewide mask mandate, he would have done so, and that is precisely why the voters of the Commonwealth gave Republican state legislative candidates such a huge margin in last November’s elections, because Mr Beshear had issued a statewide mask mandate last year.

Getting the General Assembly involved is something the Governor very much did not want to do. On July 10, 2020, Mr Beshear stated that he wouldn’t involve the legislature because he believed that they wouldn’t do his bidding.

    Beshear was asked at Friday’s news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

And, as it happens, Kentucky’s legislators are not wearing masks today, as the special session opens:

    Kentucky special session on COVID-19 starts with many lawmakers not wearing masks

    By Jack Brammer | Updated: September 7, 2021 | 5:12 PM EDT

    With most members not wearing masks, a special session of the Kentucky General Assembly started Tuesday morning to deal with the state’s surging COVID-19 pandemic.

    Lawmakers acted quickly on Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s call to extend the COVID-19 state of emergency that has been in place in Kentucky since March 2020 and more time for a state of emergency to deal with August flooding in Nicholas County. House Joint Resolution 1, which extends the states of emergency and many of the governor’s emergency orders, was expected to clear the legislature before the end of the day.

    House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, gaveled his chamber into session at 10:13 a.m. and 94 of the 100 members responded to the roll call and heard the proclamation of the special session. Thirty-four members of the 38-member Senate convened at 12:16 p.m. with most members going without a mask. The two physicians in the Senate — Ralph Alvarado, R-Winchester, and Karen Berg, D-Louisville — wore masks.

    Lawmakers returned to the state Capitol in Frankfort at the call of Beshear, who has presented them with an agenda to fight the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed more than 7,900 lives in Kentucky.

    The Democratic governor made the session call Saturday, two weeks after the Kentucky Supreme Court said his emergency orders dealing with the pandemic needed approval by the Republican-led legislature.

As far as I have heard, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd has not yet lifted his injunctions against the legislation that the state Supreme Court ordered him to do, and the parties to the lawsuit were supposed to appear before the judge today, but I have been unable to find any reports concerning that. Nevertheless, Governor Beshear at least appears to be acting as though those injunctions have been lifted.

The legislature quickly approved the Governor’s request to extend the state of emergency until January 15th, the state House of Representatives voting 92-3 in favor, and the state Senate 32-4, sending it to Mr Beshear for his signature.

By extending the state of emergency until January 15th, when the General Assembly will be in its regular session, the Governor would have the power to issue a statewide mask mandate, lasting for thirty days, but the General Assembly might just deny him that one:

    Bill ditching mask mandates for KY schools and daycare centers gains momentum

    By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Updated: September 7, 2021 | 4:32 PM EDT

    Hours after the Kentucky General Assembly began a special session Tuesday to deal with COVID-19 policies, the Senate Education Committee approved a bill that rejects the Beshear Administration’s emergency regulations requiring universal masking of people age two or older in K-12 schools and daycare centers.

    Senate Bill 1 declares the regulations requiring masks in schools and daycare centers null and void.

    The bill, approved by the committee with a 8-5 vote, now goes to the full Senate. Lawmakers who voted no voiced concerns about lifting the mask mandates at a time when transmission of COVID-19 and resulting hospitalizations are at an all-time high in Kentucky.

    Education Committee Chairman Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, said individual school boards will be free to decide their own policies about masking in schools.

    Wise said the bill would become law as soon as Gov. Andy Beshear signs it or the legislature overrides his veto, given that it is considered emergency legislation.

We had previously noted that the Governor had asked school districts to put mask mandates in place, but most districts made them optional. The Governor then got pissed off, and made it an order.

There’s more at the original, much of it devoted to the legislature’s plans to ease the restrictions on ‘non-traditional instruction,’ meaning those days in which school is conducted remotely. The legislature wants to keep schools from closing down for everybody because some students or staffers test positive for COVID-19.

Those were the two things which rankled the legislators, and Kentuckians in general, the most: the mask mandate and the schools being closed, and those are the two things the General Assembly appears to be most eager to prevent from happening again. Of course, it’s going to take a few days to see how this will play out, and what the legislature passes. But at least a wannabe dictator of a Governor has been reined in by the democratically elected General Assembly and the Kentucky Supreme Court.

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics Shading the truth does not help your case

The Centers for Disease Control reported, as of August 22, 2021, that of the eligible population in Fayette County, Kentucky, 80.6% had received at least one dose of one of the COVID-19 vaccines, with 68.3% being fully vaccinated. The chart on the right is from Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, downloaded September 3, 2021. You can click on it to enlarge the image.

So, with such a significant part of the population in the Bluegrass State’s second largest city, wouldn’t you expect COVID-19 cases to be lower than prior to the availability of the vaccines?

    300 new cases, 5 new deaths. Lexington’s COVID-19 numbers continue to spike

    By Jeremy Chisenhall | Updated: September 2, 2021 | 4:27 PM EDT

    Lexington reported five new COVID-19 deaths Thursday, making August the deadliest month for coronavirus since April.

    The five deaths all occurred in August but were newly confirmed as being caused by COVID-19. The Lexington-Fayette County Health Department has confirmed a total of 10 coronavirus deaths from August. There were only three deaths in July, four in June and six in May, according to health department data.

    The local health department has asked residents to wear a mask in crowded public areas, avoid close contact with people who are sick, cover coughs and sneezes and wash their hands often. The health department advises everyone should follow those guidelines, whether they’re fully vaccinated or not.

    Lexington also reported 301 new COVID-19 cases Thursday morning. The city’s rolling average of new cases has jumped up to 232, the highest it’s been since early January.

The chart at the left is from the article, which has free access; it’s not behind the Lexington Herald-Leader’s paywall. You can click on the chart to enlarge it, but this is a screen capture; the one at the original is interactive.

The seven-day rolling average of new cases, on September 1, 2021, was 232, the highest it has been since January, and only four previous weeks, December 6, 2020 (253), November 22, 2020 (244.3), December 13, 2020 (237.6) and January 10, 2021 (242.4), have seen a higher rolling seven day average . . . and all of those weeks were before COVID-19 vaccines were generally available. (A few health care workers began receiving vaccinations in December.)

The death rate from COVID-19 has declined significantly since the vaccines were available, with 14 recorded in August, compared to 12 in each March and April of this year, just as the vaccines started to become available, but 29 in February and the county record of 61 in January. Mr Chisenhall’s story had a graph indicating just 10 COVID-related deaths, but the chart at the right is from the Health Department. I note that, with 14 COVID-related deaths in August of 2021, in which we had no mask mandates, other than in schools, which had just opened at the end of the month, no businesses closed, and no real restrictions on activities, it was one more death than in August of 2020, with similar weather, masks required everywhere, some businesses closed and other of Governor Andy Beshear’s restrictions in place.

There were more than 300 new COVID-19 hospitalizations reported in August, with only two previous months having exceeded 300.

Mr Chisenhall’s report did not tell us what percentage of the new cases, hospitalizations and deaths were among partially or fully vaccinated people, but digging through the Health Department’s charts, the information begins to come together. The hospitalizations chart shows — though, admittedly, not quite ac clearly as it might — that hospitalizations among the non-vaccinated clearly exceed those among vaccinated patients. But that is skewed by the fact that other charts indicate that the number of cases has greatly increased among 5 to 17 year old and 0 to 4 year old patients. Since none of the 0 to 4 year old, and only half of the 5 to 17 year old, groups are even eligible to be vaccinated, those cases will very much skew the breakthrough cases percentages.

The Health Department tell us that, in one of the few charts accompanying the graphs, that in August there were a total of 5337 cases, 3775 of which were among the non-vaccinated and 1562 are ‘breakthrough’ cases among the vaccinated, 29.27%.

But when you eliminate the roughly 220[1]Even enlarged, the charts are difficult to read; I have done my best in looking at the charts to get the right number, but could be off by a few. cases among the 0 to 4 year old group, none of whom are vaccinated, and half of the cases of the 5 to 17 year old group, to get the 5 to 11 year old group, none of which are eligible to be vaccinated, from total cases, we’re down to 4680 total cases among the vaccine eligible. All of a sudden 1562 ‘breakthrough’ cases among a total of 4680 eligible to have been vaccinated, we see a ‘breakthrough’ case rate of 33.37%.

In other words, one out of three is the actual breakthrough rate in Fayette County.

Vaccination clearly helps, but not at nearly the rate that the advocates claim that it does. Actual numbers published by the Health Department, rather than hard-to-read graphics would help nail the breakthrough percentage down more directly. But, if the full truth were told, there would be plenty of evidence that people should get vaccinated, but that a vaccine mandate should not be imposed.

References

References
↑1 Even enlarged, the charts are difficult to read; I have done my best in looking at the charts to get the right number, but could be off by a few.
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University of Cincinnati Medical Center, already 11% understaffed, could lose 30% of its nurses due to #VaccineMandates

Sometimes trending stories have multiplied so much that continuing to add links to older ones clutters them up, as it was with my earlier story about mask and vaccine mandates causing people to either quit or get fired from jobs which already have a shortage of people. We aren’t taking about hamburger flippers at McDonald’s, where replacements can be trained in a day — assuming those replacements do something really radical like show up for work — but school bus drivers, who have to have commercial driver’s licenses with a school bus or passenger endorsement, and certified nursing assistants (CNAs), who take several weeks to train, and who must pass a criminal background check, or registered nurses (RNs), who require at least a two year, Associates degree, or four year baccalaureate degree, before passing their boards.

But the hits keep on coming, and even the credentialed media have begun to tell the truth. From the Cincinnati Enquirer:[1]Hat tip to William Teach for the story.

    COVID-19: Union says 30% of UC Medical Center nurses could quit over vaccine mandate

    Terry DeMio | September 1, 2021 | 2:33 PM EDT

    Pushback against area hospital systems’ mandates for employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 continues with the latest coming from more than 100 nurses who say they’d quit before complying.

    A number of UC Medical Center nurses, responding to a union survey, indicated they would leave their jobs if the hospital system’s vaccine mandate is finalized.

    The Ohio Nurses Association survey was conducted immediately after UC Health and other area hospital systems announced they would mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for their employees. The survey, done Aug. 5-12, was made public Wednesday. Results show that 136 of 456 nurses who responded – balked at the mandate. The medical center has more than 1,500 nurses.

    The survey underscores the ongoing controversy over the region’s health systems requiring vaccinations, which at one point landed all six of them in local courts. A recruiter with St. Elizabeth Healthcare, another of the six health systems, recently told The Enquirer that the vaccine mandate had led some nurses to quit.

    “This places the medical center in a very difficult position, and it places the nurses in a very difficult position,” said Dominic Mendiola, labor representative for the nurses association. He said that UCMC has been at capacity on and off since July, and currently, 187 nursing positions are posted.

There’s a good deal more at the original, but the math is simple: if the University of Cincinnati Medical Center has 1,500 nurses[2]The article did not give the exact size of the nursing staff, so I have used the minimum, 1,500, in all of my calculations., and 187 open positions, that means UCMC is slightly over 11% understaffed. Add another 136 who say that they would quit if a vaccine mandate was put in place, and that brings UCMC to 19.15% understaffed.

But there’s more. If only 456 out of 1,500 nurses responded, a 30.4% response rate, that means we do not know what the percentage of vaccine resistant nurses is overall, but statistics allows us to assume, with a margin of error, that the sample is representative of the whole. If it is representative of the whole, and the 29.82% resistant rate is true throughout the entire staff, UCMC could lose 447 nurses, for a 37.58% job vacancy rate.

Of course, the hospital has medical care staff other than just doctors and nurses: there will be CNAs, respiratory therapists, X-ray technicians, pharmacy techs, custodians, lab techs, food service workers, etc, but the Enquirer story covered only RNs.

Now, I suspect that the 1,044 nurses who did not respond to the survey did not respond primarily because they didn’t really care, and the vaccine resistance level among them would be much smaller, but UC Health decided to piss off a lot of the staff:

    UC Health spokeswoman Amanda Nageleisen said that she doesn’t have data on employee vaccination rates. But she added: “We are proud of the thousands of our nurses, physicians and other employees who have been fully vaccinated.

    “The science supports their decision, and we applaud their willingness to step forward and advance the safety of our patients, staff and community,” Nageleisen said. “These survey results do not reflect the views of the majority of our 10,000 employees, including our 2,600 nurses across the UC Health system.”

Way to tell the staff who aren’t vaccinated that you are not proud of them and their work. Yeah, that’s going to make them happy with their jobs. Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t the smartest thing to do, when you are an already understaffed company, to show disrespect for, and try to run off, the people you do have.

Nurses are not stupid people. People can, do, and have washed out or flunked out of nursing school. People who have been graduated from nursing schools can, do, and have failed their boards. They can see when their employers are showing disrespect for them, they can see that they do have job opportunities, plenty of job opportunities with other employers. And the nurses who get vaccinated grudgingly, unwillingly, just to keep their jobs, are going to become poorer employees, because they will be angry with their employers.

This push for vaccine mandates will not end well.

References

References
↑1 Hat tip to William Teach for the story.
↑2 The article did not give the exact size of the nursing staff, so I have used the minimum, 1,500, in all of my calculations.
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The #MaskMandates and #VaccineMandates are causing more problems than they would ever solve.

We have previously noted, many times, that people all over the country are resisting vaccine and mask mandates, and that these have, and will continue to have, the effect of creating a serious shortage of citical workers. From Newsweek:

1 in 8 Nurses Say They Haven’t Been Vaccinated and Don’t Plan to

By Katherine Fung | August 31, 2021 | 5:06 PM EDT

As the nation continues its efforts to ramp up vaccination rates, figures seem to lag not only among the public but also in hospitals, where one in eight nurses say they have not been vaccinated and aren’t planning on doing so.

A survey conducted between July 8 and 29 by the American Nurses Association (ANA) and American Nurses Foundation (ANF) found that among nearly 5,000 nurses, a quarter said they didn’t trust the vaccines or were unsure about the safety and effectiveness of the shots.

Of those who don’t intend on getting vaccinated, the main concerns included lack of information about long-term effects and vaccine safety, as well as mistrust in the information surrounding the vaccines’ development and approval.

Although the majority of nurses, 88 percent, are vaccinated, the proportion of vaccine-hesitant staff could present a problem for hospitals if vaccine mandates are issued for all healthcare workers.

Hospitals across the country are facing severe nursing shortages—an issue that existed before the pandemic but has been exacerbated by many leaving the field over the last 16 months due to burnout from caring for COVID patients.

The Biden administration has already required that nursing home staff be vaccinated in order for long-term care facilities to receive federal Medicare and Medicaid funding—a mandate that some in the industry have warned will pose “disastrous workforce challenges.”

There’s more at the original, but the article concludes with an absolutely laughable idea. It states that hospitals mandating vaccination could solve staffing shortages by raising pay, but with the already existing shortage of nurses, luring RNs from one hospital to another with higher pay just makes other hospitals raise their pay, and it still leaves shortages of nurses, though it might redistribute the shortages. If there aren’t enough nurses period, that’s just rearranging the deck chairs.

Then we have this, from NPR:

Chicago School Bus Drivers Have Quit In Droves Over COVID Vaccine Mandate

August 31, 2021 | 4:39 PM EDT

Chicago Public Schools says 10% of their school bus drivers quit on Friday as they’re unwilling to get mandated vaccines. The district is now offering cash to parents who drive their kids to school. . . . .

Chicago public school officials apologized for the cancellation (of bus routes), but say they were forced to do it for 2,100 students. That’s because in just one day, 70 bus drivers quit. The reason – according to district officials, these drivers didn’t want to get vaccinated, and the district was mandating it. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot backs the school district’s decision.

Much of the credentialed media reports have avoided noting why there are shortages of bus drivers, because the media know that publishing that undermines the arguments for the mandates, but there have been a few that told the truth. Note that the sources above are from Newsweek and National Public Radio, not exactly known as evil reich wing sources.

Finally, there’s this:

Mu COVID Variant, Which Scientists Fear is Resistant to Vaccines, Detected in 39 Countries

by Samantha Lock | September 1, 2021

A new coronavirus strain has been declared a variant of interest by the World Health Organization (WHO) with mutations that may be resistant to vaccines.

Mu, or B.1.621, was first identified in Colombia and cases have since been recorded in 38 other countries, predominantly in South America and Europe.

“Since its first identification in Colombia in January 2021, there have been a few sporadic reports of cases of the Mu variant, and some larger outbreaks have been reported from other countries in South America and in Europe,” a weekly epidemiological update released by WHO on August 31 read.

Over 4,500 sequences (3794 sequences of B.1.621 and 856 sequences of B.1.621.1) have been recorded in 39 countries as of August 29, the report said, citing information uploaded to the GISAID Initiative, a global science initiative that provides open-access to genomic data of influenza viruses.

Although the global prevalence of the Mu variant has declined and is “currently below 0.1 percent” the prevalence in Colombia (39 percent) and Ecuador (13 percent) has “consistently increased,” the report reads. . . . .

The variant is listed as one of five “of interest” by the WHO, including Eta, Iota, Kappa and Lambda.

Four other variants “of concern” and considered as having potential to make the pandemic worse are listed as the Alpha variant (first recorded in England and seen in 193 countries), the Beta variant (now seen in 141 countries), Gamma in 91 and Delta in 170 countries.

I wonder when they are going to run out of Greek letters for new variants. But as stories crop up about the Lambda and Mu variants being resistant to the vaccines, the arguments for a vaccine mandates fail as well.

It seems pretty obvious: we are going to have some forms of COVID with us for years and years, and destroying our freedom and our society to fight it is the worst thing we can do.