Tag Archives: #COVID19

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Fully vaccinated Harvard graduate school seeing surge in ‘breakthrough’ #COVID19 cases

You just can’t make up this stuff! 95% of Harvard University’s students, and 96% of its staff, are vaccinated against COVID-19, but this happened anyway. From CNBC:

Harvard Business School temporarily moves some MBA classes online to curb Covid outbreak

by Robert Towey | Monday, September 27, 2021 | 1:19 PM EDT | Updated

  • Harvard Business School is switching to remote learning through Oct. 3 to try to suppress the virus, which is mostly infecting the university’s fully vaccinated graduate students.
  • The university is requesting that students avoid unmasked indoor events, group travel and gathering with anyone outside their households.
  • The business school is also mandating Covid testing three times a week for all students regardless of vaccination status.

Harvard Business School moved all in-person classes for first-year MBA and some second-year students online this week, and increased its Covid-19 testing requirements to try to curb a recent surge in breakthrough cases on campus.

The school, located in Boston, is switching to remote learning through Oct. 3 to try to suppress the virus, which is mostly infecting the university’s fully vaccinated graduate students, according to the institution’s website. Roughly 95% of the university’s students and 96% of its staff are vaccinated. More than 1,000 students are enrolled in the business school’s class of 2023.

“Contact tracers who have worked with positive cases highlight that transmission is not occurring in classrooms or other academic settings on campus,” business school spokesman Mark Cautela said in a statement. “Nor is it occurring among individuals who are masked.”

Really? The virus is completely invisible, save under a microscope, and while ‘contact tracers’ can guesstimate when someone might have contracted the virus, they don’t know and can’t know. They are crediting their safety protocols, and apparently blaming other situations, but they don’t actually know anything.

Cautela added that the university is requesting that students avoid unmasked indoor events, group travel and gathering with anyone outside their households.

There’s more at the original.

The article points out that facemasks had been mandatory in all Harvard indoor settings, which would include all classes.

So, in a situation in which as high a percentage of the population as one could ever reasonably expect to be vaccinated is vaccinated, and in which everyone is and has been required to wear face masks indoors, the virus is still spreading. From the oh-so-serious Harvard Crimson:

‘We Are a Complete Outlier’: HBS Moves Some Classes Online Amid Covid-19 Outbreak

By Claire H. Guo and Christine Mui, Crimson Staff Writers | Monday, September 27, 2021

Harvard Business School moved classes for all first-year and some second-year MBA students online for a week beginning Monday, following a spike in Covid-19 cases the school attributed to off-campus social gatherings.

In an email to all MBA students on Thursday, four HBS administrators wrote that the school has counted 121 cases among MBA students since July 1, with close to 60 students in isolation that day. First-year students made up roughly 75 percent of those positive cases.

“We are a complete outlier among Harvard schools in our numbers. MBA students comprise roughly 9% of the student population at the University, but have accounted for more than two-thirds of total student cases in September. Our positivity rate is 12 times that of the rest of Harvard,” wrote HBS Dean Srikant M. Datar, Executive Dean for Administration Angela Q. Crispi, Executive Director of the MBA and Doctoral Programs Jana P. Kierstead, and Senior Associate Dean Jan W. Rivkin.

The University’s Covid-19 dashboard shows that over the past seven days, 60 of the 74 positive reported cases have been graduate students.

“These distressing figures are so high that they have attracted the scrutiny of local public health officials. Our community can and must do better,” the email continued, urging students to halt all unmasked, indoor social activities.

There’s more at the original, including the statement that Business School administrators wrote that there’s something about the way that HBS personnel interact that makes the people therein more likely to contract the virus. As in, acting like human beings?

“We sincerely believe that every student group is one event away from an outbreak cluster like those we’ve begun to see,” the school leaders wrote Thursday.

Translation: don’t act like human beings, don’t interact with each other, and for God’s sake, don’t fornicate.

We have been told that vaccination is the way out of this polidemic[1]A polidemic is a pandemic with a strong political component. No, don’t look it up; I coined the word myself., yet, in an almost fully vaccinated community, they are seeing ‘breakthrough’ cases among the fully vaccinated, who have been interacting primarily with other fully vaccinated people. The vaccinated are transmitting the virus to the vaccinated!

If, in a 95% vaccinated community, in which indoor mask wearing is mandated, the virus is spreading, one has to ask: what more can they do, mandate masks outdoors as well, and require everyone to stay two meters apart? Thank God that the General Assembly restricted Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) authority on this, because he’d probably try to impose such restrictions! He has already whined, “If I had the ability to do it right now, we would have a masking order when you are in public and indoors.”

Yet, in a nearly fully vaccinated population, entirely populated by neat, clean Harvard graduate students, with that public and indoor mask mandate in place, the virus is still spreading. Why, it’s almost as though everything the experts have been telling us has been wrong!

References

References
↑1 A polidemic is a pandemic with a strong political component. No, don’t look it up; I coined the word myself.
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Two more Philadelphia public schools closed due to #COVID19

We noted, just yesterday, that the Philadelphia School District closed Emlen Elementary School due to positive CIVID-19 tests. Now, two more have been shut down.

    COVID-19 has forced three Philadelphia schools to close

    by Rob Tornoe | Wednesdat, September 15, 2021

    The Federalist: Stanford Faculty Smear Professor Who Accurately Summarized Data On Masks

    Three Philadelphia schools have now been forced to temporarily close due to COVID-19 cases, including one Philadelphia School District building.

    Emlen Elementary in East Mount Airy will be shut for in-person learning until Sept. 24, officials said in a letter to families. The K-5 school enrolls about 300 students, all of whom are too young to be vaccinated.

    “Due to multiple positive cases of COVID-19 in our school, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH) has determined that our school building will temporarily close from 9-13-21 to 9-23-21 to help stem the spread of the virus,” principal Tammy Thomas wrote to Emlen families Monday. “Students and staff may not return to our school building during this time.”

    In addition, two charter schools — Lindley Academy Charter School and Pan American Academy Charter School — have also been temporarily closed for 14 days due to COVID-19 cases, a city spokesperson said Wednesday.

    Cheryl Bettigole, MD, from her Twitter biography.

    “In general, most transmission is not happening in school, it’s happening at home,” acting Health Secretary Cheryl Bettigole said Wednesday. She said the best way to keep school buildings open is for parents to get themselves and their eligible children vaccinated, and to not send their kids to school when they’re sick.

    “I think most of us imagined most of the spread happening in school, because all these kids are together,” Bettigole said. “But it’s typically the adults bringing it home, and then spreading it in the house.

Really? And how does Dr Bettigole know this? Or is she just defending a mask mandate, which has been in effect for all Philadelphia public schools, since the first day of school, but for which there is no evidence that it has actually slowed or prevented the spread of the virus?

The fact is simple: despite ‘contact tracing,’ despite all of the wailing of the left that they know the hideously unvaccinated are spreading the virus, no one can say that person A caught the virus specifically from person B.

Of course, the school district knows that even fully vaccinated persons can contract and spread the virus, which is why the Philly schools have mandated weekly testing for vaccinated employees.

That’s the important part here: the public schools in Pennsylvania all have these mask mandates, but, how about that, the virus is still spreading.

Despite vaccinations and despite mask mandates, this school year is looking very much like it will be like the last one.

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Why does Solomon Jones want mostly white prison guards, but not disproportionately black inmates, tested for #COVID19?

I get it: Solomon Jones, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, really doesn’t like law enforcement, and doesn’t particularly care for white people. Looking at his Inquirer author file, you’ll find columns like this:

So this morning’s column came as no surprise to me:

If Pennsylvania corrections officers don’t want the vaccine, they should look for new jobs

The only people risking the health and safety of union members are the union members themselves.

by Solomon Jones | Wednesday, September 15, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT

Solomon Jones, from his Twitter biography.

From the outset, COVID-19 exposed America as a society that is more than willing to sacrifice its most vulnerable people. Now, as workers challenge vaccine mandates meant to protect those relegated to the bottom rungs of society, the most vulnerable people will suffer once again.

Last week, the union representing correctional officers in Pennsylvania’s state prisons became one of the latest groups to officially oppose a vaccine or testing mandate. On Friday, they filed a complaint in Commonwealth Court seeking a preliminary injunction to stop an order put in place by Gov. Tom Wolf — a Democrat — requiring prison guards and other state workers to get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing. The guards say they should not have to be tested weekly unless inmates and prison vendors are, too.

Why, I have to ask, was it important for Mr Jones to point out, in the manner he did, for emphasis, that Governor Wolf is a Democrat? He is, but that’s hardly germane to the story. After all, aren’t unions primarily Democratic, politically?

The lawsuit spells it out this way: “The commonwealth’s failure to apply the ‘vaccinate or weekly test’ rule to all individuals in the congregate setting unnecessarily increases the risk to the health and safety” of union members.

Interesting argument, but I’m not buying it. I believe the only people risking the health and safety of union members are the union members themselves.

By refusing vaccination, and then fighting to skip out on COVID-19 testing, these state employees are not only risking their own health. They’re imposing the consequences of their decisions on a vulnerable population. Testing prisoners and vendors doesn’t stop unvaccinated guards from contracting COVID-19. It simply allows those guards to sidestep a vaccination mandate the president of the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association derided as “a slap in the face” while members expressed their strong opposition. More importantly, it allows them to continue to contract and spread COVID-19 among a population of incarcerated people who are unable to leave the facilities, and thus are particularly vulnerable.

Do these three paragraphs even go together? Mr Jones states that the “only people risking the health and safety of union members are the union members themselves,” but then goes on to claim that the union members are concomitantly harming the prisoners.

There are those who believe that as convicted criminals, state inmates deserve any condition, no matter how bad, that comes from their imprisonment. I don’t, especially after watching 26 wrongfully convicted Philadelphians get released since December of 2016. Twenty-four of those innocent people were Black, which makes sense, since 47% of the state’s 37,000 prisoners were Black as of July 30, even though Black people make up about 12% of Pennsylvania’s population.

Nowhere does it seem to occur to Mr Jones that 47% of the incarcerated prisoners have committed somewhere close to 47% of the crimes. He just throws those numbers out there as though readers will see them as obviously unfair. The Philadelphia Tribune, a black community newspaper, reported that about 86% of the city’s 2020 499 homicides were black, while 84% of Philly’s 2,236 non-fatal shootings were black. And, as is always the case, the shooters are around 90% probable to be the same race as their victims.

That means this is not just a major health issue. It is also an issue of racial justice. In a criminal system where Black people are disproportionately imprisoned, and wrongfully convicted far more often than their white counterparts, I’m forced to ask a simple question: How many more wrongfully convicted Black prisoners are sitting inside, waiting to be infected with a virus that could very well give them a death sentence for a crime they didn’t commit?

Why, then, does Mr Jones object to the union’s claim that the guards shouldn’t be singled out, but that everybody, the inmates and vendors, should also be tested? It would take only one vendor bringing in supplies or food, making contact with one prisoner, to pass on the virus to the incarcerated population. We already know that vaccination, while it may reduce the probability of contracting the virus, and apparently does lessen the severity of symptoms in infected persons, can still be transmitted from one vaccinated but infected individual to another person, vaccinated or not. The Centers for Disease Control stated, on August 26, 2021:

    Vaccines are playing a crucial role in limiting spread of the virus and minimizing severe disease. Although vaccines are highly effective, they are not perfect, and there will be vaccine breakthrough infections. Millions of Americans are vaccinated, and that number is growing. This means that even though the risk of breakthrough infections is low, there will be thousands of fully vaccinated people who become infected and able to infect others, especially with the surging spread of the Delta variant.

Yet Mr Jones just waves off the union’s concerns, as though they cannot be real.

Everyone who works with a vulnerable population should be vaccinated. From teachers who work with students who are not yet eligible for vaccination, to hospital workers who are exposed to those with compromised immune systems, to prison guards who work with incarcerated people in a closed environment.

If Mr Jones feels that way, why does he not agree that the vendors who serve the prison ought to have to be vaccinated or subjected to frequent testing? Indeed, since we know that the vaccinated can still contract and spread the virus, and if his concern is really the spread of COVID-19, why wouldn’t he support mandatory frequent testing to the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike? With his greatly stated concerns for black prisoners, why isn’t he concerned that the areas with the highest concentration of black residents are also the areas with the lowest vaccination rates?

The prisoners? They can’t be forced, because that would constitute assault. But Mr Jones should want them all vaccinated and frequently tested.

If our prison guards want to work without getting vaccinated, they are well within their rights to do so, but they should be prepared to find employment somewhere else.

The truth is simple: Mr Jones would love to see the number of prison guards cut, and cut dramatically, to force the cutting of the number of prisoners.

Mr Jones sees this whole issue through the lens of ‘racial justice,’ but, in fact, racial justice is a contradiction in terms. Justice, to be justice, must be handled without regard to race, and Mr Jones does not like that concept at all.

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Philadelphia public schools: will this school year be like last school year?

Governor Tom Wolf’s (D-PA) authoritarian dictates during 2020 pushed the Republicans who control the state legislature to set up two constitutional amendments to rein in a tin-pot dictator, something that certainly sounds familiar to Kentuckians! Well, though those constitutional amendments passed, Governor Wolf found a loophole, getting the state’s Secretary of Health to issue a mask mandate for public schools, but now Mr Wolf is angry because some districts are interpreting ‘exemption’ requirements very loosely. We have previously noted that some districts had chosen not to require masks, and some of the Karens were suing the school district, though they didn’t have the courage to identify themselves.

In the City of Brotherly Love, the public schools have a vaccine mandate, sort of:

    20,000 Philly schools employees must get vaccinated by Sept. 30. Here’s what happens if they don’t.

    If they choose to not get vaccinated, district workers will have to be COVID-19 tested twice a week, and they lose access to a bank of 10 “quarantine leave days.”

    by Kristen A. Graham | Monday, September 13, 2021

    The Philadelphia School District’s 20,000 employees must be vaccinated for COVID-19 by Sept. 30, but they won’t lose their jobs if they opt not to get the shot.

    If they choose to not get vaccinated, teachers, administrators, and support staff — as well as contractors — will have to be COVID-19 tested twice a week, and they lose access to a bank of 10 “quarantine leave days” that allow them to be absent from work with pay if they’re sick with the coronavirus or must isolate because of exposure.

    All employees, regardless of vaccination status, are already tested weekly.

    “The testing provider will return to schools for a second time each week to test partially vaccinated or unvaccinated staff,” Larisa Shambaugh, the district’s chief talent officer, said in an email to staff. “If these employees do not test two times a week, they will be subject to discipline.”

We can see what they are doing here.

COVID testing is unpleasant. A nurse sticks a long stick mounted swab up your nose to try to get material from your sinuses. The Centers for Disease Control said, on August 26, 2021:

    Vaccines are playing a crucial role in limiting spread of the virus and minimizing severe disease. Although vaccines are highly effective, they are not perfect, and there will be vaccine breakthrough infections. Millions of Americans are vaccinated, and that number is growing. This means that even though the risk of breakthrough infections is low, there will be thousands of fully vaccinated people who become infected and able to infect others, especially with the surging spread of the Delta variant.

Since the fully vaccinated can, and do, spread the virus, there’s no logic in letting the fully vaccinated escape testing, if the goal is to prevent the spread of the virus, so the Philadelphia public schools were mandating continued testing of the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated. But, if the vaccinated are subjected to the same testing regime as the unvaccinated, then there’s no particular incentive to those who are vaccine hesitant to take the jab. Thus, the school system had to make it worse, by mandating testing twice a week rather than once.

Further down in the Inquirer:

    Most district unions have endorsed the mandate, including the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which represents 13,000 educators, paraprofessionals, and school nurses. . . . .

    PFT has, in fact, called on the district to require COVID-19 testing for all students. Children are now only tested if they display symptoms during the school day, or if they participate in contact sports or extracurricular activities like band or choir.

If the goal is to prevent the spread of the virus, why not test the students? It’s simple: unless a student’s parents have agreed, in writing, for their child to be tested, something which will be the case for those who sign permission slips for their kids to “participate in contact sports or extracurricular activities like band or choir,” testing students would be considered a physical assault.

If you’ve ever had a COVID test, you know what I mean: while it does not actually harm the subject, it’s a hugely uncomfortable experience that could be used to question prisoners at Guantanamo. If I had a kid in the public schools, and the school system forcibly tested him, I would soon be several million dollars wealthier.

    But Unite Here Local 634, the union that represents food service workers and some school climate staff, is not pleased by the vaccination mandate, said Nicole Hunt, president.

    “I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Hunt said. “For the School District to mandate the vaccine, people will just leave. This is the most vacancies I’ve ever seen.”

The union noted that there were 195 vacant positions in its unionized jobs, and the Inquirer noted that the school district was already short on crossing guards and school bus drivers, something we have already noted.

The Philadelphia School District stated that there were 202,944 students enrolled in the 2020-2021 academic year; the numbers hadn’t been updated for this fall at the time of this writing, and was, in fact, last updated on February 19, 2021, when the schools were almost all ‘virtual.’

Interestingly, though the 2020 census put the city’s non-Hispanic white population at 34.3%, the school district says that only 14% of the student body population are non-Hispanic white. Non-Hispanic blacks make up 38.3% of the city’s population, but 52% of the student body. The other student body percentages are fairly close to their percentage of the population, which tell us one thing: white Philadelphians don’t trust the city’s public schools and are sending their kids to private or parochial schools. We have already noted that the city zip code areas with the highest black percentage of the population have the lowest vaccination rates, meaning that it is probable that a higher percentage of the student body are unvaccinated than normal. Of course, since none of the vaccines have been approved for use in children under 12, the vaccinated percentage of the student body in kindergarten through the fifth grade must be virtually zero.

But those kids can’t be tested unless their parents approve, and even with approval, who wants to be the nurse forcing a swab up into the sinuses of a struggling second grader?

And now there’s this:

    2 weeks into the school year, COVID-19 has closed the first Philly public school

    Learning will continue during the Emlen Elementary building closure; teachers will be instructing students remotely.

    by Kristen A. Graham | Tuesday, September 14, 2021

    Two weeks into the new term, COVID-19 has temporarily closed the first Philadelphia School District building.

    Emlen Elementary, in East Mount Airy, will be shut for in-person learning until Sept. 24, officials announced in a letter sent to families. The K-5 school enrolls about 300 students, all of whom are too young to be vaccinated.

    “Due to multiple positive cases of COVID-19 in our school, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH) has determined that our school building will temporarily close from 9-13-21 to 9-23-21 to help stem the spread of the virus,” principal Tammy Thomas wrote in a letter to Emlen families sent Monday. “Students and staff may not return to our school building during this time.”

    Learning will continue during the building closure; teachers will be instructing students remotely, as they did for most students for the entirety of the 2020-21 school year.

    Students who did not share a classroom with an employee or student who tested positive for COVID-19 do not need to quarantine, the letter said.

Now that’s interesting: does this mean that the school district is sharing the identities of those who have tested positive, or simply specifying classrooms?

    Schools officials are following Philadelphia Department of Public Health guidelines to make decisions about when to quarantine students, entire classes, or schools.

    Three or more cases in one classroom requires the class to quarantine; three or more classes across a grade requires a grade to quarantine; six or more cases across grades within a school within 14 days triggers temporary building closure.

    COVID-19 cases among school-aged children are rising sharply.

There’s more at the original, but I can’t be the only person who thinks it probable that we’re going to have another year in public education like the last school year.

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The #VaccineMandate is already causing nurses to quit

We have previously noted that vaccine mandates in the nursing profession would have some rather negative effects in an already short-staffed position.

    Lewis County Health System to “pause” maternity services due to staff unwilling to vaccinate

    By Julie Abbass | September 11, 2021

    LOWVILLE — The maternity department at the Lewis County Health System is the first casualty of staffing challenges made worse by health care workers prioritizing remaining unvaccinated for COVID-19 over their jobs with the hospital.

    Because of a number of vacant positions in the department already, the resignations of six staff members this week combined with the looming possibility that seven other unvaccinated people in maternity may follow suit made it clear to the Health System’s leadership that they needed to hit “pause” on services provided by that department.

    “We are unable to safely staff the service after Sept. 24. The number of resignations received leaves us no choice but to pause delivering babies at Lewis County General Hospital,” Chief Executive Officer Gerald R. Cayer said. “It is my hope that the (state) Department of Health will work with us in pausing the service rather than closing the maternity department.”

    In addition to the maternity ward, there are five other departments whose services may be curtailed in some way if a significant number of staff members decide to leave their employment rather than be vaccinated for COVID-19.

    The “pause” will begin on Sept. 25, two days before the final deadline for healthcare worker vaccination across the state for those who chose to continue their employment.

    Mr. Cayer, who spoke at a news conference on Friday afternoon in the county board room, said 30 people have resigned from their health care roles since the vaccine was mandated on Aug. 23, 20 of whom worked in clinical positions like nurses, therapists and technicians, totalling 70% of the resignations so far.

There’s more at the original, but, further down:

    Regardless of that perspective, however, there are still 165 of the approximately 650 employees who are unvaccinated and have yet to declare their intention to stay or go. About 73% of this group provide clinical services, Mr. Cayer said in a separate interview.

    In the nursing home at the health system, there has only been one resignation so far, but there are 48 people who have not yet taken action.

Doing the math, 165 unvaccinated employees out of 650 is fully a quarter of the staff, 25.38%. If 73% of the unvaccinated employees are clinicians, that’s 120 of them.

The Associated Press version of the story stated:

    Cayer said 30 people have resigned since the vaccine mandate was announced last month, most of whom held clinical positions like nurses, therapists and technicians. Thirty others have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, he said.

That’s a small sample size, but if thirty have quit and thirty have knuckled under — an expression I believe appropriate, given that they had plenty of time to be vaccinated earlier, and thus the delay in doing so seems indicative of a determined reluctance — that works out to a 50% compliance rate.

Hospitals can try moving staff around, and the article noted that there were some nurses who were currently in administrative positions rather than in direct patient care, but eventually this is going to have a real impact on patient care.

I have said it before: I believe that, potential side effects be damned, it is wiser to choose to take the vaccines than not. But I also believe that the decision to take, or not take, the vaccines, ought to be the free choice of every individual.

More, I have to wonder: among those who did not want to be vaccinated, but felt that they had to knuckle under to keep their jobs, how will their employee morale be after this? Will they do their jobs as well after having been forced to comply as they did previously? Will their loyalty to their employers suffer as a result?

No one I have seen has been asking that question, and employee morale can be a very difficult thing to measure, but one thing seems certain: these mandates will not improve morale in the slightest.

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Andy Beshear is displeased that the state legislature refused to do his bidding, but it’s his own fault

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY)

As I said, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) regrets having called the General Assembly into special session, but he has no one to blame but himself. On July 10, 2020, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported that Mr Beshear stated 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.

The Governor refused to call a special session of the legislature during 2020. Republican candidates for the legislature ran against the Governor and his edicts, and the voters rewarded them with 14 additional seats in the state House of Representatives, and two in the state Senate.

Then, as promised, the huge Republican majorities enacted several new laws, over the Governor’s vetoes, restricting his ’emergency’ authority under KRS 39A. So, what did Mr Beshear do then? He went to Democrat sycophant Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd, and got the Judge to enjoin enforcement of House Bill 1, Senate Bill 1, Senate Bill 2, and House Joint Resolution 77.

Can anyone be surprised that the General Assembly is not well disposed to the Governor, and not exactly inclined to do his bidding?

    Beshear rebukes Kentucky legislature for preventing him from issuing a mask mandate

    By Jack Brammer | Updated: September 10, 2021 | 3:23 PM EDT

    A frustrated Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear chided the Republican-led state legislature Friday for getting rid of the state’s mask mandate for public schools and banning any type of statewide mask mandate.

    The legislature’s decision on the mask issues was “wrong” and puts him in a position of trying to fight the alarming spread of the coronavirus pandemic “with one hand tied behind my back,” said the Democratic governor.

    If he had the authority, Beshear said, he would immediately implement a masking mandate for indoor settings and hopes more businesses would impose mask mandates. He also said he encourages school districts to “do the right thing” and require universal masking in schools. Local school officials will have the option of what to do about students wearing masks.

Well, that’s just it: Kentuckians voted for Republicans in last November’s elections because they were fed up with the Governor’s executive orders, and the mask mandate was probably the one which rankled them the most. When Mr Beshear said that if he had the authority he would immediately implement as mask mandate, he was stating the very reason that Republicans enjoy a 75-25 majority in the state House and a 30-8 majority in the state Senate.

    The governor used football analogies to describe the situation, saying for 18 months he has been able “to quarterback Kentucky through this pandemic. I have made the tough calls, sometimes the unpopular calls and I have taken the hits that go along with them.”

Well, that’s just it: a quarterback is only 1/11 of the offense, and without the other ten men on the field, even Tom Brady couldn’t do anything. Governor Beshear thought he could play the game by himself, and leave the other ten players on the sidelines.

Heck, not even on the sidelines, but locked outside of the locker room.

Would the General Assembly have been more willing to play ball with the Governor, if he hadn’t insulted them at every turn, if he hadn’t tried to keep them off the field? Well, who can say, given that he didn’t try it? But instead of trying to put together five offensive linemen, three receivers and two running backs, the Governor created four angry defensive linemen, three mean linebackers, and four fast and hungry defensive backs. So, he got chased back into his own end zone, and sacked for a safety.

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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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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.