☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Wednesday, December 29, 2021 ☙ FIVE DAYS 🦠

Today's roundup includes a correction and analysis of the CDC’s new FIVE DAY quarantine, NFL news, domestic vaccine passport news, Boris Johnson admits 90% of UK's ICUs are injected folks; and more…

Happy Wednesday, C&C! Sorry about the late delivery, it’s due to a midnight stubbed toe in the hotel room bathroom, which now looks like a serial killer’s fantasy crime scene, and which generated a black cloud of profanity, now floating somewhere off the east coast of South Carolina and interfering with Delta flight routes.

Today’s roundup includes a correction and analysis of the CDC’s new FIVE DAY quarantine, NFL news, domestic vaccine passport news, Boris Johnson admits 90% of UK’s ICUs are injected folks; and more…

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

🪖 Rapid Response Team, prepare for deployment. You’ve enjoyed some extended leave, but in the New Year we’ll be mobilizing the RRT for action.

🪖 I’m called for volunteers for a new team: C&C writers. I know there are a lot of good writers in the C&C army. If you have decent writing aptitude and a desire to help, consider joining the C&C Writing Team. We’ll be coordinating short, well-defined writing assignments like letters to editors. To join, send an email with your contact info to writingteam at pm.me.

Expect assignments starting next week, in 2022.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 CORRECTION. As you know, there’s nothing I hate worse than having to admit a correction. Even though Coffee & Covid is FAR more accurate than any corporate media source or government agency, and one mistake wouldn’t really affect our record, I’m not taking the rap for this one. It was the CDC. They must have announced the new five-day quarantine rule to media BEFORE updating their quarantine guidance website — which is where I got the information about 7-day quarantines for yesterday’s report. The website has been updated now.

The correct new CDC policy — as was quickly pointed out in the comments by several alert readers — is that the CDC now only requires FIVE DAYS of quarantine — injected or not — after a person is exposed or even after testing positive. That’s down from 14 days. So, they cut it by almost two thirds.

There’s even a no-quarantine option if quarantine “isn’t feasible.” Like if you have a major football game to play or something. Then you can just wear a mask.

So they dramatically reduced the length of quarantine during the middle of a massive surge in cases. Isn’t that interesting? You’d figure they would have a pretty solid reason to do it now, right?

The CDC’s website explains that “The change is motivated by science demonstrating that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness, generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after.”

Science!

That’s pretty funny. It’s not any NEW science. If you could take the CDC’s binky away and make it say what study it was allegedly relying on, the study would have to be MONTHS and MONTHS old. The fact that transmission occurs during the early period of infection is so well-established at this point that nobody’s even talking about it anymore.

So the CDC is punking us again. Dummies.

Isn’t the truth that, with so many people testing positive, we just can’t afford to have everyone off of work for two weeks? Starting with the NFL.

Oh. One more thing. The CDC treats uninjected people a little differently than the fully injected: uninjected are supposed to wear masks for five more days after coming out of quarantine. And guess what other group is also excluded from the “fully vaccinated” group and has to mask up, along with the dirty uninjected, pure-blooded group?

That’s right! People who were injected more than six months ago but haven’t been boosted, that’s who. Welcome to the shunned group, suckers!

🏈 The NFL and the NFLPA (the players’ union) announced that they are ALREADY close to an agreement to adopt the CDC’s new five-day quarantine policy. That was fast, huh? I guess they needed to do SOMETHING, since so many players have tested positive that it has basically shut the season down. If players can quarantine for only five days, instead of fourteen, that neatly puts the players back onto the field just in time for the next game.

And that’s good for business.

Don’t even THINK about there being some kind of connection between the NFL’s testing woes and the CDC’s sudden, unannounced, poorly-justified switch in position. That’s just kooky talk.

🔥 Did you notice how it only took about ten seconds to go from “the winter of death” to “it’s not a federal issue” and only “five days of isolation?” And right in the middle of spiking Omicron cases.

The Narrative is falling apart faster than they can stitch it together.

🤡 Joe Biden told reporters yesterday that he would order a vaccine passport requirement for domestic air travel — but only if his medical team recommended it.

That was possibly the most cretinous, witless and ignorant thing in the long and woeful litany of imbecilic things that Joe Biden has ever uttered out loud. And I apologize for offending imbeciles by the comparison.

A lot of people have asked me about domestic travel restrictions over the last year. Don’t you think that if they COULD HAVE ordered a vaxx passport for domestic travel, they would have? Or required proof of injection to return to the US? Especially when returning from one of the disreputable, dirty countries, like South Africa?

He can’t. Either type of restriction would be constitutionally radioactive. Biden can’t restrict Americans from traveling within the US or from coming BACK to the US. And he knows it full well, which is why he deflected when the reporters were yipping like a pack of wild hyenas, practically begging Biden to please, PLEASE order the passport system, so all those deplorables can finally be thrown off the planes.

Think about it. The states that formed the Union were originally separate independent nations. One of the most essential features of bringing those separate nations into one United States, one of its ultimate benefits, was the political and economic advantage of simplifying travel and commerce between and among those separate nations. The WHOLE IDEA was to make it possible for Americans to travel and do business in any state they wanted, without restrictions.

And that’s exactly what the Constitution insures.

Reporters are SO ignorant. The funny thing is, they think they are so smart. That’s what public education has come to: building up kids’ self-esteem so they THINK they’re smart, while failing to teach them basic life skills so they are certain to be dolts.

In particular, a domestic travel ban on the uninjected would fail the simplest legal test for constitutionality: the ‘rational basis’ test. How does it make sense to stop an un-injected Floridian from boarding a plane to Atlanta to “slow the spread” or whatever, when that Floridian can just drive up there instead?

Are you going to setup checkpoints on every road crossing a state line, genius? Will you order healthy, un-injected people to stay at home, like Austria? Because there’s no way to control their movements once they leave the house.

The reporters crave the passport system, not to “slow the spread” but to punish un-injected people or maybe, more charitably, to coerce them to take the jabs, just like the reporters did.

A domestic travel passport system would never survive judicial review. I’m more sure of that than I am that OSHA injection mandates are unconstitutional — which I’m pretty dang sure about. It’s hard to know which one to scorn most — Biden or the reporters. I guess the reporters. It’s a tough call.

💉 In a published video interview yesterday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that “the overwhelming majority of people currently ending up in intensive care in our hospitals are people who are not boosted.” He added that “over 90%” of ICU patients were “not boosted.”

So … I guess that also means that 90% of people in the ICU in Britain are vaccinated, right? I mean, I suppose that “unboosted” technically includes uninjected people, but that doesn’t really work, does it? Johnson could have easily said, 90% of people in the ICU were “not boosted or not vaccinated.” But he just said “not boosted.”

So anyway, I suppose that where we’re at now is: it’s the boosted versus everyone else. Are you surprised that they are using the same shaming techniques against the previously fully-vaccinated? You shouldn’t be. After all, the fully-vaccinated taught them those techniques work, by giving in and getting the first set of jabs.

🔥 Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo sent a letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra yesterday, accusing Biden of intentionally holding up monoclonal antibody treatments for Floridians. Fox News reported that the Biden Administration recently “paused” shipments of Regeneron and Eli Lilly’s mABs following claims the treatments are uneffective against the Omicron variant.

But Florida says that the mABs still work against Delta, even if they don’t work against the Omicron variant. Also, Ladapo’s letter referenced Biden’s comment yesterday about there being no federal solution to the pandemic. So.

🔥 An article out of local WCAX-Vermont reported this week that Covid-positive Vermonters with NO SYMPTOMS are clogging up the state’s emergency rooms.

According to the article, asymptomatic people flooding the ERs to get a free PCR test. For some reason.

At first, I struggled to understand why people would flood emergency rooms during the holidays for free Covid tests when they aren’t. even. sick. Then I realized that a positive test means two weeks of paid time off. So, why not try your luck? You might get a nice holiday break out of it.

Sometimes I think the government has totally screwed up all the incentives. It’s like they don’t know what they’re doing or something.

😷 Yesterday morning, CNN’s TV-doctor Leanna Wen doubled-down on her previous comments that cloth masks don’t work. Last time, she said:

> “Cloth masks are not appropriate for this pandemic. It’s not appropriate for Omicron, it was not appropriate for Delta, Alpha, or any of the previous variants either because we’re dealing with something that’s airborne. We’re dealing with a virus that’s extremely contagious.”

Now she’s been tweeting about it. Yesterday, while pushing industrial-grade masks, she tweeted that “A simple cloth mask won’t do when we are dealing with a highly contagious, airborne virus.”

Hahahaha! Now you tell us!

Think about this for a second. Why the switch now? What could have changed? Don’t give me “the science is evolving.” The science about cloth masks has been around since before the pandemic even started. Yet they’ve hung on to the masks like an old man hangs on to a coupon for a free car wash.

It’s not like they’re admitting they were wrong or anything. They’re trying to bluff their way through! You should watch the video clip. Wen explains to two credulous chuckleheads that cloth masks are totally useless against airborne viruses — without a single comment by anyone about the MASSIVE SHIFT in mask position. That’s how you know they’re lying. When you make a mistake, you admit it, with chagrin and with an explanation.

But even if they WERE “just wrong,” why should we listen to them now, given their track record? There’s plenty of pre-Covid science concluding that surgical masks do NOT stop influenza in hospital settings.

I’d like to know how much stock these people own in companies that manufacture and sell N95 masks. Wouldn’t that be interesting to find out?

📉 It’s too early to say, but there is some initial indication that Florida’s cases may have already peaked on Christmas Day, and are now headed back down. If it holds, that would make Florida’s Winter wave experience closer to South Africa’s, which saw a short, thin spike — completely different than the previous waves.

Statewide yesterday, the percentage of Covid ICUs to general hospitalizations is down to 17.7% over the last seven (7) days. That’s the lowest it’s been since HHS started reporting in July 2020. The previous low was 18.4% — on Monday. Until 5 days ago, it had never hit below 20%.

So, it’s looking really good. Stand by for updates.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! I’ll see you back here tomorrow (sometime) as we hang out together for the final days of 2021 (not 2020, even though the last two years sort of all run together).

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