Covid-19 After Action Report

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Now that Covid-19 is gone (I said it) we should be taking a look at who was right, who was wrong, what worked, and what didn’t for whenever it comes back

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On February 16, 2021, HWFO predicted that the Covid-19 epidemic would be gone by the middle of May. Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT) was very likely not to be 85% as claimed by Fauci and friends at the time because the prison system reached natural herd immunity in places like San Quentin, Folsom, and LA County at natural infection rates as low as 55%.

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Natural immunity to Covid was likely to be much higher than thought by the experts, because of asymptomatic spread and because of the lack of testing in the spring of 2020. The country probably started with around 36% natural immunity (see prior article), although it’s increasingly questionable how long that lasts.

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ZOMG GERMS!!!1!1one!eleventyone
The ZOMGs hid under their beds, wore three masks to the grocery store, virtue signaled to their friends on Facebook how much safer they were being than their peer group, applied social pressure to everyone they met, including strangers, and were the central fixture of what became known among its targets as “Covid Shaming.” It was a social distancing program vastly more macabre and effective than any government mandate, because they were running Cancel Culture dynamics in real time against their friends and family.

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YOLO SPEAKEASY
The YOLOs were a disparate band of rebels reacting against the ZOMGs. Some of them were people who didn’t think a virus with a 99.5% survival rate was worth this magnitude of fuss. Some didn’t think the fuss actually worked. Some thought that adding a few extra years to some old folks lives wasn’t worth sacrificing years off the young folks lives. Some were deep Trumpsters. Some were doing whatever the ZOMGs weren’t doing because they don’t like the ZOMGs. Some were simply extroverts of all stripes whose personality typing could not deal with locking themselves in a room for a year and a half.

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The formation of these two tribes was fascinating to watch from my point of view, because I’m allergic to tribal thought. The ZOMGs formed immediately and signaled their allegiance to each other by adopting one or more colored frames around their Facebook profile pictures, almost like getting a sports team tattoo. The formation of the YOLOs took longer, because they had to carefully feel all their other friends out in private to see who else was a YOLO, who was willing to sneak out of the house and have face to face contact, who was willing to risk ZOMG castigation and cancellation to have a drink with some friends. The YOLOs in border states were not fully formed as a social group until around October or November of 2020, because they had to form in secret, like ancient Christians avoiding being fed to the lions. And then they said “frick it, Thanksgiving” and “frick it, Christmas,” once they had a quorum. You Only Live Once.

And these two tribes had almost zero contact with each other. It was as if the country divided into two countries occupying the same land. And every epidemiological model that failed to account for that and presumed even mixing in a petri dish, which means every single one of them, was and is wrong. If any of those epidemiologists are reading this article now, they just had a sinking feeling in their stomach because they just realized I’m right.

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When Georgia became the first state in the union to reopen, the blue media mounted the greatest dogpile in epidemiological media history, foretelling worse doom than the Black Plague, and literally accusing governor Brian Kemp of “experimenting in human sacrifice.” In the Atlantic no less. As HWFO readers already know, they were doing this because their entire business model is clickbait outrage porn, but Blue America totally believed them because that’s what America does, blue and red. Well, the experiment is done. Georgia opened first and came out about average.

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“But the CDC said mask mandates worked!” you say. Well, sorta. According to CDC studies comparing “mask mandate” areas with “masks optional” areas, the difference in spread was 0.5% to 1.5%. Not a lot. And that difference may not have had anything to do with masks, because of how we as Americans used the masks. We all now know, as those of us paying attention have known since May of last year, that Covid is an airborne disease that is transmitted primarily by sharing stale air with a symptomatic carrier. 24 of 25 transmission cases for Covid were from symptomatic carriers, indoors, in enclosed environments. It spreads among family, friends, and inside apartment buildings and subways. But in the USA we wore them out and about, and then took them off when we got inside our homes. We took the masks off when they were most useful, and wore them proudly when they were the most stupid to wear. The masks were largely not a health and safety measure, they were a tribal totem to display to others how proud we were to be in the “compassion” tribe.

Which is exactly why everyone is still wearing them right now even though the CDC said we’re done with masking. Nobody wants to be mistaken for an evil uncaring individualist, or worse, a Republican.

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Maskers will become a permanent fixture of the environment, because wearing a mask is a very easy way to signal your moral superiority without having to actually do anything to help anyone. The billionaires will prevent the UN from re-banning gain of function research and something worse than Covid-19 will hit the air waves in a decade or less. And the world will continue to become more absurd.

Nobody will learn anything. The CDC has become a permanent allegory to “crying wolf.”

And Measles-19 (or whatever) is going to be lit, because it might be the actual wolf, while nobody is going to want to do this shite again.

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