They Can't Admit They're Wrong, So They Double Down

Where's the big post-Thanksgiving surge of the 'rona?  Nowhere.  Didn't happen.  The trajectory remains unchanged.

And this doesn't fit the narrative, does it?

A SHOCKING AND UNFORESEEABLE RESULT: Florida’s Unemployment Claims Decline Sharply As State Remains Open. The Insta-Wife and I spent some time down in Panhandle Florida last week talking to servers, cashiers and others who work in wage-and-tip jobs, and they were all rather smug about Florida remaining open, and they strongly preferred their situation to that in places like California and New York. Their attitude toward those places was a mixture of smugness, and pity.

Plus: “The California experience was especially perplexing. Despite strict COVID-19 rules, the state has set records for new cases all week, including more than 50,000 on Thursday. Florida, with no business restrictions, reported 13,148 new cases.”

And what explains this? 

California - the country's largest and richest state - is the new epicenter of America's coronavirus crisis, with unprecedented surges of seriously infected patients threatening to overwhelm hospitals and overflow morgues.

The state is reporting unnerving numbers: California has set nationwide records for new cases again and again in the past week - most recently on Wednesday, when it posted more than 41,000 infections. If California were a country, it would be among the world leaders in new covid-19 cases, ahead of India, Germany and Britain.

The number of available beds in intensive care units is plummeting. In the San Joaquin Valley, hospitals ran out over the weekend, resorting to "surge capacity." And in Southern California, a region that includes Los Angeles and San Diego, ICU capacity dipped to just 0.5% Wednesday.

I remember March--"2 weeks to bend the curve", to give the hospitals time to ramp up capacity.  Initially, there was so little capacity needed that 2 hospital ships were sent home and field hospitals set up in parks and stadiums went mostly unused.  And that was before everyone wore masks. 

So here we are in California, 9 months later, with some of the most draconian lockdown rules in the country and a mask Stasi that would make even Erich Honecker blush, and the 'rona is seemingly more out of control today than it was in early March when we still had some semblance of freedom.  How can this possibly be?

And why have we done nothing to increase ICU capacity?  It's not like hospitals haven't had 9 months to prepare.

And then you have everyone from the mayor of San Jose to the mayor of San Francisco to the Speaker of the House of Representatives to the governor of California, all violating the governor's own virus-related restrictions.  And that's just in California.  They must know the rules are onerous and useless--yet they not only enforce them on the rest of us, they double down and then flout them.  Among many problems with that scheme, hypocrisy notwithstanding, you can only double so many times before the result gets too big and you can't double anymore.  Then what do you do?

When the facts contradict your expectations, believe the facts.  Mask mandates and lockdowns and business restrictions have been an abject failure at stopping the spread of a virus that has over a 99% survival rate for those who get it.  It's a profane bizarro world where that is ignored and too many people treat the loss of freedom and society's common sense as a completely reasonable reaction.

Update:  I've been arguing forever that the number of cases isn't relevant, the number of deaths is.  But for those of you who continue to argue cases, how do you refute this?