Closed again

[Frank Cox]

Frankly, since theatres were allowed to reopen after the big shutdown of 2020 the virus didn't really have a huge effect on my life and what I do during a day. I was only allowed to have 30 people here for the shows for a few months but there was only one day when more than 30 people came to a show and I had to turn anyone away. The overall business was and is far below what it was before, of course, but even with less people coming to the shows I've still been doing what I do. Selling tickets, running movies and selling popcorn is pretty much the same routine for five people as it was for fifty, there's just less trash to pick up after the show. Checking people's ID at the door is a new wrinkle and a bit of a nuisance but even that turns into just one more thing to do when a customer walks in the door.

We've never been the kind of people who go out and go to a lot of places, so life continued along pretty much like it did before; I just had to remember to take a mask with me whenever I did go out but that's a relatively minor adjustment.

Now omicron arrives and my theatre is closed again and everything seems to have suddenly regressed to what it was in the spring of 2020.

It does seem like this should have been avoidable if not for all of the graduates from the Facebook School of Medicine, and it would be easy to get really angry. But why add more stress; I'll just try not to go there.

[Harold Hallikainen]

My "excess death" chart is still being updated daily at https://hallikainen.org/cv/ . It shows that since January 2020, about a million more people have died in the US than were expected to die.

[Steve Guttag]

The CDC Excess Deaths can be found here:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/c....htm#dashboard

[Bobby Henderson]

The situation is pretty horrible. And it's not just deaths caused directly by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. When a hospital's treatment capacity gets overwhelmed then everyone needing hospitalization gets adversely affected. Someone suffering a heart attack or stroke may face a very desperate situation if all the beds are filled with COVID-19 patients.

We're hitting new records in drug overdose deaths, more than 100,000 in the April 2020 to April 2021 period. The suicide rate is up. Isolation has not been very good to lots of people. People are putting off routine health screenings. That may result in an increase of deaths due to cancer, heart disease and diabetes. American life expectancy has dropped by nearly 2 years, down to 77 from 78.8 in 2019. That's the largest decrease in life expectancy since World War II.

[Mike Blakesley]

They're passing along bullshit about the numbers of COVID-19 deaths being faked (the trope of cancer deaths or car accident deaths being labeled as covid to get gub'ment money).

I know there is a lot of nonsense floating around about Covid but the whole thing of random deaths being labeled as Covid-caused to get government money absolutely has some truth to it, or at least it used to. I have a friend who is a county medical department head and he told me (very early in the pandemic) that you could die in any random way, but if you had exhibited ANY type of Covid symptoms at all, they would figure out a way to label it as Covid. People will do almost anything to score a bunch of money. I don't know if this kind of thing is still going on or not, but I totally wouldn't put it past anybody in government.

As for the whole selfishness, me-first attitude... why is that surprising? The whole world is now operating on instant gratification combined with a big dose of greed. The government keeps flopping around like a fish out of water. Nobody has time to digest all the "information" floating around, and they especially don't have the time to do enough research to determine what's real and what's speculation and what's outright nonsense....so they turn to their media of choice which they expect to distill the available information into a sensible honest summary. But the media decided to take sides, and then they decided that money was more important than accuracy or even honesty, so here we are today.

If you listen to George Carlin's albums from 1988 until his death, he predicted almost everything that's happening today, from viruses and diseases and catastrophes all the way to the breakdown of society that we're now starting to see.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I know there is a lot of nonsense floating around about Covid but the whole thing of random deaths being labeled as Covid-caused to get government money absolutely has some truth to it, or at least it used to. I have a friend who is a county medical department head and he told me (very early in the pandemic) that you could die in any random way, but if you had exhibited ANY type of Covid symptoms at all, they would figure out a way to label it as Covid. People will do almost anything to score a bunch of money. I don't know if this kind of thing is still going on or not, but I totally wouldn't put it past anybody in government.

As for the whole selfishness, me-first attitude... why is that surprising? The whole world is now operating on instant gratification combined with a big dose of greed. The government keeps flopping around like a fish out of water. Nobody has time to digest all the "information" floating around, and they especially don't have the time to do enough research to determine what's real and what's speculation and what's outright nonsense....so they turn to their media of choice which they expect to distill the available information into a sensible honest summary. But the media decided to take sides, and then they decided that money was more important than accuracy or even honesty, so here we are today.

If you listen to George Carlin's albums from 1988 until his death, he predicted almost everything that's happening today, from viruses and diseases and catastrophes all the way to the breakdown of society that we're now starting to see.

Mike, Perhaps ask your friend what other illnesses there are that can cause death and have the same symptoms as COVID. COVID symptoms are actually pretty unique ....

[Harold Hallikainen]

I suspect there are many causes in a particular death, so we can't attribute a particular death to one thing unless, perhaps, someone who is otherwise healthy gets hit by a car. But, in the past two years, we have had about a million more people die in the US than expected. The link Steve posted ( https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/c....htm#dashboard ) is interesting. You can see the seasonal variation in expected deaths and then how the past couple years compares. My graph at https://hallikainen.org/cv/ removes the seasonal effects by comparing the death count in a particular week to that same week in 2017 though 2019.

Harold

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

It may have been that people were dropping too fast to make detailed evaluations of each one. If they know the person had covid and died, while he had it then COVID for sure would be listed as the cause.

[Martin Brooks]

They couldn't have picked a worse name if they had chosen "Andromeda!"

Most people don't understand the Greek alphabet and how items in a series or variations of something are named with Greek letters.
The word "omicron" just sounds dark and mysterious and only serves to create fear in the minds of people who don't understand naming conventions.

They should use a YY-MM (year-month) naming convention, instead. That way, omicron would be named "2112."

A far cooler name if you ask me!

Scaring people is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. People need to be scared into getting tested, vaccinated and wearing masks. In NYC, people are definitely scared because we have a ton of street booth testing sites and up until recently, I would never see anyone getting tested. But in the last few weeks, I see long lines at every single one in spite of the cold weather. And I have to assume that people who are scared enough to get tested are also scared enough to get vaccinated.

Earlier in the pandemic, it was elderly people who were the most vulnerable. But now, in NYC, it's 25-34 year olds who have the highest infection rate by far (1827 per 100,000 DAILY), followed by 18-24 (1569 per 100K), 35-44 (1072 per 100k), 13-17 (773 per 100K), 5-12 (740 per 100K), 45-54 (640 per 100K), 55-64 (417 per 100K), 0-4 (351 per 100K), 65-74 (267 per 100K), 75+ (183 per 100K). This is based on 7-day rolling average of daily new cases as of 12/18. Numbers have probably risen substantially since, since cases in NYS are now at the highest they ever were. 7-day rolling average of daily new cases statewide is 35,000 as of 12/26.

[Randy Stankey]

No. Scaring the population is bad...wrong, immoral, unethical, unfair, unjust...just plain no good! A worldwide news organization should never do such a thing. EVER!

It's okay to say something like, "Here's the score. Pay now or pay later." I haven't got a problem with setting rules; If you go outside, wear a mask and stay arm's length away from other people. I would even agree (under certain conditions) if they said that everybody is required to get vaccinated. No problem with any of those things.

Just the other day, I saw a news item come across my news feed. It was about some family (I don't remember where) that died on Christmas because their Christmas tree dried out and caught fire. They spent lots of time showing pictures of the family who died and had lots of interviews with neighbors and classmates of the family. There were scenes of the fire department putting out the fire. There were shots of the burned-out house, afterward.

Of course, I have seen "Christmas tree fire" stories every year since I can remember. That's not the point. My point is about the way the story was presented and the depths to which they sank just to make a buck. It's pretty sick...mentally ill...the way they stoop so low!

I don't have cable TV, nor do I receive OTA television. I have a television hooked to a streaming appliance but no commercial TV. I don't want it. Stuff like this is the reason why. I refuse to pay $100+ per month just to watch a hundred channels of rubbish like that! When I go to visit my parent's house on holidays and other occasions, I see people sitting around the living room sitting, slack-jawed, staring at the television and I feel shocked and horrified at what they are watching.

I feel just as shocked and horrified at things that news organizations do to sensationalize news in order to make a buck.

Mostly, I just turn it off.

[Frank Cox]

The town where I live is suddenly a ghost town. I don't know how much of that is due to it being Christmas week and how much is due to the virus, but I really haven't seen anyone outside all week other than a few people who are either shovelling snow or loading it into trucks.

We don't have a very large downtown commercial area anyway, but there's even less moving now.

[Mark Lane]

Things here feel like they are returning to 2019. Spider-man No Way Home has already exceeded The Rise of Skywalker that we showed at Christmas 2019.
Only a handful of people came in with a mask. The theater is full of people. Life seems to be returning to normal.
We are seeing good crowds and a lot of new people. Spiderman might be the best movie for us since summer of 2019.
I think people are finally getting tired of the unconstitutional shutdowns, half truths, and fear. I think people want to be a part of the solution but don't want to be manipulated.

[Mike Blakesley]

Mike, Perhaps ask your friend what other illnesses there are that can cause death and have the same symptoms as COVID.

Well first of all, he told me that early in the pandemic. I doubt he would say the same thing now. But I think what me meant was, if you died from a heart attack, but had Covid, they'd ilst it as a Covid death, or if you died of cancer, but had Covid, they'd list it as a Covid death, even though it was probably the heart attack or the cancer that actually did you in.

When my mom died (April 2020), I asked this same friend if they were going to show it as a Covid death and he said no, because she had had no indications of ever having Covid and had been staying home mostly alone for the month before she died.

For what it's worth, other than the occasional mask-wearer, things here are pretty much back to normal. We only have one case in our county. Crowds at the theatre have been good.

[Bobby Henderson]

I know there is a lot of nonsense floating around about Covid but the whole thing of random deaths being labeled as Covid-caused to get government money absolutely has some truth to it, or at least it used to.

The lady in charge of our county's health department told me flat out during one of my civic club's meeting the trope of hospitals making money off of classifying any death as COVID is 100% bullshit. She said it pisses her off every time she hears it.

First of all, for anyone who is already "killed by COVID" in a car accident who is the government paying? The coroner? The funeral home? Doctors and hospitals don't figure into that equation. Who is personally going to make the money off of falsifying a cause of death? Doing so would be a crime, one that is not without risk.

Next: of the millions of people hospitals have been treating for COVID-19, the hospitals are operating at way into net-loss territory. They're having to write off a giant amount of bills patients will never be able to pay off, if the patients survive. It's even worse when some average guy spends weeks in the ICU only to finally die. Who is paying that bill? Insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid cover only so much. The rest has to be written off (and used as a reason to continually increase health care costs). Hospitals and clinics generate most of their profits from elective services. The pandemic put a great deal of that real business on hold.

The federal government has had to provide a lot of funding aid to hospitals around the country to keep them operational just like they've had to do with so many other businesses. If anything the situation in the US health care industry is pretty bad. A pretty big number of health care workers have quit and are still quitting. Many of these workers are quitting because they're exhausted and disillusioned.

[Mike Blakesley]

The lady in charge of our county's health department told me flat out during one of my civic club's meeting the trope of hospitals making money off of classifying any death as COVID is 100% bullshit. She said it pisses her off every time she hears it.

Well....it's a big country, procedures are different in every locality so who knows? Maybe they are both right. It's water under the bridge now anyway.