Poor Kelby Krabbenhoft, forced to resign as CEO of Sanford Health . He crossed the wrong people by stating that as a post-COVID infectee he was free from having to wear a mask, being no longer contagious or at risk. Currently science is on his side, and the ND COVID-19 Department and the CDC agree that for 90 days the sufferer shouldn't be retested or requarantined. The New York Times reports that the data show immunity likely will last for years. No matter. The anti-science deflector shield is fully operational and the Covidian Guard ever at the ready.
There's a welter of COVID-related numbers out there which makes grasping what's going on tricky. We should avoid pandemic snapshots, such as former Fargo commissioner Mike Williams's comparison of North Dakota cases and deaths to Minnesota's. ND's charts were recently higher per capita than Minnesota's (the situation has likely reversed again), but looking at COVID deaths from the start of the pandemic to the day his letter was published put the latter state's total deaths per capita much higher than ND's.
Joe Biden promises to make Americans wear masks everywhere for 100 days. This despite mask-wearing in the 75-90% range across the country to no avail. We might have to wear masks for years, given their ineffectiveness. If we could get people to stop watching kitten videos and playing fantasy football long enough to actually look around with a gimlet eye, they would discover that there's been a major surge in COVID in many states—Hawaii, Montana, West Virginia, on and on. Michigan, despite a tinpot tyrant shutting down everything, including gardening stores, is suffering a major surge. These upward spikes usually follow mask mandates, interestingly enough.
The same with many countries: Spain, Israel, England, the Philippines, Peru, Belgium...you get the point. All of these jumps followed mask mandates and in some cases harsh lockdowns. Solution? Double down on what doesn't work, drive economies into the ground, starve children in developing countries by the tens of millions, and bring Orwell's vision to fruition: a boot stamping on a (masked) human face forever. Be sure to remember that our leaders do this out of concern for us.
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Nelson: Science is useless against a panicked people We've entered a new age. Let's give it a warm, fuzzy title: how about CoronaReich?
The Danish have just finished a randomized controlled study of mask effectiveness, the first of its kind. Six thousand subjects were split into mask and non-mask groups; the control group had an infection rate of 2.1% while the masked group was 1.8%, an insignificant difference. Even critics of the study at the British Medical Journal concede that the study showed masking's benefit was inconclusive. Put differently, there was virtually no evidence masks worked.
The Forum is indicative of the COVID ballyhoo. In one edition I counted 13 articles on the topic in just the first section. The Life section is also likely to be influenced sometime: COVID casseroles followed by SARS sausages, anyone? This media-wide pounding, day after day, partly explains why polled American ignorati think some 30 million Americans have died of COVID.
Be sure to genuflect, though, when our political and medical superiors raise scepter and caduceus as clubs to demand obedience.
Nelson lives in Casselton, N.D., and is a regular contributor to The Forum’s opinion page. Email him at dualquad413@gmail.com.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Forum's editorial board nor Forum ownership.
