Category Archives: Public safety & health

Don’t Know, or Won’t Say, How Many Omicron Hospitalizations?

Posted on January 10, 2022 by | 50 comments

by Carol J. Bova

The most recent Virginia Department of Health (VDH) information on the number of COVID-19 infections in vaccinated people dates from December 25, 2021. Statewide weekly total case numbers go through January 1, 2022.

The Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association (VHHA) gives total hospitalizations and ICU numbers for confirmed and pending tests as of January 9, but doesn’t differentiate between Omicron and other forms of Covid.

Bret Baier, on Fox News Sunday, January 9th, interviewed several people about the Supreme Court session on Covid vaccine mandates and Covid information. He included an audio clip of an incorrect statement by Justice Sonia Sotomayor: “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”

He then asked Centers for Disease Control Director Rochelle Walensky if it were true that “there are fewer than 3,500 current pediatric hospitalizations from COVID-19.” Continue reading →

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Youngkin, UVa COVID Policy on a Collision Course

Posted on January 7, 2022 by | 81 comments

by James A. Bacon

The debate over COVID-19 policy rages unabated. Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General-elect Jason Miyares announced today their intention to challenge Biden-administration vaccine mandates through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, OSHA, and Head Start.

“While we believe that the vaccine is a critical tool in the fight against COVID-19, we strongly believe that the Federal government cannot impose its will and restrict the freedoms of Americans, and that Virginia is at its best when her people are allowed to make the best decisions for their families or businesses,” they said in a press release.

While Youngkin and Miyares were pushing one way, the University of Virginia was moving in the opposite direction.

In a communication to the UVa community, President Jim Ryan announced that the global spike in COVID-19 cases attributable to the Omicron variant had prompted him to take additional measures to prevent the spread. UVa is advancing the deadline for students, faculty and staff to get a COVID booster shot. The deadline — probably not a coincidence — is January 14, one day before Youngkin and Miyares take office. Continue reading →

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Posted in Public safety & health, Uncategorized

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Red Alert! Omicron Now Everywhere

Posted on January 6, 2022 by | 82 comments

Alert! Alert! Alert! This Virginia Department of Health map shows the COVID-19 transmission rate is uniformly high across the state.

by James A. Bacon

It’s crazy out there, folks. The Omicron variant is running rampant, racking up record numbers of cases across the Commonwealth and filling up hospitals. We have seen nothing like this spike in cases and hospitalizations during the pandemic, not even in last year’s winter surge. The main consolation is that deaths are not spiking. The greatest risk to public health may be indirect: COVID cases filling hospitals and displacing patients with non-emergency medical issues.

Thankfully, Governor Ralph Northam has refrained from ordering emergency shutdowns during his last days in office. The temptation to “do something” must be powerful, but it’s not clear that anything short of draconian Chinese-style lock-people-in-their-apartments shutdowns will do much to slow the spread of this hyper-transmissible variant.

Here’s the weekly snapshot of COVID data: Continue reading →

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Arlington Union: Test Everyone or Close the Schools

Posted on January 2, 2022 by | 20 comments

Click for legible image.

by James A. Bacon

I can’t decide which is scarier: a letter from the Arlington Education Association (AEA) urging school superintendent Francisco Duran not to resume full-time instruction tomorrow in the absence of sufficient COVID-19 testing, or the insouciant attitude toward punctuation and grammar by the signatory, AEA president Ingrid Gant. Take your pick: no in-person school, a proven disaster… or the possibility that the letter represents the literacy standards of Arlington school teachers, a potential disaster that will long out-last the COVID virus.

Arlington parent Ellen Gallery, a  home-schooling mom, ridiculed the letter on social media, highlighting typos and garbled syntax in the manner of an English teacher grading a paper. All the mark-up lacked was an F- at the top. Gallery’s post was disseminated widely in conservative media, and the letter well deserves the mockery it has received.

However, let us not overlook the substance of the missive. The Arlington teacher’s union is pushing back against reopening the schools. Gant wants to ensure that “teachers spending hours in close contact are not inflected.” If the Arlington teachers’ union is making this demand, surely teachers in other districts are as well. The Omicron school panic could well become Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s first big leadership test. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12), Public safety & health

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This Didn’t Have to Happen

Posted on December 31, 2021 by | 53 comments

by Joe Fitzgerald

A year ago, the post-Thanksgiving surge was still raging, but there was hope in the imminent availability of vaccines. But 2021 would be the year of criminals who stormed the Capitol because they didn’t understand democracy and of their intellectual brethren who didn’t understand science or medicine.

Virginia set a record today for statewide number of new cases. That’s the third day in a row the number has been a record (12,112 Wednesday, 13,500 yesterday, 17,618 today.) Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro have seen a total of more than 20,000 cases as of today, and Harrisonburg-Rockingham will pass that milestone over the weekend.

The largest strain is on the health-care system. Hospitals are all but closed to all but the most serious illnesses and injuries. Nurses face not only the crush of cases, but the fact that those getting most seriously ill are the most stubborn in their denial about COVID. Those people don’t know enough science to get them to the first mid-terms of nursing school, but anecdotally many of them are abusive and sometimes violent in their resistance to COVID facts. Continue reading →

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Virginia Omicron Update: December 29

Posted on December 29, 2021 by | 37 comments

New COVID cases. Source: Virginia Department of Health

by James A. Bacon

Omicron is upon us, cases are surging and local media are sounding the alarm. Nationally, hospitalizations are setting “grim records,” according to the Washington Post. Closer to home, Loudoun County’s government-run drive-through testing center reached capacity within an hour of opening. Mary Washington Healthcare providers are closing a COVID clinic after exhausting supplies of monoclonal antibodies. Virginia Tech is mandating booster shots, and Norfolk State University is postponing spring-semester classes. And that’s just today’s headlines.

So, how bad are things in reality? The statewide data tell us two things. First, new COVID cases are increasingly rapidly. Second, hospitalizations are increasing, too, but less rapidly. The big caveat is that data reported on the Virginia Department of Health COVID dashboard is more than a week old, and with the fast-moving Omicron variant now the dominant strain, the data can be pun-ishly described as “out of data.” Continue reading →

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Good for Kamras

Posted on December 23, 2021 by | 18 comments

Jason Kamras

by James A. Bacon

Yes, you read that headline correctly. And, yes, that’s Jason Kamras, superintendent of the Richmond Public Schools we’re talking about. Bacon’s Rebellion has been highly critical of Kamras in the past, but we have to support his recent statement that he has no intention to close city schools, even in the face of the hyper-transmissible Omicron variant of COVID-19.

“We are not going to close schools again,” Kamras tweeted Wednesday, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “Our students need us to stay open — perhaps now more than ever.”

“We have vaccines for literally everyone down to kindergarten. We have air filtration units in every building. There are treatments for COVID. So, I just think it’s a very different context,” he elaborated in an RTD interview. “Plus, we know that being out of school is just really damaging to kids academically, and socially and emotionally, so when you kind of weigh the risks of COVID to kids against the risk of social, emotional and academic damage to kids. I think that that calculus has just changed, how it points to keep school open.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12), Public safety & health

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Embarrassing Managerial Incompetence

Posted on December 19, 2021 by | 27 comments

M. Norman Oliver M.D., Virginia Health Commissioner

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

The Northam administration has just had an embarrassing case of managerial incompetence exposed.

A series of articles by the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Patrick Wilson (here, here, and here) sets out the story of the Department of Health laying off 14 state employees who monitor drinking water systems across the state, including six field directors with a combined 180 years of experience, due to “budget error.” This office monitors water quality across the state, enforces state and federal drinking water standards, handles inspections and permits, and assists with lab testing.

The sad tale has its beginning in 2019, when the Department of Health’s Office of Drinking Water, being advised by agency administrators that it had the funding to do so, provided salary increases to 55 employees in the office and opened a field office in Richmond with four people. It turned out that advice was wrong, with a resulting shortfall projected to be $1.4 million this fiscal year. So, now, almost halfway through fiscal year 2022, the agency, facing a budget shortfall in that budget line item, tells these 14 people they are going to be laid off, effective January 9. Continue reading →

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Posted in Government Finance, Public safety & health, Water-waste water

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Countdown to Freedom: 32 Days

Posted on December 14, 2021 by | 12 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

Oh look.

California’s dopey governor is following New York’s crazy executive. They’re both re-instituting what didn’t work the last time that COVID cases began to rise: Sweeping mask mandates and more restrictions.

There, but for the wisdom of the electorate, goes Virginia.

Oh, I suppose lame duck Ralph Northam — in an explosive display of tyrannical behavior — could impose another mask mandate on the commonwealth or tell us to be home by midnight as he did last Christmas. He could close bars again, order us not to have more than five people in our homes over the holidays and close schools.

But even the Governor knows none of those measures made a bit of difference last time and they’d be wildly unpopular today.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin will be inaugurated on January 15th and Virginians will be safe from any more sudden and erratic mandates from Richmond. Continue reading →

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It’s Silly Season

Posted on December 11, 2021 by | 23 comments

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

The Richmond Times Dispatch reports that Governor Northam will include $27.4 million in his budget bill for a new Center for Firearm Violence Intervention and Prevention in the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). What a dumb proposal!

Setting aside the obvious politics  surrounding the subject matter, as a budget analyst, I would ask, “What in the world are they going to spend $27.4 million on?” In his remarks, the Governor talked about collecting data on gun violence and analyzing it. OK.  I am always in support of gathering data. So, add two or three well-trained analysts and statisticians to DCJS’s existing research center. Now we are down to about $27 million. What is that to be used for? There was some vague reference to providing resources to localities and community-based organizations, but no explanation as to what that means.

And why do you need a “Center”? That is just more bureaucracy. Continue reading →

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Posted in Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, General Assembly, Government Finance, Public safety & health

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The Woke Never Rest: Public Health Edition

Posted on December 11, 2021 by | 21 comments

Image credit: Yenon at Deviant Art

by James A. Bacon

The forces of Wokeness are like a zombie horde. They keep coming, and coming… and coming. You might have thought that the November election that turned Virginia from Blue to Red, driven in large measure by voter revulsion to “social justice” initiatives seeping into schools, universities and every nook and cranny of government, might have knocked some sense into the Woke. But, no, they keep coming back.

The latest is a proposal by Virginia Commonwealth University to create a school of public health. As the Richmond Times-Dispatch describes the proposal, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed gaps in the U.S. healthcare industry, which VCU stands ready to address. Additional focus on public health can extend lives, lower health disparities, and keep people out of hospitals, Dr. Art Kellermann, CEO of VCU Health, says in the article.

The school would cobble together existing departments such as biostatistics, health behavior, and epidemiology to create a fifth school in VCU Health Sciences. The Board of Visitors unanimously approved the new school Friday. Now the proposal goes to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV).

The idea doesn’t sound unreasonable on the face of it. Indeed, a multi-disciplinary approach to health might have helped Virginia weather the COVID epidemic better than it did. As with the federal government, Virginia health policy has been driven by an obsessive focus on COVID statistics at the expense of other health indicators such as mental health, substance abuse, suicides, and preventive medicine. In theory, a VCU school of public health could have advocated a holistic approach to the epidemic.

But probably not.

The RTD article suggests that a primary focus of the new school will be rectifying “health disparities.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations

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Who Is the “Irrational Majority” Here?

Posted on December 7, 2021 by | 46 comments

by James A. Bacon

The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) has declined to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for school employees and students on the grounds that it lacked the “clear statutory authority” to do so, reports The Virginia Mercury. Federal agencies have yet to add the vaccine to its childhood immunization schedule. “While recommended, it’s not been formally added,” said Dr. Lauri Forlano, deputy commissioner for population health.

Here’s another reason not to compel COVID vaccinations for students: they’re not needed.

According to the VDH’s own data, here’s how COVID-related hospitalizations break down by age group:

Fewer than 1,200 Virginians under 20 years old have been hospitalized for COVID. Only 16 have died. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12), Public safety & health

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Brace Yourself for Omicron… and Omicron Hysteria

Posted on December 2, 2021 by | 37 comments

Pre-Omicron: Confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Virginia. Source: Virginia Department of Health

by James A. Bacon

The Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus has set foot (perhaps I should say set its little viral spikes) in California, and it is only a matter of days (perhaps hours) before it arrives in Virginia. How worried should we be?

Some will dismiss the virus as nothing special, nothing to divert us from business as usual — the virus is said to have mild symptoms, after all. Others will engage in non-stop fear porn — we don’t know what we don’t know about the variant! Most of us, I suspect, will take a wait-and-see attitude before either blowing it off and putting ourselves at unnecessary risk or subjecting ourselves to another round of economy-wrecking, school-debilitating government mandates.

Personally, I incline toward the former response. The virus isn’t going away; it will continue mutating, and we have to learn to live with it just as we live with the flu. Maintaining a permanent regime of shutdowns and restrictions has massive unintended consequences, from medical procedures foregone to increased social isolation, depression, substance abuse and suicide; from supply-side disruptions to a massive and unsustainable run-up in the federal debt. Continue reading →

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Omicron: It’s Here!

Posted on December 2, 2021 by | 29 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

He could barely contain his glee. He was positively giddy.

I’m talking about White House medical advisor Anthony Fauci who held a press conference yesterday to declare that the long-awaited moment had arrived: We had our first confirmed case of the Covid omicron variant.

Hallelujah!

Now the government has an excuse — however flimsy — to institute more arbitrary rules and extend others all while quietly nudging governors to crack down on civil liberties just in time for the holidays. Continue reading →

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Posted in Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Public safety & health

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New COVID Data Displays

Posted on November 29, 2021 by | 19 comments

Rates of infection per 100,000 (Jan. 17 through Nov. 20, 2021. Source: Virginia Department of Health

The Virginia Department of Health is now publishing a graph that compares the COVID-19 infection rate by vaccination status. The graph above, based on 2021 data, shows that unvaccinated people have confirmed COVID-19 infections at a rate 4.6 times that of fully vaccinated people and 2.2 times that of partially vaccinated people. Continue reading →

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