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Home » What is the risk to children from COVID?

What is the risk to children from COVID?

The New Neo Posted on by

We know that the risk to children from COVID is very low, even if they get it. But we love our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren so very much that any threat to them feels terrible. I want to protect every single child from any harm that could ever come to that child, but of course that’s impossible. It would certainly help to know the real risks of COVID to children, and to know the relative risks the vaccine poses to them.

I had heard that a healthy five-year-old died from COVID. His tragic story is somewhat more complex than that, it turns out. It can be summarized by saying that a previously healthy 5-year-old boy contracted a number of infections seemingly simultaneously, and one of them was COVID. He died, and it’s not certain why he succumbed to so many infections or which was the one that killed him, if indeed there was one.

Here’s an overview of some research on children and COVID:

Dr. Marty Makary is a medical expert and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Carey Business School. His research team “worked with the nonprofit FAIR Health to analyze approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020.”

After studying comprehensive data on thousands of children, the team “found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that no child on earth has ever died from COVID itself. But it’s also been clear from the start that the number of such children must be extremely low – which is no comfort to a family which has lost a child.

Comments

What is the risk to children from COVID? — 87 Comments

  1. Millions of kids will be masked up yet again when school starts.

    What’s the cost of that?

  2. Griffin:

    Ends and means. Their ends your costs. Not their children. Captain Obvious speaking, as usual not too helpful. 🙂

    Dan Bongino has cited this study on his podcast, so it’s getting some exposure.

  3. The other thing Makary has mentioned is that the number of children that have died is so small that the CDC or whoever could easily investigate every single one of them and determine medical backgrounds if they wanted to.

    Something like 300 or so deaths as of the time of this study.

  5. Is it too crude to note that abortion presents a much larger risk to the child than does COVID-19?

    Yet the Left embraces one and flees, in panic, from the other.

    Woke logic.

  6. Problem is blame and authority. If, to make an example, a school superintendant had the sole power to reduce some of the mitigation efforts and Billy Smith died of Covid, the super is guilty of murder in every news outlet in the state. If the super maintained the mitigation levels and Billy’s parents couldn’t make a schedule work one day and he died of some accident while unwatched….nobody but the family knows and the super doesn’t get any blame.
    Not hard to figure out.

  8. I’d bet real money that suicide from Covid/shutdown despair has killed more kids than Covid.

    An interesting anecdote I’ve read from the early history of Covid:
    While most were sheltering in place, some critical workers (medical, grocery, etc) were cleared to go to work. Many of them needed child care. Top Men In Charge were shaking in their boots. If Covid was as bad as was feared then dominos would begin to fall. One nurse would get sick and spread it when picking up her child at daycare. Then all the kids would take the infection home and before you knew it all the hospitals and groceries in town would be depopulated.
    But the kids, amazingly, did not get sick and that was an early indicator of the “invulnerability” of kids.

  9. My county in Silicon Valley CA (Santa Clara) recently decreased the official count of Covid deaths by about 20%. The explanation is that now they have time to go back and review so they did … plenty of deaths were “with Covid” not “from Covid”.
    I applaud the belated honesty.

    The county is about 2 million overall, nearly a million in San Jose and another million scattered among the other cities.
    Covid statistics:
    https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboards (and select Cases, then come back and select Demographics)
    Total Cases: 121,767
    Total Deaths: 1707

    Specifically for kids, their online dashboards provide this data:
    U20 cases: 18.7%
    U20 deaths: 0.2%

    Doing the math, 22,770 cases in kids 19 and below. And 3 deaths in 19/below.
    With a number as small as 3 there are some options, including:
    1) special cases where the children were uniquely vulnerable
    2) mistakes such that actually zero kids died
    3) mistakes such that the death count was more: 5, or 8 or 10
    However you slice it, though, the danger to kids is miniscule.

  10. Worked a few times in a health club,they had multiple groups of preschool kids all wearing masks. Sadden me to see that, first they are to young to get the concept of what would be healthy care of that mask, second little kids are germ spreaders and magnets, wearing a germ filled mask couldn’t be good for them.

  11. The data shows that there is essentially no risk to children from Covid. There is solid data that shows that masking children is harmful to them. So other reasons must apply for the insistance of imposing masking upon children. Developing unreasoning fear in parents and grand parents, instilling at an early age a habit of compliance with authoritarian controls and gravely hindering socialization of future generations.

    Were dealing with the most difficult of ‘progressive’ monsters; those whose conscience is clear for they are doing it for the greater good.

  12. Public policy must be based upon statistics, not the exceptions.

    I got the vaccine for my wife and I, but I wouldn’t advocate it for healthy young adults and especially not for children.

    When the first generation of healthy babies is born to vaccinated mothers and fathers, maybe I can be convinced otherwise. Meanwhile, better to take their chances with the actual virus.

    Like the flu, this one will be with us awhile…

  13. Watch the vaccine will magically be approved for children in a couple of months and then little Dylan and Teagan can go back to school and get pressured by their teachers to get vaccinated no matter what their parents say.

  16. “I got the vaccine for my wife and I, but I wouldn’t advocate it for healthy young adults and especially not for children.”
    I was shocked to read accounts on my local NextDoor of pregnant ladies getting vaxxed so that the child would be safe when born.
    Seemed like madness.
    On reflection, no doubt plenty of vaccines are administered during pregnancy. Still, to be vaxxed with an experimental concoction at such a critical juncture is controversial in my view.

  17. Massachusetts used to generate a Covid plot daily until mid August 2020. The average age of death was 82 compared to a life expectancy of 80 in MA. Two thirds of those were in assisted living facilities. Below age 60 the number of deaths were essentially zero. Virtually all of the deaths were “with Covid”. There was and is essentially no danger from the Wuhan flu. Yes, people will get the Wu Flu snd feel lousy for a week or so, but it is no more dangerous than the regular flu.

    After that time, they stopped reporting deaths and started reporting cases, because cases are lots more fun for the politicians since there seems to be no significant connection between cases and death but it allows them to exercise their inner dictator without compunction or regret.

  18. Humans in General are very poor at any kind of probabilistic thinking. You have to be trained to it and there is no hand-waving way to get there — you have to be OK with some simple maths notation and the discipline of sitting down and learning a way of reasoning. Both these pre-conditions are never going to happen for 90+% of humans. They’re either simply too dumb or too convinced of their own special insights to knuckle down and do it.

    We can do ‘risk’ in simple cases — e.g. see a Sabre-toothed tiger eat your neighour once or twice and you’ll pretty soon learn to absent yourself when one reappears later. Same with learning about tribes from surrounding valleys — we can instinctively model their mean and SD about a number of behavioural axes — Stereotyping. And somewhere inside us there’s even a little Bayes’ formula which will keep these models updated as more evidence comes along.

    Go much beyond that — like conditional probabilities, or combining the results of two tests with differing false positive / false negative rates and all intuition goes out the window — unless your intuition has been rigorously trained and you’ve studied for exams and done well and then gone off and worked in a lab or a hedge fund and accumulated the wisdom of the ages.

    Even then most ‘Scientists’ are just p-hackers. They know how to design experiments according to standard recipes but don’t necessarily engage in much meta-thinking about what they are doing.

  19. And vaccinating children with a new vaccine technology does not seem wise or good to me. At least not until there is compelling evidence that the virus and its conveniently-hyped Delta variant knocks off more Children than the vaccines do.

    Even then, this doesn’t allow for unknown long-term effects of vaccine — e.g. upon fertility.

    And right there, you have multiple types of risk with multiple time-frames and you have blown past the reasoning faculties of 99.99% of Humanity — and the ones who *can* juggle those kittens are not necessarily the kind of people who got as much of a serving of empathy as intelligence when genes were handed out.

  20. Here’s a good recap of the considerations incorporating known risks and benefits to date – https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/13/covid-19-vaccines-for-children-hypothetical-benefits-to-adults-do-not-outweigh-risks-to-children/ – some of the comments are helpful as well.

    Be aware that the current mRNA treatments don’t provide mucosal immunity, which is why we’re seeing significant levels of infection among vaccinated people ( well post 2 weeks ). And because that fact has generally been concealed from the public, it’s also been a major source of confusion and seemingly contradictory medical information – for example, it’s why vaccination isn’t regarded as sufficient to prevent communicability.

    Basically the reason governments want children to be vaccinated is to prevent them from becoming a harbor for COVID and its variants that may re-ignite a broader pattern of infections. That’s due to the limited efficacy of current mRNA vaccines. Otherwise the benefit is insufficient to justify known and potential risks to children by normal ethical or simply clinical measures.

    FWIW there are nasopharyngeal specific and also full sterilizing vaccines in the works, some currently in animal testing. The former should be better able to prevent initial infection ( search on ‘nasal vaccines’) and the latter should provide the class of immunity that people typically expect from vaccines. Personally I would wait and generally avoid administering the current crop of mRNA ‘vaccines’ that rely on expression of the ‘spike protein’ to children.

  21. Tyro, enlightening, thanks.
    The Joe Rogan “emergency podcast” about ivermectin on Spotify covered a lot of ground and one thing discussed was that Covid could be eradicated if ivermectin panned out.
    Instead, because experts are obtuse, inflexible and perhaps malicious Covid is likely to become a permanent part of our medical landscape. New variants will pop up each year. What. A. Shame.

  25. “what is the risk of remaining in Hong Kong?”

    Here’s my guess:
    Nonzero but minimal if you hold a foreign passport

  26. Not bad assessment.

    I’d say political risk non-zero but minimal even for locals without foreign passports if they accept that not being able to vote for meaningful candidates is a universal condition and therefore not worth bothering much about right now. Were I a Hong Kong Cantonese Local, I’d be more upset about demographic swamping via force-fed mainland immigration. They’re doing a classic Top / Bottom squeeze on the Middle here. Gets no mention in foreign press because GloboHomo runs the same Op on its Legacy Whites back in the West and is a forbidden topic.

    You may have noticed that I’m an anti-democrat. (Lower-case D). Democracy —> GloboHomo Poz. One-way ratchet. Voting schmoting.

    Holding a foreign passport belonging to a possible belligerent state in any Taiwan Straits conflict could be an issue. I’ve factored that into my calculations and hopefully haven’t gotten it wrong.

  27. Good point. I was assuming a gradual increase in tensions. And a reasonably skittish Zaphod … not oblivious until too late

  28. Well given that all risks are non-zero ….. But which part of the vast mass of humans do you consider yourself, one of the 0.000001% that can calculate probabilities for future conflicts, or one of the dumb f*ers? And how do those dumb f*ers come up with “common sense?”

    Asking more for the resident of Hong Kong, not expecting someone in Santa Clara, County to have much insight on the inner workings of the CCP. Trusting the CCP to abide by diplomatic niceties may be risky after all.

  29. Another thing that has almost entirely vanished is any worries about the people under about 70 that test positive for Covid. People don’t even pretend that it is anything to really worry about anymore. About six weeks ago the Spanish golfer Jon Rahm tested positive before the final round of a tournament which he had a big lead in and had to withdraw. Not a comment of concern was heard it was all ‘should’ve got the vaccine’ stuff.

    Less than 2 weeks later he won the US Open overcoming the deadly disease.

    The way people react to people that test positive is very telling.

  30. @JimNorCal:

    I’ve still got enough undiluted Ashkenazi Genes to have a healthy sense of paranoia and a Bolt Hole lined up further South where the Coconuts grow and the Poz is unlikely to prosper.

    Problem with Expatriation is that eventually it becomes very difficult to Go Back. To what? The Past really is a Different Country — triply so in our Age of Poz.

  31. Tyro,
    “Be aware that the current mRNA treatments don’t provide mucosal immunity”

    What about the J&J vaccine? I’d thought that was not an mRNA one.

  32. Bad news in the war against Covid. Biden Administration chose badly and the US will pay for it!

    This Big Question in virus news is whether or not the the future building up Delta (or Indian) wave of the virus epidemic will be like Great Britain’s? Or will is become bad, like Israel’s?

    Israel has new data showing that effectiveness of vaccinations drops bigly in the fifth month. And this has huge population wide consequences, resulting in more spread of infections, more viral transmission and symptomatic distress – and more death.

    See John Campbell “Big US implications from Israel” July 25 ’21 video at youtube.

    The data clearly tell us that US will track Israel with big drop in vaccine effectiveness soon. This is obvious, and unlike the UKs experience.

    Why? Both US and Israel have had 3 week gap in the double vaccinations and same brand (Pfizer). While UK has found 11 week gap produces a much better immune response performance.

    The latter is found to be doubly or triply more effective against Delta virus transmission and symptomatic illness, while the former short gap in vaccination is found to be half or two thirds less effective against Covid. (This performance benefit was found early in the vax rollout, but Biden authorities decided to ignore the evidence from the UK.)

    Bad news will become our bad Autumn to experience.

    A recent deep dive into the Israeli data by published virus microbiologist Joanne Nova (at joannenova.co.au), shows us that the longer term possibilities raise the harsher more menacing truth: the opportunity to squash and eliminate the Covid menace are getting lost in the Orange Man bad politics of antivirals.

    Instead a double spectre looms: Covid-19 will either adapt to become more benign but perhaps seasonally ubiquitous among us. Or else – like the Chicken disease, Marek’s disease – become more completely deadly to humans.

    This very bad outcome for Covid-19, which remains on the table because the virus now has more mathematical opportunities to escape from the vaccine and find a way to become more lethal.

    This is the worst possible future.

  33. Good for ya, Zaph man!

    “I’ve still got enough undiluted Ashkenazi Genes to have a healthy sense of paranoia and a Bolt Hole lined up further South where the Coconuts grow and the Poz is unlikely to prosper.”

    So… a Bolt Hole in the Philippines or Vietnam or Malaysia? Or elsewhere?

  34. I would not say that the Biden administration “chose badly,” they chose what they thought would work best for the Party and its power which is what all their choices align with.

  35. TJ:

    The sky is indeed falling. Run away to the land where coconuts grow.

    Can Do!’s hidey hole? He’s going to Papua or The Solomon Islands, although the CCP has it’s eyes on them too. 🙂

    No matter where he goes, there they are, eventually? So sad.

  36. @TJ:

    Thailand.

    Philippines has some of the most atrocious cuisine (sic) in the world and is too dumb to dance the tango with China. Also too many volcanos and typhoons. Vietnam is Backup Backup. They’re on the up and up. And fantastic food and coffee. I like parts of Malaysia but there’s the Malay/Islam Problem. Same goes for Indonesian Archipelago. Bali is animist outlier ‘Hindu’… but they are only gentle on the surface. Highest per capita killings occurred in Bali during Sukarno overthrow Year of Living Dangerously. Also see ‘Puputan’ 😀

    Thailand no paradise but hits a kind of sweet spot. Great food. Good enough hospitals… Hygiene pretty OK — never got giardiasis there. Like Japan in manners: what you see is not what you get, but one can rub along smoothly if one knows the rules.

    One metric I like to use is individuals vs crowds. Behaviours of both matter if you’re resident and not tourist.

    Individual Indonesian / Malay: Charming
    Mob of Either: You die.

    Individual Thai: Could be a drain on your wallet or pain in the ass, but mostly charming.
    Mob of Thais: Usually benign.

    Individual Filipino: Will try to pimp his niece to you so she can get passport and whole extended family can tap in to your finances.
    Mob of Filipinos: Diabetic Coma die-in.

    Individual and Vietnamese en masse: Head on swivel, ask for an extra helping of pho.

  37. om,

    The doom and gloom we’re all gonna die folks are starting to come out of the woodwork again after taking a rest the last couple of months. The big question is do they have enough power still. Do these governors have the guts to shut stuff down again?

  38. Starting to see the tweets about these people on their deathbeds telling nurses and doctors that they didn’t believe it was real and the identical tweets about hospitals being overrun.

  39. @griffin:

    Re the deathbed regret propaganda:

    Yep… it’s all over my Apple News feed starting a few days back.

    Pure coincidence of course.

  40. Lots of my daughter’s boyfriends’s third cousin works in a hospital and they are overflowing with dying 25 year olds that refused the vaccine stories.

  41. Youtube has a video lineup constant line or two of “Covid-19 News” every time you go there. One today from CBS News is “Low vaccination rates and Delta variant fuel COVID-19 surge in US.” The rest are along a similar theme.

  42. The fun tap dance the doom and gloomers have to do is shaming people for not getting the vaccine while also furiously downplaying the Texas Democrats and NY Yankees that were fully vaxxed and tested positive.

    The doom and gloomers love them some ‘cases, case, cases’ but they have a harder time when it’s vaxxed ‘cases, cases, cases’.

    If they were even a little bit consistent they would be saying stop testing people with no symptoms but that would lead to less ‘cases, cases, cases’ and we can’t have that.

  44. Griffin:

    That was last weekend’s reporting from the fool me state, aka, Missouri.

  45. om,

    Yes, I did see some reporter in Kansas City (I think) claiming that in some hospital system the average age of Covid patients in the ICU was like 34 which is beyond ridiculous and was debunked by others.

    But that is in the western part of the state but not the southwestern quadrant or whatever it was that our scared commenter was going on about last weekend.

  46. Zaphod- thanks for your excellent arm chair tour!

    Thailand? I can see it. But I understand that they’ve made expat residence tricky, and likely to get tougher.

    On my post re Covid-19 and the US following Israel, not the UK: the latter seems to have reached Delta version peak infection – rates now declining.

    Israel? Here’s a newstory:

    “Health officials weighing whether to wait for 3rd vaccine dose tailored to Delta”
    7/25/2021, 3:15:14 PM · by Nextrush ·(at freerepubl8c)
    Times Of Israel ^ | 7/24/2021 | TOI Staff
    Sharon Alroy-Preis says pandemic is still here: “We need to learn to live with it”; health and education ministries to present dueling proposals for new school year on Sunday Public health chief Sharon Alroy-Preis said on Saturday that officials were debating whether to offer a third booster shot to Israelis, or to wait for a vaccine that is specifically tailored for the Delta variant of the coronavirus. “We are checking if we should give a third dose, or whether we should wait for a vaccine against Delta,” the head of public health at the Health Ministry told Channel 12.”

    So, wait on a new booster or repeat with an old vax? — that’s in the US’ future for Autumn, folks.

    The UK has 70% double vax rates, and 80% single vax plus. (Even naturally immune from infection are advised to get one vax.) See ya in October.

  47. Zaph on SE Asian individual vs Mob behavior.

    Well, “benign” is a sweet spot m8ddle for Thai versus death or financial ruin.

    Plus, there’s that Giardiasis absence that’s super friendly.

  48. om: “Asking more for the resident of Hong Kong, not expecting someone in Santa Clara, County to have much insight on the inner workings of the CCP.”

    It’s true that even members have little visibility into the inner workings of the CCP. Let alone outsiders.
    What’s your expertise of China?

  49. True JimNorCal. I’m reading Michael Pillsbury’s book The Hundred Year Marathon.

    Super opaque China; calculated mis-direction to mislead and divide The West. Quite amazing.

  50. @TJ:

    “Zaphod- thanks for your excellent arm chair tour!”

    Forgeddabout “Always be Closing”. Always be Stereotyping! 😀

    “Thailand? I can see it. But I understand that they’ve made expat residence tricky, and likely to get tougher.”

    A few more hoops to jump through these days — but they’re mainly there to ensure that one is not indigent or doing a job that Thais could do. I’ll be ‘retired’ (as far as they’re concerned) when I make the move.

  51. Calculating risks is fine, but you’re working with known knowns and known unknowns.
    As in actual digits, not “x” and “y” whose values are unknown.
    But in many cases, you don’t know the values you think you know and it’s not actual digits, but “x”and “y” in disguise.
    And when you’re chalking away at one end of the board, some clown is redoing the figures at the other end when you’re not looking.
    And, out in the hall, where the luscious smells from the cafeteria are calling, half a dozen coral snakes got loose from the herpetology exhibit.
    So screw all the calc. Keep your head on a swivel, your right hand free and think about something else.
    I’m a Celt.

  53. “What happens when more deaths happen to children due to getting the Covid Vax?”

    It won’t be reported. Instead there will be massive coverage of something else till the story recedes.
    Who recalls that when reports came out about Cuomo nursing home deaths there was a flurry of #MeToo stories? Then … crickets

  54. On my comment last night at 11:12 I mentioned the golfer Jon Rahm testing positive six weeks ago. Well a big deal was made of him getting the vaccine after that and now he has tested positive again and is out of the Olympics.

  55. JimNorCal:

    Not claiming to be an expert on China, SE Asia, American politics, race relations and the dire effects of excess melanin, trains running on time, the superiority of centralized power run by geniuses, or even the CCP. You believe the smoke from Hong Kong? That’s your problem. Caveat emptor?

  56. Griffin,

    The biggest shock to me from your comment: Golf is an Olympic sport again?!

    Also, related to an earlier comment of yours, I seem to remember a debunking of the doctor who was being used the other day, who claimed to tell dying young people- people who thought it was all a hoax- that it was too late for the vaccine. And then they died.

    The agitprop is definitely waxing again, in regards to the Wuhan virus.

  57. Ohh, stop already, Neo, please! The risk to kids of COVID is basically zero, and that is all that matters. They do not need immunization to protect them from a non-disease (at childhood ages and beyond).
    The same is true of college students, though most schools mandate a vaccination in order to matriculate. This is administrators minimizing any risk to their budgets, even if the risk is zero.
    Meanwhile DOJ is not going after Gov. Cuomo for his order killing 15,000 elderlies in his state. Mass murder is now state-sanctioned.

    Our entire world is being turned upside down by the evil left.

  58. Fractal Rabbit,

    Yes, golf was added as a sport in 2016. I’m a huge golf fan and I think it’s dumb and a lot of the top players sat out 2016 because of the Zika virus in Rio (wasn’t that quant by 20/21 standards) and many have passed this year because of the oppressive atmosphere in Tokyo.

  59. The saga of Jon Rahm #1 ranked male golfer in the world is the perfect story for our ridiculous times of vaxxing and testing and testing and vaxxing.

    Jon Rahm is a 26 year old Spaniard who attended Arizona St and currently resides in Arizona.

    June 2020- The PGA Tour returns to play after the shutdown with very strict testing.

    June 2020-May 2021- Rahm plays on the Tour never testing positive.

    May 31,2021- Rahm has not been vaccinated. Rahm is informed he is a close contact and required to be tested daily. He receives the J & J vaccine that day. On May 31, June 1,2,3,4 he tests negative. He has a 6 shot lead after the 3rd round on June 5 but is informed his June 5 test is positive he is forced to withdraw.

    June 14- It is announced that Rahm has tested negative three times since his positive test he is now cleared for the US Open.

    June 20- Rahm wins the US Open.

    July 6- Rahm flies to Scotland for the Scottish Open needing a negative test to enter UK.

    July 13- Rahm plays in The Open Championship in England finishing 3rd again testing negative all along per UK protocols.

    July 24- In advance of Olympics Rahm test positive for Covid and is forced to withdraw.

    Rahm says he had very mild symptoms from early June Covid so it seems likely he did indeed have it then.

    What kind of a society can function like this.

  60. om “You believe the smoke from Hong Kong?”

    fyi, your posts come across as somewhat antagonistic, dismissive, hostile. Perhaps intended? Perhaps not.
    For the record my BIL and his daughter (my niece) are active CCP members. They don’t confide in me LOL. I’ve visited a number of times so I’ve seen parts of China up close and over a decade of time. Without pretending to know much, I know more than many.

    What areas do you feel you have insight into, if you don’t mind sharing? Do you you have a label that fits your outlook fairly closely? Is om your initials or a religious shout out? Asking from simple curiosity and promise not to extend the “interrogation”.

  61. seriously what’s his damage, (a relevant line from heathers) now the Dragon has their tail in everything that matters, media, academia, nonprofits, the national pulse has composed a rather comprehensive list, they have not only bought the stage, the mike and the risers,

  62. the national security law, I call it the law of ‘dangerousness’ which has been used to confiscate jimmy lai’s life work, dangerousness, is a catch all, that the island satrap has coiuned there is probably a chinese analog, like lesuo for blackmail

  63. But it’s also been clear from the start that the number of such children must be extremely low

    Let’s put our attention on the population at large – not one carefully-selected tragic example – before any decisions on masking the kiddies are made, OK? And if that mass decision is based on said single example (or the same multiplied hysterically by someone with a big microphone), fire the entire lot of decision-makers. Tomorrow.

  65. “Humans don’t calculate ‘risk’ very well, do we?”

    It should be obvious, but I will state it…

    Individual humans and small groups of humans do fine. We are all descended from humans that calculated risks well enough to become the dominant species on the planet.

    But, when mass social dynamics are in play individual calculations mean nothing.

  66. JimNorCal:

    Since you asked “om” are part of my initials, middle name, surname, nothing profound. Regarding religious affiliation, evangeliacial Christian (a sinner, but aren’t we all?).

    I am hostile to Can Do! and what he’s selling.

    Regarding CCP, just paid attention to their behavior for 40+ years. See commandersalamanderblogspot.com for current assessments about them.

    I worked in a technician role with visiting scientist from the CCP back in 1982, Ms Guangfen Chen, a really nice lady. Had grad school roommates from Taiwan. Not a vast experience with China.

  67. Paul in Boston on July 24, 2021 at 9:19 pm said:
    ….
    ”
    After that time, they stopped reporting deaths and started reporting cases, because cases are lots more fun for the politicians…” and easily manipulated.

    Change the number of cycles on the PCR test to get whatever result you want. Lower it to 25 and congratulate the wonderful, brave government officials on their performance, raise it to 33 and show the need for more restrictions. Raise it to 37, as I’ve seen, and create cases out of thin air.

    Fun, indeed.

  68. The idea of losing a 5-year-old child to illness is nearly unbearable, but the world is what it is, and even seemingly ordinary children sometimes succumb to awful luck. The question is how we should try to make them live, knowing that they don’t get a 100% guarantee of survival. Never let them go outside? Never put them in a car? This pandemic response in insane.

  72. One more off topic, then I’m out.
    om, here’s a snip from a talk by a Chinese sociologist. He’s gloating about the US flawed Covid response but I only post to note in passing his ref to sea power.
    CDR Salamander talked about France flexing its muscles in the Pacific. The Chinese fellow talks about launching additional naval tonnage equiv to the French Navy. Each year.
    Is this true?
    Is it well known?
    Regardless, a startling claim.
    https://youtu.be/Ig8zjMxzBZ4

  73. @JimNorCal:

    Might be slightly hyperbolic… but it’s very hard to grasp the immense scale of Chinese industrial capacity. And human capital production capacity. Pretty much the only big non-military ships getting made in the West today are cruise ships and mega-yachts for Oligarchs.

    Every country is stuck in a strange financial twilight zone. Nobody really knows where we’re going with world fueled by financialisation of literally everything. In the West, politicians spend this fool’s dividend on buying off populations with social security handouts, lining their pockets with kickbacks, and paying for every tattooed lesbian transsexual to have imaginary IVF treatment or some other stupid shit like that. China spends its rake from global casino on high speed rail, military buildup, massive shiny new city subway systems, superhighways, and buying up and stockpiling natural resources. All this is paid for by the gradual and then faster beggaring of every Western country which has outsourced to China. So if China is benefitting from the asset stripping of France, Germany, UK, USA, Canada, Australia… etc… why should it come as a surprise that it might be able to easily bang out a French Navy in physical capital (human capital and training could be issue) every year or so?

    Western Saber Rattlers need to avoid making the mistake Japanese made at Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto, having spent some years in America and knowing American Industrial Capability *back then*, warned his IJN superiors to no avail.

    The other mistake the Japanese made was underestimating the warlike character of riled-up Americans. You cannot form an adequate picture of a geopolitical opponent from popular culture and popular prejudices. Americans tend to make the same mistake about the Chinese. “They can only steal and copy stuff… They won’t have much appetite for fight because of the old One Child Policy.

    And as I’ve said before, the huge difference between now and 1941 is that there can be no rapid spin up of the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ (excuse me… it hurts when I laugh so much on two counts at same time) because there’s nothing much left to spin up.

  74. @RoyNathanson:

    That’s a good formulation. Small bands on the Savannah didn’t need the Gaussian Copula. Nor should we when we buy a retirement product, but that’s another matter.

  75. The appeasement post for today. Not his country, none are actually, not even Thailand. Sad.

  76. @JimNorCal:

    Wild prediction: The Chinese will in due course sink or otherwise disable one or both of the UK RN ships being based in the South China Sea area. The idea that the UK can project serious naval power much beyond Ushant in 2021 is laughable. It would be just like the Chinese to pull their pants down for them. Plus Kill the Chicken to Scare the Monkey.

    USA or Japan won’t start a war just because some RN ship suddenly got leaky in an ‘accident’… they’ll cop out whilst making loud noises. Which will spread doubt and fear in littoral states + Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, etc… all of which tacitly rely on USN and IJN to wipe their bums in a wider conflict.

    I’ve noticed in last year or so an alarming tendency of both UK and Australian governments and media to delude themselves that they are serious and credible military threats to anyone. It’s’ a kind of madness. UK has nukes, but they are of course unusable. Apart from that, nada.

  77. @om:

    Talking about the world as it is and not as you wish it would be does not constitute Appeasement.

    You are a Subject (perhaps you delude yourself that you are a Citizen) of a collapsing global hegemon. It’s falling apart in slow motion in front of our eyes. There’s still a kick or two in the Old Beast’s tail.. but you seem to think that it’s 1990. It ain’t. And it won’t be again in any of our lifetimes. Get over it and move on. Living out a good and safe life in Richland is more good fortune than most people who ever lived have enjoyed. Be content.

    (Aside: The silence about the defeat in and retreat from Afghanistan in these parts is deafening. No logic chopping and semantic games. Came. Saw. Did NOT Conquer. Departed.

    Someone will blather about not being allowed to fight to win or stupid political decisions about mission creep and the corruption. Doesn’t matter. Could have the greatest military world has ever seen and if your domestic politics stops u using it properly… you’ve still LOST. No special pleading permitted.)

  78. @om:

    Don’t believe me… Then how about Spengler, the International Money Jew Par Excelllence:

    https://asiatimes.com/2021/07/wake-up-america-the-world-just-isnt-that-into-you/

    “The people with big jobs in Washington came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when America was the technological marvel of the world, and American inventions created the digital age. We haven’t done a lot lately except code some complicated software.

    China has installed about 80% of the world’s 5G mobile broadband capacity, the carrier for the Fourth Industrial Revolution as much as railroads were for the First Industrial Revolution, and is moving much faster towards smart cities, automated ports, autonomous vehicles, self-programming robots and a wealth of other 5G applications.

    American supply chains can’t keep up with the $5 trillion in demand that the US Treasury dumped onto consumers, so America is running a $1 trillion a year balance of payments deficit. The pull of demand has spiked the inflation rate above 5%.

    The Federal Reserve and the White House say this is transitory, but US industries aren’t investing in new equipment. In fact, capital expenditures for US industrial companies this year will be 35% lower than in 2019, and not much better next year.

    The US isn’t investing in energy, or much else. It doesn’t boast a single company to compete with Huawei, Ericsson, or Nokia in 5G broadband. China, with its robust supply chains and abundance and diversity of skilled workers and engineers, is likely to get a jump on the United States in the new technologies that will transform economic life.“

    Far more than I have… and so much, much more than you have… this guy has been around in China during its rise and met the movers and shakers, seen the factories and done the deals. Believe him. I feel sorry for poor old Goldman. He’s a genuine American Patriot of the old school as well as his natural Israel Thing and he’s been pumpkin out warnings Cassandra-like for ages and nobody seems to listen.

  79. Can Do!

    Congratulations, you know where to send the rent money. I’ve got some missionaries in India and Africa that I’ll send it to, it’s doing you no good after all.

    High speed trains don’t give CCP men any women that will carry on the family line. Their demographics suck, chappie. Real world.

    Your best hope the Thais will take you. Will the CCP allow you to flee with enough to live in the means which you have become accustomed? Sad to be you.

  80. Can Do!

    Many years ago, even in those olden days before you were born, similar geniuses as you declared the USSR and or Nazi Germany were the the way of the future, they “worked.” Sad story chappie. Sad.

  81. Om,

    Please read this:

    https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-end-of-merit/

    Relevant quote:

    “Only 5 percent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 percent in China; as of 2016, China graduated 4.7 million STEM students versus 568,000 in the United States, as well as six times as many students with engineering and computer science bachelor’s degrees. “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields,” Apple CEO Tim Cook has observed, revealing one rationale for keeping virtually all the company’s production in the Middle Kingdom.”

    Taffy 3, The Bulge, and the Manhattan Project are ancient history. This is not the country it was in 1945, 1965, or even 1995. Zaphod’s (and Goldman’s) warnings about China’s technological, manufacturing, and engineering capacity are valid and deserve a serious response. You sneer at Zaphod for not having a country of his own. You’re right: he doesn’t. Zaphod is a man without a country precisely because of the demographic/political changes he keeps banging on about. His fate is therefore instructive. The United States is not South Africa, but there are powerful people in this country who view South Africa as a model for us. I think there are features of our political geography and social and political culture that will frustrate their plans, but I’m not at all complacent about that.

    You don’t like what Zaphod has to say. I don’t like it either, and have taken issue with some of it. But whether we like it or not isn’t the point. The point is, Is he right? You’re blaming the messenger.

  82. Hubert:

    I’m not making excuses for the message and the methods of totalitarians. Appeasement is appeasement.

    He is a man without a country because he chooses to live in Hong Kong. He deigns not to live in western countries, ironically while moaning that “his people” need their own country. Actions and words.

    You know what ancient means. Is 1995 ancient history? if so, 2001, and 2020 were ancient history.

    CEO of apple who chooses to build his gee gaws in China; there was an ancient history quote about capitalists and rope, but our mega capitalists don’t think their necks will get a rope burn or spine snap. The CCP crocodile will eat them too.

    We have serious problems, throwing in race, religion, and homage to the CCP and China are not conductive to a serious discussion. But that’s a feature not a bug.

  83. om:

    Disagreeing with Zaphod is fine. Criticizing Zaphod is fine. But the petty insults in which you often engage isn’t fine. I’ve asked you to stop – don’t know whether you’ve seen my previous requests, so I’m asking you again. It takes away from your arguments rather than enhancing them, and I don’t like petty squabbling on the blog. I do allow some of it, of course – we’re all human. But you’ve been indulging in way too much of it re Zaphod.

    I realize that, among other things, Zaphod is annoying. That’s on purpose. So why rise to the bait?

  87. Om,

    Apologies for the delayed response, and for reviving a dead thread. Bad habit of mine.

    Re: Taffy 3 etc., I should have said “might as well be ancient history”. It’s not for you and me, but I suspect it is for most people in this country. Certainly most people under 40 or even 50.

    I don’t read Zaphod’s comments about the PRC’s growing power as appeasement or homage. I read them as warnings. As for why he lives in HK, I assume it’s for professional reasons. He has said that he will be moving elsewhere when he retires, so it would appear that he does not want to live under the sway of the CCP any longer than he has to. In the meantime, I view his bulletins from HK and the PRC in the same way that I would have viewed William Shirer’s dispatches from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, if I had been around then: as useful information/intelligence from somebody who is on the spot.

    Barry,

    Yes, I read the VDH piece on the PRC’s weak points vis-a-vis the U.S. I hope he’s right, but I’m not as sanguine as he is.

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