Horowitz: From Fort Benning to Japan and Hawaii, face masks are not working

One will not find a greater degree of compliance to a mask mandate than with one placed on military trainees by drill sergeants. That’s why, if masks are really the viral placebo their devoted cult worshipers make them out to be, one would expect mask mandates to work wonders in these environments. Except, they didn’t work – just like they didn’t work in Japan, Hawaii, Israel, California, Miami, or any other place where they’ve shown near universal compliance for months, yet the virus spread rapidly.

In the military, they don’t just virtue signal and wear masks as a symbol. If they are led to believe mask-wearing will work to stop the spread, they will wear them seriously with the boot of the drill sergeant behind them. Yet, despite universal mask wearing, the super social distance rituals, and all precautions imaginable, it failed to stop an outbreak at Fort Benning in Georgia in May.

Here’s how the outbreak unfolded, according to Elizabeth Howe of Connecting Vets. About 640 recruits from the 30th AG Battalion and 2nd Battalion, 29th Infantry Regiment arrived at Fort Benning in May for training and were immediately tested for COVID-19. Four recruits tested positive and were removed from the group while the remaining soldiers were placed in isolation for 14 days without any training exercises. After the 14-day quarantine, they were all retested and every single one was negative.

Only then did the training commence – with the full panoply of obsessive social distancing measures, including mask wearing. You can imagine that there will never be greater compliance to these rules than during military training. Yet, just eight days later, after one recruit exhibited symptoms, 142 of the trainees tested positive. That is 22% of the entire group isolated and quarantined together. As they were young, none of them were hospitalized and most were asymptomatic.

The case of Fort Benning should have served as a harbinger of what was to come in June with the surge of cases throughout the country, and now, the entire world. You cannot run or hide from God’s respiratory viruses that spread as ubiquitously as the flu. However, at the same time, we see God’s mercy – that the majority of cases are asymptomatic and there are very few serious cases outside of those who are immunocompromised.

Another important observation from this Fort Benning outbreak is in order. Notice how the masks did not help and the virus spread far and wide, but stopped at the 22% threshold? This is another great example of what Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford professor John Ioannidis predicted early on based on the natural case study of the Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak – that the virus hits a brick wall in most places around the 15%-20% marker. Seventeen percent of passengers on the Diamond Princess tested positive. The working theory is that most people have some degree of cross-immunity from other coronavirus colds and that the virus does not transmit homogeneously from every infected individual.

While there will be places where the virus hits up to 40% of the people, albeit with most not exhibiting symptoms, most states and countries seem to get a respite from the disease once they reach 15%-20% seroprevalence in the population, or even less. We are beginning to see this in the southern states that have already peaked and are seeing plummeting rates of new hospitalizations.

Thus, we see God’s judgment and mercy mixed together. On the one hand, nothing seems to prevent a spread in the population, but on the other hand, a de facto herd immunity threshold is hit around 20%. The quicker we achieve this through the younger population, the more we will see results like we’ve witnessed in the military.

There is no greater petri dish and natural case study of a confined universe than on an aircraft carrier. During the spring, there was an outbreak on the USS Theodore Roosevelt whereby 24% of the sailors tested positive. Yet, there was only one fatality.

Hence, it’s not like the mask mandate at Fort Benning worked even a little bit. They seemed to have suffered roughly the same infection rate as those places caught by surprise, such as the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

How much more evidence do we need before this mask cult takes its Jonestown mentality and seeks mental health treatment?

What we saw at Fort Benning is now playing out throughout the world.

Japan is a country where people have been wearing masks for months with a degree of discipline we would expect in our military. Yet, cases are soaring, despite the fact that they are not testing nearly as much as we are:

They are now panicking in Hong Kong with cases surging despite a universal mask mandate in place for months.

Countries like Japan and Hong Kong are as disciplined and as clean as they come. But you can’t stop a pandemic flu. Thankfully, there really is no reason to panic because the rate of serious cases is even less in Asia thanks to their inherent partial immunity.

We are seeing the same pattern here in America. Hawaii has had the most severe lockdown of anywhere and it’s enforced very zealously. They also have had near universal compliance to their long-standing mask mandate in place since April. They are also an island country. Yet, it has experienced a 700% increase in cases over the past 30 days!

The same holds true for a state like California, which had the earliest stay-at-home order in March and has never exited a modified phase one reopening. We all know how that has turned out. The same holds true for Israel and Australia. In fact, in the ultimate irony, the only countries that seem to remain flat are the Nordic countries, which have aggressively resisted the idea of public masking.

Again, a lot of this stems from immutable laws of nature. The northern countries got the virus earlier, then it migrated south to places like America’s southern states, Hawaii, Israel, and Australia. Also, any country that has not achieved at least 15% seroprevalence will always remain vulnerable until they do so. Which is why Sweden is riding high with herd immunity, relatively few deaths, and a society and economy intact.

What we are seeing over and over again is that in areas where the virus already spread, the lockdowns don’t work at all. In areas where there was a low rate of seroprevalence at the time of the lockdown, they successfully delay the spread temporarily. But because those policies are unsustainable until eradication, which could take years, they are actually forestalling herd immunity, keeping vulnerable people at risk longer, crushing their society and economies, and ensuring that so many seniors die of isolation and atrophy.

The virus eventually catches up to them, which is what we have witnessed in places like California, Hawaii, Israel, and Australia, which thought they dodged the bullet by destroying their economies. Now, they are left with nothing but a sea of cross-contaminated cloth masks.

For those of you who wondered why no other generation was ‘smart’ enough to think of these policies to “mitigate” a respiratory virus, the feebleness of our actions have now been unmasked.

Horowitz: Subways, buses & trains still running in coronavirus hot spots. How exactly does that help fight the virus?

It’s hard to think of a more opportune place for a contagious virus to spread than in subways and on buses. Yet, weeks into the shutdown of businesses that never engender large crowds and prohibition in some states for citizens to hike in wide-open state parks, mass transit is still running to some degree in almost every major hot spot. Let me guess: This is also scientifically sound policy built on the vaunted “models and projections,” right?

So many parts of America are now thankful they don’t live in Europe, where so many people don’t have cars and rely instead on public transportation for everything. Cars are the great beacon of freedom, movement, and individualism and the symbol of America’s wide-open expanse. Cars are extremely reliable and facilitate every level of personal liberty and economic movement, yet at the same time they are the perfect long-term and short-term vehicle for social distancing and the antidote against viral spreading. Mass transit, on the other hand, is to coronavirus what water and sunlight are to plants.

Here is a sample of some major city or state transit systems still operating either at full or at reduced capacity as of April 1:

In some of these cities, you could be pulled over and questioned for simply traveling alone in your car, but the subways are still open! New York is the big shocker. Police have to patrol the cars to count how many people are in them.

Wouldn’t you expect mass transit to be the first thing shut down during this epidemic? National Review’s Dan McLaughlin observes how by tracing the zip code map of coronavirus cases in New York City, it is quite evident that the subway lines could have played an outsized role in transmission of the virus.

Yes, shutting it down would be disruptive, but not nearly as disruptive as a full nuclear winter on all businesses and even very important medical care, which is now causing the furloughing of vital health care providers.

I live right outside Baltimore, not exactly rural Wyoming. Everyone in my neighborhood has two cars, and it is by no means an upper-income neighborhood. Keeping most businesses open, facilitated through individual car travel and wearing masks and gloves, would result in exponentially better outcomes for our lives, economy, and yes, defeating the virus than shutting everything down but leaving open mass transit.

Whatever value added one can possibly see in keeping mass transit open in large cities, even under a weekend schedule, it would not get nearly as many people to work as lifting some of the more draconian bans on businesses. And with so many people working at home anyway, lots of friends and neighbors who don’t have cars would be able to borrow them. It wouldn’t work for everyone, but it would sure get more people to work than a mandatory lockdown.

According to payroll provider ADP, the entirety of the net job losses in March came from small businesses, which are the easiest venues to implement safe sanitation and distancing. With mass transit still running and criminals being released, this is exactly the time we should apply the Illinois Supreme Court’s exception to state quarantine powers – when “regulations adopted for the protection of the public health are arbitrary, oppressive and unreasonable.” (People ex. rel. Barmore v. Robertson, 1922.)

Alas, the reality is that mass transit is a holy grail of the Left, just like jailbreak, which is why these authoritarian policies, not grounded in reality, are so arbitrary and political. Shockingly, rather than moving away from mass transit, $25 billion in transit funding was slipped into the coronavirus rescue bill that was signed into law last week. Nancy Pelosi is already calling for a “phase 4” coronavirus bill to fund mass transit, among other pet projects.

Again, at what point and after how much devastation are we the citizens going to start asking questions of the government and the media and why their supposed concern for science and regard for “science” always results in inconsistent outcomes benefiting their long-standing political beliefs?

Coronavirus outbreak expands to 18 states

Will Trump consider suspending travel to China amid the coronavirus outbreak?

An epidemic that begins in another country can only spread to America if we admit people at our ports of entry traveling from the source country. Yet whenever a public health crisis breaks out, such as the Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014 and in Congo last year, a temporary travel ban seems to be the last thing on the minds of the federal agencies responsible for protecting public health, rather than the first option. Immigration and travel are regarded as too sacred to restrict. Will the coronavirus outbreak in China be different?

The death toll from the 2019-nCoV epidemic, simply referred to as the coronavirus, has now exceeded 80, as more than 2,700 cases have been confirmed in China. The potentially deadly respiratory illness originated in Wuhan, China, and has spread throughout Hubei province and even to Hong Kong. Travel likely should have been shut down two weeks ago, but the virus has now spread to the United States. There are now five confirmed cases – two in California, one in Seattle, one in Chicago, and one in Maricopa County, Arizona. All five patients had traveled recently to Wuhan.

Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, announced over the weekend, "We expect to find more cases of novel coronavirus in the United States."

It’s particularly alarming given that the symptoms and source of this virus are like those of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which also originated in south China in 2002. During the SARS epidemic, which lasted into 2003, 774 died out of a total of 8,098 known cases worldwide.

One would expect that the first course of action of the government would be to prevent Chinese from traveling here or Americans from traveling to China and returning, or at least to impose a travel ban on parts of China. That is the first step to ensuring that the disease doesn’t spread like wildfire in our country. Yet, as with epidemics of the past, there doesn’t seem to be any imminent warning of suspending travel.

This is particularly jarring in the case of China. On average, we issue 1.4 million tourist visas to Chinese nationals every year, more than to nationals of any other country in the world. That’s a pace of nearly 4,000 per day traveling here, not including the Americans who travel to China and return. That is one massive pipeline through which an epidemic can spread.

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