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MBD: Yemos Hamashiach
ונזכה
Mar 19, 2019
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ונזכה · Mordechai Ben David
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℗ Mordechai Ben David
Released on: 1992-09-05
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Composer Lyricist: Mordechai Ben David
Composer: Mordechai Ben David
Lyricist: Mordechai Ben David
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COVID-19 and the Hype
By Rabbi Dr. Yosef P. Glassman, MD | February 04, 2021
Every life is sacred and should be saved when possible. Start there.
On Purim 5781 (תשאף=gematria for “take a deep breath in”) the Jewish community, along with the rest of the world, will mark a year of Nahafochu. Yet traveling to Lakewood, Monsey or Brooklyn, one might mistakenly think that the dreaded coronavirus has been eradicated. Masks are rare, except in supermarkets. It is not clear whether the animus is “Hashem ya’zor” versus “we’ve passed this test already” versus lack of trust in government.
However, the lack of public masking, en masse, is a notable flashpoint. Indeed, ultra-Orthodox Jews are in the spotlight as one of the many groups who seem to defy public health recommendations, both here and in Israel. It does indeed look like our compatriots are blatantly disregarding laws around the virus and perhaps, one might argue, bucking modern science in order to avoid the inconvenience of a mask. But are the Jews truly disregarding science? Is current practice and law purely based on science, and is it consistent? Let’s examine our view of the pandemic from a less emotional and more objective eye; this is demanded of us. The inconsistencies might make you reconsider your Purim plans or lack thereof.
Inconsistency #1: Plastic dividers. New plexiglass dividers, shower curtains and splash guards are now a common part of the scenery. To be sure, a virus could easily go around or through the hinge of the aliyah “penalty boxes” in most shuls. These dividers are notably new petri dishes that house many bacteria, viruses and other pathogens. Other than blocking a direct sneeze, they are highly symbolic at best. Not only are we not cleaning these surfaces often, but even worse, the supermarket touchpad for the debit cards are a bacterial and viral nest. Rarely are they cleaned between customers.
Inconsistency #2: Nursing home deaths. The statement, “Over 400,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 over the past year” is quite shocking. Yet, pre-COVID19, approximately 400,000 Americans nursing home residents died of other infectious diseases yearly. Picture CNN putting a tally of nursing home deaths on the screen as it is now with COVID. It would look similar in number. Additionally, 33 percent of nursing home residents die every year and 50 percent pass after three years of entering nursing home on average of all causes1. Alarm bells need to be consistent to be effective and believable. No one should die of preventable disease. We needed to wash our hands with soap for decades prior to 5780.
Inconsistency #3: Death rate. Americans are dying now at a rate of 8.977/1000 people/year. This is similar to 1978 America. Only two years ago, Americans died at a rate of 8.697/1000, which is still pretty high compared to the rest of the world (7.6/1000 people/year). Compared to China, whose death rate rose from 7.26 to 7.4/1000/year over the past year, we are doing poorly, but we were doing worse last year as well. That said, in 1950, the world was dying at a rate of 20/1000/year.2 One cannot place a cold number on the death of one person and we as doctors and society need to try to prevent every preventable death. Yet, it is truly hard to label this entire phenomenon as a pandemic as the CDC defines it: an event in which a disease spreads across several countries and affects a large number of people. Yes, over 100 million people worldwide have contracted the dreaded virus, and over 2 million out of a total 7.674 billion have sadly and unfortunately died. These numbers sound large, yet relatively speaking, this translates as a cold stat of 1.3% COVID + and and only 0.026% dying. All numbers are relative. Compare this to 2019, when 2.6 million people died of other communicable lower respiratory infections (0.034% of the world). Was that large? Sure it is larger than Bnei Brak and Meah Shearim combined, but it may not even qualify as a halachic magefa. Ask your local Orthodox rabbi. And, by the way, in case you needed another positive reason to make aliyah prior to Moshiach, one must know that in 2019 the overall death rate was 5.328/1000/year in Israel, dropping to 5.323 in 2020, COVID included. Food for thought.
Inconsistency #4: Selective alarm bells. Public health messaging alarm bells are quite arbitrary. Of course, the doctor’s individual and public health goal should always be ZERO preventable deaths, but if one is to be true to statistics and science, one must look at what the American government’s attitude truly is around public health at large. We are sounding the “public health” alarm bell at this time, but one of the greatest public health emergencies is far from contained—tobacco. Deaths from highly addictive cigarette related disease tops 500,000 per year in the U.S. in a typical year, (10 percent second hand). Nicotine ads are geared toward children and there is limited recourse. Additionally, run-of-the-mill alcohol remains, statistically speaking, more deadly and costly to society than crack and heroin; yet liquor stores remain thriving, while they often sell cigarettes and collect taxes for the American government. Do we see the paradox? Ban cigarettes to be true. Alcohol should still be open to responsible adult use, but needs heavy education and a cup of ice.
Inconsistency #5: School closings: German researchers have proposed that closing certain parts of society (e.g., schools) while leaving others open (e.g., liquor stores) has created a mushroom cloud effect and has spread the coronavirus even faster. By the way, kids have three times the greater risk of dying from flu, God forbid, than from COVID-19. Also children are 16 times less likely to die from COVID-19 than adults. Recent studies from Georgia have shown that schools are not superspreaders. Teachers should and could take caution, as they are older, but even this caution needs to be put into perspective.
Inconsistency #6: Deadliness of COVID-19 itself. The truth is that the deadly nature of COVID-19 is not necessarily the virus itself, but the underlying inflammatory state of the host. Deaths were 12 times higher among patients with reported underlying conditions compared with those without reported underlying conditions (19.5% versus 1.6%)3. Very often, “previously healthy” patients with COVID-19 became hospitalized as the virus unmasked an underlying dormant illness. We Americans were already at risk, overweight and carrying an inflammatory sac of fat around our pancreas (myself included), literally poison to all organs. COVID-19 triggers the attention of the already overdriven immune system and makes a big surprise party around the lungs and many blood vessels. Couple that with the inflammatory plaques around the coronaries and aortas building up since age three. Thus, COVID-19, in its thrombotic and clotting nature, has allowed these fatty plaques to clog further into heart attacks and strokes. Yes, the disease itself hits the lungs and even leads to blood clots in the lungs, but the real culprit is the immune response combined with underlying inflammation. COVID-19 is the unmasker of baseline inflammation. It is the unmasker of a poor diet. It is the unmasker of lack of exercise. Indeed, deaths from non–COVID-19 causes (e.g., Alzheimer disease, diabetes, heart disease) increased sharply in five states with the most “COVID-19 deaths.”4 The real alarm bell is the underlying conditions that put us at risk.
Inconsistency #7: Masks. The World Health Organization tells us that it is hard to expect the gold standard of a randomized controlled trial comparing mask wearers to non-mask wearers. This is for ethical reasons. It would be similar to comparing the building homes with a flowing sewage system versus those without sewage systems, and seeing which household contracted more disease. Public health measures often can only be observed for results. Causality is difficult to ascribe despite the obvious. This is similar to masking. We only have some studies that are not robust. Only one observational study has directly analyzed the impact of mask use in the community on COVID-19 transmission. The study looked at the reduction of secondary transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Beijing households by face mask use.5 It found that face masks were 79 percent effective in preventing transmission, if they were used by all household members prior to symptoms occurring. That said, the source of 80 percent of all COVID infections remains unknown. The remaining known 20 percent is likely at home and restaurants, or any other place you can think of that one hangs out in crowds with potential prolonged exposure.
It is clear that masks must help to at least stop infected drops from exiting a person’s dalet amos; whether they prevent infection likely depends on the mask itself (N95 versus shmatte). Yet, know that any place that people feel the most comfortable, they take masks off for long periods (e.g., restaurants and home, most commonly), where virus can linger and spread. Sure, your fellow family diners don’t mean to spread COVID-19 to you, but if infected, it is very likely from your nearby loved one, not the passing haredi at Whole Foods. And perhaps the optics aren’t good when black and white Jews are maskless, but true mask advocates need to be consistent, wearing them round the clock, even at home. Lack of societal rule consistency leads to both conscious and subconscious questioning of the sincerity of public health recommendations and rightly screams hypocrisy.
Every life is sacred and needs to be saved, but COVID-19, overwhelmingly and scientifically speaking, is not the death sentence that is projected on the news. It is real. It is not a hoax. Be careful. Protect the elderly and immunocompromised. But at the end of the day, the Infinite Creator is the Dayan HaEmet, even with all our efforts.
1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6143238/
2 https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate
3 Coronavirus Disease 2019 Case Surveillance — United States, January 22–May 30, 2020. Weekly / June 19, 2020 / 69(24);759–765)
4 Woolf SH, Chapman DA, Sabo RT, Weinberger DM, Hill L. Excess deaths from COVID-19 and other causes, March-April 2020. JAMA. 2020; 324 (5): 510-513.
5 Y. Wang et al., Reduction of secondary transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in households by face mask use, disinfection and social distancing: A cohort study in Beijing, China. BMJ Global Health 5, e002794 (2020)
Rabbi Dr. Yosef P. Glassman, M.D. lives in Bergenfield and is the director of hospital medicine at a community hospital in Lakewood, where he leads the COVID-19 unit. He is also CEO of HADARTA.org, which encourages elder aliyah specifically to Safed.
From Jewish Link, here.
‘The 7 Days of Creation Correspond to the Years of the World’ – You Do the Math!
The Most World’s Important Unanswered Historical Question: “What Changed in 1800?”
March 30, 2011
The economic historian Gregory Clark summarizes a remarkable fact.
. . . there is no sign of any improvement in material conditions for settled agrarian societies as we approach 1800. There was no gain between 1800 BC and AD 1800 — a period of 3,600 years. Indeed the wages for east and south Asia and southern Europe for 1800 stand out by their low level compared to those for ancient Babylonia, ancient Greece, or Roman Egypt.
Then, around 1800, this all changed. Economic growth began: about 2% per annum, compounded. That brought our world into existence.
We are the great beneficiaries of a process that few people understand. No one has explained cogently how it came into existence. A rate of growth so slow that no one could perceive it at the time has created a world that would have been inconceivable in 1800.
This change has taken a mere three generations. This is simply inconceivable.
My daughter gave me a great Christmas present in 2010. She scheduled an appointment for me to interview a man in her church. His name is Lyon Tyler. My daughter grew up in a city named after his grandfather: Tyler, Texas. His grandfather was John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States. He signed the law that admitted Texas into the Union in 1845.
John Tyler was born in 1790, the first full year of Washington’s Presidency.
Lyon Tyler’s younger brother, also alive, uses the ultimate one-upsmanship one-liner I have ever heard. After chatting for a while with a stranger, he springs it on him.
“As my grandfather once said to Thomas Jefferson. . . .”
You can try to top that one. You won’t succeed.
In 1889, the first volume of Henry Adams’ history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison appeared. Adams was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams. He began his book with this paragraph.
According to the census of 1800, the United States of America contained 5,308,483 persons. In the same year the British Islands contained upwards of fifteen millions; the French Republic, more than twenty-seven millions. Nearly one fifth of the American people were negro slaves; the true political population consisted of four and a half million free white or less than one million able-bodied males, on whose shoulders fell the burden of a continent. Even after two centuries of struggle the land was still untamed; forest covered every portion, except here and there a strip of cultivated soil; the minerals lay undisturbed in their rocky beds, and more than two thirds of the people clung to the seaboard within fifty miles of tide-water, where alone the wants of civilized life could be supplied. The centre of population rested within eighteen miles of Baltimore, north and east of Washington. Except in political arrangement, the interior was little more civilized than in 1750, and was not much easier to penetrate than when La Salle and Hennepin found their way to the Mississippi more than a century before.
The world of 1800 would have been recognizable to Socrates, except for the printed book. In contrast, the world of 1889 would not have been recognizable to the young John Tyler.
By 1889, these post-1800 inventions had arrived: gas lighting, electric lighting (arc light), the steam powered ship, the tin can, the macadamized road, photography, the railroad, portland cement, the reaper, anesthesia, the typewriter, the sewing machine, the Colt revolver, the telegraph, the wrench, the safety pin, mass-produced newspapers, pasteurization, vulcanized rubber, barbed wire, petroleum-based industry, dynamite, the telephone, Carnegie’s steel mills, the skyscraper, the internal combustion engine, the automobile, and commercial electricity.
So, as I move toward the day when I am a footnote rather than a participant, I propose a thesis. One unanswered question above all others constitutes the most important historical question in recorded history. Here it is:
What happened around the year 1800 in Great Britain that led to approximately 2% per annum economic growth for the next two centuries?
Some economic historians think this began around 1780. Others, most notably Angus Maddison, believe it began in 1820. The year 1800 is a good middle-ground position.
THEN AND NOW
Our world is not even remotely like the world of 1800. In contrast, 1800 was recognizably similar A.D. 1. Clark points out that in the Roman Empire in A.D. 1, information traveled at about one mile per hour. In 1800, this had increased to about 1.4 miles per hour. Compare that with the speed of light: 186,000 miles per second. That was what the telegraph did.
The world of 1876 was not remotely like 1800. Yet compare 1876 with today. A child in 1876 who read a newspaper account of Custer’s Last Stand lived long enough to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in 1969.
In 1967, I took a graduate seminar in economic history from Hugh Aitken. I had studied this subject as an undergraduate with him in 1962. Aitken was a great teacher. He is not famous, but several years after I took that seminar, he became the editor of The Journal of Economic History, one of the two major academic English-language journals in the field. In one session, he said this. “There is no agreement on what happened around 1800 to launch the Industrial Revolution.” There is still no agreement.
Here are the questions: (1) Why 1800? (2) Why in in the northern tier of northern Europe?
In a two-volume series, scheduled to go to six volumes, Prof. Deirdre McCloskey has surveyed the field. McCloskey argues that the fundamental change that made possible the industrial and agricultural revolutions was in the area of society. The age-old hostility to the entrepreneur changed in seventeenth-century Holland and spread to Great Britain. It was a change in ideas that mattered, not a change in property rights or technology.
The second volume, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010), is a cogently argued case against all of the arguments from economic efficiency alone. These economic changes were not sufficient to create the transformation.
The problem is this: the first two volumes do not come close to proving McCloskey’s thesis, a thesis that I have wanted to see proved for 40 years, namely, that seventeenth-century Protestantism changed the minds of people in the pews and on court benches regarding the ethical legitimacy of profits and the pursuit of economic self-interest. I wrote my Ph.D dissertation on this topic as it applied in Puritan New England. Maybe the next four volumes will do this through a careful survey of sermons, catechisms, and theological treatises of Dutch Calvinists and their imitators in Scotland and England. I hope so. But this will not be easy to prove.
[Note to Dr. McCloskey: take a look at the answers to the questions in the Westminster Larger Catechism (1646) on the fifth commandment: questions 126-33. See if they differ from the Lutheran interpretations a century earlier. They promote a hierarchical, status-based society that is hostile to “uppity” people of the lower sorts who start moving up.]
Dr. Clark has written a good book on the difference that 2% per annum has made, A Farewell to Alms (2006). He offers page after page of examples of how bad things were in 1800. He also offers suggestions regarding why the change took place. Dr. McCloskey challenges all of them.
And so it goes. The origin of most important transformation of human society in the last 4,000 years has no cogent, plausible, carefully documented explanation.
It had to do with liberty. But the legal foundations of liberty stretch back into European history. It had to do with technology. But men have always been inventive. Why 1800? Why Great Britain and North America?
We want this process to continue. It looks as though it will continue. We are future-oriented people. We like to think that tomorrow will be better than yesterday.
The creativity of billions of people are being coordinated by market processes that we do not understand. As Leonard E. Read wrote in 1958, no one knows how to make a pencil.
We do not know how the process began where it did and when it did, but with the failure of socialism in our era, we now know how to maintain it: through liberty of choice, by allowing people to retain the fruits of their labor, their risk-taking, and their confidence in the future.
The petty restraints imposed by politicians and bureaucrats will not thwart the growth process for long. The promise of liberty is too widespread today. While the government can and will continue to attempt to appropriate individuals’ wealth in the name of the poor, to be administered by upper middle class bureaucrats, the effort will not succeed. The wealth formula is now known. It is simple. “Get the state out of the way of future-oriented people.”
CONCLUSION
Ludwig von Mises argued in 1922 that the greatest strength of the socialists was their belief in the inevitability of victory. But they were wrong. They lost the war on two battlefields: theory and practice.
This is why, in the long run, the most effective tool in the market for liberty is confidence that individual creativity will produce a better world, as long as people keep their hands off each other’s property. “Thou shalt not steal” is a good place to start. “Thou shalt not covet” is the foundation of “thou shalt not steal.”
The battle is not technological. It is ethical. The good guys will win. That is the lesson of the free market. The free market links personal responsibility with ownership. This is the key to prosperity.
From Gary North, here.