Wisconsin Supreme Court Rules Lockdowns Are Illegal

I think they should outlaw hamburgers and fries. That will prevent deaths. A national speed limit of 25 mph, that will save lives.

Given that most chronic diseases are self inflicted and preventable, one can see plenty of fodder for the totalitarian impulse.

Come on Mish, question 1 is not a good question. If a bill is approved by both houses of the Legislature and signed by the governor, then it is a valid law, if it does not violate the state or federal Constitution. Some minor underling inventing a law with criminal penalties is invalid, period, the end.

The other side of choices–words from a new doctor at Bellevue hospital in NYC

….The next Monday, as I put on my scrubs and mask for my first day of work, I was propelled by anxiety and excitement. I had worked ten years and countless hours for this moment: the first time I’d be entering the hospital as an M.D. It was pouring rain in New York, and though it’s only a five-minute walk from my apartment to Bellevue Hospital, I was drenched by the time I walked in the front entrance and toward the newly established temperature-screening point. I was surprised at how familiar the wards felt when I got off the elevator. The same cold fluorescent lights. The same smells, acrid and organic. That every face here was concealed in a mask was somehow not as unsettling as it had been in Trader Joe’s. It was the sounds that oriented me most: beeping, everywhere. The language of the hospital is beeps — the oxygen is too low, the heart rate is normal, the medicine has been given. Almost every action in a hospital has a corresponding beep.

The superficial familiarity, however, concealed profound difference. As I became acquainted with “my list” — the patients my team was assigned to care for — I learned that every one of them had COVID-19. My list was not an anomaly; nearly every patient in the hospital had the coronavirus. Whole floors once dedicated to surgical specialties, cancer, and heart failure had been turned into COVID overflow floors. The idea of specialists, at least temporarily, no longer existed; nearly every provider in the hospital cared for COVID patients.

The providers themselves were different too. Many were traveling nurses, NPs, and PAs — reinforcements flown in from across the country. Some were meant to serve at the Javits Center and other “relief valve” sites, but, at least by their own reports, so few patients were making it there that their assignments had been changed. An NP from Memphis told me in a southern twang: “Every year, I go on a service trip to a different place. Last year, I went to Nicaragua. Year before that, Ghana. This year, I’m here helping y’all.” The implied comparison unsettled me.

Before I started, I had become increasingly obsessed with numbers. Case fatality rates and infectivity scores and flattening curves. If I could just grasp the facts and figures, wouldn’t I get some semblance of control? But on my first day, as I rounded with my team on critical patient after critical patient, the statistical lens through which I’d seen COVID dissolved. The numbers were now real human beings whose health I was responsible for. That first day, I counted at least 20 “RRTs,” or rapid responses, announced over the hospital PA system. Each time the PA system beeped overhead, I prayed it was not my patient who needed to be ventilated and brought to the ICU. Wouldn’t it represent some personal failure if it was?

My attending and older residents assured me there was very little we could do to halt the natural progression of COVID-19. Patients either got better or worse; our efforts made almost no difference. But my education had cemented a clear conviction: medical interventions make sick patients better. I stubbornly clung to the notion that a patient improving was a result of our successes, and a patient deteriorating the result of our failures. What was the point of all this schooling if my role was merely to watch and wait?

Lying in bed after my first day, I felt haggard, burdened by the enormity of responsibility and how little I could actually do. As I was about to fall asleep, a beep came over my cell phone — the resident Slack channel announcing another rapid response, this time on a 33-year-old critical patient I was caring for. I felt queasy. Powerless in my bed at home, I already couldn’t escape the hospital.

The next day, a patient unexpectedly died. I was eating lunch when a “code” — indicating the patient was without a pulse — was called to her room. I thought it was a mistake as I ran up the stairs. She had been the patient I was least worried about; just hours earlier, we had discussed the possibility of her going home soon. Now I was outside her room, frantic as I peered in through the double glass doors and saw an older physician I did not recognize doing chest compressions. I had been told that the recent graduates would not be part of codes, since there is a high risk of viral transmission during these “aerosolizing” events. But how could I not enter? I put on my PPE and stood there frozen, staring into the room, literally and figuratively at the precipice between student and doctor. The patient was pronounced dead before I could make up my mind to enter.

The hospital has been a lonely place for patient and provider alike. With patients wearing oxygen masks and providers covered head-to-toe in PPE, the ability to have real conversations has been difficult. Most of the patients on my team spend the majority of their days completely alone, without any form of distraction. But amid the isolation, the hospital has still had moments of genuine human connection and joy. One of my patients was desperate to meet her newborn grandson, so I found a donated iPad and held it for her as she FaceTimed with her daughter and the baby. She smiled at me through tears when the call ended. “That beautiful boy, he has a whole big life to lead,” she said. “I just pray to live another day.”

Toward the end of my first week, as I prepared to leave after another long day, the hospital intercom beeped. I feared it was another RRT. Instead, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” began to play over the Bellevue PA system. The hospital seemed to pause. Whispers had circulated that the song would be played hospitalwide each time a patient was extubated or discharged from the ICU; I had yet to hear it. Relief flashed across everyone’s eyes — a big, collective exhale. Some nurses began to clap to the rhythm. I was surprised to find myself laughing.

These moments of levity, however, have been few. Five of the first ten patients I cared for passed away. For a new physician — for anyone, really — this amount of death is disturbing. I remember the names and faces of each of them; their deaths will no doubt stay with me. In my two years of clinical experience as a medical student, I had lost four patients total. I was shocked the first time family members looked to me for consolation and wisdom as their loved one neared death. Certainly, they thought, as I felt, that I was just a random guy who had taken a couple of science classes and was given a stethoscope and a white coat.

Over the course of medical school, my impostor syndrome diminished. I came to appreciate my role in those critical moments before and after death helping a family come to terms with the inevitable — to begin to grieve and, ultimately, heal. But COVID has uniquely undermined this critical aspect of patient and family care. Given the sheer volume of patients and the acuity of each case, I’ve had less time and emotional bandwidth to process my patients’ deaths. One afternoon, I received a call from a patient’s daughter, who was sobbing as she told me that her mom had passed away and she was trying to locate her belongings. I was ashamed that I didn’t initially recognize the woman, or which patient she was talking about. Finally, I realized that it was the new grandmother, the one I’d found the iPad for. She had passed away, alone, after a week of being on a ventilator in the ICU. Before I could internalize this, my pager beeped with another urgent task for me to attend to.

The NYU residency program and my mentor physicians have done their best to make space for processing what we’re going through. There are regular debriefing and group-therapy sessions that help, but none of that can change what we’re witnessing daily. The first years of residency are known as particularly formative in a doctor’s career since our medical habits and “muscle-memory” have not yet been cemented. This experience will inevitably shape the kind of doctor I become.

Even over this first month of being an M.D., I have noticed a new hypervigilance take hold of me. My first night shift in the hospital, I was assigned a patient whom the primary day team described as “stably sick.” When I went to introduce myself, I found him delirious in the midst of pulling off his oxygen mask. I watched in horror as his oxygen saturations dipped from 95 to 48 in a matter of seconds — anything less than 90 is too low, and I had never seen a conscious person lower than 70. I ran out of the room to call an RRT. Even as the patient stabilized, I could not relax. Each hour for the rest of the night, I found myself back at his door, peering in through the acrylic window to check his oxygen saturation.

This hyperalertness has lasted. In medical school, I was taught that a patient’s medical trajectory is typically relatively easy to track. Though occasionally physicians are surprised by their patients’ outcomes, most of the time they follow a predictable course. My experience with COVID patients has shattered that belief. So instead, I find myself constantly on high alert. That hypervigilance is a cardinal symptom of PTSD is not lost on me….

When the leader of a country turns simple acts of public hygiene into political division there is truly no hope.

If you back up and look, the costs of the lock-down are now officially wasted.

The time and cost could have been offset by the integration of good public hygiene into everyday life–thereby continuing the slowdown in the spread and allow a measured re-opening.

The time of the lock-down could have been poured into increasing supplies of necessary items and getting real testing and tracing set up, but it wasn’t.

The time of the lock-down could have been centered around working out a coordinated set of standards for re-opening and supporting businesses during re-opening, but it wasn’t.

Wasted, wasted, wasted.

So let me understand: Wisconsin has less than 500 Covid deaths, has flattened the curve, has lots of hospital beds available. This isn’t New York or New Jersey. Let them open. Our great State of Michigan’s legislature will be the next to overturn our control freak Governors ridiculous rules so we actually have an economy when this is over. As a Wolverine, I hate to say it but our nemesis Ohio is leading the way, and showing us what Freedom looks like. And check out how many dead in Ohio, less than 2,000 in a state of 11M

How much of this is down to alienation between the have’s and have not’s; between the income and tax generating and the tax spending sectors of society? The disenfranchised and in debt needing to get to work …

How many people will die because of the ruling?

Hmm? Hard to say. If you think a politician cares more about you and your family than you do, then I’d say many. On the other hand, if you believe people care more about their families and themselves than do politicians (which I’m inclined to believe) then I’d say very few.

The typical leftist meme is that people are too dumb to take care of themselves. This is prevalent in the thinking behind the Nanny State and in many of the comments above. Thus, we must have government thuggery! So much for freedom and personal responsibility.

Well, let’s force everything open and see what happens. We’ll find out how badly China has been fudging their numbers depending on our fate.

I just wish these same people had been able to locate their backbones during the whole post 9/11 circus, especially the Patriot Act, and during TARP. I guess most of America can’t think theoretically, something has to be right in their faces for them to notice. You can oppress them from afar to your heart’s content and debase their money until the end of time, but prevent them from going to the hair salon or cancel sportsball games and they go ape.