by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

This is what you get when the government starts price-jacking.

What am I talking about?

Ever notice that EMS is in the same building as firefighting?  When you have a routine, no-real-risk minor car accident where the vehicles are driveable and everyone is standing on their own — both EMS and the Fire Department is rolled?  Ditto if you call for one or the other at your home or office?

Never mind where both have their vehicles, and the “modern practice” of trying to shove ALS down everyone’s throat.  They did that here a number of years ago — ballot issue, which passed.  Of course the entire ****ing Fire Department lobbied hard for that, because it would mean nice million dollar ambulances and, instead of someone who had basic EMS skills, advanced skills at three or four times the salary and they had to be in the building on-call all the time, not on a volunteer basis.

Volunteer fire departments worked fine for a long time.  Paid ones make sense in higher-density areas, some of the time.  But the more integration the higher the taxes and the more “specialized” everyone gets.  Oh, and the more it’s all shoved together.

Well, now in Kirkland there’s an entire fire department, along with its EMS, that is under quarantine and will not be putting out any fires or attending any heart attacks.  Why?  Because they all were in the same place all the time and they made runs to Kirkland’s nursing home which had a Coronavirus outbreak which, conveniently, was not analyzed, reported or isolated straight up until the second order effects, that is, someone died, occurred.

Now you have an essential government service effectively shut down.  You likely have one thousand carriers of Coronavirus all over the greater Seattle/Tacoma area, all the way to Redmond and beyond.  Those are the third order carriers who got it from the second-order ones who are now symptomatic; said third order ones are, in part, under quarantine at the firehouse but most of the second-order carriers have no damn clue they gave it to thousands of others, all of whom are likely asymptomatic and thus have utterly no way to know they’re dangerous.

Granted, right here and now that’s one fire station. There are others, albeit further away, so the ability to actually put out a fire hasn’t been much impacted.  The city is, of course, claiming to be “fully staffed” and “not impacted.”

Uh huh.

Sure it isn’t.  Just like they were 100% honest about this virus at their nice nursing home, right?  They were very forthcoming when the first resident or staffer got sick?  They tested everyone immediately, knowing since mid-January this was a risk as there are a metric crap-ton of Chinese and Americans who travel between China and the SeaTac/Kirkland/Redmond are all the time?

Uh, no, they did not.  Not until someone died and they couldn’t hide it any more.

Incidentally your actual odds of survival if you have a heart attack haven’t changed much either.  But that’s not because response time hasn’t been materially extended — it has.  No, rather that’s because statistically speaking going from basic EMS to ALS may have had a 10% increase in your odds of survival of said heart attack but you were 90% likely to die before, so now you’ve got one more chance in 100 to live.  Losing that one extra chance is statistically lost in the noise of whether there’s a car wreck between you and the firehouse when you fall over clutching your chest in your home.  You tripled the cost of providing the service (or more, since you also now need in-building 24x7x365 coverage where you didn’t before) and got an effective nothing for that expense, while at the same time you decreased resiliency and redundancy, which is now screwing you blind in terms of fire response — where it might actually matter.

Do you believe anything you’re being told any longer?  Why would you?  Federal, State and Local governments lie all the time.  The Chinese lie too; that we know.  Statistically speaking it is impossible the Chinese did not know that this virus was a problem as far back as December and perhaps before; on a mathematical basis Patient Zero was likely in early October.

They arrested one of the doctors who blew the whistle on this early; he later contracted it himself and is dead.  Still want to argue with them being “responsive”?  No — they instead seeded it all over the world and, although Trump did slam the door closed he waited until he had no choice, just as he is waiting now with Mexico’s border.

You can’t expect otherwise.  Further, for healthy people this bug is not the end of the world.  That’s the good news.

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