Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
We are appealing for help to identify a man who kissed a woman on the cheek to thank her for helping when his lorry became stuck under a low bridge,” tweet Derbyshire Police. “Were you in the area of Dale Road, #Matlock, between 12pm and 4pm on Tuesday, 28 April.”
Just kidding
Or maybe we won’t; the politicians and their media tools will be desperate to claim that only the shutdown spared us from global destruction.
The Covid-19 modelling that sent Britain into lockdown, shutting the economy and leaving millions unemployed, has been slammed by a series of experts.
Professor Neil Ferguson’s computer coding was derided as “totally unreliable” by leading figures, who warned it was “something you wouldn’t stake your life on”.
The model, credited with forcing the Government to make a U-turn and introduce a nationwide lockdown, is a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming”, says David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco.
“In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.”
Earlier: What Neil Ferguson’s Booty Call Tells Us About Modern Politics.
The maddening thing about this entire debacle is that Neil Ferguson is a buffoon who has been pulling numbers and models from his rear end for 20 years and has been wrong for twenty years. His peers are no better and no more believable, whether opining on flu viruses or global warming.
We have now met the Imperial College London epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology Neil Ferguson — the “gold standard” of disease modeling, according to the New York Times and Washington Post. Ferguson is of course the expert whose projections of huge death tolls from COVID-19 in the United States and the United Kingdom have supported the ongoing shutdowns. Ferguson projected as many as 2,200,000 deaths in the United States and 500,000 deaths in the United Kingdom.
Looking back at that Guardian article, Bill observes that Ferguson has a record of making stupid worst-case predictions about the threat of new viruses. Bill cites “what Prof. Gold Standard said in 2005 about the projected Bird Flu death toll to the Guardian”:
Last month Neil Ferguson, a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, told Guardian Unlimited that up to 200 million people could be killed.
“Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” said Prof Ferguson. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.”
A Department of Health contingency plan states anywhere that there could be between 21,500 and 709,000 deaths in Britain.”
The Bird Flu’s death toll from 2003 to 2020 is 455.
Dr. Ferguson was equally off with his death projections for mad cow disease. He made big headlines in the United Kingdom by predicting that mad cow disease could kill between 50 and 50,000. Bill writes: “Millions of cows were slaughtered. But to be fair, his scientific ‘model’ was right. The death toll [is 178 to date].”
Among the British publications that have recently drawn attention to Dr. Ferguson’s record are The Sun and The Telegraph.
The Washington Post reported on the Ferguson effect in the current crisis in “A chilling scientific paper helped upend U.S. and U.K. coronavirus strategies.” The New York Times reported on the Ferguson effect in the story “Behind the Virus Report That Jarred the U.S. and the U.K. to Action.” Subhead: “It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were, as who reported them: Imperial College London.” Given Dr. Ferguson’s record, however, the numbers should probably have been questioned if not discounted precisely because of the source.
26 Cobb Island Drive, purchased for $3.850 million in 2014 has sold today for $3.2. Nothing wrong with the house, but I-95 hasn’t gotten any quieter in the past five years.
Of interest, perhaps: this property went into contract just last week and has already closed. New Yorker?
Well, hardly that bad, but our housing stock does continue to evolve. Take, for instance, this new construction at 180 Stanwich Road, listed today at $6.530 million. It’s hardly to my taste but then, I am hardly the builder’s target audience, so we’re square.
The sale history of the 1925 house it replaced provides a look into the market changes that have occurred in the past few decades. Although grievously dated, it sold in just 14 days in November 2001 for $1.950 million. Barely three years later, in march 2005 it sold for $2.6 million after 11 days, a 33% increase just for sitting there. Those were fine days for home buyers, not so good for buyers.
But that sale also served as a demarcation in the market for old homes. They still do sell, but to an increasingly-thinner buyer pool, so sales take longer and yield scrawnier returns. The 2005 buyers of this place, for example, put it back up for sale in 2014 at that same $2.6 million they’d paid nine years before and there it sat until 2014 when they finally sold it to this builder for $2.050.
So it goes.
Gone and mostly forgotten
19 Meadow Drive, in Rock Ridge and asking $9.495 million, reports a contract. New construction priced at $13.995 back in January 2018, I’m sure this discounted price is a slight disappointment, but the builder paid $3.9 for the 2-acre lot, so he’ll be just fine.
44 Dublin Hill, as imagined
The buyers of 42 Dublin Hill Road paid $6.6 million for its 23 acres in 2018. Now they’re getting ready to present a six-house subdivision to the buying public, starting at $7.250 million and ending at $7.850.
Tax records show that they borrowed $20 million from Patriot Bank this past February, so I guess they’re serious. I hope it’s successful, although it hasn’t struck me that what our market suffers from is a dearth of $7 million mansions. Still, COVID and all that, who knows?
Going down?
70% in nursing homes and assisted care facilities.
The point here is not that we should speed up Granny’s death, but that we could protect her and her friends far better by focusing on nursing home safety and not applying a sledge hammer to the entire economy. When this whole kerfuffle started the so-called experts knew nothing about the disease and so, armed with spurious computer models, shut down the world. We know much more now, and can reasonably lift our finger off the panic button.
Similar thoughts here: “Nursing homes account for an appalling percentage of Coronavirus deaths”. 72% New Hampshire, 82% Minnesota, etc.
No face mask! No wonder he’s dead.
Homeless man dies of alcohol poisoning, cause of death recorded as COVID-19
Sebastian Yellow, 35, was found dead by police on May 4. Montezuma County Coroner George Deavers later determined that his death was due to acute alcohol poisoning. His blood-alcohol content measured in at .55. The legal limit in the state is .08.
But before [Montezuma County Coroner] Deavers signed the death certificate, Colorado health officials reportedly categorized Yellow’s death as being due to COVID-19.
Back in April, health officials in Colorado classified three nursing home fatalities as COVID-19 deaths, even though attending physicians ruled they were not related to the coronavirus.
While Yellow later tested positive for COVID-19, Deavers said his death had nothing to do with the coronavirus.
Like Kung Flu itself, there’s a lot of this going around. Certain people and groups have a lot invested in this virus, and that’s not to our benefit.
RELATED: Suicides from job-loss on the rise.
Karen-deaths
Australia, 1937: young polio victims
It’s been pointed out by many people, (including here, several weeks go, and with increasing frequency, that the world did not shut down during the polio epidemic, and that was a good thing because the epidemic kept appearing and killing and crippling people from 1930 into the ‘50s. And polio was an equal opportunity scourge, striking people of all ages, with horrible, crippling effect.
We have no idea when a cure for Coronavirus will be developed, if it ever is at all, yet governors like California’s Newsom vow to keep their states shut down until such a cure is found. Not much may be left for us to come back to.
For whom are we destroying the world? By far, mostly those who weren’t going to be with us long anyway: “Of the 5,141 virus deaths in Massachusetts, 3,095 have occurred in the state’s nursing homes — more than 60%, double the percentage even in New York.”
Yet Gov. Charlie Baker, the scold and scourge of all golf carts, gun shops, nail salons and churches, none of which have recorded any fatalities, seems strangely oblivious to the ever-escalating toll in the state’s “long-term care facilities,” which are both heavily regulated and subsidized by the commonwealth.
Ditto, the Legislature, where no one seems to be demanding hearings into the nursing-home death tolls, which dwarf those of neighboring states.
Of the 5,108 deaths, only 246 were of people under the age of 60. Yet they remain locked up, more than a million have lost their jobs, and yet they are daily lectured and threatened by politicians who say next to nothing about the nursing homes where residents are actually at risk.
In Maine, “To date, at least 69 people with COVID-19 have died in Maine. The majority of those deaths have occurred in nursing homes or other long-term care facilities”. Maine’s governor has ordered the entire state closed in order to prevent those 69 deaths, destroying tens of thousands of businesses and throwing several-hundred-thousand Mainers out of work and onto the welfare rolls. And those are figures pre-Memorial day, when the tourism season, accounting for 1/3 of the state’s economy, was supposed to open, but won’t.
Rescinding these measures tomorrow won’t help much, now that the world’s been saturated in a whipped-up panic, but if normalcy is ever restored and people look back at what happened and how we responded, it’s going to be clear that we couldn’t have chosen a more destructive “remedy”.
So what to do? Perhaps use some of the trillions of dollars we’re spending trying to mitigate the effects of this madness and open up quarantine shelters instead. Thousands of now-shuttered hotels and motels are available (even some Trump properties are on the market). Rent or buy them and offer rooms to the fearful of all ages. Free food and streaming services, filtered air, and free medical care on-call, while the rest of the country can go about its business. The alternative, proposed by our enemies on the left, is the creation of a socialist economy, with a nationalized industry and a populace on a permanent dole. that would please many people, especially the products of our modern educational system, but it will be the end of freedom.
8 Laurel Lane, $2.495 million, gone to contract in 21 days. The late owner, John Caron, led Greenwich library’s Great books Discussion for 40 years. Looking over the syllabus for just one season, I’m awed.
102 Hendrie Ave
On a duller scale, the spec house at 102 Hendrie Avenue (where Hendrie curves left, downhill towards Binney Park and Drinkwater goes straight ahead) has sold for $2.4 million. It began $3.095 way back in June 2018, and it took a while before price and reason matched.
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