ANOTHER CONTAGION THE EPIDEMIOLOGISTS DON'T SEE.

There's a scene in the 1965 version of Doctor Zhivago where the young doctor tells a bureaucrat, "That's another disease we don't have in Moscow.  Starvation."  Our public health officials aren't willfully not seeing what is in front of them; rather, their expertise is so blinkered that they're not capable of coping with the evidence.  "More Americans are shoplifting food as aid runs out during the pandemic."  That headline is a deflection.  Yes, Congressional Democrats delayed action on additional relief under the theory that if it was worse for Our President, it was worth the suffering.  But the anecdotes in the article come from a few places.

Most of California is now under strict stay-at-home orders, for example, while states including Nevada, Maryland and Pennsylvania have issued new indoor occupancy limits. Such orders tend to hit already vulnerable workers in low-wage service jobs in restaurants, retail and bars the hardest.

Nice of them to discover what I've been reporting for months.

Here's an extended excerpt, from Chicago, subject to the double whammy of ineffective state lockdowns and an idiot mayor.

Alex graduated with a master’s degree in May and was immediately in a bind: no job, no money and, with much of the country still shut down, little hope that anything would change.

She’d spent most of her $1,200 stimulus check on rent, and used what little she had left to buy groceries. Everything else — vitamins, moisturizer, body wash — she said she shoplifted from a Whole Foods Market a few miles from her apartment in Chicago.

“It was like, I could spend $10 and get a couple of vegetables or I could spend $10 on just a box of tampons,” said Alex, 27, who asked to be identified by her middle name to speak candidly. She has a job now, earning $15 an hour, but still struggles to make ends meet. She says she continues to shoplift — something she’d never done before the pandemic — every few weeks.

She says she moves through the store mostly unnoticed. Usually, she said, she picks up a few bulky vegetables — a bunch of kale, maybe, or a few avocados — to disguise the pricier items she slips into her bag at the self checkout.

“I don’t feel much guilt about it,” she said. “It’s been very frustrating to be part of a class of people who is losing so much right now. And then to have another class who is profiting from the pandemic — well, let’s just say I don’t feel too bad about taking $15 or $20 of stuff from Whole Foods when Jeff Bezos is the richest man on Earth.” (Bezos is the founder and chief executive of Amazon, which owns Whole Foods. He also owns The Washington Post.)

Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment.

The article also reports on Les Miserables manifestations at the dollar stores, which acknowledge the shrinkage and their enhanced security efforts.

Meanwhile, the boffins fret about families getting together for Christmas.  Is that what being stupid about being smart looks like?