Who knew? There are power freak lifeguards.
A paddleboarder was arrested in Malibu Thursday after ignoring lifeguards’ orders to get out of the ocean amid social distancing rules, reports KTLA 5.
The lifeguards flagged down deputies for assistance, but the man ultimately chose to stay in the water alongside the Malibu Pier for about 30 to 40 minutes, according to Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials.
Deputies summoned their patrol boat from Marina Del Rey, and the man swam to shore once it arrived, officials said.
He was subsequently arrested on suspicion of disobeying a lifeguard and violating Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stay at home order, a misdemeanor.
He was booked at the sheriff’s station in Calabasas before being released with a notice to appear in court, deputies said.
He could face a $1,000 fine, up to six months in jail, or both.
According to the Los Angeles Times, a surfer in Manhattan Beach was fined $1,000 last weekend after similarly ignoring repeated orders to exit the ocean.
-RW
UPDATE
Wacth the clip of the ocean Nazis:
LMAO!— Jeremiah Harding 🌐 (@InsanityIsFree) April 3, 2020
"HEY! YOU THERE! IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN, FAR AWAY FROM ANYONE ELSE, NOT TOUCHING OR COUGHING ON ANYONE.
YOU'RE UNDER ARREST FOR THE SINISTER CRIME - DOING SOMETHING WE DON'T LIKE!
SURRENDER AT ONCE! DON'T ASK WHY IT'S OK FOR US TO BE HERE!"pic.twitter.com/nJKyHCJyca
I'm confused. Why can't you go into the ocean?
ReplyDeleteIt's unfair. Not everyone has an ocean in their backyard.
DeleteWhat part of "stay at home" do you not understand!
Deletewhat part of its our human right to travel freely dont you understand?
DeleteBecause they said so.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing there are no repercussions if you ignore a "high shark activity alert" and go swimming, but here you get busted for being in the ocean far from anyone. Ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteI'm also confused. So in order to protect us from this guy in the ocean, possibly infected cops should arrest him and put him in a jail with other possibly infected people, in the same building with cops....
ReplyDeleteHuh?
This is the last paragraph of the KTLA article. Kim must be the in house seer.
ReplyDeleteSomebody with a million bucks pocket change! Call her bluff.
"Kim Prather, who works at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told the Los Angeles Times that the beach could be one of the most dangerous places in California amid the outbreak. She said she fears the virus is being washed into the ocean and transferred back into the air along the coast."
“I wouldn’t go in the water if you paid me $1 million right now,” she told the newspaper.
So, I looked at the story and wondered how close the guy was to another human being and found...nothing. I thought "social distancing" meant staying away from other people.
ReplyDeleteSince he was taken into custody and booked, how much "social distancing" went on there? Very little, I'd guess.
Then, I found this gem from the story:
"Kim Prather, who works at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told the Los Angeles Times that the beach could be one of the most dangerous places in California amid the outbreak. She said she fears the virus is being washed into the ocean and transferred back into the air along the coast.
“I wouldn’t go in the water if you paid me $1 million right now,” she told the newspaper."
Wow, really? I wasn't aware viruses were spread this way. What about during flu season? Do they shut down the beaches then, too?
Ridiculous.
Prather is the only scientist I have found (in a brief search) that is making these claims. IMO and experience this does not pass the smell test. Please anyone with expertise correct my laymen logic that it seems very unlikely that a corona virus could proliferate in the ocean to the extent that enough of it would be present to get a person sick from mists and sprays.
ReplyDeleteMy experience is 40 years of surfing on a regular basis in all conditions. Yes I have gotten mild ear infections and have felt not so great after a storm washes scum into the ocean. But in 40 years only three times and one of those times was in Mexico (where they are less tidy with trash) when I was a stupid teen.
I have some questions for Prather: If at all, how much more dangerous is COVID-19 than influenza to beach goers? What is the risk to the reward? Is COVID-19 so dangerous that it supersedes the health benefits of surfing or just going to the beach?
Well now, if someone in perhaps Asia who happened to have the virus, sneezed on the water, after several hours there might be a concentration of the virus of a few parts per trillion (something like a grain of salt on a dump truck of potato chips) in the general vicinity of that part of the ocean. And if these random particles of virus continued to persist and remain active in the high-salt ocean water (the same one that disintegrates in a few days the fabric of cloths worn by those who have been stranded in the ocean), constantly bombarded with UV light (which is used as a disinfectant in numerous contexts), and exposed to constant physical duress from high wind and waves, these surprisingly robust virus particles could in theory disperse throughout the ocean at concentrations completely undetectable by any method of modern science, instrumental or otherwise. After several weeks, a lone particle of virus might find its way into the coastal waters of somewhere around, say, San Diego, and if that single magic virus particle were to hop up out of the water and into the nostril of an unsuspecting surfer, and if the the virus was not flushed immediately from the surfer's body due to the high rate of respiration associated with physical activity, or mucal activity designed to protect the surfer's body from pathogens. And if the surfer was deficient in Vitamin D, which is unlikely given the surfer's active life style, and if it finds a cell deficient in zinc then certainly an infection could occur.
DeleteOn the other hand, the previous discussion considers only the possibility the virus is spread inorganically. It is plausible the virus could be picked up any of a number of species of aquatic life, perhaps a great white shark, for example. So, the same surfer subjected to something like a run-of-the-mill, shark attack might have the overarching worry of picking up a virus.
>>> For a serious discussion, you might consider as a start, “Role in aquatic ecosystems,” in the Wikipedia article, “Virus” (about half way down). There are a mind-blowing number of viruses in seawater. The fact that we are exposed to a viral soup every time we play in the ocean, generally without getting sick, highlights how robust our bodies can be. That there would be a heightened risk of COVID-19 specifically from seawater right now seems unlikely.
Thanks Anonymous that’s good info.
DeleteGrounding or earthing is another health aspect of being in the ocean or barefoot on the beach.
A knee injury has been keeping me from board surfing but I still like to body surf and run in the sand. Now that is against the law.
on a covid-related note, some clerks at a convenience store told me that an irate customer had smashed their protective glass barrier the corporation had put up to protect employees, while screaming that such a barrier was "racist." True story. 🙄
ReplyDeleteI had seen the barrier the week before (it's like the ones used in some banks) and it was gone, so I asked what had happened to it.
The lunatics are running...rampant!
DeleteWhen will you say, "Enough!"?
ReplyDeleteWhen they close your place of employment indefinitely because they can?
When they shut down your place of worship?
When they shut down your child's school?
When they separate families?
When there are no elections?
When you come home from a different state or city and have to fill out papers showing where you will be for the next 14 days and State Troopers will make unannounced visits to ensure you are complying?
When you are turned around at a checkpoint?
When they decide your business isn't really essential so they shut off the electric and water?
When they tell you to shelter in place for 2 weeks and it'll all be better but now extend it another month?
When, under the guise of "Health Checks", they come knocking on your door to make sure you are home?
When you are not allowed out for groceries or toiletries so you have to accept a rationed product delivered by the military?
When your bank accounts are closed and you are given a special ration card?
When they accuse you of being a carrier so they need to put you in a "FEMA Camp" for quarantine?
When they shut down internet and cellular networks to all but "official communications"?
When it is decided firearms, during a period of "National Emergency", only belong in the hands of the government?
When they put you in jail because you don't have the "proper papers" showing a need to be out?
When will you say, "Enough!"?
When it's too late!
DeleteDemand a jury trial. When are we returning to jamming 600 strangers in a stuffy room all day waiting to be called for jury duty?
ReplyDeleteI wish someone would do a story on Japan. They seem to have relatively few restrictions when compared to Europe and the US and they have been hit with very few Coronavirus cases and deaths. My gut feeling is that a lot of the precautions taken in the West are not that helpful.
ReplyDeleteCould a resident file a FOIA to get the cost of that arrest? At least the paddleboarder got the exercise he wanted, maybe not the arresting officers who were reluctantly pulled away from their coffee breaks and donuts.
ReplyDeleteStay at home helps slow the spread of the virus. It also slows the spread of antibodies. There are no solutions, only trade offs.
ReplyDeleteNo staying at home INCREASES the spread of the virus!
DeletePer WHO:
The World Health Organization (“WHO”) released a study on how China responded to COVID-19. Currently, this study is one of the most exhaustive pieces published on how the virus spreads.
The results of their research show that COVID-19 doesn’t spread as easily as we first thought or the media had us believe (remember people abandoned their dogs out of fear of getting infected). According to their report if you come in contact with someone who tests positive for COVID-19 you have a 1–5% chance of catching it as well. The variability is large because the infection is based on the type of contact and how long.
The majority of viral infections come from prolonged exposures in confined spaces with other infected individuals. Person-to-person and surface contact is by far the most common cause. From the WHO report, “When a cluster of several infected people occurred in China, it was most often (78–85%) caused by an infection within the family by droplets and other carriers of infection in close contact with an infected person.
Dr. Paul Auwaerter, the Clinical Director for the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine echoes this finding,
“If you have a COVID-19 patient in your household, your risk of developing the infection is about 10%….If you were casually exposed to the virus in the workplace (e.g., you were not locked up in conference room for six hours with someone who was infected [like a hospital]), your chance of infection is about 0.5%”
With such little evidence of prolific community spread and our guiding healthcare institutions reporting the same results, shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses. The data is overwhelming at this point that community-based spread and airborne transmission is not a threat. We don’t have significant examples of spreading through restaurants or gyms.
When you consider the environment COVID-19 prefers, isolating every family in their home is a perfect situation for infection and transmission among other family members.
Evidence from South Korea and Singapore shows that it is completely possible and preferred to continue on with life while making accommodations that are data-driven, such as social distancing and regular temperature checks.
I hope that this paddle-boarder image becomes the iconic image associated with this whole coronavirus quarantine tyranny...sorta like the iconic image of the lone Chinese guy staring down the tanks in Tianamen Square in the 80s...
ReplyDeleteHow does one make an arrest without "Failing to Observe Social Distancing"?
ReplyDeleteThe rules never apply to the state's punitive priesthood.
Delete