RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-against-covid-tests-for-the-young-and-healthy-11599151722?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Bhattacharya, a physician and economist, is a professor at Stanford Medical School. Mr. Kulldorff, a biostatistician, is a professor at Harvard Medical School.

Should people who aren’t sick be tested for Covid-19? In August the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention revised its guidance to suggest focusing on the elderly and patients with symptoms. One may be excused for thinking that more testing is always better, but that isn’t true. Anyone can be infected with the virus, but there is a thousandfold difference in the risk of death between the young and the old. Testing strategy should reflect that.

There is little purpose in using tests to check asymptomatic children to see if it is safe for them to come to school. When children are infected, most are asymptomatic, and the mortality risk is lower than for the flu. While adult-to-adult and adult-to-child transmission is common, child-to-adult transmission isn’t. Children thus pose minimal risk to their teachers. If a child has a cough, a runny nose or other respiratory symptoms, he should stay home. You don’t need a test for that.

What would routine Covid-19 testing of children accomplish? A child with no symptoms who tests positive would be sent home and deprived of an education. Enough asymptomatic cases would lead to school closures. Yet the public-health consensus is that classroom learning is important, and closures are highly detrimental. That’s especially true for working-class children, whose parents can’t afford tutors or learning “pods,” but must instead make difficult choices between supervising their children’s education and paying the bills.

Sweden was the only major Western country that kept schools open for kids 15 and younger throughout the pandemic, with no masks or mass testing. How did it turn out? Zero Covid-19 deaths among 1.8 million children attending day care or school. Teachers didn’t have an excess infection risk compared with the average of other professions.

https://pjmedia.com/election/matt-margolis/2020/09/03/prof-biden-claims-a-black-man-invented-the-light-bulb-not-a-white-guy-named-edison-n886912

Joe Biden, who claims he wants to fact-check Donald Trump in real time during the presidential debates, told a real whopper on Thursday during his visit to Kenosha.

“People fear that’s, which, that which is different. We gotta, for example, why in God’s name don’t we teach history in history classes? A black man invented the light bulb, not a white guy named Edison.”

Fact check: False.

Make no mistake about it, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Joe Biden presumably was referring to Lewis H. Latimer, a former slave who worked as a researcher under Edison, who, three years after Edison patented the incandescent light bulb, patented a more efficient way of manufacturing carbon filaments, which were used in Edison’s bulb design. Fake internet rumors have been circulating for some time now suggesting that Latimer is the actual inventor of the light bulb and even the telephone.

Apparently, fake internet rumors are where Joe Biden gets his history lessons.

https://spectator.us/nancy-pelosi-hair-salon-san-francisco-covid/
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to a hair salon, closed by law because of COVID, is one of those small incidents that illustrates a larger, more troubling problem.

It shows how insiders like Pelosi are allowed to play by a different rules than the rest of us. Worse, they think they are entitled to receive this preferential treatment. That’s what people hate, with good reason, about powerful politicians, celebrities, and billionaires.

Pelosi has plenty of company. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot visited a closed salon herself and caught some flak. Her lame excuse? Lots of people look at her. When the dangerous demonstrations that rage across the city moved toward her residential block, she deployed police to stop them. Her justification? She and her family deserve safety. They certainly do (and more than most because she represents us and is subject to more threats). But what about everybody else in Chicago? Don’t they deserve something better than broken windows, looted and boarded-up stores, free-fire zones in bad neighborhoods, and a city prosecutor who sits on her hands crying “social justice”?

In Seattle, we saw the same hypocrisy and entitlement when the city councilors who voted to defund police added extra security for themselves, at taxpayers’ expense. In New York, we saw it when celebrities coming to the Video Music Awards were allowed to skip the 14-day quarantine imposed on other travelers.