RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/barack-obama-who-botched-two-pandemics-criticizes-response-to-coronavirus/

On Wednesday afternoon, Barack Obama criticized the Trump administration for failing to create a “coherent national plan” during the coronavirus pandemic.

“While we continue to wait for a coherent national plan to navigate this pandemic, states like Massachusetts are beginning to adopt their own public health plans to combat this virus––before it’s too late,” he tweeted.The funniest thing about this tweet is that Barack Obama is the last person in the world who should be criticizing the federal response to a pandemic. Does he think we’ve forgotten he botched not one, but two pandemics? Barack Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services declared the H1N1 pandemic a public health emergency on April 29, 2009, but didn’t declare it a “national emergency” until October—two months after the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic, and after a thousand Americans had already died, and millions already infected. If you think he was taking the outbreak seriously at the time, the facts beg to differ.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/pandemic-is-but-one-of-americas-security-concerns/

The world was a dangerous place before the coronavirus pandemic, and it will still be dangerous after it.

While Americans debate the proper ongoing response to the virus and argue over the infection’s origins, nature, and trajectory, they may have tuned out other, often just as scary, news.

Many Americans are irate at China for its dishonest and lethal suppression of knowledge about the viral outbreak. But they may forget that China has other huge problems, too.

Its overseas brand is tarnished. Importers can never again be sure of the safety or reliability of Chinese exports. They will know only that their producer is a serial falsifier that is capable of anything to ensure power and profits.

Even China’s vaunted propaganda machine that slanders its critics as racists and xenophobes no longer works. The sheer number of countries that have suffered huge human and financial losses from Chinese lying won’t believe another word from Beijing.

How will China collect its Silk Road debts from now-bankrupt Asian and African countries? Most of them are accusing China of being racist and responsible for the global epidemic that wrecked the very economies from which China planned to harvest profits.

China was beginning to lose the trade war with the U.S. even before the virus struck. Americans think that China is huge, powerful, and rich. In truth, Chinese per capita income is about a sixth of America’s.

China produces only about two-thirds of the nominal GDP of the United States despite having more than four times as many people. Hundreds of millions of rural Chinese remain trapped in poverty.

The U.S. has the 33rd-highest mortality rate, measured as deaths divided by total cases, out of the 134 countries tracked by Johns Hopkins. That means more than 100 countries have lower mortality rates than the U.S., although many of those countries reported comparatively few cases. When compared only to the ten countries with the most cases, the U.S. ranks as the second-lowest mortality rate as a percentage of total cases. That means eight of those countries hardest-hit by the coronavirus have higher mortality rates than the U.S…When mortality is measured per 100,000 people among the ten countries with the most cases, the U.S. ranks seventh, with Iran, Germany, and China reporting lower numbers of deaths per 100,000 people…the lack of testing in the United States could lead to an undercounting of overall COVID-19 cases. If the total number of cases is actually higher, that would mean the current data might be overstating the death rate.

https://www.city-journal.org/covid-19-point-of-care-rapid-test

In June 1981, the rapid-response newsletter of the Center for Disease Control, the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, published news of an unusual pneumonia in otherwise healthy young men in Los Angeles. It would take four years from those first recorded cases of AIDS to the first FDA-approved test for HIV, and over a decade before the first rapid test. And so, if just a year ago, any of my colleagues had told me that we could have a point-of-care rapid test after mere months of a new pathogen’s emergence, I would have regarded it as hopelessly optimistic.

Yet that is what the first-of-its-kind alliance between the U.S. biotechnology industry and the federal government has delivered. Just four months after the emergence of Covid-19, a dizzying array of tests is available to patients, physicians, and researchers. The initial tests, dependent on identifying the viral genome, have now been supplanted by much faster, much less expensive antibody tests. Unlike genomic tests, which require laboratory equipment and take several hours to complete, the new antibody-based tests are portable, and some don’t require any special materials other than saline. The antibody tests may answer questions not only about a patient’s current state but also about whether he has been exposed in the past by measuring antibodies that the immune system creates in response to the coronavirus. Finally, just today, the FDA announced that it is granting authorization for the first Covid-19 test that can be taken at home, affording an opportunity for many people in at-risk groups who have forgone testing up to now. By all measures, the emergency regime set up by the FDA has opened the floodgates of innovation on one of the most vexing problems of responding to a viral outbreak, and with great success.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/1-in-5-new-york-city-residents-infected-with-ccp-virus-antibody-testing-shows_3324032.html

Preliminary results from antibody testing in New York state found a 13.9 percent infection rate, officials announced Thursday, suggesting 2.7 million in the state have been infected by the CCP virus.

People who test positive are believed to have had the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease, in the past. Some patients with virus never show symptoms and have no idea they were infected. Experts believe past infection could make people immune to the virus, though that theory has not been confirmed.

Preliminary results from 3,000 tests carried out across 19 New York counties found 13.9 percent of those tested have antibodies against COVID-19. But that figure climbed to 21.2 percent in New York City and dropped to 3.6 percent in counties outside the city, Long Island, and Westchester and Rockland counties.

The percent positive on Long Island was 16.7 percent and 11.7 percent in Westchester and Rockland counties combined.

Forty three percent of those tested were in New York City, 14.4 percent were on Long Island, 9.8 percent were in Westchester and Rockland counties, and 32.8 percent of them were in the rest of the state.