RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-shows-off-new-rapid-coronavirus-test-kit-in-rose-garden-as-hhs-says-1-million-americans-tested/ar-BB11VVeG

President Trump announced on Monday that the United States has tested over 1 million people for the coronavirus as he unveiled a new rapid test kit for the contagion that is supposed to give results within five minutes.

Speaking from the White House’s Rose Garden, Trump said that reaching 1 million tests is “a milestone in our war against the coronavirus.”

Trump’s announcement on the new rapid test kit from Abbott Laboratories comes just days after the company said that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had given them emergency clearance to produce its cartridge-based test. The company says that its test delivers a negative result in 13 minutes when the virus is not detected.

Also during the press conference, Trump also announced that Ford is repurposing an auto parts factory west of Detroit to start building simple ventilators to treat coronavirus patients.

The automaker says that starting the week of April 20, it expects to produce 50,000 ventilators in 100 days. The plant in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, would have the ability to build 30,000 per month after that. Ford also is working with GE Healthcare to quickly double production of a more sophisticated ventilator at a factory in Madison, Wisconsin.

Trump reiterated the need to practice socially distancing on Monday as experts warned that the peak number deaths from the virus is likely to occur sometime next month.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-covid-19-deaths-soar-past-3000-as-new-york-issues-appeal-for-medical-volunteers_3291978.html

More than 3,000 people have died from the CCP virus in the United States while over 164,539 cases have been confirmed, according to the latest data collated by Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking the global pandemic.

As of March 30, a reported 3,164 have died from the COVID-19 disease, with 914 of those deaths occurring in New York City, which has become the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.

On Monday, New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an urgent nationwide appeal for medical volunteers to join what he called the “front lines” as he and health officials warned that the crisis unfolding in the state is just a preview of what other U.S. communities could soon face, adding that the virus “doesn’t discriminate” and that no American is immune to the disease.

“We need to recruit more healthcare workers,” he told a briefing at a makeshift hospital at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. “We need to share healthcare professionals within this state and within this country. As governor of New York, I am asking healthcare professionals across the country, if you don’t have a healthcare crisis in your community, please come help us in New York now.”

“I don’t care if you live in Kansas. I don’t care if you live in Texas. There is no American that is immune … what is happening to New York is not an anomaly. There is nothing about a New Yorker’s immune system that is any different from any other American’s immune system. So in many ways, New York is just a canary in a coal mine.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/31/some-much-needed-coronavirus-perspective/

WHAT DO ALL THESE NUMBERS MEAN?

Like just about everyone else in the country, we are sitting in our homes under orders from our state governments, with little to do but follow coronavirus statistics. And they look fearsome.

There are almost 140,000 active cases of COVID-19 in the United States. Nearly 20,000 new cases were reported on Sunday alone. The death toll in the U.S. is now close to 3,000 — with more than 2,000 of them occurring in just the past week.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that the death toll could reach 200,000. Another model says 82,000 will likely die, with daily deaths peaking in mid-April at more than 2,000. By comparison, the last pandemic — the so-called swine flu — claimed 18,000 lives.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump said he’s extending the federal government’s “social distancing” guidelines through April. In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam announced a “stay at home” order through June 10. School systems are starting to consider whether they will even be able to open in the fall.

It’s unprecedented, to be sure. But the problem with all the numbers being bandied about is that they lack any context.

On its own, 3,000 fatalities might seem like a tremendously large number. But that’s before you learn that an average of 7,700 people die in the U.S. every single day. Which means that over the past week, when the coronavirus took 2,000 lives, nearly 54,000 people died from other causes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-fda-breakthrough-on-treatment-11585609832?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday green-lighted two malaria medicines that have shown some promise treating the novel coronavirus, and the emergency approvals couldn’t come soon enough. Expanding their use could bring quicker relief to patients and hospitals while allowing scientists to better assess their efficacy.

The malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine (HC) and chloroquine have been around for more than five decades, so their safety is well documented. New evidence suggests that they could also help fight the novel coronavirus, as op-eds by Dr. Jeff Colyer on these pages have reported. Both chloroquine and HC in vitro block the replication of RNA viruses like the novel coronavirus.

Hydroxychloroquine nowadays is often prescribed for the autoimmune conditions lupus and rheumatoid arthritis that result from the body’s immune system attacking its own cells. Scientists have also documented an overreactive immune response in severely ill coronavirus patients.

Notably, a study in France of 80 coronavirus patients given HC and azithromycin, an antibiotic for upper respiratory infections, documented “a clinical improvement in all but one 86 year-old patient who died, and one 74 year-old patient still in intensive care unit.” Doctors have also reported anecdotal evidence of the malaria drugs’ efficacy.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2020/03/29/hydroxychloroquine-help-is-on-the-way-n2565926

And as the good news is coming in there is a greater reason for hope!

Here are just a handful of new developments from the last few days and hours.

Dr. Fauci when asked if he would use the Hydroxychloroquine cocktail, answered with resounding affirmation. (Simply because he had asked for better clinical evidence previously did not mean he was unaware of what the data was already showing).
France reversed its previous ban on the drug. When the highly esteemed Dr. Didier Raoult released his first survey’s findings the French medical authorities were resistant. As he released an even larger study, with more patients and improved results from his initial study, the French public health officials had no choice but to give guidance as to its use.
India’s public health guidance granted affirmation for physicians and front line medical workers to begin taking it as a preventative. This use was the very suggestion I recommended as first steps in this column a week ago. Since our own CDC has cited its prophylactic benefits our doctors and front line medical personnel should be taking it now.
Given the increased acceptance here in the states not one, but as many as seven different pharmaceutical companies have agreed to mass produce as much as 250 million doses by mid-April. Given Dr. Raoult’s guidance in both of his studies this would give the globe enough inventory to cure 46,000,000 cases. Presently we have not yet hit one million cases worldwide. Notably Bayer, Novartis and Teva Pharm stepped up, pledging to donate several million doses right out of the chute.
Doctors began prescribing off-label use and in doing so are replicating the clinical results in remarkable fashion. One doctor in Monroe, New York has treated in excess of 700 patients. As of this writing he’s lost zero patients to death, zero to intubation, and only two to hospitalization. Another doctor in New York City has treated in excess of 100 patients with zero deaths.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/03/30/icymi-nancy-pelosi-just-threatened-president-trump-with-another-investigation-n2565955

In case you missed it over the weekend, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi falsely accused President Trump of “fiddling” around and called for an investigation into his handling of the Wuhan coronavirus crisis. 

“President Trump’s denial at the beginning of this was deadly,” Pelosi said during an interview with CNN. “As the President fiddles, people are dying.”

Pelosi is responsible for delaying a $2 trillion relief package for workers and families by a week after blowing up bipartisan negotiations. She then attempted to insert a long list of far-left, radical agenda items into the relief package. Talk about “fiddling,” Pelosi is the queen of it. She’s proving once again House Democrats aren’t interested in working for the American people. Instead, they’re interested in political power. They’ve also shown the only thing they’re capable of is launching investigations, rather than governing.

Further, when President Trump took action in late January to ban travel to and from China, Pelosi joined fellow Democrats and accused him of xenophobia. She also criticized the early March travel ban on passengers from Europe, where the Wuhan coronavirus is still raging.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/30/how-bad-regulation-bureaucracy-slowed-the-fight-against-deadly-wuhan-coronavirus/

Amid all the political name-calling and finger-pointing over who’s to blame and how to attack the Wuhan coronavirus, one thing surprisingly gets little mention at all: regulation. But bad regulation not only slowed our response, it likely added to our death count.

We’re happy to note that in recent days and weeks, President Trump has helped ease the regulatory burden of our response to the coronavirus, pushing Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, our main health agencies, to bend, suspend and in some cases upend useless rules.

But that doesn’t mean every useless regulation was excised from the rulebooks. Or that our major health care regulators made good decisions with the billions of dollars entrusted to them for basic research.

Far from it. And the coronavirus pandemic and the public panic that ensued is a case in point. To be blunt, U.S. health care regulatory agencies mishandled the crisis.

Indeed, both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) fumbled the ball early when it came testing for the Wuhan coronavirus, largely because of bad regulations.

“Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states with growing cases such as New York and California are struggling to test widely for the coronavirus,” the New York Times noted in a March 11 story. “The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has now spread to at least 36 states and Washington, D.C.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-five-ways-we-might-defeat-it/?itm_campaign=headline-testingDon’t be complacent. But do have hope.

R ight now there are plenty of reasons to worry deeply about the toll COVID-19 will take on America. Cases and deaths are spiraling upward. Our main tools for addressing the crisis involve simply locking society down, leading to shocking economic harms. And even if these tools prove effective, the virus may simply begin to spread again when they are lifted, or perhaps rebound in the fall and winter when the weather cools down again. Perhaps most troublingly, there are some reports of people being “reinfected,” raising the possibility that even those who survive COVID-19 are not always immune to it going forward. A worst-case scenario would force us to decide between a year or two of repeated lockdowns while we wait for a vaccine on the one hand, and millions of deaths on the other.

I am not going to tell you this is all a hoax. I am not going to tell you to ignore the restrictions lawmakers have placed on your movements or the advice of public-health authorities. But I am a big believer in capitalism and human ingenuity, so I’d like to provide a quick overview of some routes out of this mess people are working on. I have immense hope that at least a couple of them will pan out, and in that event I also hope the folks behind them become unbelievably rich.

1) Find a drug that fights the virus or treats the symptoms. Vaccines take a long time to develop and test, because each must be tailored to a specific virus, but there are already lots of drugs around that might work to treat or prevent COVID-19. We need to figure out which ones immediately. The World Health Organization has launched a “global megatrial” of four possibilities: remdesivir, a drug developed to treat Ebola that, alas, did not work for that purpose; chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which are used to treat maladies including lupus and malaria; ritonavir/lopinavir, an HIV drug; and ritonavir/lopinavir combined with interferon-beta, which shows some signs of fighting MERS. If they work against COVID-19, these drugs could reduce the disease’s death toll, lessen pressure on intensive-care units, and change the tradeoffs inherent in reopening the economy. Thank God for Big Pharma!

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/29/viral-prerequisites-and-nationalist-lessons-in-time-of-plague/

Trump’s prior initiatives eased the implementation of many of his most effective orders during this crisis.

President Donald Trump has courted endless controversies for promoting nonconventional policies and entertaining contrarian views. From the outset, he oddly seemed to have believed that having navigated the jungles of the Manhattan real estate market—crooked politicians, mercurial unions, neighborhood social activists, the green lobby, leery banks, cutthroat rivals—better prepared him for the job than did a 30-year tenure in the U.S. Senate.

Certainly, candidate and then President Trump’s strident distrust of China was annoying to the American establishment. The Left saw China in rosy terms as the “Other” that just did things like airports, high-speed rail, and solar panels better than did America’s establishment of geriatric white male has-beens. Many on the Right saw China as a cash cow that was going to take over anyway, so why not milk it before the deluge?

In sum, conventional Washington wisdom assumed that appeasing the commercial banditry of an ascendant China, at best might ensure that its new riches led to Westernized political liberalization, and at worst might at least earn them a pat on the head from China as it insidiously assumed its fated role as global hegemon.

Trump once enraged liberal sensibilities by issuing travel bans against countries in the Middle East, Iran, Nigeria, and North Korea as they could not be trusted to audit their own departing citizens. His notion that nations have clearly defined and enforced borders was antithetical to the new norms that open borders and sanctuary cities were part of the global village of the 21st century.

Trump certainly distrusted globalization. He has waged a veritable multifront war against the overreach of transnational organizations, whether that be the European Union or the various agencies of the United Nations. Even relatively uncontroversial steps, such as greenlighting experimental drugs and off-label uses of old medicines for terminal patients drew the ire of federal bureaucrats and medical schools as potentially dangerous or irrelevant in cost-benefit analyses.