RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/testing-isnt-everything-11588373448?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Many states are starting to lift their shutdown orders, but some governors are still insisting they need more testing to do so. The Trump Administration on Monday responded by laying out all of the country’s testing capacity. But no amount of testing by itself will stop the virus from spreading. States will need a cocktail of strategies to limit the spread of infections.

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Testing problems did hamper the initial U.S. response and allowed the coronavirus to spread undetected for weeks in Seattle and New York City. Testing was at first limited to people who had knowingly come into contact with infected individuals, and then it took days to get results. President Trump too often overpromised what the feds couldn’t deliver.

But testing has dramatically ramped up, and the Food and Drug Administration has now approved 70 coronavirus tests—about four times more than it approved for the H1N1 flu virus in 2009. More tests per capita have been performed in New York City than in Singapore, South Korea and Australia.

Hospitals and labs have performed about 1.6 million tests in the past week, according to the Covid Tracking Project. The White House coronavirus task force presentation shows that most states with the biggest risks have the capacity to test 60% to 80% of their population each month. Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week said tests would be available at some 5,000 pharmacies across New York.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/01/pelosis-congress-should-shelter-at-home-for-the-rest-of-the-year/

Earlier this week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer postponed lawmakers’ return to Washington DC, citing concerns about coronavirus transmission. Congress should stay out of Washington DC a lot longer. Even until next year.

The primary reason isn’t because they, like health-care workers or truckers or grocery store employees or pastors, might catch coronavirus doing their jobs. The primary reason is that when they “do something,” Congress usually hurts the country far worse than if they just took naps in the closet or played cards all day, like my husband’s coworkers at a union-run former workplace.

The nation should have learned this from activist responses to the Great Depression, which we now know made the depression longer and harder. It also created expectations, institutions, and ways of life that have upended our exceptional system of self-government. Yet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is as determined as President Franklin D. Roosevelt to exploit this crisis for political gain, on the well-founded calculation that if Democrats ask Republicans to unleash a horde of locusts, they’ll agree to half the locusts. Maybe even three-quarters!

Despite failing so far to use the pandemic to get race and sex quotas for corporate boards, insane emissions requirements on airlines, more money for Democrat politicking funneled through unions, student loan bailouts, and bigger tax credits for solar panels, Democrats have already commandeered it to send pork to the Kennedy Center, bail out the U.S. Postal Service, get raises for Congress as 26 million Americans filed for unemployment, fund PBS stations, and upcharge for refugee resettlement.

And they’re just getting started. Pelosi has started talking about moving beyond blanketing the nation with deficit-funded checks into a “guaranteed income.” Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Doug Jones (D-Ala.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) propose to “fund a portion of a company’s payroll costs, up to $90,000 per worker who has been laid off or furloughed.”

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has proposed a similar idea. “Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has proposed a bill that would cover 100 percent of salaries for at least three months.” Shifting American workers to federal welfare akin to the make-work Civilian Conservation Corps of Roosevelt’s day (but without the bridges) could cost another trillion dollars. At least, initially. Since the small business bailout fund has been replenished twice and counting, we shouldn’t expect Congress to turn off the firehose any time soon. It’s a national emergency, you see.

https://twitter.com/andrewbostom/status/1256191869803024384 

3/5 of the hysterically reported, so-called “Mt. Sinai (NYC) young covid19 stroke victims” had MAJOR stroke risk factors, INCL. 1 WITH PRIOR STROKE!; Moreover respiratory infections other than covid19 have long been assoc. w/stroke. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/04/umpc-argues-covid-19-not-as-deadly-as

“ER Dept Chair of Renowned U Pitt Med Ctr argues COVID19 not as deadly as feared—estimates true case-fatality ratio of 0.25% (like 1957-58 pandemic flu) & says its hospitals will shift back to normal” Andrew Bostom, M.D.

A UPMC doctor on Thursday made a case the death rate for people infected with the new coronavirus may be as low as 0.25% — far lower than the mortality rates of 2-4% or even higher cited in the early days of the pandemic.

Dr. Donald Yealy based it partly on studies of levels of coronavirus antibodies detected in people in New York and California, and partly on COVID-19 deaths in the Pittsburgh region. The studies found that 5-20% of people had been exposed to the coronavirus, with many noticing only mild illness or none at all, he said.

“We’ve learned that way more people, far, far more people have actually been exposed to the infection without any knowledge of it. That makes the overall death rate much lower,” said Yealy, who is UPMC’s chair of emergency medicine. “Many people just didn’t feel sick at all and recovered without difficulty.”

Yealy went on to offer a hypothetical scenario of 3% of Allegheny County residents being exposed — a conservative number compared to the findings of the New York and California studies.

That would mean about 36,000 people in Allegheny have been exposed to the coronavirus. With 94 COVID-19 deaths in the county as of Thursday, it would mean 0.25 percent of people exposed to the coronavirus had died, he said.

“There is a big difference between 0.25% mortality and 7%,” Yealy said.

Yealy said about 1,300 people in Allegheny have tested positive for COVID-19. That would mean, in his hypothetical scenario, another 34,700 had been exposed but had no symptoms. He noted the latter group may also have antibodies to protect them from future infection, although he pointed out it’s still unknown how much protection people get from previous exposure to the new coronavirus.

Yealy further said the majority of the deaths among UPMC patients involved people over 80, with many being nursing home residents.

https://fee.org/articles/physicians-say-hospitals-are-pressuring-er-docs-to-list-covid-19-on-death-certificates-here-s-why/

The economic incentive to add COVID-19 to diagnostic lists and death certificates is clear and does not require any conspiracy.

When Drs. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi of Accelerated Urgent Care held a press conference last week, their goal was to galvanize policymakers to reopen the economy.

The California-based hospital owners may have uncorked a bigger story.

During their long discussion with reporters, Dr. Erickson noted he has spoken to numerous physicians who say they are being pressured to add COVID-19 to death certificates and diagnostic lists—even when the novel coronavirus appears to have no relation to the victim’s cause of death.

“They say, ‘You know, it’s interesting. When I’m writing up my death report I’m being pressured to add Covid,’” Erickson said. “Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add Covid? To maybe increase the numbers, and make it look a little bit worse than it is?”

The longtime ER doctors, who had their video removed from YouTube after the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) jointly condemned their briefing, aren’t the only ones to say COVID-19 is being classified uniquely. (There’s reason to question some of the snap conclusions the physicians reached in their briefing, but YouTube’s decision to ban them is absurd, if predictable.) 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/30/the-betrayal-of-general-mike-flynn/

He acted as an agent of Russia. He colluded with the Kremlin to rig the 2016 presidential election. He turned on his country by attempting to undermine U.S. foreign policy. He purposely misled the vice president. He had an extramarital affair with a Russian asset. He is a liar.

Those are just some of the accusations that have been leveled against Lt. General Michael Flynn for nearly four years. Flynn, a three-star U.S. Army general with tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, made the mistake of crossing the Obama White House; he’s been suffering the consequences ever since.

And the country he heroically served for decades, for the most part, betrayed him. From the U.S. Justice Department to the president of the United States to the federal court system to his own lawyers, Flynn has been deceived at every turn in what certainly is one of the most tragic miscarriages of justice in recent political history.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the leadership of the villainous James Comey, began targeting Flynn shortly after he was fired by then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for his outspoken criticism of the Obama Administration’s approach to Islamic terrorists.  

“It infuriates me when our president bans criticism of our enemies, and I am certain that we cannot win this war unless we are free to call our enemies by their proper names: radical jihadis, failed tyrants, and so forth,” Flynn explained in an op-ed about why he was fired in 2014. “With good leadership, we should win. But we desperately need good leaders to reverse our enemies’ successes.”

That column was published in the New York Post on July 9, 2016. Three weeks later, the FBI launched an official probe into Flynn, Obama’s former Defense Intelligence Agency chief, and three others for allegedly colluding with Russia to rig the election in favor of Donald Trump, whose campaign Flynn was advising at the time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-wisconsin-election-no-spike-cases-after-in-person-voting/

Some good news, for a change.

More than three weeks after 413,000 Wisconsin voters went to the polls, there has not been the spike in COVID-19 cases attributed to the election that many feared.

“The state said about two dozen people may have been infected on election day,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Wednesday. “Some have characterized these numbers as an ‘uptick,’ but the experts are cautious.”

Ryan Westergaard, the chief medical officer at the Department of Health Services, told the paper that a link could not be established between the election and the very small number of cases that had developed among the 413,000 voters who showed up to the polls on April 7.

“With the data we have, we can’t prove an association,” Westergaard said. “It would be speculative to say that was definitely the cause without really investigating closely and being clear that somebody really had no other potential exposure to infected people. I don’t think we have the resources to really do that to know definitely.”

“I don’t think that the in-person election led to a major effect, to my surprise. I expected it,” Oguzhan Alagoz, an expert in infectious-disease modeling at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told the Journal Sentinel.

A Democratic state senator suggested last week that there had been a surge of cases because of the election, but as Politifact Wisconsin reported, the surge was due to an outbreak at several meat-packing facilities in Brown County, home to Green Bay. Even when accounting for the delays in testing and the virus’s incubation period, a spike in new cases due to the election should have showed up by now if it were going to occur.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/lockdown-critics-may-valid-points-152936053.html

Three months after the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed in the U.S., has the time come to start paying more attention to the critics? 

I’m referring to people like John Ioannidis, the Stanford University School of Medicine scientist who argued early on that the coronavirus was far less deadly than the models were predicting. Or the Swedish epidemiologist John Giesecke, who says that protecting the elderly and frail — and allowing the rest of society to go about its business — makes far more sense than lockdowns, whose efficacy, he believes, remains unproved. And yes, I’m even referring to Alex Berenson, the pugnacious former journalist who has become a national villain (except at Fox News) for poking holes in the conventional wisdom about how to mitigate the virus and pointing out the various harms that have resulted from measures like lockdowns.

As the online publication UnHerd put it recently, “The debate about lockdown is not a contest between good and evil.” In that spirit, I would like to offer four contrarian arguments that, at the very least, ought to be taken more seriously.

We’re still acting as if the original models were correct. In mid-March, a team at Imperial College in London estimated that 500,000 British citizens and 2.2 million Americans would die from an uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus. That estimate caused the governments of both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump to begin stressing self-isolation measures, according to the New York Times. In the U.S., state after state shut down their economies while a mad scramble took place to create hospital space for Covid-19 patients.

Since then, the major models have been revised downward significantly. According to data compiled by the Reich Lab at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, models now estimate 67,000 to 120,000 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. Yet strict measures like lockdowns, which were put in place based on the original modeling, remain in place, while hospitals around the country, many of which are largely empty, continued to be reserved for nonexistent Covid-19 patients.