RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/a_solution_to_covid19_is_in_sight.html

A solution to the COVID-19 epidemic is in sight.  It is the combo used by South Korea, where people are back at work, to successfully stem its COVID-19 outbreak.  It has three parts: (1) greatly expanded testing of those who could be infected and (2) effective treatment of the virus with a hydroxychloroquine-zinc cocktail, combined with (3) the product of American ingenuity: rapid development of vaccines. 

While these solutions might be thwarted by bureaucracy, progress is happening rapidly, and there are reasons why our collective Groundhog Day of staying at home every day while the economy falters and body counts grow could soon be over. 

Greatly Expanded Testing

Testing is one key.  South Korea did its testing for COVID-19 by setting up drive-through testing stations around the country.  Sufficient tests are now available in the United States to make testing widespread, but it isn’t happening.  During President Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force press conference on Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence and Task Force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx discussed the problem:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: On the subject of testing, we have now completed more than 1.1 million tests around the country. We’re working very closely with governors around America to — to assist them in drive-through and community testing centers[.] …

Abbott Laboratories is actually going to be producing 50,000 tests a day and distributing those around America.  There’s already the machines in some 18,000 different locations around the country, and they’ve told us they have several thousand on the shelf now[.] …

We’re testing about 100,000 Americans a day.  That’ll continue to grow.  It’ll continue to accelerate[.] …

DR. BIRX: It is disappointing to me right now that we have about 500,000 capacity of Abbott tests that are not being utilized.  So they are out.  They’re in the states.  They’re not being run and not utilized.

Why aren’t the tests being utilized?  The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are standing in the way.  On its website, the CDC has extremely restrictive criteria regarding who should be tested.  The only ones with high priority are:

Hospitalized patients.
Those who are in long-term care facilities with symptoms.
Those who are 65 years of age or older with symptoms.
Those with underlying conditions with symptoms.
First responders with symptoms.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/05/its-time-to-figure-out-which-businesses-can-reopen-first-and-how/amp/?utm_source=

How do we reopen after the coronavirus goes away? The mere question, in the middle of the pandemic, is fraught.

Anyone entertaining the idea that businesses should move toward reopening is shamed as caring more about the stock market than people dying. Any discussion of how to get people working again is met with people smugly screaming “stay home!” at each other.

I am staying home, along with my whole family. We’re collectively taking COVID-19 very seriously. We’ve been in self-quarantine since March 13 — before restaurants and bars in the city were shut down, before Mayor Bill de Blasio finally closed city schools and days before his last trip to the gym.

All that to note that I’m no COVID-truther who thinks this is no big deal — it’s a very big deal. But looking ahead, figuring out a way to get people back to work has to be permitted. In fact, it’s essential.

It’s hard not to notice that many of the people shrieking and shaming are still employed. What about all the people who don’t have any money coming in for their families? We need to figure out the path back for them.

Businesses can’t open tomorrow or next week. But how do we get our city working again?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bet-big-on-treatments-for-coronavirus-11586102963?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Some imagine that the coronavirus will run its tragic course in the spring, with the direst results avoided by intense social-distancing and other mitigation efforts, and then our lives can more or less return to normal in the summer.

But that isn’t realistic. Even if new cases start to stall in the summer heat, the virus will return in the fall, and so will fresh risk of large outbreaks and even a new epidemic. People will still be reluctant to crowd into stores, restaurants or arenas. Schools may remain closed. The public’s fears won’t relent simply because there are fewer new cases. We’ll be running an 80% economy.

The only way out is with technology. Aggressive surveillance and screening can help warn of new infection clusters that could turn into outbreaks, but that won’t be enough. A vaccine could beat the virus, but there won’t be one this year. The best near-term hope: an effective therapeutic drug. That would be transformative, and it’s plausible as soon as this summer. But the process will have to move faster.

Americans would have the confidence to return to work, even if the virus is still circulating in the fall, if they knew that a robust screening system is in place to identify and arrest new outbreaks and medication can significantly reduce the chance of becoming severely ill. Kevin Warsh, a former Federal Reserve governor, estimates that such a drug could restore at least $1 trillion in economic activity.

https://www.newsday.com/news/health/coronavirus/gov-andrew-m-cuomo-the-coronavirus-1.43666531

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Sunday that new deaths from the coronavirus are possibly plateauing in New York State and the number of patients leaving hospitals is increasing.

As of Sunday, Cuomo said, there have been 122,031 coronavirus cases and 4,149 deaths related to the disease. 

Cuomo sounded a note of cautious optimism at signs that the state’s level of confirmed cases could be approaching or even be past its peak. The past 24 hours saw 594 deaths, a decrease from the record 630 reported Friday. About 12,000 people in New York have been discharged from hospital care — 74% of all cases — with 1,700 discharged in one day, the governor said.

“We could be very nearly near the apex and we could be beyond the plateau right now,” Cuomo said in his daily update on the pandemic Sunday morning. “The coronavirus is truly a vicious and effective killer at what the virus does … We are all watching a movie and we are waiting to see what the next scene is.”

He said that as the number of cases have surged across Nassau County and the rest of Long Island, fewer new cases are being reported in New York City. He again reiterated Sunday that more assistance in the form of medical personnel and supplies is needed.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/05/a_good_leader_is_more_than_a_mouthpiece_for_experts_142866.html

“Leaders should listen to experts, but leaders are more than mere mouthpieces for expert advisors. A leader listens, assesses. and then decides; this is what President Trump does every day as challenges unfold. When it comes to lifting the quarantine and restarting the economy,  Trump is more than capable of making the decisions necessary to make America great again. ”

President Trump is often attacked because he relies on his own judgement and doesn’t always do what current or former government experts insist he should do. And he has a hard call coming up, as economic and health experts may provide conflicting advice about when to start lifting the quarantine on at least some of us so that we can go back to work. 

It’s true that a prudent person listens to expert advice because a learned perspective can be informative. But a wise person uses critical reasoning seasoned by generalized knowledge to judge the prudence of expert advice.  Consider the expert advice regarding wearing masks in crowded public spaces.   

I saw only one person wearing a mask when I was at O’Hare International Airport on March 10 — and no one was wearing a mask at the airport upon my departure to return to Chicago on March 13. While I was traveling, the government declared a pandemic, Harvard and other universities sent students home, and local schools started to close. 

https://nypost.com/2020/04/04/so-many-to-blame-for-coronavirus-crisis-so-dont-bother-goodwin/

As a deadly virus sweeps across America, it was inevitable that we would also suffer an outbreak of the blame game. With the body count soaring and the economy collapsing, finger pointing is in full bloom.

Never mind that all the blame in the world will not save a single life or create a job. The game must go on because politics is ultimately a zero-sum affair.

President Trump, of course, is the most common target, and his critics are the usual suspects. Democrats and the media are ganging up to create a narrative that people died because Trump failed to act fast enough.

“As the president fiddles, people are dying,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in announcing an investigation that smells like impeachment 2.0.

She and others cite the president’s reluctance in January and early February to fully grasp the threat of the coronavirus and ­delays in providing test kits.

They have a point, especially about the testing fiasco. But they conveniently ignore their own culpability.

First, the president was up to his neck in the flimsy Ukraine impeachment case Pelosi and the media cooked up. The final acquittal vote came on Feb. 6, but recall that the accusers, which included every Dem in Congress and the party’s presidential candidates, demanded additional witnesses. Had they gotten their way, the trial would have run through the end of February and maybe into March.

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https://pjmedia.com/trending/1000-bed-new-york-hospital-ship-has-only-20-patients/

The hospital ship USNS Comfort that’s been docked in New York since last Monday, has only 20 patients, according to the New York Times. The USNS Mercy docked in Los Angeles has only 15 patients.

The ships were never meant to treat coronavirus patients and were admitting only those who tested negative. But bizarre rules and bureaucratic bungling have made the task of filling those ships with patients a lot harder than it should be.

Washington Examiner:

The Navy is refusing to treat nearly 50 conditions, and ambulances are unable to take patients directly to the vessel. Ambulances must first bring patients to a hospital for an evaluation, including a test for COVID-19, and then deliver them to the ship.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/rep-ocasio-cortez-wants-reparations-for-minority-coronavirus-victims/

True to form, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is playing the “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” game and is calling for reparations because minorities are getting the coronavirus at a faster rate than white people.

Reparations for being sick, reparations for being a distant ancestor of a former slave, reparations for being a victim of “redlining,” reparations for business inequalities — eventually she’s going to run out of white people’s money to take.

But that won’t deter our fearless warrior queen.

New York Post:

“COVID deaths are disproportionately spiking in Black + Brown communities,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted to her 6 million followers  on Friday morning.

“Why? Because the chronic toll of redlining, environmental racism, wealth gap, etc. ARE underlying health conditions,” the Bronx-born lawmaker added.

“Inequality is a comorbidity. COVID relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations,” she wrote.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/491021-how-deadly-is-the-coronavirus

“That is why random sampling is important. John Ioannidis, a Stanford epidemiologist who is famous for debunking bad research, has been pushing for it. He told me that random sampling is needed and could be done with a couple of thousand tests. When I told him that I previously worked in the polling industry, he put it in terms that resonated with me. He said, “Random representative testing is like polling. We run thousands of opinion polls in this country. We should similarly get a representative sample of the population and get them tested. It is just so easy.”

How deadly is the coronavirus? It is a simple but vital question that we don’t know the answer to right now. With American lives and livelihoods on the line, we need a science-based baseline from which to make public policy decisions. Hopefully those answers come sooner than later as the White House looks to do random sampling, something I recently reported. 

To be clear, every single life has value, and the overburdening of hospitals in places such as New York City is real and devastating. The toll on our doctors and nurses, many of whom have contracted the coronavirus by selflessly putting their own lives on the line to save others, is also real. We mourn the loss of each precious life and are in debt to the heroes on the front line.

The economic toll of shutting down nonessential businesses across the country is also real. A record-shattering 10 million Americans filing for unemployment in just two weeks and the largest bailout in United States history — $2.2 trillion — are sobering numbers that reflect the economic calamity we are facing. As government and public health officials make decisions of enormous magnitude, shouldn’t we know how infectious and lethal the coronavirus is?