RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/03/virus_experts_early_statements_belie_prescient_portrayal_142845.html

As predictions of the coronavirus’ impact have grown more dire and the White House has belatedly acknowledged the pathogen’s repercussions on the nation, the media have increasingly sought to portray the administration as out of touch with early warnings from medical experts about the coming storm. A closer look at the public statements of those very same experts during the early weeks of the outbreak reveals that the administration’s initial reassurances were largely aligned with the assessments of the medical community.

Today Anthony Fauci is held up by the media as a national hero of the pandemic response and the only reason to listen to a White House coronavirus briefing. Yet, rewind the clock back to January and his public statements essentially mirrored those of the administration.

On Jan. 21, he emphasized that it was unclear whether the virus could spread from person to person: “Is it a continual spread? Is it sustained? We’re not quite sure yet.” A University of Minnesota expert offered that “this is one of those inflection moments in outbreak history where we have enough information to be very concerned, but not enough information to say this is going to be an international crisis.”

In a Jan. 23 Journal of the American Medical Association podcast, Dr. Fauci repeatedly downplayed the virus’ potential impact on the U.S., noting that all five cases here were travelers from China. He also noted that due to limited testing in China, the number of infections was likely much higher than official counts, meaning that the death rate of the virus was likely much lower than feared.

Asked whether the U.S. might contemplate city-wide shutdowns like those China was enacting at the time, Fauci replied, “There’s no chance in the world that we could do that to Chicago or to New York or to San Francisco, but they’re doing it.  So, let’s see what happens.”

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

How much does the general public really know about the Chinese Coronavirus?  What is the death rate solely attributable to the virus?  Of those that have died, how many had serious underlying conditions?  Do the reported deaths include those who died of other ailments but had also contracted the virus?  What is the actual age breakdown of fatalities?  The CDC claims that this virus is extraordinarily contagious; how much of a threat to spread the virus to others are those who are asymptomatic (have the virus but report no symptoms) yet are still contagious?

Since the Chinese Communist Party has refused to fully share their actual experience with the world, including the death toll, one has to turn to other sources.  There are presently two primary sources that can be analyzed: Italy and New York City.

As of April 1, 2020, Italy had recorded 13,100 deaths (4.3% of its recorded cases).  By far the highest number in the world, if China’s extremely dubious 3,300 deaths can be believed.  87% of all the deaths in Italy have occurred among those over 70.

It is generally acknowledged that not only does Italy have the oldest median population in Europe but also among the unhealthiest due to smoking and air pollution in Northern Italy, the epicenter of their coronavirus outbreak.  Further, its medical care system is among the worst in Europe and overstretched even in the best of times.

As to how they have categorized the death toll, Professor Walter Ricciardi, Advisor to the Italian Ministry of Health:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/up-from-expertise/

Scientists must ultimately address the threat of the virus, but they cannot solve the immediate problem of mobilizing the country against it.

The political-opinion factory has moved from downplaying the coronavirus outbreak to haranguing the president for his alleged dismissal of science. The New York Times’s Paul Krugman charges not just Trump but the Republican Party as a whole with cultivating “an attitude of disdain toward expertise.” Never mind that the president and the media have taken a similar trajectory during this crisis — from dismissal to alertness to panic — while others on the right, such as Tom Cotton, sounded the alarm from the beginning. The underlying assumption that experts alone can resolve this crisis is wrong.

For one, a monolithic expert opinion on the present pandemic does not exist. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, emerged only three months ago; scientists haven’t had nearly enough time to conduct conclusive research into it. And constraints on testing, compounded by uncertainty as to the number of asymptomatic cases, make the current medical data largely unreliable.

While some epidemiologists have used previous flu pandemics to inform their thinking, that approach requires rough estimates of factors such as reproduction and fatality rates, leading to wide variance in projections. To take one example, Oxford University researchers found that as much as 40 percent of the U.K. might be immune to the novel coronavirus, while a team from Imperial College London projected more than 250,000 domestic deaths, even under strict social-distancing measures. For all their sophistication, computational tools rely on inputs that are difficult to observe in real time.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/03/trumps-move-to-ease-fuel-efficiency-rules-will-save-money-and-also-save-lives/

President Donald Trump’s decision to slow the huge increases in fuel-efficiency standards put in place by the Obama administration in 2012 was met with derision and scorn by green groups, the big media and others on the left. In fact, it’s a wise move, one that will save Americans money, but more importantly, will save lives.

Trump’s action is perfectly timed. With the economy in turmoil from the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, automakers will not have the means to retool, research and revamp their car lines to obey President Barack Obama’s absurdly stringent rules. Auto sales are now plunging.

Obama’s rules would have required automakers to push the Corporate Average Fuel Economy from 25.3 miles per gallon per vehicle in 2012 to 54.5 mpg by 2025. To do that, fuel efficiency had to increase about 5% a year.

Contrary to complaints in the media of Trump’s “rollback” of standards, all the new rules do is reduce the fuel efficiency gains required to 1.5% a year, rather than the unreachable 5%. So the U.S. fleet average will be 40 mpg, not 54.5, by 2025. Even so, that will still be 28% higher than Obama’s rules.

More importantly, automakers strained to meet the Obama requirements, forced to radically downsize cars and create a money-losing electric-car fleet that still requires subsidies even to exist.

Of course, everyone likes clean air. But our fuel-efficiency standards didn’t start out with that as their goal. In fact, America’s fuel-efficiency standards got their start in 1975 as a way to mitigate the impact of the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo. At the time, with oil prices surging, inflation raging and increasingly worthless dollars flooding global oil markets, it seemed like a good idea.

https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1246107585129992192

Model v. reality update, New York, April 3: model says 61000 hospitalized, 11500 ICU beds.

Reality says 14400 (actually 14,800) hospitalized, 3700 ICU beds.

Reminder: we are 12 days out from the official lockdown, 14-17 from the unofficial panic/reduced activity…

BROKEN MODELS: The CDC Doctors Screwed Up Bigly! USNS Comfort in NY Harbor Sits Idle with 3 Patients — USNS Mercy in LA has Only 15 Patients

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/02/infectious-disease-specialist-says-use-of-coronavirus-drugs-touted-by-trump-are-absolute-game-changer/

A noted infectious disease specialist who has treated 72 COVID-19 patients with the drugs hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin is claiming  that the combined use of the antimalarial medication and antibiotic are “an absolute game changer” in the war against the disease.

The results have been so promising, Dr. Stephen Smith, founder of The Smith Center for Infectious Diseases and Urban Health, told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that “this could be the beginning of the end of the pandemic.”

During an appearance on “Ingraham Angle” Wednesday night, Smith pointed out that not a single COVID-19 patient that he put on the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin regimen for five days or more has had to be intubated, a medical procedure that involves putting a tube into a patient’s trachea and placing them on a ventilator for respiratory support. Most of the people, he said, got better after only two days on the drug cocktail.

“The chance of that occurring by chance, according to my sons Leon and Hunter who did some stats for me, are .000-something,” he said, adding that “it’s ridiculously low.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/02/researchers-develop-potential-coronavirus-vaccine/5112675002/

A potential vaccine for COVID-19 has been developed and tested successfully in mice, researchers reported Thursday.

“We’d like to get this into patients as soon as possible,” said Andrea Gambotto, associate professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and co-author of a paper announcing the vaccine in the journal EBioMedicine.

As far as reaching clinical trials, “we would like to think a month, give or take. Maybe two months. We just started the process,” said co-author Louis Falo, a professor and chairman of the Department of Dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Thursday’s announcement, more than three months into a pandemic that has killed 50,000 people and sickened almost 1 million worldwide, presents an urgent challenge to government regulators, who must weigh how much to speed up the vaccine approval process.Vaccines often take years to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Yet on March 16, the first four healthy volunteers in Seattle received a different potential COVID-19 vaccine, made by a company called Moderna and administered in a small clinical trial at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-america-still-global-leader-time-crisis/

Any laxity in fighting the virus is not to be found with the U.S., but rather with its loudest and most opportunistic critics.

A current global myth alleges that America under the Trump administration is not leading the world fight against the coronavirus in its accustomed role as the post-war global leader.

Yet the U.S. was the first major nation to issue a travel ban on flights from China, with Donald Trump making that announcement on January 31. That was a bold act. It likely saved thousands endangered by Chinese perfidy and soon became a global model. None of the ban’s loud critics are today demanding it be rescinded.

In typically American fashion, as we have seen in crises from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, after initial shock and unpreparedness, the U.S. economic and scientific juggernaut is kicking into action.

Already the U.S. is transitioning from a long, disastrous reliance on Chinese medical supplies and pharmaceuticals. In ad hoc fashion, companies are gearing up massive production of masks, ventilators, and key anti-viral supplies.

The number of known deaths from the virus — for now the only reliable data available — shows a fatality rate of about 7–8 per million people in the United States. That per capita toll is analogous to Germany’s and one of the lowest in the world among larger nations.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/why-is-susan-rice-using-coronavirus-as-an-excuse-to-shill-for-china

Susan Rice just reminded Xi Jinping why he misses her presence in the president’s ear.

President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser did so with two arguments on Tuesday to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

First, and admittedly at Mitchell’s pushing, Rice stated that the Trump administration’s description of the coronavirus as the “Wuhan virus” is unacceptable and undermines global cooperation. Viruses can arise anywhere, Rice said, adding that “Wuhan virus” is “race-baiting” and “shameful.”

This was news to me. I was under the impression that Wuhan is not a race, but rather a Chinese industrial city where the virus first infected humans.

But Rice wasn’t done, adding, “It doesn’t serve us well, it doesn’t serve the objective of squelching the virus globally, to brand in nationalistic, or xenophobic, or racist terms. We all have to work together…”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/got-coronavirus-antibodies-11585782003?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

One of the great uncertainties in the coronavirus pandemic is how many people have been infected without knowing it or showing symptoms. Fortunately, there are now tests for that, and broadly deploying them will be critical to saving lives and getting Americans back to work.

Dozens of commercial and public health labs around the world are rolling out antibody tests that can show if an individual was recently infected with the virus and has developed immunity. When fighting a pathogen, the immune system produces proteins known as antibodies that bind to specific molecules known as antigens on the invader’s surface like a lock and key.

Antibodies circulate in the blood for weeks and even months after infection, providing resistance to another onslaught, though the immune system remembers how to produce them on demand. Vaccines work by instructing the immune system to make antibodies to shoot down pathogens before they proliferate.

Because antibodies linger in the blood, they are especially useful for determining if someone has been infected with the coronavirus. Some experts estimate that more than half of infected individuals show mild or no symptoms, though the true figure could be higher. Around three-quarters of people infected with flu viruses show mild or no symptoms.