RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/weve_been_had_and_trump_knows_it.html

While President Trump closed the U.S. border against entry from China at the end of January, his overall instinct was right.  The CCP virus was nasty, but no worse than a supercharged flu.

Health professionals overwhelmed Trump and his inner circle with doomsday scenarios, bullied by panic-obsessed virologists and epidemiologists — begging for attention and copying the alarmist playbook from the climate/global warming extremists, allied with the MSM Trump-haters.

And now the government has completely suffocated economic demand, creating a depression, an unnecessary calamity that is destroying lives, livelihoods, families, and fortunes for a generation.  It is becoming apparent that the end-of-the-world predictions, computer models warning of an apocalyptic black plague worldwide, are all wrong.

Those paying attention were warned that the worse-case scenarios were hysterical, by the likes of Stanford epidemiologist John P.A. Ioannidis.

In dramatic fashion, U.K. Imperial College scientist Neil Ferguson published a doomsday scenario on March 16.  Now, just ten days later, he has reversed his outlook, essentially settling on a prediction no worse than a bad flu season.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-law-enforcement-in-a-time-of-crisis/

There are systemic complexities that addle the administration of justice regardless of whether a catastrophic event is caused by criminal conduct.

The Justice Department wants the power to detain suspects indefinitely without trial. That was the storyline last week. DOJ, you were to believe, was exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to carry out a Constitution-shredding gambit, completely in line with two intertwined media caricatures: Donald Trump’s authoritarian streak and Bill Barr’s long held affinity for executive branch imperialism. If you listened to enough of the commentary around the initial reports, you were pretty sure Trump and Barr were about to lock up Joe Biden, the prime-time hosts at MSNBC, and maybe even the New York Times editorial board.

It should by now go without saying that the distorted story was remote from reality.

The Justice Department made some proposals . . . but it did so at the urging of Congress, not unilaterally. The upshot was to empower the courts, not the executive. In fact, “empower” is an overstatement. The idea was to give judges latitude to deal with due process deadlines that necessarily become problematic when some catastrophic event undermines the capacity of courts to function.

The profound challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to our health-care system, potentially in all U.S. states and territories, is the predominant news story of 2020. Less obvious but all too real nonetheless is the challenge it poses for the criminal-justice system.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-week-of-coronavirus-pain-and-progress-51585245116?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

As the number of Americans infected with the coronavirus surges, and hospitals are besieged, it can appear that America is losing the pandemic war. But in important ways the U.S. is better off at the end of March than it was a week ago, and it’s worth tracking the progress as well as the pain.

The most important good news this week is the ebbing panic in financial markets. The Federal Reserve unveiled new facilities to provide liquidity to corners of the market where anxiety had shut down trades or threatened a run. Think money-market and municipal-bond funds. The Senate bill that the House passed Friday adds $454 billion for Treasury that can backstop further Fed actions if they’re needed.

Our market sources say trading has calmed down and most sellers can find buyers for assets to raise cash when they need it. If you think this doesn’t matter to the real economy, imagine a cascade of defaults that become bankruptcies that become a banking panic. At least for now the panic toward a deflationary spiral has stopped. The Fed and the Senate legislation sparked this week’s modest rally in equities.

“I’m going to say something that is a little bit complicated but do it in a way we can understand it together. In the model, either you have to have a large group of people who a-asymptomatic, who never presented for any test to have the kind of numbers predicted. To get to 60 million people infected, you have to have a large group of a-symptomatics. We have not seen an attack rate over 1 in 1,000. So either we are measuring the iceberg and underneath it, are a large group of people. So we are working hard to get the antibody test and figure out who these people are and do they exist. Or we have the transmission completely wrong.

So these are the things we are looking at, because the predictions of the model don’t match the reality on the ground in China, South Korea or Italy. We are five times the size of Italy. If we were Italy and did all those divisions, Italy should have close to 400,000 deaths. They are not close to achieving that.

Models are models. We are — there is enough data of the real experience with the coronavirus on the ground to really make these predictions much more sound. So when people start talking about 20% of a population getting infected, it’s very scary, but we don’t have data that matches that based on our experience.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_nhs_had_13_years_to_prepare_for_coronavirus_but_still_didnt.html

“The National Institutes of Health is the government agency primarily responsible for biomedical and public health research. After SARS and, again, after H1N1, the NIH, along with the CDC, should have been paying close attention to illnesses emerging in China and other Second and Third World countries.”

If there’s one thing the coronavirus experience has taught us, it’s that bureaucracies don’t function as well as they’re supposed to. In New York, the bureaucracy opted to spend $500 million on illegal aliens instead of on ventilators. Likewise, during the Obama administration, after the 2009 H1N1 epidemic, the Obama administration, despite warnings, never bothered to replenish stockpile of N95.

It turns out now that the NIH was also doing the bureaucratic equivalent of twiddling its thumbs when it should have been acting to prepare America for the next pandemic. It’s sheer luck – mixed in with Trump’s foresight about China and good management skills – that John Hopkins, in late 2019, ranked America as the best-prepared country in the world for handling a pandemic.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/lethality_of_the_whuan_virus_is_still_unknown.html

The ongoing Wuhan virus hysteria is immensely frustrating to those trying to understand and think clearly, because the information available is incomplete, the key question (how lethal is it?) is unanswered and the vast majority of media coverage and “analysis” so infantile and innumerate.

It would appear that Real Clear Politics has taken to publishing a daily death rate by country, using diagnosed cases as the numerator.  But testing penetration of populations varies by country, and everywhere is heavily weighted to the very sick, missing completely the possibly huge number of Wuhan positives who are only slightly ill or have no symptoms at all.  A death rate based on that numerator is grossly misleading in an alarmist direction.

Potentially further calling into question the value of the published numbers is that there are apparently no international standards for when a death should be attributed to the Wuhan virus.  In Germany, it appears that they are strict — i.e., death must have been caused by the viral flu, not the underlying condition that put the usually elderly person at high risk.  To some extent, at least, this may account for Germany’s extraordinarily low death rate, even employing its known cases as numerator.

Italy, on the other hand, may be inadvertently inflating its death numbers by including virtually all deaths in Wuhan-positive persons in their total, regardless of apparent actual cause.  There is some evidence that Italy performs postmortem Wuhan tests, and if the body tests positive, the death is attributed to the virus — though, in fact, the (e.g.) 87-year-old who had been suffering from heart failure for months was carried off by his underlying, largely age-related frailty.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/is_coronavirus_less_fatal_than_early_predictions_suggested.html

The coronavirus is an icky disease that takes a cruel toll on the elderly, the sick, and the unlucky.  In this modern era, we can outwit many things that once routinely killed people, but the Grim Reaper is still out there, and he’ll eventually get all of us.  Scary headlines have hinted that the coronavirus is now the Grim Reaper’s preferred method.

Media reports have told us that the coronavirus is significantly more deadly than the flu, which annually kills 30,000 to 60,000 Americans.  Based on the speed with which it killed in China, Italy, Iran, and Spain, it looked as if the American death toll could easily top two million people annually.  While that’s small potatoes compared to past pandemics (e.g., the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, Spanish Influenza), it’s a staggering toll in modern America.  Any actions seemed worthwhile to keep America from turning into a viral slaughterhouse.

But that might not be what’s happening.

At the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall), Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, two medical professors at Stanford, propose that we’re using the wrong math and that we are still missing the numbers we need to do the math correctly.  However, by extrapolating from available data, one can argue that the coronavirus’s mortality rate is significantly lower than the early estimates.