RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

–

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?

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/other/491200-cdc-begins-testing-blood-for-antibody-coronavirus-treatment

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has started using antibody blood tests to confirm coronavirus infections, even among those who have not developed symptoms, Politico reported.

The test scans for antibodies in a blood sample to confirm whether a person has been exposed to the coronavirus, The New York reported. The tests, called serology tests, can help confirm whether there have been populations of U.S. residents carrying the virus across the country.

Determining how many people who come into contact with the coronavirus and do not get sick is key to understanding the spread of the pandemic, according to Politico.

The tests will focus on three groups. The first group tested will be those who were not diagnosed with the coronavirus in hot spots where the disease has multiplied across the country. This would include areas like New York City, now the epicenter of the virus in the United States. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/03/why-is-queens-the-hotspot-of-hotspots-in-the-nations-coronavirus-crisis/

While failing to offer an honest explanation about how this disease continues to consume New York City, Cuomo nonetheless is demanding the rest of the country surrender to tyrannical and punitive government “cures” to do what he did not.

According to reports, the death toll from coronavirus-related illness in the United States, according to some sources, reached 6,000 on Thursday. The country remains in lockdown and the economy is in freefall after the White House warned this week that between 100,000 to 200,000 people will die in the United States over the next few months from the Wuhan flu.

The country’s main hotspot remains New York City. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is holding daily press briefings to riff about how we are “all in this together,” whine about the dearth of critical supplies his administration failed to secure as the crisis unfolded overseas, and wisecrack with his brother. Nearly half of all U.S. fatalities have occurred in New York state, according to tracking reports.

Cuomo insists that New York is the “tip of the spear” of COVID-19 cases; it’s only a matter of time, Cuomo predicts, before the rest of the country is under siege by the lethal virus.

But New York is not the tip of the spear—it is the spear.

As I detailed here, Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio failed to prepare for the inevitable spread of coronavirus until it was too late. There were warning signs dating back to January that the disease would sweep through certain areas of the city, endangering the lives of health care workers, state residents and people across the country.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/04/trump-derangement-syndrom-is-immune-to-the-coronavirus-and-the-facts/

Even as China’s role in creating the COVID-19 crisis becomes more clear, the left is trying to blame President Donald Trump for the resulting deaths. None of it makes sense, and all of it is beneath contempt at a time when the country is still at war with this invisible enemy.

On Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN’s “State of the Union” that “The president’s denial at the beginning was deadly. His delay in getting equipment to where it’s needed is deadly … As the president fiddles, people are dying.”

Even as Pelosi was uttering this shameless screed, intelligence officials were putting the finishing touches on a report showing how China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak and has been underreporting how many contracted the disease and the number of deaths.

When that report became public, Vice President Mike Pence noted that “What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.”

State Department immunologist Dr. Deborah Birx added that “The medical community interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected.”

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.”