RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/can-we-please-be-sober-minded-about-the-coronavirus/

EXCERPT

The coronavirus may not prove as threatening as first feared, but one way to ensure that it isn’t is for American officials to take it seriously. Foolish happy talk aside, the administration has, by and large, acted appropriately. The targeted travel restrictions can at least slow the influx of infected people while researchers work to develop treatments and vaccines. In addition to providing resources to those researchers and streamlining the testing process, federal agencies should promptly disseminate the number of cases and work with localities to quarantine patients as warranted.

To hear the Democrats tell it, Trump has already stumbled into a debacle. They’ve hit him for alleged cuts to the CDC, but Congress has in fact increased funding to the agency during Trump’s presidency. The cool-headed analysts at the New York Times also chimed in. Readers of Gail Collins — who titled a column “Let’s Call It Trumpvirus” — can be forgiven for thinking the president concocted the virus in the West Wing. Paul Krugman absurdly said Trump’s fear of “scary brown people” left the government ill-prepared to combat the crisis.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/03/were-accumulating-more-critical-information-about-the-coronavirus-every-day/

With cases of the new coronavirus (officially SARS-CoV-2, and the illness it causes designated COVID-19) spreading, there is intense interest in what we know and what we can expect. Here’s a primer.

There are several factors that determine how damaging and worrisome outbreaks will be. The first is the degree of infectiousness, or ability to spread. Examples of the extremes are noroviruses, which can sweep rapidly through an institution or cruise ship, and the rabies virus, which is almost always transmitted to humans through the bite of a warm-blooded animal.

The second is virulence — the severity or degree of pathogenicity of the infection. Using the same two examples as above, norovirus infections cause severe nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, but the symptoms are short-lived and almost never cause significant morbidity if treated symptomatically. Thus, although high in infectivity, they are low in virulence. By contrast, by affecting the brain, rabies gives rise to central nervous system symptoms and is almost always fatal once symptoms occur.

Not surprisingly, the most worrying events are a combination of high levels of both infectiousness and virulence. An example of that would be flu in a bad year — one in which the vaccines aren’t a good match for the viruses circulating in the population, which gives rise to high numbers of illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths. This flu season in the Northern Hemisphere is looking like a pretty average one; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that so far this season there have been at least 32 million flu illnesses, 310,000 hospitalizations and 18,000 deaths from flu. And those figures are in spite of pretty effective vaccines — again, about average, at 45%.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/03/hillarys-reckoning-isnt-over/

The increasingly desperate Democratic Party and its allies in the media weep tears of joy at the thought of Hillary Clinton riding in to save the party, perhaps after a deadlocked Democratic National Convention. No such luck. After a judge’s decision Monday, Clinton would be wise to lay presidential dreams aside and lawyer up.

It’s been a long time since Clinton’s unquestionably illegal private email and homebrew server have even been mentioned in the media. But legal activist group Judicial Watch didn’t forget.

It was Judicial Watch’s request five years ago about the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi terrorist attack that led to the uncovering of Clinton’s private email network.

On Monday, acting on a request from Judicial Watch, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he would allow Judicial Watch to depose the one-time secretary of state, her former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and two other State Department officials.

Not only will this bring back questions about Hillary’s actions before and after the Benghazi terrorist attack, in which four Americans were murdered, but it will at minimum serve as a reminder of the failure of her tenure as the nation’s top diplomat.

In making his judgment, Lamberth made clear he doesn’t believe the government has been forthcoming in its responses thus far.

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

Since the moment coronavirus entered the media’s vocabulary, the media and the Democrat party have been working diligently to assure the American people that it’s the second coming of the Black Death and that it’s all Trump’s fault. Disgustingly, many of them have been insisting that it will destroy the American economy (which, after all, is one of Trump’s biggest selling points) and certain people who shall be named – Paul Krugman, I’m talking to you – seemed to celebrate the stock market’s big drop last week. The stock market, though, seems to be recovering already, posting huge gains on Monday.

Don Surber, one of the most astute bloggers around, was unsurprised by the market’s gyrations because he had predicted this event long ago:

 NPR reported, “Stocks took another steep dive Friday, deepening a multi-day rout fueled by fears about the coronavirus’ impact on the global economy.

“The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 357 points on Friday, capping a week in which the blue chip index fell 3,583 points or 12.4%. The Dow is down 16.3% from its recent peak on Feb. 12.”

This is the correction I predicted for 2020 in highlights on December 31.

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

In San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, it was routine to see men from China spit in the streets, blow their noses in their fingers and then wipe their hands on anything nearby, and generally violate American hygienic norms.  Outside the tourist zones, Chinatown’s restaurants and grocery stores also suggested resistance to American hygiene.

The Chinese who came to America to escape communism were amazing people and model immigrants.  They worked hard and were so family-focused and education-oriented that, usually within one generation, they made the leap from Chinatown squalor to lovely suburbs.  However, unlike the Japanese, the Chinese did not bring with them a culture of cleanliness.

When it comes to epidemic diseases, these cultural norms matter — and political systems may matter even more.

One of the things noted here last week is that the coronavirus, unlike ordinary respiratory viruses, may also be transmitted through fecal matter (emphasis added):

Speaking of filthy, one of the problems with coronavirus is that, even though it’s an upper respiratory disease, it’s also spread by fecal matter.  It will be a disaster in places that don’t have good fecal matter control: China (primitive toilets and no culture of hand-washing); India (which is working hard to bring toilets to people, but it’s slow going); Africa (a world drowning in fecal matter); and San Francisco (also drowning in fecal matter).  

That reference to hygiene in China gained new meaning from reading a viral post from Regie Hamilton, who was in China eighteen years ago to adopt his daughter.  He vividly remembers the cultural comfort with fecal matter and other disease vectors:

https://pjmedia.com/trending/breaking-federal-judge-orders-hillary-clinton-deposition-over-private-emails-says-still-more-to-learn/

A federal judge has ordered former Secretary of State and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to sit for a sworn deposition in order to answer more questions regarding her use of a private email server during her tenure at the State Department. D.C. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth granted a request from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, arguing that her past statements on the matter were insufficient, Fox News reports.

“As extensive as the existing record is, it does not sufficiently explain Secretary Clinton’s state of mind when she decided it would be an acceptable practice to set up and use a private server to conduct State Department business,” Lamberth said. According to Lamberth, Clinton’s previous written responses to questions “were either incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory at best. Simply put her responses left many more questions than answers.”

Judge Lamberth specifically ordered an in-person deposition because using written questions now “will only muddle any understanding of Secretary Clinton’s state of mind and fail to capture the full picture, thus delaying the final disposition of this case even further.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/01/the-coronavirus-numbers-are-not-quite-what-they-seem/

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the FDA.

The purpose of this slightly pedantic discussion is not to minimize the significance of the new coronavirus, but rather to put into perspective some of the media’s warnings of apocalypse.

Fractions are taught in elementary school, but adults sometimes still manage to misunderstand how they work in everyday life. I was reminded of that after President Trump’s Saturday press conference, which focused on the federal government’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus (formally SARS-CoV-2, with the illness it causes designated COVID-19). Let me explain.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the articulate, veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described at the presser how the efforts to prevent the spread—or “contain” the virus—would continue, but warned that we should expect the number of coronavirus cases in the United States to increase.

Fauci emphasized that the chance of becoming infected remains low and that the majority of those who contract the virus—75 to 80 percent—will experience it like a “bad flu or a cold.” The other 15 to 20 percent, he said, may need “advanced medical care.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/01/new-impeachment-rules-would-snare-obama/

Obama was not impeached not because he did not do things that Donald Trump did, but because his opposition in the House did not do what Democrats later most willingly did: attempt a coup to remove a president without cause.

Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure was detrimental to the United States, but like most of his nonbelievers, I harbor no animosity for his person.

Few critics that I know advocated that Obama be impeached, much less removed from office, before his reelection bid—even amid his worst scandals and dangerous policies. But we are now in a new age, whose protocols might have made it impossible for the Obama Administration to have finished two terms. 

Remember, his administration ran some 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels in some hare-brained scheme to monitor violence spilling into the United States. Under the new customs, he should have been impeached for instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to refuse to testify to Congress about Fast and Furious, or at least for not handing over subpoenaed documents. Imagine a Trump gun-walking scheme in Mexico. 

It was bad enough that Holder was the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, well aside from the embarrassment of his unhinged outbursts about “my people” (hint: his “my” did not mean Americans of all races and creeds). We all remember Holder’s lunatic dismissals of his own country as “a nation of cowards.” (Imagine Bill Barr referring to “my people” or calling Americans cowards)

https://twitter.com/andrewbostom/status/1234166783516585984

THANKS TO DR. ANDREW BOSTOM, M.D.

NIAID Dir Fauci’s welcome sobriety on corona/COVID-19, which “may ultimately be more akin to a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)” [published by the ideologically Left, NEJM, no less!] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

The latest threat to global health is the ongoing outbreak of the respiratory disease that was recently given the name Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19). Covid-19 was recognized in December 2019.1 It was rapidly shown to be caused by a novel coronavirus that is structurally related to the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). As in two preceding instances of emergence of coronavirus disease in the past 18 years2 — SARS (2002 and 2003) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) (2012 to the present) — the Covid-19 outbreak has posed critical challenges for the public health, research, and medical communities.

In their Journal article, Li and colleagues3 provide a detailed clinical and epidemiologic description of the first 425 cases reported in the epicenter of the outbreak: the city of Wuhan in Hubei province, China. Although this information is critical in informing the appropriate response to this outbreak, as the authors point out, the study faces the limitation associated with reporting in real time the evolution of an emerging pathogen in its earliest stages. Nonetheless, a degree of clarity is emerging from this report. The median age of the patients was 59 years, with higher morbidity and mortality among the elderly and among those with coexisting conditions (similar to the situation with influenza); 56% of the patients were male. Of note, there were no cases in children younger than 15 years of age. Either children are less likely to become infected, which would have important epidemiologic implications, or their symptoms were so mild that their infection escaped detection, which has implications for the size of the denominator of total community infections.