RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8232131/Adherence-social-distancing-spurs-dip-projected-U-S-coronavirus-deaths.html?ito=push-notification&ci=13334&si=5694542

Coronavirus death toll estimate DROPS again: Top COVID-19 model shows predicted US fatalities have fallen by 12% from 68,841 to 60,308 – just a month after it projected that 84,000 would die

The University of Washington’s model projected on Friday that the US death toll will reach 60,308 by August 4
This marks a 12 percent decline from 68,841 deaths forecast earlier in the week
Better-than-expected social distancing practices and strict state shutdowns have helped slow the outbreak and improve the outlook for Americans
States with low death rates could relax some restrictions on May 4, experts said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-to-give-commencement-to-west-point-pence-delivering-speech-at-air-force-academy_3317096.html

President Donald Trump said he will give a commencement speech at West Point, a U.S. military academy in New York.

Trump told reporters in Washington Friday that cadets will be spread out to comply with social distancing guidelines amid the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a novel coronavirus that emerged from mainland China last year.

“I understand they’ll have distancing, they’ll have some big distance, so it will be very different than it ever looked. Do I like the look? No, I don’t,” he said.

Eventually, graduations will return to normal, with people “nice and tight,” he added.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/18/its_time_for_the_white_house_to_focus_on_drug_approvals_142941.html

In this COVID-19 era, it’s the scientists who will ultimately get us back to work. It is time for the Trump administration to acknowledge this and adjust its public communication strategy accordingly. It is hard to envision a scenario looking like the “normal” we all crave until we have therapeutics to protect us from the coronavirus’s effects as we await a vaccine to prevent us from catching it. Once we all know we can take a drug that will minimize symptoms and possibly prevent infection in the first place, we can interact safely in ways that even a ramped-up testing regime will not allow.

Daily White House briefings, and as a result the media and the American public, have been fixated up to now on the response to the pandemic from the administration and Congress. These updates primarily focus on three of the four main categories of activity: federal aid to businesses and displaced workers, needed supplies and equipment for our health care system, and the social distancing regimen complete with handwashing and homemade masks. The two medical faces of this crisis, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, have concentrated on the last two and keep faithfully explaining what the administration is doing, or should be doing, to increase testing, equip frontline workers, and ultimately flatten the curve. 

We hear much less about the fourth category of activity, that is, the race to find a therapeutic solution to combat the virus while we await a vaccine. Therapeutics include anti-viral drugs that inhibit the coronavirus and antibody therapies that boost immunity to the virus, and possibly off-label use of existing drugs. 

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/coronavirus-model-estimates-us-deaths-down

A key coronavirus model has lowered its estimate of total U.S. deaths in its latest projection of how many will die due to the contagious virus.

The revision will likely fuel criticism from skeptics that initial projections were overblown, and one that government leaders may use to say that efforts to combat the spread are working.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) lowered its projection of total deaths from 68,841 (with an estimate range of 30,188 to 175,965) to just over 60,308 (with an estimate range of 34,063 to 140,381) in an update published Friday.

The institute said that change was partially driven by both higher estimates in states like New York and New Jersey, and lower projections in states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, Georgia and Florida.

“By incorporating the trend in cases alongside COVID-19 deaths in our model, many locations are now predicted to have longer peaks and are taking longer to move down the epidemic curve to zero deaths,” a statement from the institute said. “Subsequently, these places now have higher projections for cumulative COVID-19 deaths through the first wave.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/493195-its-our-right-and-duty-to-question-those-deciding-americas-fate

When in the United States of America did it become objectionable, or considered outright wrong, to question the wisdom and policies of our politicians, bureaucrats and “experts”?  If “we are all in this together,” as people have been declaring about the fight against COVID-19, then shouldn’t we all have a say in our collective fate? That should be the right of every American citizen, even those who disagree with states’ shelter-at-home and business closure orders.

When did it become wrong, or a crime punishable by arrest, for Americans to peacefully protest a governor’s stay-at-home order, as happened recently in Raleigh, N.C.? Evidently our right to peacefully protest has become a “non-essential activity” to be broken up by the police. In Lansing, Mich., protesters against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order used vehicles for their “Operation Gridlock.”

To curb the spread of COVID-19 in America, we have temporarily surrendered our lifestyles, livelihoods, life savings, mental health and even our very freedoms to the dictates of politicians, bureaucrats and public health experts. “For our own good,” they have put in place orders to control the movement and actions of most of the nation’s 330 million people.  

No one can deny that COVID-19 is a dangerous, highly-infectious virus. That said, the solutions to curb the contagion seem to be holding Americans hostage. Are we still allowed to contrast what’s happening with this pandemic to those of the past and ask logical questions?

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/493370-keeping-the-coronavirus-death-toll-in-perspective

As governors and mayors debate when to lift their coronavirus stay-at-home orders, public health experts predict a flood of deaths should businesses be allowed to reopen before universal testing or a vaccine for the disease is available. These are the same experts whose previous apocalyptic models of coronavirus fatalities and shortages of hospital beds and ventilators have proved wildly inaccurate. It may be useful to look at some numbers for perspective. 

As of 3 p.m. Eastern on April 16, there were 30,920 coronavirus deaths in the U.S. New York state accounted for 14,198 — or 46 percent — of those deaths. New York City accounted for 11,477 of New York state’s deaths and 37 percent of national deaths. This week, New York City started counting deaths as coronavirus fatalities if the patient had not been tested for the disease but was suspected postmortem of having it. This relaxed standard increased the U.S. death count by 17 percent. Other jurisdictions will inevitably follow suit. 

The national coronavirus deaths represent a death rate of 9.4 per 100,000 of the U.S. population. Take out the New York fatalities and the New York share of the national population, and the coronavirus death rate for the rest of the country is 5.4 per 100,000 of the U.S. population.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-ventilator-shortages-have-not-come-to-pass/

The ventilator shortages of which we were all gravely warned have not yet come to pass.

In March, one of the most feared aspects of the pandemic was the widely reported coming shortage of ventilators. One well-publicized estimate, repeated by the New York Times, the New Yorker and CNN, was that the U.S. would need roughly one million ventilators, or more than five times as many as we had. Gulp. Ventilators are expensive, they’re complex machines, and they can’t be churned out in the thousands overnight.

In the state that (as of today) has one-third of the country’s confirmed COVID-19 cases, New York governor Andrew Cuomo sounded the alarm for ventilators repeatedly. On March 27, he acknowledged “I don’t have a crystal ball” but said his state desperately needed 30,000 ventilators, maybe 40,000, but had only 12,000. When President Trump noted that Cuomo’s state had thousands of unused ventilators it hadn’t even placed yet, Cuomo admitted this was true but said he still needed more: “Yes, they’re in a stockpile because that’s where they’re supposed to be because we don’t need them yet. We need them for the apex,” Cuomo said at the time. On April 2, Cuomo predicted the state would run out of ventilators in six days “at the current burn rate.” But on April 6, Cuomo noted, “We’re ok, and we have some in reserve.”

Now New York appears to have passed the apex. Deaths, a lagging indicator, crested at 799 on April 9 and hit 606 on April 16, the lowest figure since April 6. Hospitalizations are also declining, and on April 16 also hit their lowest level since April 6. Cuomo today has so many ventilators he is giving them away:

https://spectator.us/stanford-study-suggests-coronavirus-more-widespread-realized/

Another day, and yet more evidence has appeared that could indicate the number of people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, might be vastly higher than official figures suggest. This time a Californian study suggests the figure in one county could be more than 50 times the number who knew they had had the virus.

A team from Stanford University and other colleges recruited volunteers in Santa Clara County via Facebook adverts and produced a sample of 3,000 representatives of the county as a whole. They were then invited for blood tests to detect the presence of antibodies to the virus. The result was positive in 1.5 percent of cases. Adjusting for age, gender and ethnicity the results suggest that 2.8 percent of people in the county had already had the virus. That might not seem many, but at the time of the study — on April 4 and 5 — only 1,094 people in the county were recorded as having the virus. The study suggests the real figure is between 48,000 and 81,000.

Like many studies which have been pre-published in order to aid understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic, the paper produced by the Stanford-led team has not yet been peer-reviewed. Moreover, it took place in a part of the United States where very few people have so far tested positive with the virus. It would be interesting to see the experiment repeated in New York City, where recorded infections are far higher.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-update-encouraging-results-for-treatment/

Yesterday, STAT News reported positive results for the antiviral medicine remdesivir. A clinical trial at the University of Chicago treated 125 patients with the drug, developed by pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences.  Of the 113 patients in severe condition, most were discharged, and only two died.

While the complete results of the trial have yet to be released, and the drug will still have to go through further studies, these results are an encouraging sign as policymakers plan to reopen the economy. Stocks rallied on the news.

The medical data from the U.S. has been mixed. While the number of new cases increased yesterday, the number of new deaths fell.

There is variation across states. In New York, daily deaths have been falling of late, whereas deaths in the rest of the country have increased. This heterogeneity accentuates the difficulty of coordinating a federal pandemic policy. The White House has published guidelines for states to reopen, including a sustained reduction in cases and robust testing and contact tracing. The reopening of the economy will be staggered as states assess their capacity to prevent further waves of infection.

While almost all the hardest-hit states have seen case growth fall to around 5 percent a day, the number is considerably higher in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Louisiana and Florida, which both appeared slated for massive outbreaks, seem to have avoided the worst.

However, testing has plateaued, which makes it difficult to gauge the actual number of cases. Until we have widespread testing, including serology tests for immunity, we won’t know how vulnerable the population is to further waves of infection.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/16/we-need-a-manhattan-project-to-create-a-coronavirus-vaccine/

It’s a sign of institutional failure and a lack of cultural vitality that we resort to the most draconian, most primitive response to a virus. And instead of science, we get scientism—the ritualistic display of competence rather than truth. We can and must do better.

There are only two ways human action can get the SARS-CoV-2 virus permanently behind us and return to normal life: we either develop a knock-out therapy that kills the virus dead in people who have contracted it, like powerful antibiotics do with bacterial infections, or we need to develop herd immunity. Without one of those, we are left hoping that the virus simply burns itself out and disappears. That would be foolish. But a knockout drug—a cure—is highly unlikely. There is no such drug for the seasonal flu or for the rhinoviruses that cause the common cold. So while effective therapies should be a part of the strategy to combat the ill effects of this virus, and sensible precautions like masks can prevent its spread, the only way to permanently defeat it is through herd immunity.

Doctors and public health officials all know this. So do politicians. Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) said during a press conference describing his plan for reopening California: “Normal it will not be. At least until we have herd immunity and a vaccine.”

Most people think, having “flattened the curve” and avoided the dire predictions of millions dead made just weeks ago, that we’ve defeated the virus. We haven’t. What we did was slow the infection rate and that’s good; but the virus is still circulating and countries with much better testing and tracing systems like South Korea and Singapore have experienced further outbreaks after reopening which, in turn, have led to more lockdowns. We want to avoid both of those things. Escaping that unhappy fate means getting to herd immunity quickly.