RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”