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A Week of Coronavirus Pain and Progress Infections are rising, but markets are calmer and medical aid is surging.

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

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.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

No Green New Deal in stimulus: Craig Rucker

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://www.cfact.org/about/

Despite efforts by radical greens to ram the bill full of climate “pork,” it looks like their expensive wish list didn’t make the cut.

This is good news, thanks largely to the President and many Senators who called out their crafty attempts to sneak in a radical wish list that has nothing to do with the virus into the bill.

Of course they have to pass it for us to see everything that’s in it… just as the founders intended.

“[The Democrats said] ‘We want green energy, let’s stop drilling oil’ — they had things in there that were terrible…Windmills all over the place and all sorts of credits for windmills — they kill the birds and ruin the real estate. A lot of problems,” President Trump explained during a town hall style broadcast.

Just because America has dodged one Green New Deal bullet, don’t think the climate radicals won’t be back.

MEDIA Comments turned off

New York Times Op-Ed Blames Christians, Not China, For Spread Of Wuhan Coronavirus By Tristan Justice

Posted By on March 27th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/27/new-york-times-op-ed-blames-christians-not-china-for-spread-of-wuhan-coronavirus/

A New York Times op-ed published Friday is casting blame on the evangelical movement for the Wuhan coronavirus plaguing the nation.

The piece, titled, “The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved By Evangelicals,” written by Katherine Stewart is filled with undue condescension and mockery of Christians that is becoming the norm among our mainstream media elites.

The crux of Stewart’s piece is that the Republican Party has become embedded with a spiritual movement whose beliefs fly contradictory to science, blaming the idiocy and extreme actions of a few who defied public health orders against large gatherings to stigmatize half the country.

Stewart’s piece however, only further exposes a deep disdain for the Christian faith through the employment of hypocritical arguments in an attempt to smear the religious right.

“Religious nationalism has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good,” Stewart wrote. “When you’re engaged in a struggle between the ‘party of life’ and ‘party of death,’ as some religious nationalists now frame our political divisions, you don’t need to worry about crafting careful policy based on expert opinion or analysis.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

A NEW LOW FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES HATE MEDIA

Posted By on March 27th, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/coronavirus-trump-evangelicals.html

The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals

Trump’s response to the pandemic has been haunted by the science denialism of his ultraconservative religious allies.

By

Katherine Stewart

Ms. Stewart is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

More Thoughts on Computing the COVID-19 Fatality Rate By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on March 27th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-fatality-rate-computing-difficult/#slide-1

It’s based on decisions about whom to include or exclude, which are often conjecture.

On the Corner last week, I groused a bit about the difficulty of tracking the coronavirus fatality rate. It appeared to be hovering at a bit over 1 percent in the United States. But those appearances can be deceiving.

The elusiveness, I noted, was evident from an observation by Anthony Fauci, the esteemed immunologist of the National Institutes of Health and President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine in late February, Dr. Fauci hypothesized that the fatality rate may be “considerably less than 1%” because many people who are infected experience either no symptoms or very mild symptoms and therefore do not report. The fatality-rate statistics are skewed toward the people who do report.

The question naturally arises: How much less than 1 percent could the fatality rate be?

More specifically, could the fatality rate for the coronavirus disease that sprang from China late last year (as our Jim Geraghty has comprehensively documented) approach a figure as low as the fatality rate for influenza? The question is important. President Trump frequently touts a comparison of the new coronavirus to flu. Americans longing to return to a semblance of normalcy — understandably so, given the gargantuan ruin the lockdown is causing — complain that closing the country due to coronavirus is overkill, since we don’t do it for flu.

Regrettably, I reckon the answer must be that even if the coronavirus dipped perceptibly below 1 percent, it would still be much worse than flu. Why? Because none less than Dr. Fauci (among others) says so. Though he recently wrote that the rate could be “considerably less than 1%,” he has also recently testified, in a House hearing, that the novel virus from China has a “mortality rate of ten times” that of seasonal flu. He put the latter at 0.1 percent, which would rate the new coronavirus at 1 percent.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Cuomo Deserves No Plaudits for His Handling of Crisis The facts prove that Cuomo put his state, and yes, the country as a whole, in danger with his last-minute disaster planning and fealty to open borders. That should spark outrage, not admiration. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on March 27th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/26/cuomo-deserves-no-plaudits-for-his-handling-of-crisis/

It was a stunning confession.

During a press briefing on Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo admitted that closing schools and colleges in his state was a spur-of-the-moment decision based on a health crisis for which he was not prepared. “What we said at a moment of crisis is ‘isolate everyone,’” Cuomo told reporters while seated in front of boxes of medical supplies. “Close the schools, close the colleges, send everyone home, isolate everyone in their home. [It] wasn’t even smart, frankly, to isolate younger people with older people.”

Cuomo conceded that the reason he ordered public schools and colleges shut down was that he “didn’t have the knowledge [and] we needed to act.” The governor’s comments were made on March 24, more than two months after the first reported case of coronavirus was detected in Washington state.

New York, particularly the city, is the nation’s current hotbed of coronavirus activity. According to one tracking site, nearly 31,000 New Yorkers have tested positive for COVID-19, resulting in 3,800 hospitalizations and 285 deaths. On Wednesday, three army hospitals were deployed to New York and Washington to provide medical support and additional beds if needed.

The third-term Democratic governor, unsurprisingly, is earning media praise for his handling of the crisis.

“Andrew Cuomo shows how to lead during the coronavirus crisis,” swooned the Washington Post’s editorial board this week. Cuomo, according to his hometown newspaper, is the “politician of the moment” whose daily press briefings are must-watch events praised both by Democrats and Republicans like former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Even Billy Joel is impressed with the tough-talking political progeny. A recent poll places Cuomo towards the top on the list of officials Americans most trust to handle the Wuhan virus debacle.

Cuomo, his new admirers insist, is the antidote to President Trump—a leader who rose to the challenge, spoke the truth, and made the tough choices while the White House ducked and dithered.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Fauci’s Folly After 50 years in Washington, D.C., the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has become an overly cautious bureaucrat. By Ruth Papazian

Posted By on March 27th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/26/faucis-folly/

EXCERPT

“During the daily briefings of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, repeatedly referred to reports from frontline clinicians that the combination of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin can completely clear coronavirus from the body within six days as “anecdotal” evidence.

The coronavirus pandemic is a medical story, not a political story. Yet, there are no medical journalists in the White House Briefing Room. To a medical journalist, “anecdotal” evidence is what doctors in the field are reporting. To a political journalist, “anecdotal” evidence is unsubstantiated hearsay.

Fauci knew—or should have known—that political journalists would report his characterization of clinical reports on the safety and efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (HCQ+AZ) not as something “you hear out there” but as the president overhyping (or “lying” about) the benefits of the treatment.

Over and over again, Fauci also gave the false impression that the experimental treatment regimen would not, or could not, be given to severely ill patients before data from large-scale, randomized double-blind clinical trials becomes available: “My job as a scientist is . . . to prove without a doubt that a drug is not only safe, but it actually works.”

All well and good, but a clinician’s job is to save lives. And in the midst of a burgeoning global pandemic when speed is of the essence, field experience with two drugs whose safety profiles are well understood suffices to treat patients who are likely to die. For this reason, the FDA-approved chloroquine and remdesivir, an Ebola treatment, for “compassionate use.” Both drugs can be administered immediately to patients who have serious or life-threatening cases of coronavirus. “

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Logic, the first casualty-Aynsley Kellow

Posted By on March 27th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/opinion-post/logic-the-first-casualty/

It is a fundamental principle of risk management that the benefits of any decision should be weighed against the costs. What is less often appreciated is that risk is an interactive phenomenon. Perceptions of risk often lead to people adjusting their behaviour in ways that reduce (or increase) the chances of a hazard occurring. Risk does not equal a hazard plus some fixed probability of it occurring.

University College London Professor Emeritus John Adams captured this with his idea of a ‘risk thermostat’, whereby we balance our propensity to take risks, risk perceptions and costs and benefits. Aaron Wildavsky perhaps captured this most parsimoniously in his aphorism that ‘the secret of safety lies in danger.’

But overestimating risk can lead to costly responses. In one famous example the 1976 Swine Flu epidemic in the US resulted in the rushed development of a vaccine that was far worse than the disease, causing many cases of Gullain-Barré Syndrome, a rather nasty immune system disorder. This was described in detail by Robert Formaini in his excellent book The Myth of Scientific Public Policy. Unfortunately, all too often, governments do not understand that public policy cannot be decided solely by scientific experts, because human conduct frequently undermines the intentions of policy-makers by exhibiting behaviour scientists did not anticipate.

The appropriate medical field for responding to pandemics is epidemiology, not immunology. As Nobel Prize winning immunologist Peter Doherty put it in an interview on Sky News on March 26, he’s a ‘lab guy’, not an epidemiologist. Good epidemiology should, of course, include a good measure of social science to cover this eventuality, but I once attended a conference on climate change where a prominent epidemiologist disavowed any knowledge of human behaviour, stating ‘I am not a social scientist.’ He went on to argue that the health of future Aboriginal Australians would be seriously harmed by climate change — ignoring the rather obvious point that the impacts of future climates projected by models rested on emissions scenarios that assumed massive increases in wealth; apparently none of this would find its way to Aboriginal communities, which would continue to wallow in squalor.

Which brings us to the current pandemic with the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19. The government policy response has seen some sensible measures adopted, especially in shutting down borders and requiring a degree of ‘social distancing’ in an effort to flatten the curve of infections sufficiently to allow the health system to cope. But has the National Cabinet gone too far?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

If COVID-19 Models Are Unreliable, What Does This Mean For Climate Models? by Frank Bullitt

Posted By on March 27th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/27/if-the-covid-19-models-are-wrong-what-does-this-mean-for-climate-models/

It wasn’t long ago, just in recent days, in fact, that we were being told the coronavirus was going to kill more than 2 million Americans. But some researchers are indicating the forecasts of doom were driven by faulty models.

What then, are we supposed to make of the models that have been fueling the global warming hysteria?

The forecast used to predict 2.2 million U.S. deaths and 510,00 deaths in Great Britain was produced by Imperial College in London. It is “the epidemiological modeling which has informed policymaking in the United Kingdom and other countries in recent weeks.”

OK, but is the information reliable? Epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta is doubtful.

“I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” he said in the Financial Times.

Gupta’s team of researchers at Oxford believe both the hospitalization and mortality rates are much lower than the worst estimates, and immunity is more widespread than previously thought.

The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed from professors of medicine at Stanford who said “projections of the death toll” reaching 2 million to 4 millon “could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.” They believe “epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for” a number of important factors.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Political Media Are Failing America By David Harsanyi

Posted By on March 27th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-crisis-political-media-failing-america/

Their ineptitude, bias, childishness, and outright stupidity have become a genuine danger to the health of the republic.

Here are some of the public figures and institutions that Americans hold in higher esteem than the media according to Gallup:

Hospitals,Their child’s school and daycare centers,State governments,Their employer, CDC and NIH, Mike Pence,Donald Trump ,Congress.

Only one institution that Gallup asked about, the media, had negative approval rating — sitting 19 points behind its archenemy Donald Trump. And there are likely many other people and places that the public has more trust in than journalists.

This reality is a disaster for a liberal democracy, and much of it is brought on by the press’s own blinkered, sanctimonious, and transparently partisan temperament. On this topic, I could provide a book-length list of grievances. Every day brings an exasperating number of misleading and bad-faith takes by political journalists and “fact-checkers.”

But for now, I’ll just note that it’s not merely a problem of traditional bias among reporters and cable news networks, which preach exclusively to their choirs (no one is innocent on that count.) I’ve long read major newspapers, whose nonpolitical product is often amazing, through a filter. The institutional bias at the Washington Post and the New York Times certainly isn’t new. But there used to be a corresponding level of professional gravitas that engendered reader trust.