RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-covid-models-get-wrong-11592435169?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Here we go again. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has issued a new forecast that Covid-19 fatalities would spike over the summer in states that have moved faster to reopen. Cue the media drumbeat for another lockdown. Maybe someone should first explain why the models were wrong about so much the last time.

Take New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo locked down the state in mid-March based on dire warnings. His public health experts projected the state would need as many as 140,000 hospital beds and 40,000 intensive care units—two to three times more regular hospital beds and 10 times more ICU beds than were available. The UW model forecast that 49,000 regular beds and 8,000 ICU beds would be needed at the peak.

New York was hit hard, but Covid-19 hospital bed utilization in New York peaked at 18,825 and 5,225 for ICUs in mid-April. Even in New York City, hospital utilization never exceeded 85% of capacity and 89% for ICUs. Government-run hospitals in low-income neighborhoods with the most cases were unprepared, but they were ill-managed before the pandemic.

New York was the country’s frontline in the coronavirus attack, and caution was needed in the early days because so little was known about the virus. The original UW model, which was based on the experiences in Italy and Wuhan, assumed that strict lockdowns would curb infections, reduce hospitalizations and lower deaths faster than they actually did in the Northeast.

Asked last month about when fatalities and hospitalizations would meet state thresholds for reopening, Mr. Cuomo responded: “All the early national experts, ‘Here’s my projection model.’ . . . They were all wrong. They were all wrong. . . . There are a lot of variables. I understand that. We didn’t know what the social distancing would actually amount to. I get it, but we were all wrong.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/17/corporate-americas-strategy-of-mob-appeasement-will-destroy-it-just-as-it-always-has/

Twenty-six years ago, Morgan Stanley hired Marilyn Booker as their first diversity director, charged with overseeing corporate efforts from the firm’s New York City headquarters, a 685-foot, glass, Times Square skyscraper. Ten years ago, Booker left that post to work in their financial wealth management division. Seven months ago, Booker was fired.

But that was before video aired of George Floyd’s death, and spreading, national protests escalated into riots, violence, church burning, monument defacing, and occupations. How quickly things change. Now Booker is leading a group of black women in suing the company that employed her for a quarter-century, charging that the firm systematically discriminates against black employees.

The suit comes after a notably active week for the investment bank’s activism. Since Black Lives Matter blasted back into our Alzheimer’s-addled news cycle, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, James Gorman, committed $25 million to a new internal “diversity” effort, sent $5 million to the NAACP, promoted two black women, and sent an email about it all to staff. For his efforts, he was personally named in Booker’s lawsuit.

But Morgan Stanley is not uniquely stupid for empowering an activist whose sole job was to call them racists. For decades, corporate America has launched similar efforts in the vain hope that money, press releases, and choice divestments could virtue-signal them out of the mob’s cross-hairs and even hurt their competitors. None of it saves them. On the contrary, moves to embrace the mob have placed corporations more clearly in their sights than they were before.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/coronavirus-arizona-reopening-media-distort-numbers/

Yes, they’re up, but the media is rushing to deem the state’s reopening a catastrophe.

 A rizona is the latest focus of the reopening debate, with national headlines about the state heading for a COVID disaster.

The state’s positivity rate — the percentage of tests that are positive — and hospitalizations are up, key metrics that are more meaningful than simply having more confirmed cases (which can be simply a function of more testing).

There’s no doubt that there’s increased community spread in Arizona, a trend that bears watching. But the rush to push the state into shutting down and deem it a cautionary tale of the perils of reopening is simplistic at best and skips over details crucial to understanding Arizona’s true situation.

“We’ve been pretty clear to everyone that we don’t think Arizona’s immune to COVID-19,” says an Arizona official. “We know that we will see cases just like we had elsewhere in the country.”

Arizona hasn’t been particularly hard hit by COVID. It sits between Indiana and Tennessee in total cases, at about 39,000.

On a per capita basis, it’s roughly in the same place as neighboring states. It has 538 confirmed cases per 100,000, while Colorado has 511, New Mexico has 474, and Utah 470. Colorado and New Mexico have slightly more deaths per 100,000.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/17/the_political_logic_of_trumps_

n the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday, President Donald Trump laid out an executive order addressing police misconduct and the ensuing national protests. Until now, his main response has been to voice strong support for “law and order” while condemning the excessive use of force, specifically in the case of George Floyd and generally across the country. His main theme has been: stop the mob rule, restore order, and get rid of a few bad apples. The executive order goes further, adding real substance to those vague pronouncements.

What does the executive order do?

The president’s executive order establishes a national credentialing process for police, making it harder for bad cops to transfer quietly to another city or county. It bans chokeholds — the kind that killed Mr. Floyd — except when the officer’s life is in danger. It provides training to de-escalate conflicts and funds social workers to assist police with endemic problems, such as homelessness, mental illness, alcoholism, and drug abuse. It will pay for non-lethal equipment, an indirect recognition that our policing relies too heavily on military equipment bought cheaply after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Police sometimes need that firepower and protection, but over-reliance puts officers in the wrong frame of mind and endangers suspects’ lives. De-escalate, if possible, and leave punishment up to the courts. The executive order moves in that direction, without saying so directly.

How does this executive order play out politically?

First, it allows Trump to tell swing voters, “See, I’m not a hardline law-and-order president. I want to restore order, of course, but I want enforcement to be fair and applied in a race-neutral way. Policing is a difficult and dangerous job, but a necessary one. Whenever possible, it should be done with the least violence possible.” Who could object to that message? It is especially important for the president to deliver it after the harsh police confrontation around Lafayette Park last week and Trump’s support for it.