RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/28/with-states-re-opening-where-do-we-go-from-here/

With many states starting to reopen significant portions of civil society that were closed, it’s time to assess where we are and what should come next. Much of the commentary for the past month or so has revolved around widely varying assessments of the “real risk” from COVID-19. Opinions vary widely, to say the least.

Much of the argument has taken place in a rapidly evolving context which started with very little definitive knowledge. Unfortunately, many policymakers and much of the media cited epidemiological models created very early in the crisis and, declaring them authoritative, used them as the basis to justify mass shutdowns to “flatten the curve.”

When the dire predictions did not come to pass—a good thing—combatants on both sides dug into their positions. Those who had cited the studies generally have taken the position that the shutdowns worked and saved many lives. Those who oppose the shutdowns point to the fact that the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths are much lower than the models predicted they would be with shutdowns in place, let alone without any shutdowns at all.

The good news is that with so much attention focused on this one problem, we are learning about this virus more quickly than humanity has ever learned about any disease ever before. What can be done to end the threat of this virus and create a model for addressing the next one? Because, you can rest assured, there will be a next one. Novel coronaviruses are going to be with us for a while. How did we get here and what should come next? Are shutdowns really going to be the new normal?

https://spectator.us/paranoid-style-covid-19-central-park-safetyism/

To grasp the urgency of lifting the ubiquitous economic shutdowns, visit New York City’s Central Park, ideally in the morning. At 5:45 am, it is occupied by maybe 100 runners and cyclists, spread over 843 acres. A large portion of these early-bird exercisers wear masks. Are they trying to protect anyone they might encounter from their own unsuspected coronavirus infection? Perhaps. But if you yourself run towards an oncoming runner on a vector that will keep you at least three yards away when you pass each other, he is likely to lunge sideways in terror if your face is not covered. The masked cyclists, who speed around the park’s inner road, apparently think that there are enough virus particles suspended in the billions of square feet of fresh air circulating across the park to enter their mucous membranes and to sicken them.

These are delusional beliefs, yet they demonstrate the degree of paranoia that has infected the population. Every day the lockdown continues, its implicit message that we are all going to die if we engage in normal life is reinforced. Polls show an increasing number of Americans opting to continue the economic quarantine indefinitely lest they be ‘unsafe’. The longer that belief is reinforced, the less likely it will be that consumers will patronize reopened restaurants or board airplanes in sufficient numbers to bring the economy back to life.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/the_lefts_listen_to_the_science_mantra_is_growing_old_trump_listened_and_thats_the_problem.html

One of the left’s standard attacks on the President is that he doesn’t listen to the science!  Sadly, he did listen to the so-called experts who predicted wildly hyperbolic death and destruction and he agreed to the economic shutdown.  

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” – Niels Bohr  

The President surely realizes by now that he should have operated on his gut instincts which rarely fail him.  Dr. Fauci, for example, sees no patients.  He looks at computer models, all of which were wrong.  Dr. Birx probably has more hands-on experience, but she too recommended closing up the nation.  They were wrong.  

Governor Cuomo was wrong when he whined that he needed 40,000 ventilators and thousands more hospital beds. Trump provided everything he demanded, but they were not needed.  Cuomo has no common sense and sent Covid-positive patients into nursing homes rather than the Navy hospital ship or either of the two other Army-engineered field hospitals.  This one order caused the deaths of fragile elderly people.  Cuomo’s handling of the crisis in his city has been disastrous on every front.  His state was the least prepared for such an event after bragging that New York was ready.  It was not.

https://quadrant.org.au/

One of the things this infernal Wuhan virus has taught us is that many of our fellow citizens will dance to any tune governments play. I find it entirely credible that instructions to cower in the bathtub would be greeted with, ‘Oh well you know, the government must be right’. Sheep, looking for all the world like people, are seemingly in great abundance.

The are no doubt other things we are learning but I want to end with a confirmation rather than with an instance of new learning. As we know from the economic desolation they cause when in charge; from their national self-loathing; from their agenda to rob us of pride in our past; from their determination to tear down institutions (like traditional marriage) which have served us so well; from their overt hostility towards Christianity; from their intrigue to divide us by race and by sex, leftists are a plague on the world, more virulent than any virus. And, true to form, is their doleful advocacy in the current crisis.

Want more stringent lockdowns to keep more people out of work and in despair? Look left. Want ever-longer lockdowns to maximise long-lasting damage to people’s livelihoods, mental health and wellbeing? Look left. Want the loss of yet more individual liberties and inalienable rights? Look left.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-some-hospitals-overwhelmed-many-underutilized/

We feared hospitals would be overwhelmed. Instead, in many states, they’re emptying out and laying off doctors and nurses.

We had to destroy the hospitals to save them.

You could be forgiven for thinking that’s the upshot of the coronavirus lockdowns that have suspended elective surgeries and generally discouraged people from going to hospitals.

Many hospitals are getting pushed near, or over, the financial edge. At a time when we feared that hospitals would get overwhelmed by a surge of patients, they have instead been emptied out. At a time when we thought medical personnel would be at a premium, they are instead being idled all over the country.

We are experiencing an epidemic that bizarrely — and in part because of the choices of policymakers — has created a surfeit of hospital beds and an excess of doctors and nurses.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Protests have been around for centuries. The Protestant Reformation in northern Europe in the early 16thCentury was a protest against the universality of the Catholic Church. Americans protested England, beginning with the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and ending at Yorktown in 1781; the French stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. The Russian Revolution of 1917 toppled the Tsars. Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution in China in 1949 forever changed that country, killing an estimated 20 to 40 million people. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 followed protests. In our country, in the past half century, we have seen marches for civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights. We have had anti-war protests. More recently we had the Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Woman’s March and March for Life. How productive they have been is a matter of debate. Writing last year in “Perspective Magazine,” Chaya Benyamin wrote: “Protest rhetoric is more about preaching to the choir than it is about changing hearts and minds.” A Harvard study of the Tea Party movement, three years ago, had similar nebulous conclusions. But, as an observer, it seems that all these protests resulted in change, some revolutionary.

A reader in Louisiana, a retired lawyer, e-mailed a week ago: “President Trump’s having essentially accepted the epidemiologists’ over-reaction to an admittedly dangerous virus will be historically judged to be by far his greatest first-person policy error.” I tend to agree. Never before, in the history of this Country, was a decision made to intentionally shut down the nation’s economy. In an essay titled “Innovation versus the Coronavirus,” Bill Gates referred to the current pandemic as “the first modern pandemic.” But is it? The 1957-1958 H2N2 virus was called a pandemic, as were the 1968 H3N2 virus and the 2009 H1N1 pdm09 virus.  Those three pandemics killed 2.25 million people worldwide, including 230,000 in the U.S.

The President was put in an untenable position. In early January, when China knew of how contagious and deadly the virus could be, scientists and medical experts around the world, including the WHO, CDC, FDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIAID downplayed its malignancy, as did politicians from both Parties. It wasn’t until February that models, many using erroneous data inputs, began showing horrific projections. So personal and political fears, as well as the dread of litigation, obviated a calculated, rational response. Politicians did U-turns, with the media, which had been largely silent in January, jumping aboard. Lockdowns were imposed. Executive Orders were issued and, if not obeyed, offenders could be arrested. In truth, the virus was worse than Pollyanna’s first claimed, but not as bad as Cassandra’s later suggested.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/americas-china-dependency-syndrome-lloyd-billingsley/

““We cannot outsource our independence,” the president said last Monday. “We cannot be reliant on foreign nations. I’ve been saying this for a long time. If we’ve learned one thing it’s let’s do it here, let’s build it here, let’s make it here.”

“Made in China” has been a familiar label on products for years but it wasn’t until March of 2020 that Americans learned of the perils that might entail. China threatened to impose export controls on pharmaceuticals that would plunge America into “the mighty sea of coronavirus.”

Sen. Marco Rubio told reporters the United States was “dangerously reliant” on China for critical goods, including parts for technologies needed to fight COVID-19. Since 2004, Chinese pharmaceutical companies have been supplying 80-90 percent of U.S. antibiotics. Americans might wonder how they landed in such a dependent position, and that invites a comparison with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The world’s first socialist state, established in the world’s largest nation, never produced a single product the West wanted or needed. For all its vast natural resources, the USSR was an economic basket case, and by the mid-1980s in serious trouble.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15936/patriotic-americans-against-tyranny

Perhaps the last time any of us saw nearly 80% of Americans agree on any issue was our resolute response to the 9/11 attacks by terrorists or our nation’s spirit following Pearl Harbor.

Today’s findings send a strong and unmistakable message to all politicians, pundits, and policy makers that there is no room for politics in a COVID-19 era….

[P]utting aside our differences and concentrating on policies that will protect our nation today and far into the future is our shared path forward.

America has no patience for any politicians who seek to use the COVID-19 crisis to advance their own partisan agenda.

That is the bottom line from a recently completed national survey by McLaughlin & Associates that reveals how this pandemic has united our nation in a manner not seen since we came together as one to retaliate against aggressor nations that would harm our democracy.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/the_standard_for_reopening_states_is_rigged_.html

The new White House standard for reopening the economy in various states is rigged to severely prolong the economic strangulation under the current lockdowns. The criterion has been defined as a 14-day period of declining volume in new cases or a 14-day period of declining rates of positivity of those tested.

Testing is ramping up in every state, which if the epidemiologists are right, will produce a lower percentage rate of positivity on the tests since the curve has been bent.  But there is a new factor which throws all of these calculations off so far off that the 14-day standard should be abandoned.

That factor is the likelihood that there are an enormous number of asymptomatic cases out there that have never been counted (nor tested so far). Early estimates based on sampling in Iceland suggested maybe half of all those infected were asymptomatic. Dr. Fauci estimated 25% of cases might be asymptomatic. Now we have much higher estimates. The Stanford sampling study in Santa Clara County testing for antibodies, a similar study in Los Angeles County, a study in a town in Germany, a study just done in New York State, and testing in an Ohio prison and a Boston homeless shelter, suggest the number of asymptomatic cases are in fact  many multiples of the number of cases already tested positive so far.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1253711249084383232.html?refreshed=yes

Wrong both ways, for several reasons.

1/ The flu case fatality rate is calculated off a huge base – 60 million Americans in 2017/18 – and flu deaths may be undercounted for the same reason coronavirus deaths are supposedly undercounted – they mainly occur in old, sick people.

2/ We have a VACCINE for the flu. It is not perfect, but it can sharply reduce infections in some years, and it is generally widely distributed, especially to the people most at risk. That suppresses both the CFR and IFR for the flu.

3/ The 21% NYC antibody figure is likely low, both because it doesn’t foot with plausible figures from other places (generally lower, but in places where deaths have been far lower), and because it takes time for people to develop antibodies, so the figure usually rises anyway.

4/ NYC and NYS seem to have made counterproductive decisions, including heavy ventilator use and sending elderly COVID patients to nursing homes (!). Also, some NYC hospitals faced serious strain in late March (unlike almost anywhere else in the US). Hospital strain is dangerous.

5/ Add all this up, and the COVID death rate will likely settle into the 0.25%-0.4% range (1 in 250 people infected to 1 in 400). Far from 20 times higher than flu. Meanwhile, the median age of death is 78-80. And unlike the flu, #SARSCoV2 is basically not dangerous to children.

6/ As long as supposedly serious people are saying things like coronavirus is 20+ times as deadly as the flu, we’re going to have a hard time getting out of this mess.
Alex Berenson@AlexBerenson
 As long as supposedly serious people are saying things like coronavirus is 20+ times as deadly as the flu, we’re going to have a hard time getting out of this mess.