RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/opinion/coronavirus-lockdown.html

In 1976, the artist Saul Steinberg drew a cover for The New Yorker — “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” — that became an instant classic. You know the one: Manhattan heavily in the foreground, the Hudson River, a brownish strip called “Jersey,” the rest of the America vaguely in the distance.

It could almost be a map of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States.

Even now, it is stunning to contemplate the extent to which the country’s Covid-19 crisis is a New York crisis — by which I mean the city itself along with its wider metropolitan area.

As of Friday, there have been more Covid-19 fatalities on Long Island’s Nassau County (population 1.4 million) than in all of California (population 40 million). There have been more fatalities in Westchester County (989) than in Texas (611). The number of Covid deaths per 100,000 residents in New York City (132) is more than 16 times what it is in America’s next largest city, Los Angeles (8). If New York City proper were a state, it would have suffered more fatalities than 41 other states combined.

It isn’t hard to guess why. New York has, by far, the highest population density in the U.S. among cities of 100,000 or more. Commuters crowd trains, office workers crowd elevators, diners crowd restaurants. No other American city has the same kind of jammed pedestrian life as New York — Times Square alone gets 40 million visitors a year — or as many residents packed into high-rises. The city even has a neighborhood called Corona, which, it turns out, has among the highest rates of coronavirus infections.

Consider a thought experiment in which metropolitan New York weren’t just its own state, but its own country. What would the crisis for what remained of America look like, then? In this slightly smaller nation of a little more than 300 million people, the death toll would amount to about 7.5 per 100,000, slightly above Germany’s levels.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/5/the-scab-the-wound-beneath

EXCERPTS:

An overriding theme of the historian Thucydides’ monumental history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) is the fragility of civilization. In extremis, when both the elites and masses lose their thin veneer of culture, society can turn feral quickly. During a horrific war, plague, or revolution, even a wealthy and sophisticated civilization such as that of the classical Greek city-states regresses in a second to its innate state. And what follows from these natural and man-made disasters is not pretty. Still, these calamities can be tragically instructional. Hypocrisies arise. Pretexts vanish. Fundamental but forgotten truths, easily masked in times of calm, reemerge. From Thucydides’ warnings, we can glean that even suburban elites in Range Rovers can in a day be reduced to tugging over toilet paper rolls at Whole Foods.

Of course, in historical terms, covid-19may prove a rookie virus in comparison to the still mysterious infection—typhus, smallpox, or typhoid?—that wiped out one quarter of the Athenian population along with its iconic sexagenarian leader Pericles. He was the architect of the very wartime strategy of forced withdrawal inside the walls of Athens that birthed the plague in the first place and took his life.

Thucydides’ accounts of the plague, the savage factionalism at Corcyra, the mass executions at Mytilene and Melos, and the disaster at Syracuse all remind us that what is considered normal in calm can be rendered absurd instantly in the cauldron of panic and death. Last month I saw what seemed to be a stylishly dressed woman in a Lexus buying toilet paper from her car window in the parking lot of a local Walmart from someone who appeared homeless, a social interaction rare in healthier times.

The pernicious coronavirus tore off an American scab and revealed suppurating wounds beneath. Take the central actor of this plague, China. For much of the twenty-first century, the American establishment’s foreign policy toward China, to the degree it was even formalized, was ethically and logically bankrupt. Yet the status quo remained unquestioned, given it rested on a rare alignment of both progressive and commercial self-interests.

Of course, Americans in general have had a long romance with China. They were never colonialists in China, at least in the manner of the Europeans. Over fifteen million Chinese, our erstwhile allies, were killed in World War II, many brutally slaughtered by our enemies, the Japanese.

More recently, Mao Zedong, arguably the most lethal mass murderer of the twentieth century—perhaps a greater killer than Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot combined—held an attraction for the New Left of the 1960s. His cherubic smile, worker’s cap, peasant dress, cool aphorisms, and hatred of running-dog capitalists once captivated student protestors. Even Barack Obama’s acting White House communications director, Anita Dunn, in 2009 still swooned that Mao was one of her two favorite political “philosophers”:

And then the third lesson and tip actually come from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa—not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you’re going to make choices. You’re going to challenge.

https://www.city-journal.org/snapshots-from-shadow-of-covid-19

The pandemically correct line out of Trader Joe’s—everyone in the masked queue standing six feet apart—stretches down Spring Street from the food-market entrance and turns the corner on Sixth Avenue. I brake to a stop and tell Diane that the store is too crowded. We should just go home.

“We need a few things,” she says, and gets out.

I take my pick of a dozen parking spaces. The weather’s nice, but I do not put the window down, distancing myself from the air of my own hometown. Judging by that line, Diane will need at least an hour to buy essentials, and here I am sheltering in place in the Honda. I glance at my reflection in the rearview mirror. Have I turned into the legendary mafia guy, who, fearful of his friends, sends his wife out to start his car?

This is my first time outside in four days, and I’m surprised to find myself struggling against a crushing sense of bereavement that somehow alternates between anxiety and rage. Nearby, a woman sits on a bench, her mask lowered, her face raised to the antiseptic sun. A well-dressed but unmasked young man walks by and speaks to her, pointing toward the strange spectacle of a traffic-free avenue. Apparently, he’s standing too close, because the woman raises her mask and walks away. The young man wanders back and forth aimlessly, either stoned or in shock, or both. I recognize the look. I just saw it in the mirror.

Deep breaths. Coronavirus is not the Black Death. It’s not the epidemic that took down Marcus Aurelius or the cruel plague that devastated seventeenth-century London. It may turn out to be less dangerous than the Asian flu pandemic of 1957, which killed 116,000 Americans. That remains to be seen. The disease’s core public symptom is panic.