RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-california-

We’re fighting an epidemic of untruths pushed by unscrupulous reporters.

California is touchy, and yet still remains confused, about incomplete data showing that the 40-million-person state, as of Sunday, April 12, reportedly had 23,777 cases of residents who have tested posted for the COVID-19 illness. The number of infected by the 12th includes 674 deaths, resulting in a fatality rate of about 17 deaths per million of population. That is among the lowest rates of the larger American states (Texas has 10 deaths per million), and lower than almost all major European countries, (about half of Germany’s 36 deaths per million).

No doubt there are lots of questionable data in all such metrics. As a large state California has not been especially impressive in a per capita sense in testing its population (about 200,000 tests so far). Few of course believe that the denominator of cases based on test results represent the real number of those who have been or are infected.

There is the now another old debate over exactly how the U.S. defines death by the virus versus death because of the contributing factors of the virus to existing medical issues. Certainly, the methodology of coronavirus modeling is quite different from that of, say, the flu. The denominator of flu cases is almost always a modeled approximation, not a misleadingly precise number taken from only those who go to their doctors or emergency rooms and test positive for an influenza strain. And the numerator of deaths from the flu may be calibrated somewhat more conservatively than those currently listed as deaths from the coronavirus.

Nonetheless, the state’s population is fairly certain. And for now, the number of deaths by the virus is the least controversial of many of these data, suggesting that deaths per million of population might be a useful comparative number.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-art-of-an-oil-deal-11586819335?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

“So credit to Mr. Trump for using U.S. global influence to mitigate the mayhem. Russia and Saudi Arabia have agreed to take on the bulk of the cuts. After Mexico balked at an order to cut its production by 400,000 barrels a day, President Trump volunteered the U.S. to cover 300,000 barrels of its share.”

President Trump has been chasing a diplomatic victory, and he got one this weekend when he brokered a deal between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia to limit their production that may also limit the bloodbath in the U.S. shale patch.

OPEC and Russia have agreed to curtail their production by 9.7 million barrels a day—about 10% of global output—in May and June amid a steep falloff in demand due to the coronavirus that is expected to exceed 20% of last year’s consumption. After Russia last month refused Riyadh’s calls to cut supply, Saudi Arabia opened up its tap and slashed its crude price.

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/beware-government-overreach-protect-our-health

When two important goals conflict, sensible people try to strike a sensible balance. This sense of proportion and mutual forbearance is central to living peacefully in a liberal society like ours.

It is important to remember these values as we deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The most striking aspect of the American public’s response has been the extensive, purely voluntary compliance with city, state, and local guidelines and orders. That phrase “purely voluntary” is crucial. Some of the guidelines have hardened into legal mandates, but even in those cases people have cooperated willingly because they want to do the right thing, both for themselves and for their community.

What about cases where voluntary compliance breaks down, where people don’t follow the guidelines or even the laws? If personal values and social pressures don’t work, the authorities have to step in. But their first step should be a warning, unless a violations are malicious or pose serious danger. If finger wagging at lessor violations fails, the next step should be a fine or sometimes even jail. But punishment should be a last resort.

Balancing the right to assemble with public safety

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/12/herd-immunity-vs-herd-mentality/

Although we do not yet know every detail of the end of our infatuation with the coronavirus, it’s clear that the historian of this episode will include a chapter called “Mistakes Were Made.”

If I might adapt Keats, “much have I travell’d in the realms online, / And many goofy states and kingdoms seen.” And if my experience wasn’t quite like that of the “watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken” (or even “like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star’d at the Pacific”), still there have been discoveries that produce a little frisson of recognition.

The most recent was the distinction I saw somewhere between herd immunity, on the one hand, and herd mentality, on the other.

We’ve been hearing a lot about “herd immunity” lately. Along with the phrases “social distancing,” “flattening the curve,” and “sheltering in place,” “herd immunity” is one of the chief flecks of jargon adopted by newly minted amateur epidemiologists in this age of (new master word) coronavirus. (And it seems we’re all epidemiologists now, in more or less the same sense that the future King Edward VII was correct when he observed, in 1895, that “we’re all socialists now.”)

“Herd immunity” is a settled concept in epidemiology. It occurs when “a large percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through previous infections or vaccination, thereby providing a measure of protection for individuals who are not immune.”

“Herd mentality,” on the contrary, provides immunity from independent thought. It protects a population from thinking clearly by spreading a spirit of conformity. It increases a people’s docility, thus rendering them more susceptible to the blandishments of usurping authority.

https://humanevents.com/2020/04/09/with-coronavirus-overkill-is-what-works/

As Americans endure the privations necessary to “flatten the curve” of new cases of coronavirus COVID-19, we wish that our leaders could manage even a fraction of the comity and tolerance exhibited every day by ordinary people throughout this country.

Sadly, we see too much of the opposite.

Putting aside the machinations of politicians, there seems to be a widespread need to blame any misstep, or even uncertainty, on somebody or something. The ubiquitousness of social media and the internet drives the conviction that there is a definitive answer for everything, if only you could find the right website or news channel, or follow the right people. And there certainly is no shortage of pundits and pontificators confident about offering predictions based on insufficient or anecdotal data—or, worse yet, making assertions that genuine experts know are false.

America would like to know the exact mechanism by which COVID-19 spreads in order to impose only those measures that are necessary and sufficient.

Unfortunately, although we have many insights, and are gaining more every day, that knowledge is not perfect. We do know that a sledgehammer will drive that nail—in other words, in this situation, overkill is what works, even if it cannot be continued indefinitely.

Currently, scientists have no way to accurately predict which infected patients will develop an often-fatal condition called “cytokine storm,” a severe immune reaction in which the body releases an excess of chemicals called cytokines into the blood too quickly, which compromises oxygenation of the blood in the lungs and can cause multiple organ failure. Surrogate variables like age and certain pre-existing conditions are helpful, but not definitive, predictors.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Most decisions we make involve some measure of risk. Generally, the consideration is fleeting. Do I take the stairs and risk falling, or the elevator and risk it breaking down? At times, the choice is more absolute: Do I take the double-black diamond with moguls, or do I go around on the bunny trail? Sometimes the odds are important: Is my need to cross the street against traffic so great that the attempt should be made despite oncoming traffic? Risk is ubiquitous.

It is embedded in the friends we make, where we go to college, what job we take and in our choice of a marriage partner – a risk my wife and I took fifty-six years ago today. A wise friend used to say that he was never upset with mistakes he had made but was troubled by risks he never took. Risks vary depending on what we do. To a soldier in combat, risks have different consequences than the ones we encounter daily. In his 1916 collection of poems, Mountain Interval, Robert Frost included “The Road Not Taken.” At a fork in the road a traveler pauses, knowing he cannot walk down both paths, so chooses “the one less traveled by…”  The reader never knows whether the choice was a good one or not, only that it “has made all the difference.” As well, progress is impossible without risk. A baserunner cannot steal second without taking his foot off first. Neither can we avoid risk. “Security,” as Helen Keller once wrote, “is mostly a superstition.”

Risk is defined as the interaction with uncertainty, a measure of the probability of danger or loss, against safety or profit. In our daily lives, we try to mitigate risk. We are encouraged to look before we leap. Insurance companies employ actuaries to assess risk and calculate premiums. Investors use algorithms to quantify the risk of loss against the potential for gain. While these calculations are never perfect, they are Darwinian in that those who are best at measuring risk tend to be the most successful, what Joseph Schumpeter termed creative destruction in industries as they adapt to change.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/10/time-to-sideline-the-false-prophets-of-doom/

Fauci, Birx, and Adams have sent too many mixed messages from the start. While at first diminishing the threat of COVID-19, they now are sowing fear and panic across the country.

The warning from the nation’s top public health official was terrifying.

“This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on Fox News last Sunday, referring to coming deaths due to the novel coronavirus. “It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.”

Holy Week, Adams further cautioned, would be the “hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives.”

President Trump echoed Adams’ dire prediction. “We are coming up onto a time that’s going to be very horrendous, probably a time like we haven’t seen in this country,” Trump said from the White House on April 4. Instead of celebrating Easter and Passover this week, the president soberly admonished, Americans would instead see “some very bad numbers” about people succumbing to COVID-19.

Those alarming forecasts were based on a model produced by the University of Washington late last month. Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, assembled a set of graphs to show how COVID-19 would overwhelm the country’s health care system, causing a shortage of hospital beds, intensive care units and ventilators.

Murray also originally calculated that 2,271 people would die on April 15, which would be the peak “death day” in the United States. But that wasn’t the only scary news. Sick people would by dying in the streets and entryways outside of hospitals across the country because no beds would be available.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/manipulation-through-racial-hoaxes-walter-williams/

We black people are so convenient and useful to America’s leftists. Whenever there’s a bit of silencing to be done, just accuse a detractor or critic of racism. A recent, particularly stupid, example is CNN’s Brandon Tensley’s complaint that the “Coronavirus task force is another example of Trump administration’s lack of diversity.” Tensley said the virus experts are “largely the same sorts of white men (and a couple women on the sidelines) who’ve dominated the Trump administration from the very beginning.” I’d like for Tensley to tell us just what racial or sex diversity contribute to finding a cure or treatment for the coronavirus.

Jesse Watters was criticized as a racist for claiming that the coronavirus outbreak was caused by Chinese people “eating raw bats and snakes.” He added that “They are a very hungry people. The Chinese communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked, it is unsafe and that is why scientists believe that’s where it originated from.” Watter’s statement can be settled by a bit of empiricism. Just find out whether Chinese people eat bats and snakes and whether that has anything to do with the spread of the coronavirus.

It may be perplexing to some, but I believe that our nation has made great progress in matters of race, so much so that imaginary racism and racial hoaxes must be found. Left-wingers on college campuses and elsewhere have a difficult time finding the racism that they say permeates everything. So they’re brazenly inventing it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/08/how_the_wuhan_virus_will_change_the_world_order_142886.html

The horrific spread of COVID-19 has filled hospitals and graveyards, shut down the global economy, and exposed deep fissures among nations. The international problems, such China’s rising threat and reliance on foreign sources for critical supplies, are not new. But the contagion puts them in sharp relief and will surely affect relationships going forward.

Most changes won’t come until the crisis passes. Right now, policymakers are preoccupied with life-and-death decisions. They don’t want to challenge Beijing while they need its medical supplies and data. They also want to see if it will fulfill its promises in the Phase I trade deal or cheat, again. But make no mistake, changes are coming.

The biggest will involve China. The pandemic not only originated there, it spread because of how China is governed. The Chinese Communist Party, like all dictatorships, maintains tight control over information. It gives out only what helps the regime, hides whatever hurts it, spews propaganda, and cracks down on anyone who speaks out of turn. The Wuhan doctors who first sounded the alarm bells were immediately silenced. Science labs, which decoded the viral structure, were shut down and their data destroyed. China still won’t share vital information about how the virus works and how it affects different populations. Reporters, both professional and amateur, who mentioned the pandemic were suppressed. Some international reporters were expelled. Some locals have not been seen again.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/coming-war-between-generations-bruce-thornton/

Short-term thinking has been the bane of democracies since ancient Athens. Regularly scheduled elections and term-limits make it politically expedient, if not mandatory, for politicians to gratify the people’s desires, or assuage their present fears, even if the action or policy creates greater risks later. As Tocqueville wrote, “A clear perception of the future founded on judgment and experience” is “frequently wanting in democracies.” The dangers and discomforts of the present will trump the greater ones of the future.

The current pandemic crisis illustrates this perennial flaw, which hasn’t been mitigated by our greater knowledge of diseases and remedies for them. In the case of the Wuhan virus, we don’t have the requisite data to establish its mortality rate among the infected, or even the number of infected. The various models that project a mortality rate have exaggerated the toll: At this point the number of dead is a few hundred more than the 7400 of Americans who die every day, and much less than the 24,000 to 64,000 who died of the flu this season. Yet most states, seconded by the president’s recommendations, have imposed a radical social-distancing policy, which the president has extended to the end of April.

As a consequence, our economy has taken a historic hit, with 10 million employees laid off and thousands of businesses both big and small (the latter comprise nearly half the private workforce) shuttered. Goldman-Sachs projects GDP to shrink 35% this summer, and others estimate unemployment may reach the 25% recorded during the Great Depression. A booming economy has been stalled as a matter of policy, with consequences such as a significant recession or even a depression, the malign effects of which––depression, divorce, addiction, suicide–– will continue to seriously damage the lives of millions for the foreseeable future.