RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://theconversation.com/whats-the-difference-between-pandemic-epidemic-and-outbreak-133048

The coronavirus is on everyone’s minds. As an epidemiologist, I find it interesting to hear people using technical terms – like quarantine or super spreader or reproductive number – that my colleagues and I use in our work every day.

But I’m also hearing newscasters and neighbors alike mixing up three important words: outbreak, epidemic and pandemic.

Simply put, the difference between these three scenarios of disease spread is a matter of scale.

Outbreak

Small, but unusual.

By tracking diseases over time and geography, epidemiologists learn to predict how many cases of an illness should normally happen within a defined period of time, place and population. An outbreak is a noticeable, often small, increase over the expected number of cases.

Imagine an unusual spike in the number of children with diarrhea at a daycare. One or two sick kids might be normal in a typical week, but if 15 children in a daycare come down with diarrhea all at once, that is an outbreak.

When a new disease emerges, outbreaks are more noticeable since the anticipated number of illnesses caused by that disease was zero. An example is the cluster of pneumonia cases that sprung up unexpectedly among market-goers in Wuhan, China. Public health officials now know the spike in pneumonia cases there constituted an outbreak of a new type of coronavirus, now named SARS-CoV-2.

As soon as local health authorities detect an outbreak, they start an investigation to determine exactly who is affected and how many have the disease. They use that information to figure out how best to contain the outbreak and prevent additional illness.

Epidemic

Bigger and spreading.

An epidemic is an outbreak over a larger geographic area. When people in places outside of Wuhan began testing positive for infection with SARS-CoV-2 (which causes the disease known as COVID-19), epidemiologists knew the outbreak was spreading, a likely sign that containment efforts were insufficient or came too late. This was not unexpected, given that no treatment or vaccine is yet available. But widespread cases of COVID-19 across China meant that the Wuhan outbreak had grown to an epidemic.

COVID-19 was first noticed in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 but quickly spread across the globe. This map shows all countries with confirmed cases on March 5, 2020. CDC

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/03/09/health_care_is_a_right_only_if_doctors_surrender_theirs_142591.html

Bernie Sanders is convinced that promising Americans guaranteed health care is the modern equivalent of “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” but he is not alone. In some form or another, health care consistently tops every poll that gauges what makes Democrats tick.

So now that the race has narrowed to “Biden vs. Bernie,” it is time to ask what we the American people will be getting if the No. 1 issue on the Democrats’ agenda is actually implemented.

First of all, we should recognize that there is no realistic difference between any two Democrats on this topic, though some pretend they don’t want to bankrupt the economy by fully funding guaranteed health care for all. In fact, they all agree with Sanders that “health care is a right,” and that means they will ultimately try to buy health care for everyone, no matter how expensive it is.

But when you ask them how or why health care is a right in the same way that life and liberty are human rights, you get circular answers or misleading ones. It is a right because it is important, we are told. Or it is a right because it is unfair for some people to get better treatment than others merely because they have more money. By that reckoning, there is a right to fly first class.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/do-university-closures-make-sense/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

If young people are relatively safe from coronavirus but can infect others who are less safe, then doesn’t it make sense to keep them together at colleges rather than sending them home, where they are more likely to infect their parents and grandparents? Maybe there’s a good rationale for these moves. Or maybe we’re having trouble getting our heads around an illness that requires us to protect old people from young people, and fear of litigation isn’t helping us think it through better.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/07/the-finger-of-trump-on-a-new-plague/

EXCERPT

A week ago, I wrote about the president’s masterly press conference about the coronavirus. As Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) observed, the president’s decision to suspend flights between the United States and China early on in the epidemic was “the single most consequential and valuable thing” done to slow the course of the malady. 

That’s not how his political opponents spun it, of course. The president was denounced as “racist,” “xenophobic,” etc. by the Left, but that talk dried up as panic began to take over. In that earlier column, I mentioned Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He was writing about Tulipomania in 17th-century Holland—when a single tulip bulb might go for more than the price of your house—financial bubbles, and the like. But we seem to be seeing a medical version of that now. 

As I have noted, we do not know how rapidly or how widely the virus will spread, nor do we know how deadly it will be. People over 65 seem to suffer more serious illnesses than younger people, especially if they have underlying health problems. As is the case with other maladies, the older and frailer you are, the more likely it is that you will die from the coronavirus.

That said, it is worth maintaining some perspective on the disease. In early February, the CDC estimated that at least 12,000 people had died from the flu from October 1, 2019 through February 1. That number might be as high as 30,000. So far, CDC estimates, some 31 million Americans have caught the flu this season. Somewhere between 200,000 and 370,000 of those have been hospitalized because of the virus. 

As for deaths, the CDC estimates that it will probably equal or surpass the 2018-2019 season when there were 34,000 flu-related deaths in America. (The 2017-2018 season saw 61,000 deaths.) Writ large, the World Health Organization estimates that the flu kills between 290,000 and 650,000 annually.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/07/socialism-extinguishes-the-american-and-biblical-ideal/

Those today pitching democratic socialism as a safe and benign form of socialism are hiding the truth about it. By nature, socialism disregards any aspect of democratic will when it is in conflict with its fixed social agenda and goal of economic leveling. Thus, democratic socialism is an oxymoron, a seductive syntax and play on words.

Socialist candidates running for office do not do so to offer greater liberty, income, opportunity, or greater speech rights, but to institute heavy social engineering aimed toward conformity and sameness. History shows how in the name of “fairness” socialist rulers and bureaucrats disregarded democracy, as well as citizens who do not accept the deprivations needed to bring about the “ideal state.”

Too many among our young assume that socialism will provide the same level of prosperity and easy consumption they currently enjoy, with an added feel-good patina. They see no downside. But current and past real examples prove that prosperity, abundance, and ease of purchase and opportunity, including free speech, dramatically decline with the advent of any form of socialism. Political and religious freedom is inexorably tied to economic freedom. There is no “right” type of socialism or a right time for it or even a right person to oversee it.

Today’s fashionable cultural Marxism puts in jeopardy even more freedoms than that of the economic Marxism of years ago. It attacks and severely diminishes freedom of speech, assembly, and religious freedoms. The intent of indicting “America as racist from top to bottom,” as do many on the Left, is to provide political license to tear down and rebuild America according to socialism’s leveling and confiscatory blueprint.

The Lie of American Socialists

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/07/anyone-notice-that-trumps-economy-keeps-beating-expectations/

February’s jobs report “smashed expectations.” That’s how one news site described the latest monthly employment numbers out of the Commerce Department, which showed the economy created 273,000 jobs last month. Smashing expectations has become a regular feature of the Trump economy. Anyone care to guess why?

Based on the consensus forecast of economists, the first two months of this year should have seen a total of 335,000 jobs created. The actual number was 63% higher: 546,000.

For the past four months, job growth has averaged 248,000, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised several previous months’ gains sharply upward. In the best year under President Barack Obama, job growth averaged 250,000 a month.

The current job growth is even more impressive given that it’s coming more than 10 years after the last recession ended, and long after the experts told us we were already at full employment.

There’s more. To get a full picture of how much better than expected the Trump economy is performing, take a look at the forecast put out by the Congressional Budget Office just as Trump was taking office in January 2017.

According to the CBO, which based its forecast on the assumption that the economic policies of the Obama administration remained in place, the economy should have created only 2 million new jobs by this point.

The actual number: 6.9 million.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Just this past week, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) Spoke outside the Supreme Court to protestors, while the Court was hearing a case that would require doctors in Louisiana who operate at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Senator Schumer, standing on the courthouse steps and speaking to protestors, called out Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by name, threatening them: “ I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” When called out by others, including Chief Justice John Roberts, some Republican Senators and a few in the media, Senator Schumer claimed to regret his choice of words. Yet everything he says is predetermined and politically motivated. He is not stupid but has had no real-world experience. Since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1974, he has spent his entire career (forty-five years) in public service. He parses his words carefully.

This is not to absolve the Right, but vitriol among the sanctimonious left who feel a God-granted right to dictate to “deplorables” and others has become ubiquitous. Progressivism has become a religion in that it claims a moral code of wokeness, political correctness, identity politics, victimization and intolerance, the glue of shared values and mythologies. They clamor for diversity, as long as there is conformity in thought.

Nastiness and incivility have long been present on the political scene and always most venomous during political campaigns. There have always been fringe elements on both sides of the political divide who urge violence and recrimination against those with whom they disagree. However, incivility was generally limited to those on the political stage and to a few commentators whose bigotry is their success. Reporters and the general public were once more restrained in their observations. In our age of better educated citizens who have more free time to think about candidates and politics, unadulterated hatred should have given way to reflection and perspective. It hasn’t. Hatred, on the part of the left, has gone mainstream. Consider a few selections: White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family were asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky by the co-owner, because of her ties to the “inhumane and unethical” Trump Administration. Senior White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller was accosted in a Washington, D.C. restaurant and called a “real-life fascist.” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson was forced to leave another restaurant when fifteen protestors showed up shouting “Shame!” Such acts were encouraged by the establishment. In June 2018, Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) told attendees at an event to continue publicly harassing members of President Trump’s Cabinet.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-hype-crisis-predictions-sars-swine-flu-panics

We’ve been here before, and the direst predictions have not come to pass

EXCERPT

When hysteria is rife, we might try some history. In 1997 we were told that bird flu could kill millions worldwide. Thankfully, it did not. In 1999 European Union scientists warned that BSE “could kill 500,000 people”. In total, 177 Britons died of vCJD. The first Sars outbreak of 2003 was reported by as having “a 25% chance of killings tens of millions” and being “worse than Aids”. In 2006, another bout of bird flu was declared “the first pandemic of the 21st century”, the scares in 2003, 2004 and 2005 having failed to meet their body counts.

Then, in 2009, pigs replaced birds. The BBC announced that swine flu “could really explode”. The chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, declared that “65,000 could die”. He spent £560m on a Tamiflu and Relenza stockpile, which soon deteriorated. The Council of Europe’s health committee chairman described the hyping of the 2009 pandemic as “one of the great medical scandals of the century”. These scenarios could have all come to pass of course – but they represent the direr end of the scale of predictions. Should public life really be conducted on a worst-case basis?

Both Hancock and Britain’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, have struggled to contain the alarm. The government’s action plan pointed out that the virus is highly contagious, but the “great majority” of those who develop symptoms will experience only a “mild-to-moderate but self-limiting illness”. Every medical expert I have heard on the subject is reasonable and calm.

Not so politicians and the media. They love playing to the gallery, as they do after every health scare and terrorist incident. Front pages are outrageous. No BBC presenter seems able to avoid the subject. Wash hands to save the nation. The BBC must be sponsored by the soap industry.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-no-bail-fiasco-in-new-yorkthe-no-bail-fiasco-in-new-york-11583534248?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

You know New York has a problem when even Mayor Bill de Blasio admits it. On Thursday the New York Police Department held a press conference to report that major crime is up 22.5% this February over a year ago. Both the cops and the mayor attribute the spike to the bail reform pushed through the state Legislature in Albany last year, which is releasing people who have been arrested for one crime to go out and commit another.

“There’s a direct correlation to a change in the law, and we need to address it, and we will address it,” Mr. de Blasio said of the increase in crime. The mayor also said he was “absolutely confident” it will be addressed in Albany in the budget due April 1.

The Democratic Legislature, with the backing of both Mr. de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ended cash bail last year. The goal was to prevent cases such as that of Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old charged with stealing a backpack. Because his family could not afford bail he spent three years in prison on Rikers Island—much of it in solitary—without being tried or convicted of a crime. After his release, he ultimately committed suicide.

The sensible part of bail reform was aimed at preventing injustices such as this one. The non-sensible part was to deprive judges of the discretion to keep behind bars criminals who remain a menace to the community.

https://www.city-journal.org/de-blasio-thrivenyc-mental-health-plan?utm_source=Bigger+Apple&utm_campaign=
DJ Jaffe is author of Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill, executive director of Mental Illness Policy Org. and an adjunct fellow at Manhattan Institute.

Mayor de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray, who serves as his mental-wellness czar, just announced an additional goal for ThriveNYC, their signature $850 million, multiyear mental-health plan: “Reach People with the Highest Needs.” One might think that that priority would have been part of the original plan. In any case, it’s a hollow promise: a close reading of the 2020–2022 ThriveNYC spending plan and “Progress Report” makes it clear that the de Blasio administration will continue to send money to ineffective programs, while giving short shrift to programs that reduce homelessness, arrests, and incarceration of the seriously mentally ill. The mayor and his wife justify the continuing ThriveNYC boondoggle by reporting meaningless and misleading statistics.

Over the last four years, de Blasio and McCray regularly insisted that ThriveNYC was helping the seriously mentally ill. In 2019, McCray told an incredulous city council that 100 percent of ThriveNYC’s funds are used for the seriously ill. The real figure is well short of that mark. New York City Council Speaker Cory Johnson says that only 13 percent of the program’s funds go to the seriously mentally ill. Gary Belkin, the program’s first director, pegged the figure at 19 percent; Susan Herman, ThriveNYC’s current head, says that in 2022 it will go up to 26 percent.