RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/joe-bidens-dr-death/

Ezekiel Emanuel has some unsettling beliefs.

Does Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel believe Joe Biden would be better off dead?

That would be a peculiar position for Biden’s chief adviser on medical issues and a member of the candidate’s Public Health Advisory Committee to take. But if we accept the reasoning behind Emanuel’s infamous 2014 essay, Biden is nothing more than a resource-sucking shell of himself who should stop trying to prolong his life.

I suspect that if one of Trump’s advisers on coronavirus had once taken to the august pages of The Atlantic to reason that men who reach the age of 75 are useless to society, the press would be vigorously exploring and amplifying his position. Reporters have rarely bothered to bring it up with Emanuel, who is constantly on TV — or with Biden, who is now “sheltered in place” and trying to prolong his life.

It’s quite simple: Does Emanuel believe that Biden, aged 78 on Inauguration Day, is faltering or declining, or in a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived? Does Emanuel consider Biden to have been robbed of his ability to contribute to work, society, and the world? Does he believe that Biden will now be remembered as feeble, ineffectual, and even pathetic? Is Biden’s creativity, originality, and productivity pretty much gone? Surely a younger person, according to Emanuel’s own societal prescription, would be better prepared for the job.

While some of us believe age is catching up to Biden — time waits for no one, etc. — we still believe his life is more than political aspirations. Does Emanuel?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-americas-high-risk-high-cost-project/

America has never undertaken its like — a high-risk, high-cost endeavor launched amid uncertainty, panic, and pessimism.  Whatever we eventually call it, there is a coronavirus “project.”

Chemotherapy
It’s a race to identify the origins, nature, and danger of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the best way to treat, vaccinate against, and mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 disease — all without destroying America to save it.

However the Corona Project is defined, it remains different from all previous existential American efforts. We are not building any new weapon or infrastructure or deliberately adopting a radical new policy. Much less are Americans fighting a visible enemy, poverty, or just bad habits.

Instead, we are giving ourselves massive social and economic chemotherapy to weaken or retard the virus within us before our massive therapeutic shutdown kills the U.S. economy — a sort of neutron bomb that destroys human interaction without incinerating visible infrastructure. In other words, we the patient apparently must be sickened to the point of near death in order to survive the disease.

It is certainly difficult to compare similar American mass efforts in the past. Their costs are murky — and not just because of inadequate record keeping, the adjustment of prior dollars to current time and inflation, or the need to consider the relationship between lives and money. In addition, the tab for past “wars on” something or other (e.g., alcohol, illiteracy, smoking, poverty, drugs, etc.) usually rippled out for years, both positively and negatively.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/27/ive-worked-the-coronavirus-front-line-and-i-say-its-time-to-start-opening-up/

I’m an emergency physician at St. Barnabas Hospital in The Bronx. I have been in the ER every day these last few weeks, either supervising or providing direct care. I contracted a COVID-19 infection very early in the outbreak, as did two of my daughters, one of whom is a nurse. We are all well, thank God.

COVID-19 has been the worst health care disaster of my 30-year ­career, because of its intensity, duration and potential for lasting impact. The lasting impact is what worries me the most. And it’s why I now believe we should end the lockdown and rapidly get back to work.

From mid-March through mid-April, the ER staff at St. Barnabas huddled in groups of about 20 every morning. We asked ourselves what had happened over the previous shift. We generated a list of action­able tasks for the following 24 hours. At first, we addressed personal protective equipment and the management of patients with mild illness who were seeking COVID-19 tests.

Then came the wave of critically ill patients in numbers none of us had ever seen. This lasted for two weeks. The number of patients on ventilators accumulated in the ER and throughout the hospital. We witnessed an unprecedented number of deaths. The tone of the huddles became more somber. We became accustomed to the morbidity; we did our jobs.

It is precisely what I have witnessed that now tells me that it’s time to ease the lockdown. Here’s why.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/04/27/why-illinois-is-in-troubl

Illinois could soon be the first state in history to have its bonds rated as “junk.” Last month, both Moody’s MCO and Standard & Poor’s downgraded Illinois debt to just one notch above junk status.

Last week, the Illinois State Senate President Don Harmon (D-Chicago) wrote a letter to Congress requesting a $41.6 billion bailout. Critics balked.

In many ways, Illinois may have already crossed the Rubicon.

Our analysis at OpenTheBooks.com shows that an Illinois family of four now owes more in unfunded pension liabilities ($76,000) than they earn in household income ($63,585). In a state of 13 million residents, every man, woman, and child owes $19,000 — on an estimated $251 billion pension liability.

Our auditors discovered 110,000 public employees and retirees who earned more than $100,000 last year.

We found tree trimmers in Chicago making $106,663; nurses at state corrections earning up to $277,100; junior college presidents making $491,095; university doctors earning up to $2 million; and 111 small town managers who out-earned every governor of the 50 states ($202,000).

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-4-27-what-is-the-real-level-of-mortality-from-the-chinese-flu

Several commenters on yesterday’s post express a strong interest in learning the true level of mortality from the Chinese Virus. Are the numbers reported at sites like Worldometers as “Coronavirus Deaths” accurate and reliable, or are they inflated? Or, for that matter, could it be that the number of “Coronavirus Deaths” is under-reported for reasons that could include people dying at home without ever being tested?

My answer is that it is impossible to know at this point. The best indication we will get will come when the CDC issues final data for deaths from all causes in the U.S. for the month of April. When we get that number, we can subtract from it the approximate “normal” number of deaths that would have occurred anyway during April. The difference will be a good estimate of the number of excess deaths attributable to the virus. My prediction is that that number will be far less than the number of “Coronavirus Deaths” being officially reported. I’ll bet on about half or even less; but I’m the first to admit that I could be proved wrong.

The problem with attributing deaths to the virus begins with the fundamental problem of all scientific endeavor, which is that events in the real world have not just one but many causes. As a common example closely related to the subject of this post, many patients with cancer get pneumonia at the final stage of their disease. Did they die from the cancer or from the pneumonia? Or from both? When you look at the CDC statistics, you will see that each death has been assigned uniquely to just one of the major categories. In this case, each death has been assigned either to cancer or to pneumonia, not both. But how did someone decide that death A was from cancer, but death B was from pneumonia, when the patients had both and were in terminal condition? Generally, there is not much riding on the decision, and if it is made arbitrarily — half to one, half to the other — that’s probably fine.