RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/testing-isnt-everything-11588373448?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Many states are starting to lift their shutdown orders, but some governors are still insisting they need more testing to do so. The Trump Administration on Monday responded by laying out all of the country’s testing capacity. But no amount of testing by itself will stop the virus from spreading. States will need a cocktail of strategies to limit the spread of infections.

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Testing problems did hamper the initial U.S. response and allowed the coronavirus to spread undetected for weeks in Seattle and New York City. Testing was at first limited to people who had knowingly come into contact with infected individuals, and then it took days to get results. President Trump too often overpromised what the feds couldn’t deliver.

But testing has dramatically ramped up, and the Food and Drug Administration has now approved 70 coronavirus tests—about four times more than it approved for the H1N1 flu virus in 2009. More tests per capita have been performed in New York City than in Singapore, South Korea and Australia.

Hospitals and labs have performed about 1.6 million tests in the past week, according to the Covid Tracking Project. The White House coronavirus task force presentation shows that most states with the biggest risks have the capacity to test 60% to 80% of their population each month. Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week said tests would be available at some 5,000 pharmacies across New York.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/01/pelosis-congress-should-shelter-at-home-for-the-rest-of-the-year/

Earlier this week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer postponed lawmakers’ return to Washington DC, citing concerns about coronavirus transmission. Congress should stay out of Washington DC a lot longer. Even until next year.

The primary reason isn’t because they, like health-care workers or truckers or grocery store employees or pastors, might catch coronavirus doing their jobs. The primary reason is that when they “do something,” Congress usually hurts the country far worse than if they just took naps in the closet or played cards all day, like my husband’s coworkers at a union-run former workplace.

The nation should have learned this from activist responses to the Great Depression, which we now know made the depression longer and harder. It also created expectations, institutions, and ways of life that have upended our exceptional system of self-government. Yet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is as determined as President Franklin D. Roosevelt to exploit this crisis for political gain, on the well-founded calculation that if Democrats ask Republicans to unleash a horde of locusts, they’ll agree to half the locusts. Maybe even three-quarters!

Despite failing so far to use the pandemic to get race and sex quotas for corporate boards, insane emissions requirements on airlines, more money for Democrat politicking funneled through unions, student loan bailouts, and bigger tax credits for solar panels, Democrats have already commandeered it to send pork to the Kennedy Center, bail out the U.S. Postal Service, get raises for Congress as 26 million Americans filed for unemployment, fund PBS stations, and upcharge for refugee resettlement.

And they’re just getting started. Pelosi has started talking about moving beyond blanketing the nation with deficit-funded checks into a “guaranteed income.” Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Doug Jones (D-Ala.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) propose to “fund a portion of a company’s payroll costs, up to $90,000 per worker who has been laid off or furloughed.”

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has proposed a similar idea. “Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has proposed a bill that would cover 100 percent of salaries for at least three months.” Shifting American workers to federal welfare akin to the make-work Civilian Conservation Corps of Roosevelt’s day (but without the bridges) could cost another trillion dollars. At least, initially. Since the small business bailout fund has been replenished twice and counting, we shouldn’t expect Congress to turn off the firehose any time soon. It’s a national emergency, you see.