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.

***

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.

https://twitter.com/andrewbostom/status/1256191869803024384 

3/5 of the hysterically reported, so-called “Mt. Sinai (NYC) young covid19 stroke victims” had MAJOR stroke risk factors, INCL. 1 WITH PRIOR STROKE!; Moreover respiratory infections other than covid19 have long been assoc. w/stroke. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/04/umpc-argues-covid-19-not-as-deadly-as

“ER Dept Chair of Renowned U Pitt Med Ctr argues COVID19 not as deadly as feared—estimates true case-fatality ratio of 0.25% (like 1957-58 pandemic flu) & says its hospitals will shift back to normal” Andrew Bostom, M.D.

A UPMC doctor on Thursday made a case the death rate for people infected with the new coronavirus may be as low as 0.25% — far lower than the mortality rates of 2-4% or even higher cited in the early days of the pandemic.

Dr. Donald Yealy based it partly on studies of levels of coronavirus antibodies detected in people in New York and California, and partly on COVID-19 deaths in the Pittsburgh region. The studies found that 5-20% of people had been exposed to the coronavirus, with many noticing only mild illness or none at all, he said.

“We’ve learned that way more people, far, far more people have actually been exposed to the infection without any knowledge of it. That makes the overall death rate much lower,” said Yealy, who is UPMC’s chair of emergency medicine. “Many people just didn’t feel sick at all and recovered without difficulty.”

Yealy went on to offer a hypothetical scenario of 3% of Allegheny County residents being exposed — a conservative number compared to the findings of the New York and California studies.

That would mean about 36,000 people in Allegheny have been exposed to the coronavirus. With 94 COVID-19 deaths in the county as of Thursday, it would mean 0.25 percent of people exposed to the coronavirus had died, he said.

“There is a big difference between 0.25% mortality and 7%,” Yealy said.

Yealy said about 1,300 people in Allegheny have tested positive for COVID-19. That would mean, in his hypothetical scenario, another 34,700 had been exposed but had no symptoms. He noted the latter group may also have antibodies to protect them from future infection, although he pointed out it’s still unknown how much protection people get from previous exposure to the new coronavirus.

Yealy further said the majority of the deaths among UPMC patients involved people over 80, with many being nursing home residents.