Category: Health Care

The Battle of Atillis Gym

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This may go down in history books as the 21st-century Concord Bridge:

A few hours after workouts began Monday morning at New Jersey’s Atilis Gym — which is making national headlines for its early reopening in defiance of Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s coronavirus shutdown order — police showed up outside the Bellmawr business.
What happened next?
The large group of people outside the gym were angry and hostile, likely believing the officers showed up to shut down the gym, hand out tickets, or even make arrests. Amid the mostly unintelligible hollering, a few phrases rang out clearly:

“You have the right to refuse unconstitutional orders!”
“Freedom!”
“You swore an oath to protect our rights!”

Soon enough the crowd quieted down enough so that one of the officers was able to address them.
“We are and we’re only here for everybody’s safety today,” the officer began. “We planned for the worst, hoped for the best, and it seems like that’s what we have out here today. Formally, you are all in violation of the executive order.”
Then came the officer’s surprising follow-up statement: “On that note, have a good day. Everybody be safe.”

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

In other COVID-19 news, President Trump revealed he has been taking hydroxychloroquine as a precaution, and the media freaked out:

President Donald Trump on Monday confirmed at the White House that he was taking hydroxychloroquine and zinc as preventatives against the coronavirus.
“I happen to be taking it. I’m taking it. Hydroxychloroquine. Right now, yeah,” he said.
Trump said that he had been taking the medicine for about a week and a half.
“I’m taking the two, the zinc and the hydroxy, and all I can tell you is, so far I seem to be ok,” Trump said.
He said that a doctor and many others had sent him positive letters about the effectiveness of the drug.
“I’ve heard a lot of good stories and if it is not good, I will tell you right,” he said. “I’m not going to get hurt by it.”
The president spoke to reporters about the drug on Monday afternoon at a White House roundtable with restaurant owners.
“I’m still here,” he said, saying that he had “zero symptoms” from the drug or the virus.

Predictably, CNN gave air time to Trump’s enemies to tell lies:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to President Trump as “morbidly obese” during an appearance Monday night on CNN and said he shouldn’t be taking hydroxychloroquine to stave off coronavirus.
Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, made the remark in an appearance on “Anderson Cooper 360” during which she was asked about Mr. Trump’s taking the drug, which he’d revealed earlier in the day.
She said taking that drug was not a good idea for the president because of his “age group and in his, shall we say, weight group,” which she described as “morbidly obese.”
The 80-year-old speaker, who is second in the presidential succession line behind Vice President Mike Pence, said she would “rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists.”
To be considered “morbidly obese,” a technical term, a person would have to be 100 pounds over his ideal body weight and have a BMI of 40 or more, or 35 or more if he also has obesity-related health conditions, such as diabetes or high blood pressure.
Those conditions would not seem to apply to Mr. Trump.
His body-mass index, according to a 2019 medical examination, is 30.4, which is considered “obese,” but not morbidly so.
At 6-foot-3, his 243-pound weight isn’t close to 100 pounds too much, and the same physical put him in “very good health overall” with a resting pulse rate of 70 and a blood pressure reading of 118/80 — all three figures well within normal range.

Ask around and see how many people over 60 are in such excellent health as President Trump. If he’s not as lean as a marathon runner, perhaps it’s because he has been too busy to go jogging lately. As to the Speaker’s assertion that hydroxychloroquine has “not been approved by scientists,” (a) the drug has been commonly prescribed for more than 70 years, and (b) many health-care workers, including nurses and doctors, are doing exactly what Trump is doing, using the hydroxy/zinc combination as preventative medicine during the pandemic. Also, as many people pointed out, if Trump is “morbidly obese,” what is Stacey Abrams?




 

Trust the Health Experts!

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Last week, I was shocked to hear that Los Angeles was planning to be on coronavirus lockdown until August. Even if that was your plan, why would you announce more than two months of onerous restrictions so far in advance? Just extend it by two weeks now, see what happens and, if the number of new cases doesn’t meet your target, keep adding two-week extensions until you’re satisfied with the numbers. But no — August!

Trying to process this information was difficult, and then yesterday, Instapundit informed me that the person in charge of coronavirus policy Los Angeles is a former high-school principal who got a Ph.D. in Social Welfare from Brandeis. “Doctor Ferrer” is not a medical doctor, and has no real scientific expertise. She got her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a major in “Community Studies.” A few years ago, when she served as executive director of Boston’s Public Health Commission, “Doctor Ferrer” was featured in a CBS News program as an expert in — wait for it — teen dating violence.

Is she really the person you want running your epidemiology operations?

This business of credentialed “experts” claiming authority to run our lives has become intolerable, and the promotion of such phony expertise has become a disgrace to the profession of journalism:

Everyone in the media was horrified last month when Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced he would begin reopening the state’s economy. An April 21 headline in The Week denounced Kemp’s reckless “experiment,” and on April 22, MSNBC bemoaned the Republican governor’s “dangerous gamble.” Dana Milbank of the Washington Post declared: “Public health experts fear coronavirus will burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman.” The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull went so far as to call Kemp’s move an “experiment in human sacrifice.” Yet perhaps the most memorable media condemnation of Kemp was from Ron Fournier, former Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, who proclaimed on Twitter: “Mark this day. Because two and three weeks from now, the Georgia death toll is blood on his hands. And as Georgians move around the country, they’ll spread more death and economic destruction.”
Well, everyone did mark the day and, after Fournier’s “two or three weeks” elapsed, they called attention to how badly wrong his prediction had been. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

‘Out-of-Towners’ Blamed for ‘Mayhem’ After Florida City Re-Opens Beach

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Florida’s COVID-19 response has been a tremendous success story. Much like Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp resisted the Cult of Eternal Lockdown, the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, delayed issuing a statewide lockdown order and was one of the first governors to lift the order. As I have explained elsewhere, most Florida counties were handling their own coronavirus outbreaks with local policies, so DeSantis didn’t feel a statewide lockdown was necessary, especially because there were so many counties with very few cases, but finally he gave in to the political pressure. And as soon as May 1 arrived, DeSantis was ready to go back to business. Democrats demonized DeSantis, with activist Daniel Uhlfelder touring Florida beaches dressed as the Grim Reaper to promote the message that the Republican governor’s decision would kill people.

Meanwhile, Florida residents have begun resuming normal life without a statewide mandate, which means local governments are making their own decisions. Naples, on the state’s southwest coast, opened its beach May 1, but last weekend saw such crowds that they closed it again:

The city of Naples closed its public beaches at 12:01 a.m. Sunday. City leaders said the beaches were overrun with beachgoers to start the weekend, so the move is a continued effort to stop the possible spread of the coronavirus.
According to the city press release, “In an effort to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and alignment with CDC guidance and Governor DeSantis’s Executive Order 20-112, the City of Naples will be closing all public beaches within city limits effective 12:01 a.m. on Sunday, May 10 until further notice.” . . .
Naples Councilman Gary Price told us he visited the beaches during [Saturday, May 9] to get a look for himself. And what he said he saw disappointed him, concerned him and caused him to make a call to the city manager about how to regain control of the beaches in the city.
“We really wanted to make sure that people were safe,” Price said. “And what I saw today is what I believe to be really not safe.”
Price took a picture while checking out the beach, and that’s what prompted him to take action, he said. Price said he saw signs that people were visiting from the east coast of the state since their beaches remain closed.
“I took some pictures of cars that were from Broward and Miami-Dade dealership plates,” Price said. “And so you could tell from the cars.”

See? It’s not the Collier County locals who caused the problem; rather, it was people traveling from the Miami area — more than 100 miles away, where the beaches are still closed — who were the problem. Three counties (Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward) account for about 60% of all coronavirus deaths in Florida, and guess what else we know about those counties? Right — they’re overwhelmingly Democrat. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton got 57% of the vote in Palm Beach, 64% in Miami-Dade and 67% in Broward. So the lockdown of the entire state was necessitated by the high rates of infection in these Democratic stongholds. Now that the statewide order has been lifted, the beaches remain closed in the high-infection Democrat areas. This creates problems for places like Naples, in Collier County, where infection rates have been low. Would you care to guess how people vote in Naples?

You guessed it — Trump got 62% of the vote in Collier County.

Partisan affiliation correlates with lifestyle differences, which is why Democrat-dominated areas of Florida have high COVID-19 infection rates, and why Republican-leaning Naples can’t re-open its beaches without being overrun by people trying to escape from Miami:

The City of Naples has voted to reopen its beaches again but this time with some limitations.
After a grueling emergency meeting and three failed motions, council members negotiated their way to a fourth and final vote.
Naples beaches will be open sunrise to sunset, Monday through Friday, starting at 7 a.m. May 13. The beaches will have shorter hours on weekends: 7 to 11 a.m. and then closing before reopening from 5 p.m. to sunset. The weekend hours will extend to Memorial Day, too.
Coolers and tents will not be allowed on the beaches, but chairs can be used in the evenings to watch the sunset.
Parking enforcement has been beefed up with fines doubling to $200 with no option to pay early for a discount. Illegally parked cars can also now be towed.
Parking will be limited to those with beach stickers (both city and Collier County stickers are accepted) but the city will not allow parking on residential streets unless they are properly marked parking spaces.
Readers React: Facebook readers react to city of Naples public beach closures, lack of social distancing
Some council members were steadfast in trying to get shorter hours during the weekdays as well as the weekends.
“I am rigidly set on 7-day bifurcation hours,” Councilman Ray Christman said. “It seems to me that opening the beach from dawn to dusk, five days a week and not placing any limitations on activities is just further increasing the risk of having out-of-towners coming in and using the beach and creating a situation that replicated last weekend.” . . .
Only a week after the city opened the beaches to the public, the closure order was issued after a council member witnessed crowds on Saturday not following social distancing guidelines.
“My judgment call was not done hastily,” Mayor Teresa Heitmann said. “It was done with the city manager, the police chief and the fire department to make sure this situation does not get out of control. I heard descriptions of mayhem and a lack of regard to emergency orders of social distancing.”

Democrats come to town? “Mayhem!”

Beyond this problem in Naples, how is Florida faring in its return to normalcy? We were told by Democrats like Uhlfelder that DeSantis’s decision would certainly result in thousands of COVID-19 deaths, but guess what? It hasn’t happened. Three weeks ago, during the week of April 18-24, Florida reported an average of 825.7 new cornavirus daily, and 45.7 deaths daily. For the week of May 9-15, the average daily number of new cases was 644.7 — a 22% reduction — and the average daily number of COVID-19 deaths was 31.7, a reduction of 31%. Florida’s per-capita death rate from the virus is still 94% lower than New York’s.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Remember How Everybody Was Going to Die Because Georgia Ended Lockdowns?

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The headlines last month were scary:

Georgia’s dangerous coronavirus experiment
— Joel Mathis, The Week April 21

Georgia’s Kemp neglected to warn people
about his dangerous gamble
— Steve Benen, MSNBC, April 22

Kemp poised to lift restrictions,
despite warnings of renewed outbreak
— Alan Judd and Greg Bluestein, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 29

It was a “gamble,” an “experiment,” and the media all agreed it was “dangerous” for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to do this “despite warnings.” You would have thought, based on the coverage, that Kemp’s plan was so reckless and irresponsible as to guarantee a “renewed outbreak” that would kill thousands. But what actually happened?

Georgia’s daily COVID-19 deaths had already peaked by the time Kemp announced he would begin re-opening the state’s economy. On April 16, Georgia recorded 52 deaths from the virus, concluding a week (April 10-16) in which the state recorded 205 deaths, an average of 35.7 deaths daily for that week. For the seven day period ending Thursday (i.e., May 8-14), Georgia recorded a total of 105 coronavirus deaths, an average of 15 daily. In other words, comparing these two seven-day periods, there was a 58% decrease in Georgia’s COVID-19 deaths. The number of daily new COVID-19 cases reported has likewise declined more than 50% since April, even as the number of tests performed has increased.

COVID-19 is a new disease. Everything we know about this virus, we’ve learned in the past six months. However, something Michael Fumento remarked last month bears repeating: Epidemics are always subject to Farr’s Law, in which cases rise and fall in a bell-curve pattern. The death toll peaks and then recedes because, in the early stages of the outbreak, the disease “grabs the low-hanging fruit” (the most vulnerable population), but eventually runs out of such victims. While quarantine policies can “slow the spread” and “flatten the curve,” ultimately no human intervention matters more than the effect of Farr’s Law.

By the time Governor Kemp announced his “gamble” in the third week of April, the number of COVID-19 deaths in Georgia had already peaked. While the number of reported cases was still continuing to rise (it did not peak until April 27, when 937 new cases were reported), this was an artifact, the result of more widespread testing, which identified asymptomatic or mild cases. Throughout the course of Georgia’s coronavirus outbreak so far, there have been 1,557 deaths and, with the daily death toll still decreasing steadily, it seems unlikely the state will experience the “renewed outbreak” that Kemp’s critics warned about.

As of 10 a.m. today, Georgia’s per-capita death rate from COVID-19 (measured in deaths per million residents) was 150, which was 88.5% lower than the state of New York’s death rate of 1,417.

Oh, and just for your information, the daily number of U.S. coronavirus deaths nationwide peaked at 2,683 — on April 21, which was 25 days ago. The highest daily number of deaths in the past week was 1,772 on Wednesday (May 13), and that number was 34% below the April 21 peak.

UPDATE: Earlier this week, Stacey Lennox said, “Dear Media, Governor Kemp Will Accept Your Apology Now.” Don’t hold your breath.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Hope you will remember that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

Why Gallup, New Mexico?

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Over the weekend, I saw reports that New Mexico Gov. Lujan Grisham had invoked the state’s Riot Control Act to shut down traffic in the city of Gallup. The coverage didn’t provide the context to understand why this community of 21,678 people was such a COVID-19 incubator:

Gallup is in McKinley County, which has 1,027 positive cases of Covid-19 as of Thursday. The county has more than 30% of the state’s 3,411 cases and the most positive cases in the entire state, the governor’s statement said.
“Its infection trend has shown no sign of flattening,” according to the statement. . . .
“The spread of this virus in McKinley County is frightful,” Lujan Grisham said. “And it shows that physical distancing has not occurred and is not occurring. The virus is running amok there. It must be stopped, and stricter measures are necessary.”

Having seen many stories in which the media promoted the idea that rural America would soon be afflicted by this disease, I wondered if somehow this prophecy was coming true. But why here? Of all the places, why was the virus “running amok” in this particular town?

 

So I checked the map, and noticed that Gallup is on I-40, where it intersects with U.S. 491, leading north to the Navajo Nation. If you live on the reservation and want to go shopping, Gallup is where you’d go, and the Navajos have been hard-hit by COVID-19. Such was my deduction Saturday, and now the New York Times follows up:

The lockdown comes as state and local authorities grapple with one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the United States on the nearby Navajo Nation, the country’s largest Indian reservation, and a surge in detected cases in places near the reservation.
As of Sunday, the Navajo Nation had reported a total of 2,373 cases and 73 confirmed deaths from the virus. . . .
The refusal to follow social distancing guidelines by some residents of Gallup and other so-called border towns near the reservation has emerged as a source of tension, as tribal authorities say the behavior is undermining their attempts to control the virus.
The Gallup area had the third-highest rate of infection of any metropolitan area in the United States as of Sunday. . . .
Before the lockdown, tribal leaders complained that their attempts to curb infections on the reservation by setting curfews and creating checkpoints were being undermined when Navajo citizens ventured into Gallup.
Residents of Gallup also groused that many people were ignoring social distancing guidelines by crowding into vehicles and food stores. . . .
Native Americans account for 53 percent of New Mexico’s confirmed coronavirus cases, while making up about 11 percent of the state’s population. . . .
In the nearby town of Grants, also located near tribal nations in western New Mexico, the mayor openly defied Ms. Lujan Grisham last week by telling businesses to reopen. (The state Supreme Court has ordered the mayor, Martin Hicks, to obey the state orders.)
Mr. Hicks has asserted that Navajos were to blame for spreading the virus, openly expressing an unsubstantiated position that seems to be gaining traction in towns near Native American reservations.
“We didn’t take it to them, they brought it to us,” Mr. Hicks said in a telephone interview, without offering any proof. “So how are we going to spread it amongst them when they’re the ones that brought it to us?”

Oh, no! He said what you’re not allowed to say!

The question of who is infecting whom is not supposed to be openly discussed. Viral outbreaks just randomly happen, we are supposed to believe, never questioning if demographic disparities in infection rates are anything more than accidental, unless we want to blame racism. The possibility that behavioral differences between groups might help explain these disparities is not permitted, because that might lead to “victim-blaming.” You can’t ask who was “ignoring social distancing guidelines” in Gallup, and the way the New York Times reports the story, you don’t get a clear answer, except when Mayor Hicks expresses his “unsubstantiated” opinion. Well, we might ask, how was it that this disease from China became rampant among the Navajo? One would not suspect that there was a lot of international travel by reservation residents. My hunch was that this might have something to do with the numerous casinos (including the Fire Rock Casino near Gallup) operated by the Navajo Nation. Maybe tourists brought the virus to the casinos, infecting Navajo employees who then spread it on the reservation?

Imagine my surprise, then, at discovering the real cause:

Navajo officials . . . have traced the surge in the reservation’s coronavirus cases to a March 7 rally held by an evangelical church . . .
Infectious disease specialists say the virus is thought to have arrived on the reservation later than in other parts of the United States. It began spreading rapidly after it was detected among members of the Church of the Nazarene, an evangelical congregation in the outpost of Chilchinbeto near the Arizona-Utah border.
Families traveled from far-flung parts of the Navajo Nation to attend the rally, which included a prayer service in response to the pandemic already spreading in parts of the country.

You can read more background about that at the Navajo Times, and I confess it never would have occurred to me that an evangelical rally was the event that triggered this pandemic outbreak. So I’ll have to ask readers to accept my sincere apology for my un-Christian suspicion.




 

More Evidence That Lockdown Orders Are the Wrong Approach to COVID-19

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Somewhere between 20% and 50% of all deaths from the coronavirus pandemic have been elderly residents of nursing homes. We knew, at the very outset, that the elderly were at highest risk from this disease, and one would think that measures to protect them would have been a high priority. Yet as Daniel Greenfield explains, such measures were not taken, in the very same “blue” states where Democratic governors have enforced the most stringent lockdown orders. (Hat-tip: CBD at AOSHQ.)

If the elderly and other people with health conditions that make them particularly vulnerable to this disease could be protected, there would be no need for the economically damaging lockdown orders, once we had clearly avoided the worst-case “surge” scenarios that had been projected. Most of the country went into lockdown mode in mid-March and, by the first week in April, we had passed the crisis point without crashing the health-care system — the “apex” of the “curve” never reached the level where hospitals ran out of ICU beds, etc. The daily number of COVID-19 deaths in New York, for example, peaked at 799 on April 9, and as of yesterday was down to 337, a 58% decline in less than three weeks.

We now know that the number of people infected with the virus greatly exceeds the number of known cases of the disease, which is to say that most people exposed to the virus are either asymptomatic or never become sick enough to seek treatment. The virus did not overwhelm the health-care system in its first “surge,” and it is highly unlikely that lifting the lockdown orders now would result in any system-crashing surge because (a) substantial “herd immunity” has already been reached, and (b) the risk to the elderly is now sufficiently understood that the most vulnerable segment of the population will be protected.

Let’s add this: Nobody is proposing to force anyone to go to a restaurant, or attend a baseball game, or otherwise expose themselves to situations where there is an elevated risk of exposure to the virus. If you want to err on the side of caution, and continue hiding out at home, nobody is going to stop you. But we are clearly past the point where governments should be mandating closure of “non-essential” businesses, or arresting people for going for a walk in the park. As long as vulnerable elderly people are being protected, or acting responsibly to protect themselves, the rest of America can go back to business. Stifle your inner “Karen”:

A math teacher at Steinert High School [in Hamilton, N.J.] was caught on video this week shouting at a group of teenagers playing football in the park that they should “die a long, painful death” from the coronavirus.
The teacher was identified by multiple sources as Nicole Griggs, who has been a township teacher for the last 15 years and also taught middle school, according to the district website.
One of the teenagers, a freshman at Steinert, told The Trentonian that he and a group of school friends were playing football Thursday at the former Homedell School, on the 500 block of East Franklin Street, when Griggs stopped to admonish them from behind a chain-link fence. . . .
At first, Griggs, who appears to be wearing a gray sweatshirt and walking her dog, seems to be looking out for the teens by telling them the parks are closed because of the virus outbreak.
She asks them if they need her to scream the warning “loud enough so you can hear me over your music. Parks closed. You will get arrested if the cops come.”
She soon melts down when one of the teens asks, “Wait, can we go over there?”
The teacher goes so far as to tell the teens she doesn’t care if they put her on blast online.
“Parks closed. The whole area,” Griggs says. “Get it through your thick head. You are the reason we are in this situation. You are the problem, not the solution. Go ahead keep recording. Who are you going to show it to? Post me on social media. You’re the idiot doing the wrong thing. I’m just trying to save your ass and save your life. But die, OK. I hope both of you get the coronavirus. I hope you both die a long, painful death.”

Kids throwing a football around in a park are not “the reason we are in this situation,” but the lockdown mentality appeals to the Karens of the world, who can’t stand to see anyone having fun.

(The “Karen” meme explained.)




 

COVID-19: Numbers That Really Matter

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Among the dishonest games that the media have played with coronavirus is their habit of reporting cumulative totals of reported cases and deaths as if this is the only metric of the pandemic. Anyone with a functional brain, however, must realize that this is misleading and nearly useless in terms of understanding how the outbreak is actually progressing. The cumulative total always goes up, and periodically crosses certain thresholds which can be treated as “news,” for example when the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 passed 2,996, the death toll of the 9/11 attacks: DISEASE KILLS MORE THAN AL-QAEDA!

This is a game, I say, and a dishonest one, because this disease is a worldwide pandemic, and not an isolated event. What matters, if our goal is to comprehend the disease as a public health concern, is whether it’s getting worse or better, and how rapidly this change is happening. As I mentioned in my column today, epidemics tend to follow a certain bell-curve pattern, ascending to a peak and then declining. If we can accurately track new cases and deaths on a daily basis, these numbers will give us an idea of which direction we’re heading and how fast we’re going. Without that kind of measurement, we’re lost, and merely reporting cumulative totals doesn’t help us. So why is the media addicted to this? Because the useless number is effective as anti-Trump propaganda, especially when presented without appropriate perspective.

Consider, for example, that the U.S. coronavirus death toll is, as far as we know (because China is lying) the largest in the world. Yes, but our population (about 327 million) is much larger than any European country. America has more people than the combined total population of Germany (81 million), France (66 million), the United Kingdom (65 million), Italy (61 million) and Spain (46 million). Calculating COVID-19 statistics on a per-capita basis is the only reasonable measurement. Here are the 10 countries with the highest coronavirus death rates, expressed in deaths per million population, with the number in parenthesis showing the “confirmed case fatality rate”:

Belgium ………………………. 631.0 (15.44%)
Spain ………………………….. 503.4 (10.25%)
Italy ……………………………. 446.4 (13.53%)
France …………………………. 341.2 (14.10%)
United Kingdom …………… 311.8 (13.56%)
Netherlands …………………. 262.2 (11.81%)
Ireland ………………………… 227.1 (5.61%)
Sweden ………………………. 223.3 (12.02%)
Switzerland …………………. 192.6 (5.62%)
United States ………………. 171.6 (5.62%)

You see that in terms of the per-capita death rate, nine European countries are worse than the United States, with four countries at least twice as bad as us, and yet our media won’t mention this, because all they care about is blaming Trump. What has Trump done that was worse than what has been done by the leaders of Belgium, Spain, etc?

The people at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and other major media establishments don’t want Americans to ponder that question, because these “news” organizations are actually political organizations, devoted to a partisan project of electing Democrats and enacting a liberal agenda.

Another question the media don’t want Americans to think about: Exactly how dangerous is COVID-19? You might think, given that more than 50,000 Americans are already reported to have died from this disease, that the answer to that question is self-evident. But if we don’t know how many people are actually infected with this virus — and we don’t, because many infected people are asymptomatic — then we don’t know what percentage of those infected eventually die from the disease.

This is important, because our economy has been devastated by lockdown orders which are continuing because it is feared that easing restrictions on business activity would result in untold thousands of unnecessary deaths. We cannot even begin to estimate the risk, however, if we don’t know how deadly the virus really is, as a percentage of all infections. Five physicians, led by Tennessee anesthesiologist Dr. Jonathan Geach, have written an article about this problem and you should read it.




 

New York’s ‘Curve’ Has Been Bent

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Look very closely at that image from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s press briefing Sunday. The daily peak of new COVID-19 hospitalizations — 3,177, based on three-day rolling averages — was three weeks ago. The latest number, 1,087 on Saturday, represents a 66% reduction.

Think about this, and remember that the whole point of stay-at-home orders and “social distancing” was to “bend the curve,” to avoid a “surge” of hospitalizations that would overwhelm the health-care system. As hard-hit as New York has been, they avoided that crisis, and the “curve” has long since been bent. A two-thirds reduction in new hospitalizations, sustained over the course of three weeks, is an undeniable victory.

Yet the governor, while showing that data, laid out a plan to “re-open” his state that would not return New York to normal before mid-June:

Every day, cable-news channels provide live coverage of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s briefings about his state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. What has happened in New York is not merely the worst COVID-19 outbreak in America, but possibly the worst in the entire world. Such are the biases of our news media, however, that no one ever suggests Cuomo is responsible for the deadly toll of this disease in his state. Instead, the Democratic governor is treated with deference by the press corps, which instead — and rather illogically — focuses the blame on President Trump.
Watching Cuomo’s press briefings is to behold the work of a master in the rhetorical arts of pretended expertise and straw-man arguments against imaginary antagonists who, in opposing the governor’s orders, are irresponsible and unscientific. Cuomo employs a vocabulary (e.g., “evidence,” “research,” “transmission rate”) that conveys an advanced knowledge of epidemiological science which, of course, he does not possess. His audience is expected to forget that, just a few weeks ago, the governor was warning of a shortage of health-care resources based upon computer-modeled projections which proved to be grossly exaggerated . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.