Category: Health Care

Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo: The Media’s Favorite Scientific Geniuses

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Watching MSNBC today (so you don’t have to) and it’s amazing how laser-focused they are on the blame-Trump narrative of COVID-19. The MSNBC viewer is given the impression, for example, that Joe Biden was presciently warning about this Chinese disease in January, when what is being quoted is not what Biden himself said, but campaign statements issued on the candidate’s behalf. Likewise, Joe Scarborough passes over as inconsequential the fact that Nancy Pelosi, who now presumes to lecture the president about “science,” was in January and February leading an impeachment effort in Congress that might have distracted the president from keeping up with the latest developments in the pandemic.

And what about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo? The media, which relentlessly attacks Trump at the White House coronavirus briefings, has nothing but praise for Cuomo, despite the fact that Cuomo has presided over the worst outbreak in the country. The most insulting part of the media’s coverage of COVID-19, however, is that they claim for themselves the authority of scientific experts — and expect to be taken seriously:

A virus is not magic, epidemiology is not voodoo, and the credentialed experts are not a priesthood. Yet the reporters, anchors, and commentators on cable TV news — most of whom have no more claim to expertise in such matters than you or I — exhibit a cult-like faith in the ability of the Pandemic Priesthood to predict the future. Previous failures by these experts to predict the course of the COVID-19 outbreak are ignored, as the television preachers of “science” encourage their viewers to regard the priesthood with religious reverence. Most amazing of all is how the media has conferred expert status on certain politicians, as if New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were qualified to deliver scientific lectures on preventing the spread of contagious disease.
All of this, of course, has little or nothing to do with actual science, and very much to do with political bias. . . .

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




 

Good News: More Evidence COVID-19 Is Less Lethal Than Most People Believe

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For some time now, it has been apparent that a large percentage of people infected with COVID-19 are either asymptomatic or have such mild symptoms that they have never been tested for the virus. From an epidemiological perspective, this is a double-edged sword. If you’re infected but asymptomatic, you can spread the disease without knowing it. This probably explains, for example, why New York City went from having just one known case in early March to having hundreds of cases within a couple of weeks. It’s possible that many who spread the virus never knew they were infected because they never had symptoms.

However, there is a bright side to this double-edged sword: If a substantial percentage of Americans have already been infected by COVID-19 without becoming sick (and never getting tested) then the fatality rate would be much lower than is suggested by the simple arithmetic based on reported cases and reported deaths from the disease. Nationally, the U.S. has 683,786 reported cases, and 34,575 reported deaths, which would mean 5% death rate. The rate is much lower in some states; Florida reports 24,119 cases and 686 deaths, which is a 2.8% death rate. If there are many asymptomatic people who have never been tested, however, the death rate is actually much lower. And . . .

EXAMPLE #1:

Sweeping testing of the entire crew of the coronavirus-stricken U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: The majority of the positive cases so far are among sailors who are asymptomatic, officials say.
Roughly 60 percent of the over 600 sailors who tested positive so far have not shown symptoms of COVID-19, the potentially lethal respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, the Navy says. The service did not speculate about how many might later develop symptoms or remain asymptomatic.
“With regard to COVID-19, we’re learning that stealth in the form of asymptomatic transmission is this adversary’s secret power,” said Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham, surgeon general of the Navy.
The figure is higher than the 25% to 50% range offered on April 5 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force.

EXAMPLE #2:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now “actively looking into” results from universal COVID-19 testing at Pine Street Inn homeless shelter.
The broad-scale testing took place at the shelter in Boston’s South End a week and a half ago because of a small cluster of cases there.
Of the 397 people tested, 146 people tested positive. Not a single one had any symptoms.
“It was like a double knockout punch. The number of positives was shocking, but the fact that 100 percent of the positives had no symptoms was equally shocking,” said Dr. Jim O’Connell, president of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, which provides medical care at the city’s shelters.
O’Connell said that the findings have changed the future of COVID-19 screenings at Boston’s homeless shelters.
“All the screening we were doing before this was based on whether you had a fever above 100.4 and whether you had symptoms,” said O’Connell. “How much of the COVID virus is being passed by people who don’t even know they have it?”

EXAMPLE #3:

The first large-scale community test of 3,300 people in Santa Clara County found that 2.5 to 4.2% of those tested were positive for antibodies — a number suggesting a far higher past infection rate than the official count.
Based on the initial data, researchers estimate that the range of people who may have had the virus to be between 48,000 and 81,000 in the county of 2 million — as opposed to the approximately 1,000 in the county’s official tally at the time the samples were taken.
“Our findings suggest that there is somewhere between 50- and 80-fold more infections in our county than what’s known by the number of cases than are reported by our department of public health,” Dr. Eran Bendavid, the associate professor of medicine at Stanford University who led the study, said in an interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer.

You see that the emphasis in media reporting on these results is on the negative aspect — a large number of asymptomatic cases means that spread of the infection is wider than we knew, and more difficult to detect — so that they completely ignore the upside. In the Boston homeless shelter story, for example, this is a population that, to say the least, has less-than-optimal access to health care, and yet you have 146 case in which none of the infected people even had symptoms? Similarly, in Santa Clara County, the random testing suggests there have already been tens of thousands of asymptomatic coronavirus cases in the community — people who were infected, but never got sick. And the Navy’s testing on the aircraft carrier, where most of the sailors are young people in prime physical condition, the large number of asymptomatic cases indicates that very few such people will experience anything more than mild symptoms from this coronavirus. This is good news.

We should be encouraged, and ignore the media’s negative spin.




 

A ‘Granular’ Re-Opening Plan

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During the past couple of weeks of daily briefings, Dr. Deborah Birx has popularized the word “granular” to describe how the COVID-19 task force is tracking the spread of the disease. While the news media remain focused on the Big Numbers — the cumulative total of cases and the death toll — those whose job it is to try and control this contagion must pay attention to a series of small-scale pictures: What is causing the increase in cases in one particular county? Are local health officials able to do complete contact tracing on new patients? Does the task force need to move more resources into this region?

During the discussion of when and how to “re-open the economy” (a misleading phrase, because large segments of economic activity have not been restricted by “stay-at-home” orders), the anti-Trump media seemed to be under the impression that a one-size-fits-all approach would be imposed by the White House, which never made sense. There are many parts of the country where rates of COVID-19 infection are still very low, and there is no reason why these communities cannot be permitted to ease restrictions, while at the same time keeping the viral “hot spots” under lockdown orders. For example, in Florida, no one is suggesting that the Miami area should just “go back to business” anytime soon, but it doesn’t make sense to maintain indefinitely the same restrictions in Lakeland and Kissimmee.

If the level of infection, on a per-capita basis, is comparatively low in a community, and if the number of new cases is small enough that each individual case can be contained via quarantine and contact tracing, then a return to something like “normal” life is possible. Of course, there must be measures to protect the elderly and other high-risk individuals, but let me quote something from an Associated Press article:

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

That’s from an article about Brazil, whose president fired the health minister this week, but it is a fair summary of what we know: Most people who become infected with COVID-19 are never hospitalized; some are asymptomatic, or nearly so, while a relatively small percentage of those infected develop serious problems which may be fatal. Thursday’s report from Florida, for example, shows 23,340 known coronavirus cases since March 1, of which 3,458 (14.8%) have ever been hospitalized, and 668 (2.9%) have died. Keep in mind, of course, that some unknown percentage of Floridians have actually been infected already, but experienced few or no symptoms, and recovered without ever being tested or treated by any medical professional. So the actual death rate is probably lower than what has been reported, and Florida’s 668 deaths in a population of more than 21 million are but a fraction of the per-capita death rate in New York, New Jersey or Michigan. Letting states and local communities manage their outbreaks, under guidance based on “granular” metrics, is what the Trump plan is about:

President Donald Trump gave governors a road map Thursday for recovering from the economic pain of the coronavirus pandemic, laying out “a phased and deliberate approach” to restoring normal activity in places that have strong testing and are seeing a decrease in COVID-19 cases.
“We’re starting our life again,” Trump said during his daily press briefing. “We’re starting rejuvenation of our economy again.”
He added, “This is a gradual process.”
The new guidelines are aimed at easing restrictions in areas with low transmission of the coronavirus, while holding the line in harder-hit locations. They make clear that the return to normalcy will be a far longer process than Trump initially envisioned, with federal officials warning that some social distancing measures may need to remain in place through the end of the year to prevent a new outbreak. And they largely reinforce plans already in the works by governors, who have primary responsibility for public health in their states.
“You’re going to call your own shots,” Trump told the governors Thursday afternoon in a conference call, according to an audio recording obtained by The Associated Press. “We’re going to be standing alongside of you.”

My guess is that we’ll see a resumption of spring training games in Florida in a matter of weeks. Just keep watching the numbers.




 

Against ‘Experts’ and the ‘Elite’: Because All of Us Know More Than Any of Us

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Here’s a secret that isn’t really a secret: I am opinionated.

I know what you’re saying: “Where is Sarah Hoyt’s shocked face?”

The reason I’m opinionated is because I know a lot of stuff. From the time I was 7 years old, my hobby was reading The World Book Encyclopedia, and I’d more or less read the whole thing by age 12. Having a lot of knowledge tends to make one confident in one’s opinions, and thus I became an obnoxious know-it-all at an early age. Arrogant punk that I was, there followed a sort of graduate training program in the School of Hard Knocks, whereby I added “street smart” to my bookish achievements, and I have never stopped learning.

Have some of my opinions changed? Yes, rather drastically in some cases, but when you get to be my age, you ought to have formed quite solid opinions on the subjects that you know best, while also gaining wisdom enough to adopt an attitude of intellectual humility in regard to subjects with which you are less familiar. When it comes to epidemiology, I have tried to avoid being like those Twitter pundits who, as recently as February, were regaling us with their expert opinions of Ukraine and the constitutional limits on presidential authority, only to switch hats quite suddenly and begin posing as authorities on contagious disease.

Who are these people? Why do they consider themselves all-purpose experts, and expect the rest of us to accept their opinions as authoritative? Quite simply, they are members of the intelligentsia, calling to mind a famous aphorism of George Orwell: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Members of the intelligentsia specialize in persuasion, employing their superior skill in the use of language to advance particular views on various subjects — economics, politics, etc.

Yet it is a fact, as true in our era as it was in Orwell’s, that many members of the intelligentsia are fools who, by their superior skill in rhetoric, become articulate proponents for bad ideas.

Let me emphasize this point: Rhetorical cleverness can easily be mistaken for being right, if you care so much about the form of argument that you can be persuaded by mere eloquence. Think about the so-called philosophes of 18th-century France — Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, et al. — whose ideas were so influential in provoking the French Revolution. Perhaps most mischievous of these was Rousseau, whom Edmund Burke acknowledged as “a writer of great force and vivacity” with “a style glowing, animated, enthusiastic,” and yet wholly vicious in his influence. Of the revolutionaries who would soon murder thousands of their fellow citizens by the guillotine and other means, Burke wrote: “Rousseau is their canon of holy writ . . . he is their standard figure of perfection.” And it has remained true, for more than 200 years, that nearly every genuinely bad idea in the world first emerged from the mind of a French philosopher. Don’t get me started on Foucault. But I digress . . .

It is enough to persuade some people of the truth of an opinion that it is widely endorsed by “experts.” Some people who in general disdain religion nevertheless have a mystical reverence toward academic credentials. Some people would believe that frogs could fly, if the argument in favor of this proposition was offered by a Harvard professor with a Ph.D., and published as an op-ed in the New York Times.

Think about the scientific “consensus” in favor of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW, also known known as “climate change”). There are scientists who are skeptical toward this theory, but such is the practice of modern academia that all research funding in this area is monopolized by those who endorse the “consensus” view. So the skeptics are marginalized, even while the predictions made by proponents of AGW theory prove to be false, and such eminent climate-change “experts” as Michael Mann resort to lawsuits in an effort to silence their critics. (“Creator of Global-Warming’s Infamous ‘Hockey Stick’ Chart Loses ‘Climate-Science’ Lawsuit.”) Many similar examples could be cited of credentialed experts whose once-popular ideas have since been discredited, but the point is that idolatry of expert authority has caused serious problems in our society because so many (allegedly) educated people lack the kind of common-sense skepticism necessary to independent thought. If there were a “consensus” among Ivy League professors that frogs can fly, the editors of the New York Times would never express the slightest doubt. And such has been the case, generally, with the media’s treatment of the coronavirus pandemic.

In January, and continuing through most of February, the danger of the Chinese disease was widely dismissed by Democrats and the media:

Trump’s critics want us to forget, for example, that when the president announced a ban on travel from China on Jan. 31, many of them condemned this measure as a racist overreaction. “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science,” Joe Biden said the day after the China travel ban was announced . . .
The headline on a Jan. 28 BuzzFeed article advised Americans, “Don’t Worry About The Coronavirus. Worry About The Flu.” On Jan. 29, Farhad Manjoo published a column in the New York Times with the headline “Beware the Pandemic Panic.” Manjoo downplayed the danger of the virus and instead cautioned, “What worries me more than the new disease is that fear of a vague and terrifying new illness might spiral into panic, and that it might be used to justify unnecessarily severe limits on movement and on civil liberties, especially of racial and religious minorities around the world.” One thing we can never expect from elite journalists is accountability. Rather than admitting his own errors, Manjoo simply pivoted to blaming Trump: “Coronavirus Is What You Get When You Ignore Science” was the headline on his March 4 column, in which he asserted that the president had “gut[ted] the United States’ pandemic-response infrastructure.”

When did the “consensus” shift? It was right after the “Super Tuesday” primary, when Biden finally showed he could stop the Bernie Sanders insurgency, that the media decided that Trump was “ignor[ing] science” by failing to do more than he had already done. Now? The media is keeping up a drumbeat that nationwide lockdown orders must be continued indefinitely. To advance this argument, the media keeps repeating the cumulative death-toll from COVID-19, ignoring the fact that (a) the vast majority of these deaths are in a handful of major urban areas, and (b) on a per-capita basis, the pandemic in the United States is much less severe than in Europe. In most parts of America, the coronavirus outbreak hasn’t been nearly as widespread or as deadly as in the big cities, but the media is keeping up their incessant fear-mongering theme, because they’re deliberately seeking to cause a prolonged recession for which they will blame Trump. And their justification, you see, is their professed faith in “science” and “experts.”

This faith treats a certain small number of people as a secular priesthood, qualified to speak ex cathedra on all things scientific, whose judgment on such matters is beyond dispute. Yet the scientific “experts” behind the IHME model spectacularly failed to project the trajectory of the pandemic, and why? Because skepticism was forbidden. No one inside Dr. Murray’s IHME cabal would have dared to question the accuracy of the computer model they utilized to create their projection.

Discredited by failure, however, the priesthood can still do no wrong in the eyes of their worshipful admirers in the media. And so “science” is invoked as the basis of arguments for why Florida, for example, cannot be allowed to end its statewide shutdown orders. In case you didn’t notice (CNN won’t report this) Florida has already “flattened the curve” of its COVID-19 outbreak. The statewide number of daily new cases reported peaked April 3 — more than a week ago — at 1,308 and last week, Monday through Friday, averaged about 1,100 new cases daily. So the dreaded “surge” of new cases that Florida had been warned about is already over, and the state’s hospital system was not overwhelmed. Indeed, fewer than 3,000 Floridians have ever been hospitalized with COVID-19. The state’s cumulative total of cases (21,019) represents an infection rate of 98 per 100,000 residents, which is 99% lower than the rate in New York. Keep in mind, of course, that 59% of all Florida coronavirus cases are in three counties — Dade, Broward and Palm Beach — yet the entire state has been under a lockdown order.

See my point? If the public data is available, everybody with sufficient interest and knowledge can run their own analysis, and interrogate the “science” behind these foolish policies, without the media distorting the story by reporting cumulative totals of cases and deaths, as if this were the number that actually mattered most. From a public-health perspective, however, the issue is whether the spread of the contagion is so rapid that it overwhelms the health-care system. Outside of three counties, Florida has never had that problem and likely never will. The net number of hospitalizations in the state went down slightly on Monday, the governor reported, and if this trend continues another week, by next Monday (April 20), we can guess that the number of new cases daily will be in the vicinity of 700. By May 1, even the “hot spots” in Dade County will probably be under control.

This problem with the failed “expert” projections of disaster (the IHME predicted that Florida’s pandemic wouldn’t peak until early May) is that no one person — not even the most experienced and credentialed scientist — possesses as much knowledge as all the rest of us combined. This is a point that the Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek made, and it was the subject of James Surowiecki’s 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. The Internet makes possible a form of research known as “crowd sourcing,” where everyone interested in a subject collaborates to find answers, and it’s amazing to see how this works. If the “experts” are wrong, the rest of us can grab hold of the facts to prove them wrong.

Here is a commenter (“miked765”) at Instapundit:

As of today rounded approximate numbers from covid19stats.com show the states of NY/Jersey/Michigan account for approx 276k of the US 561k cases, just about half of all US cases. These same three states combine for approx 13k the est. 22k covid-deaths in the US, about 59% of all US deaths. Combined population of NY/NJ/Mich is 38 million. These are the only three US states with 1k+ covid fatalities. Michigan 6% death rate is the highest in the US, a full point higher than second-place New York.
However…California has 39 million population, but 11k cases and 651 deaths.
Texas population 29 million, approx 14k cases 271 deaths
Florida population 21 million, 21k cases, 474 deaths
That’s 89 million people, 46k combined cases and 1,396 combined fatalities, a fraction of the combined totals in NY/NJ/MI.
By contrast, Spain 46 million population approx 169k cases, 17k deaths.
South Korea 51 million population 10k cases, 211 deaths
This is why you cant compare the USA with any other country. We have both an entire Spain and an entire South Korea within our border in terms of relative harm done by/success fighting the virus.

This is not — NOT — a nationwide crisis, and our coronavirus pandemic is not — NOT — nearly as bad as Europe’s, on a per-capita basis.

You see? We may not be “experts,” but some of us can do basic arithmetic, while the “elite” journalists can’t seem to figure it out.




 

COVID-19: The Insanity Pandemic

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Long before anyone heard of the Wuhan coronavirus, America was already gripped by a pandemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Our news media were particularly hard-hit by that illness, and unless you were immune to TDS, it was not safe to expose yourself to CNN or MSNBC. An irrational desire to blame Trump for this disease from China was a typical symptom of the comorbidity between TDS and COVID-19:

One word keeps recurring in online discussions of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s latest orders to fight the state’s raging COVID-19 outbreak: “insanity.” Last week, the first-term Democrat issued an order extending the state’s stay-at-home policy, which had been set to expire April 15, until May 1. Michigan has the third-highest number of coronavirus cases of any state in America, and certainly strong measures are required to get the pandemic under control. But the devil is in the details, and Whitmer’s new order instantly provoked a firestorm of outrage.
Among the complaints was that Whitmer had prohibited sale of seeds and other garden supplies at a time when vegetable gardens need to be planted. Executive Order 2020-42 is titled, “Temporary requirement to suspend activities that are not necessary to sustain or protect life,” and it is quite specific about which activities are and are “not necessary.” . . .

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




 

COVID-19: The Democrat Disease

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Part of the developing liberal media narrative about COVID-19 pandemic is that black people are disproportionately impacted by the disease. The usual explanation for this is that black people have more “underlying conditions” — heart disease, Type II diabetes, etc. — that so often make the difference between having a mild case of coronavirus and having a serious case that might kill you. What goes unmentioned in such explanations is that black people are also disproportionately likely to live in high-density urban areas and to use public transportation. Why do you think New York City became such a death trap in this pandemic? Millions of people ride the subway there every day, and the city’s population density is the highest in America. Because urban life is also highly correlated with voting Democrat, the Chinese virus also has a partisan bias. Republican voters tend to live in suburbs, small towns and rural areas, regions where the COVID-19 infection rate is lower. A “stay-at-home” order will help reduce the spread of a contagious disease far more effectively if you live in a single-family home than if you live in a crowded apartment complex, and so the residential patterns of Democrats are part of the risk patterns that have political consequences.

Consider the case of Maryland. The state has long been deep “blue,” with two Democratic senators, seven of eight House seats controlled by Democrats (“one of the most gerrymandered states in the country”), and Democrats dominating the state legislature by a 2-to-1 margin. Nevertheless, in 2014, Maryland elected Republican Larry Hogan as governor and he has been so successful that, in 2018 — a terrible mid-term election for the GOP — Hogan was re-elected by a 12-point margin over former NAACP president Ben Jealous. If you look at the map of that 2018 election, you’ll see that the county with the largest margin for Jealous was Prince George’s. This is a D.C. suburb where the population is 65% black, the population density is 1,700 per square mile, and the Democrat got 71%, with 225,889 votes to Hogan’s 89,925. Compare that to Washington County, in the state’s western panhandle, where the population is about 10% black, the population density is 320 per square mile, and Hogan got 77%, with 38,765 votes to Jealous’s 10,894.

Based on what we know about the pattern of COVID-19 infections, what would you deduce about its impact in these two counties? As of Saturday, these were the county coronavirus numbers for Maryland:

 

As you can see, Prince George’s County had the most coronavirus cases (1,923) and the most deaths (50) of any jurisdiction in Maryland, while Washington County was near the low end, with only 72 known COVID-19 cases, and only one death. Here is a further analysis:

Prince George’s County
Population 909,327
COVID-19 cases (as of 4/11) ………………… 1,923
COVID-19 cases (per 100,000 residents) …. 211
COVID-19 deaths (as of 4/11) …………………. 50
COVID-19 cases (per 100,000 residents) …. 5.5

Washington County
Population 151,049
COVID-19 cases (as of 4/11) ……………………. 72
COVID-19 cases (per 100,000 residents) …. 48
COVID-19 deaths (as of 4/11) ………………….. 1
COVID-19 cases (per 100,000 residents) …. 0.7

So, the per-capita rate of COVID-19 cases in Prince George’s County is roughly 4.4 times higher than in Washington County, and death rate in Prince George’s County is nearly eight times higher. This remarkable differential is not a result of politics, nor can it be blamed on racism. Rather, the coronavirus infection rate reflects differences in lifestyle — e.g., urban vs. rural — that are also reflected in the partisan preferences of communities. This data is subject to misinterpretation, of course. The liberal media want to blame the disproportionate impact on the black community on racism and poverty, even though Prince George’s County “is the wealthiest African American-majority county in the United States,” and has a substantially higher median household income ($71,696) than majority-white Washington County ($52,994).

Let’s be clear: Nobody is “safe” from COVID-19. Being white or living in a rural area doesn’t make you immune to this disease, and the virus doesn’t care which party you vote for. However, risk is always a matter of statistical probability, and because the Democratic coalition is so heavily skewed toward urban voters, the outbreak of a contagious disease that spreads most rapidly in high-density communities with public transportation means that Democratic voters are most at risk.

(Thanks to John Hoge for help with statistical calculation.)




 

Jan. 30: ‘We Still Believe the Immediate Risk to the American Public Is Low’

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CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield.

The first five known cases of COVID-19 in the United States were all patients who had recently traveled to Wuhan, China.

Case No. 1 was in Snohomish County, Washington. Case No. 2 was in Chicago. Cases No. 3 and 4 were in Orange County, California, and Case No. 5 was in Maricopa County, Arizona. However, Case No. 6 was different. It was “the first instance of person-to-person spread with this new virus here,” as the CDC reported:

Previously, all confirmed U.S. cases had been associated with travel to Wuhan, China, where an outbreak of respiratory illness caused by this novel coronavirus has been ongoing since December 2019. However, this latest 2019-nCoV patient has no history of travel to Wuhan, but shared a household with the patient diagnosed with 2019-nCoV infection on January 21, 2020.
Recognizing early on that the 2019-nCoV could potentially spread between people, CDC has been working closely with state and local partners to identify close contacts of confirmed 2019-nCoV cases. Public health officials identified this Illinois resident through contact tracing. Both patients are in stable condition.
“Given what we’ve seen in China and other countries with the novel coronavirus, CDC experts have expected some person-to-person spread in the US,” said CDC Director Robert R. Redfield, M.D. “We understand that this may be concerning, but based on what we know now, we still believe the immediate risk to the American public is low.”

One of the repeated lies of the anti-Trump media is that the president failed to do what was necessary to prevent the spread of this disease. We are told, by Democrats and the media, that President Trump “wasted” six weeks during which he should have been . . . Well, doing something more than what he did, which was actually quite a lot.

On Jan. 29, Trump announced the formation of his Coronavirus Task Force, headed by HHS Secretary Alex Azar, and including the CDC director Dr. Redfield, who retired from the Army medical service with the rank of colonel, and whose medical specialty is viruses. On Jan. 31, Trump announced a ban on travel from China, which was controversial at the time. The same day Trump announced the ban, Joe Biden, campaigning in Iowa, accused the president of “hysterical xenophobia,” saying Trump was leading with “fearmongering . . . instead of science.”

The claim that Trump is “anti-science” has become part of the media’s narrative about the COVID-19 outbreak. Supposedly, a bias against science explains why the president didn’t do whatever it was that his critics, with the benefit of hindsight, say he should have done. What he actually did, however, was entirely in keeping with what the medical experts would have advised, given the circumstances. With only six known coronavirus cases in the U.S., five of them were people who had just returned from Wuhan, and the sixth was a household member of one of these travelers. So the first thing to do, obviously, was stop the arrival of more infected people from China, where the pandemic began and at the time had just been recognized as a “global emergency” by the WHO.

OK, so what happened next? As of Feb. 26 — nearly a month after Trump had created the coronavirus task force — there were still only 15 known cases of the disease in the United States. It was on Feb. 28 that Case No. 16 was identified in Santa Clara County, California:

Santa Clara County confirmed the second case of “community spread” of the new coronavirus in the United States, on Friday.
It is also the third novel coronavirus case in the county — and officials said it is not tied to the other two cases.
The individual tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. They had no contact with a known infected person and did not have any relevant travel history. . . .
The first case of community spread was reported just a day prior on Thursday in Solano County. The patient was transferred to the University of California, Davis Medical Center for treatment from NorthBay VacaValley Hospital in Vacaville, California.
Business Insider reported that the UC Davis patient also did not have a relevant travel history or have any contact with known infected people. A leaked internal memo showed that the woman was transferred to UC Davis on February 19, but initial efforts to have her tested for COVID-19 were rejected because she did not meet the previous CDC requirements.

At that point — where the 16th case had just been identified — there was not a single known COVID-19 case in New York or New Jersey. The only known case on the East Coast up to that point, was a man who had recently arrived in Boston from Wuhan, China, in late January. At that time, Boston Public Health Commission director Rita Nieves said, “The risk to the general public remains low.” And this continued to be the case throughout February, so that if you want to cherry-pick quotes by President Trump during that time saying that he believed we had the problem under control, and that the Wuhan coronavirus posed no serious risk to Americans, so what? This was the consensus of the medical community at the time. It was not until the first week of March that the outbreak began to escalate rapidly. New York Times, March 1:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Sunday confirmed New York State’s first case of the coronavirus, saying that a woman contracted the virus while traveling in Iran and is now in New York City isolated in her home.
“The patient has respiratory symptoms, but is not in serious condition and has been in a controlled situation since arriving to New York,” Governor Cuomo said in a statement.
The 39-year-old-woman is in Manhattan, according to state officials. She returned from Iran last week, and was tested after going to a hospital in the city; she has since been staying at home, officials said.
Early on Monday, the governor said the woman was a “unique case.” Appearing on CBS This Morning, he said she was a health care worker so “she knew to take precautions and stay in a controlled situation.” He added that she had not ridden public transportation since returning to New York.
Later, on CNN, he said he anticipated that “there will be community spread” but that “there’s no reason for concern.”

Andrew Cuomo, March 1: “There’s no reason for concern.”

How is it that Trump is being blamed for supposedly ignoring the danger of this disease, when the governor of New York — whose state now has thousands of residents dead from COVID-19 — described the news of the first case in the state as “no reason for concern”? At that point in time, Cuomo’s confidence seemed justified. There were still but a few dozen known cases of this disease in the country, and almost no one realized that, in a certain percentage of cases, people infected with the disease were asymptomatic, but still transmitting the virus to others.

One thing that did go wrong in the early federal response to the coronavirus pandemic was that the CDC and the FDA bungled the development and approval of testing, hindering identification of people with the virus. That was a bureaucratic snafu, for which Trump was not to blame, but because hindsight is always 20/20, we now know that COVID-19 was already spreading far beyond the known cases in late February and early March. For example, the outbreak in Dougherty County, Georgia, which is now one of the worst per-capita of any in the country, was spread at two funerals that took place on Feb. 29 and March 7.

Here we are, then, on Good Friday, with all the churches empty because of lockdown orders inspired by the pandemic, and the media continues promoting the narrative that Trump is to blame, because he is “anti-science.” Yet we see that many other officials — including the director of the CDC and the Democratic governor of New York — were not expressing fear of a widespread pandemic in January and February. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Mayor Bill DeBlasio of New York City was telling residents to go on with life as normal as late as March 11: “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life.”

More than 5,000 residents of New York City have died from COVID-19, and it took less than a month to compile that grisly total. The total number of coronavirus case for New York state, whose governor declared March 1 that there was “no reason for concern,” is 161,807 — more than Spain (157,053), Italy (147,577), France (124,869) or Germany (120,157).

There is plenty of blame to go around, if we want to point fingers, but shouldn’t we start with the Communist regime in Beijing? Oh, wait — didn’t somebody tell us not to worry about China?

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign released a new ad on Thursday attacking former Vice President Joe Biden for his past support of China.
“During America’s crisis, Biden protected China’s feelings,” the text of the ad reads.
The ad features Biden’s past positive comments about China, as more Americans suffer from the coronavirus that first came from China.
“It is in our self-interest that China continue to prosper,” Biden says in the ad.
The ad also features Biden toasting Xi Jinping at dinner and questions on Biden’s son Hunter’s investments in China.
Dr. Anthony Fauci also has a cameo in the campaign ad, praising the president enacting the China travel ban to help fight the virus.

 

Democrats who want to play politics with this virus are likely to discover, to their regret, that they cannot win that game.




 

Oregon’s Pointless COVID-19 Lockdown

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Wednesday, Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Kate Brown announced that the state’s public schools would not re-open this school year, and also extended “indefinitely” an order closing restaurants and bars. That order, issued last month, had been scheduled to end April 15.

A simple question: Why?

Oregon’s schools must be doing a lousy job of teaching arithmetic, to say nothing of basic science. According to CNN, Oregon (population 4.1 million) has had a total of 1,321 reported cases of COVID-19, with 44 deaths. That’s 31 cases per 100,000 population, a known infection rate 96% lower than the rate in New York. Your chances of dying of coronavirus in Oregon are slightly above one-in-a-million, and the vast majority of the cases are in a few cities, but the entire state remains under a stay-at-home order with no end in sight. The question remains: Why?

Jeff Stidham called my attention to a blog that is asking this question, and explains that Oregon is planning on a “surge” of COVID-19 cases, an expectation based on model projections which simply do not reflect the reality of the state’s coronavirus outbreak:

[T]he reason so many Governors locked down their states is because they were presented with data by the IHME that showed extreme death levels if lockdowns didn’t happen. Frankly, if I’d been presented with the IHME’s data I probably would have locked down Oregon, too. Here’s the problem: their data has proven to be disastrously wrong, and has overestimated death and hospitalization rates by 5-10x, which means they have been off by roughly 500-1,000%, which basically means their data has been useless. . . .
[A]ny peak for COVID-19 has not only ALREADY HAPPENED, but it was actually happening before Governor Brown’s lockdown order of March 23rd. Moreover, even if you accept the highly faulty model that Governor Brown is using that has never been right, even on our worst day it shows that our hospitals will barely be stretched with a forecast usage of 8.6% of current capacity.

The local press in Oregon is still relying on these projections, publishing headlines like “Oregon prepares for coronavirus surge,” despite the fact — clearly apparent from data published by Oregon’s health department — that the state’s “surge” in cases is already over.

Think about this: It takes a certain number of days between the time someone becomes infected with COVID-19 and the time they experience symptoms (if they ever do exhibit symptoms, since many cases seem to be asymptomatic). The reason for all the crisis messaging in March was that it was projected that a “surge” in cases would overwhelm the hospital system. Patients who experience only mild symptoms — they experience flu-like symptoms for a few days, then recover — and never require hospitalization are irrelevant to the public-health concerns about a possible shortage of hospital beds, ventilators, medical personnel, etc. Therefore, the important statistic to study is not the cumulative total of known COVID-ID cases, but rather the number of hospitalized patients.

The time delay between a person contracting the virus and being hospitalized is one factor to keep in mind when examining trends in the pandemic. Another factor is the time-lag between onset of symptoms and death, in those cases that prove to be fatal. In Italy, for example, their number of new cases peaked about six days before the daily number of deaths. The most recent Oregon coronavirus deaths:

Oregon’s 39th COVID-19 death is a 74-year-old man in Linn County, who tested positive on March 22 and died on April 3 at his residence. He had underlying medical conditions.
Oregon’s 40th COVID-19 death is a 97-year-old man in Linn County, who tested positive on March 15 and died on April 4 at his residence. He had underlying medical conditions.
Oregon’s 41st COVID-19 death is an 87-year-old woman in Multnomah County, who tested positive on March 28 and died on April 6 at her residence. She had underlying medical conditions.
Oregon’s 42nd COVID-19 death is a 41-year-old woman in Multnomah County, who tested positive on April 5 and died on April 8 at Oregon Health and Sciences University. She had underlying medical conditions.
Oregon’s 43rd COVID-19 death is a 66-year-old man in Multnomah County, who tested positive on March 31 and died on April 5 at his residence. He had underlying medical conditions.
Oregon’s 44th COVID-19 death is a 74-year-old man in Benton County, who tested positive on March 26 and died on April 8 at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis. He had underlying medical conditions.

So, these six patients tested positive between March 15 and April 5, and died between April 3 and April 8. The time between positive and death ranged from three days (patient #42) to 21 days (patient #40). All but one of these six deaths involved patients who had tested positive in March. And the number of new cases has been decreasing since the third week in March. Given that Oregon’s current case numbers are far from placing any strain on the state’s hospital capacity, that the known infection rate in Oregon is barely 3 in 10,000 residents, and that the state’s death rate of known cases is 3.3%, why is the entire state still locked down? Because the governor is a Democrat?