Category: Health Care

FDA Approves ‘Game Changer’ Drug

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This is very good news:

On Sunday night, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, drugs often used to treat malaria and recently touted by President Donald Trump as a possible “game-changer” in the fight against the China-originated novel coronavirus, or COVID-19.
The United States Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) announced in a statement on Sunday that the FDA will allow the drugs to be “donated to the Strategic National Stockpile to be distributed and prescribed by doctors to hospitalized teen and adult patients with COVID-19, as appropriate, when a clinical trial is not available or feasible,” a Politico report said.
The statement noted that “Sandoz donated 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine to the stockpile and Bayer donated 1 million doses of chloroquine.”
Trump made it clear weeks ago that his administration would work to fast-track promising drugs like hydroxychloroquine with the FDA, all in an effort to combat COVID-19.
Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is on the same page as President Trump when it comes to the popular anti-malaria drugs, permitting trials of hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine, and azithromycin to commence in his state.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) As I mentioned Sunday, an Orthodox Jewish doctor in New York publicized his own results using chloroquine and azithromycin via Sean Hannity, who in turn went directly to Vice President Mike Pence — how influential was that in putting pressure on the FDA to fast-track this approval?

Glenn Reynolds notices that Politico asserts there is “scant evidence” for the effectiveness of chloroquine, despite the actual evidence from French studies, which are not “scant” at all. It’s almost as if journalists were suffering from an “Orange Man Bad” disease, or something.




 

Trump Was RIGHT: Chloroquine Works Against Coronavirus, Doctor Says

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An Orthodox Jewish doctor in New York has become internationally famous after announcing that the anti-malarial drug chloroquine, touted as a coronavirus treatment by President Trump, has proven effective in treating hundreds of patients. Dr. Vladimir Zelenko publicized his trial of the drug in an unusual manner — by emailing Sean Hannity.

Dr. Zelenko was interviewed on Hannity’s radio program Monday afternoon, and by Monday night, Vice President Mike Pence was on Fox News responding to what Dr. Zelenko had told Hannity:

Mr. Vice President, I’m holding up a letter. I’m going to read from it from a second, from a doctor in the New York area, and if I may read from it — he has now worked with his — his associates and he has a regimen.
Hydroxychloroquine, 200 milligrams twice a day, five days. Azithromycin, 500 milligrams once a day, five days. Zinc sulfate, 220 milligrams once a day for five days. This is what he has seen, him and his team have now treated approximately 350 patients in Kiryas Joel, it was an area of New York that was hit particularly hard and another 150 patients and other New York areas.
His results, we have had zero deaths, zero hospitalizations, zero intubations, zero.

 

This is anecdotal, and Hannity’s medical experts were cautious in assessing the scientific validity of Dr. Zelenko’s claims:

 

While it would be a mistake to assume this to be a “silver bullet” based on the claims of a single physician, the combination of chloroquine and azithromycin (an antibiotic) is now being used to treat more coronavirus patients around the country. President Trump’s role in calling attention to this treatment has been controversial, but so far it appears that he has been vindicated, and lives are being saved as a result.




 

A Curse Be Upon Them: NY Times Blames America’s Christianity for #Coronavirus

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The New York Times is published by atheist perverts who hate America, and who have covered themselves in disgrace for decades. They forfeited whatever credibility they still had when they refused to return the Pulitzer they got for Walter Duranty’s Stalinist propaganda during the Soviet “show trial” era, and their irresponsible reporting about the Duke University rape hoax helped incite a campus firestorm that, among other things, radicalized Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

Now, however, the New York Times has blasphemed against the Most High, and has viciously attacked God’s people, in an op-ed column blaming Christians for the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak:

The argument, by journalist and author Katherine Stewart, is that because religious voters supported Trump, that means he governs without regard for science.
Stewart also claims that Republicans, more than Democrats, are likely to deny science.
In her op-ed, titled “The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals,” she writes:

Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.
At least since the 19th century, when the proslavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as “theories of unbelief,” hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States.

She then goes on to provide several quotes from pastors who pushed back against the idea of closing their churches.
Stewart admits: “By all accounts, President Trump’s tendency to trust his gut over the experts on issues like vaccines and climate change does not come from any deep-seated religious conviction.”
But she adds: “But he is perfectly in tune with the religious nationalists who form the core of his base.”

 

Putting aside, for now, the partisan bias involved — Ms. Stewart and the New York Times are only against religion when it gives them an opportunity to attack Republicans — what of their effrontery in defaming the 19th-century Presbyterian theologian R.L. Dabney? They might as well have dragged down in the mud the names of Knox, Calvin and Luther, and indeed all of the Apostles, as no honest student of the Bible could ever have disputed Dabney’s faithfulness to the Gospel.

You would never see the New York Times smearing Muslims this way, and indeed they would be the first to scream “Islamophobia!” at anyone who dared mention the many Muslim beliefs and practices that liberals might otherwise find objectionable. Likewise, you won’t find any criticism of the (alleged) Catholicism of Andrew Cuomo or Nancy Pelosi in the New York Times. It is only those Christians who vote Republican whose faith is routinely impugned by the New York Times.

By the way, do you know how it was that Katherine Stewart came to be an “expert” on the Religious Right? A Boston native, she moved to California where the local public school had a Bible study club, as approved by the Supreme Court in its 2001 decision Good News Club v. Milford Central School. Stewart became so angry that such a club existed that she wrote an entire book about this vast right-wing conspiracy “to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity.”

There is a specific set of “fundamentalist” beliefs that the Left finds objectionable. To believe in Sola Scriptura — the authority of the Bible — is objectionable to the Left, since a Bible-based faith contradicts the moral relativism and man-made authority the Left prefers.

Supposedly, the Bible is “anti-science,” and therefore Christians are to blame for the spread of coronavirus in the United States. This argument fails to explain, of course, why the Chinese in Wuhan were eating bats, a practice specifically condemned by the Bible (Deuteronomy 12:18).

This column by Katherine Stewart (@kathsstewart on Twitter) is the point of no return. By publishing this column, the New York Times has finally — unmistakably and irrevocably — declared war on God. Let us pray that the Almighty will pour out His undiluted wrath upon them. Let them go bankrupt and be utterly obliterated. Pray to God that this destruction should come upon them suddenly, “as a thief in the night.”

Selah.




 

Italy Takes a Turn for the Worse

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After five days of apparent improvement, Italy’s coronavirus outbreak worsened Friday, when the country reported more than 900 deaths:

The number of people who have died of novel coronavirus in Italy has risen by 969 in the past day, the biggest daily jump since the crisis began.
The total number of deaths now stands at 9,134, according to Italy’s Civil Protection Agency, more than any other country.
There has been an increase of 4,401 coronavirus cases in the past day, Italy’s Civil Protection Agency said.
The total number of recorded coronavirus cases in Italy, including deaths and those who recovered, now stands at 86,498.
The 969 figure includes 50 deaths that were not included in Thursday’s figures. The previous biggest spike in deaths came last Saturday, when there was an increase of 793.
Since the beginning of the crisis in Italy, 51 doctors who tested positive for the disease have died, the Italian Association of Doctors said Friday. Of those doctors, 32 were working in Lombardy, the Italian region worst-hit by coronavirus.
A total of 6,414 health care workers have been infected as of Thursday, according to the Italian National Institute of Health.

The previous highest number of daily coronavirus deaths in Italy was 793 last Saturday, and by Monday, they had fallen to 601. However, the daily number of new Wuhan virus cases, which also peaked last Saturday at 6,557, has since remained below that mark. Italy’s caseload is still very high, and increasing, as the number of new cases reported daily greatly exceeds the number of patients reported as recovered from the disease.

Meanwhile, in the United States, 18,691 new cases of Chinese coronavirus were reported Friday, and 401 deaths. Here are the latest state-by-state numbers, according to CNN:

New York ………………….. 44,635 (519 deaths)
New Jersey …………………. 8,825 (108 deaths)
California …………………….. 3,801 (78 deaths)
Washington …………………. 3,723 (175 deaths)
Michigan ……………………… 3,657 (92 deaths)
Massachusetts ……………… 3,240 (35 deaths)
Florida ………………………… 3,192 (45 deaths)
Illinois …………………………. 3,026 (34 deaths)
Louisiana ……………………… 2,746 (119 deaths)
Pennsylvania ……………….. 2,218 (22 deaths)
Georgia ……………………….. 2,198 (65 deaths)

The top 10 states account for 81,261 cases, which is 80% of the total of 101,241 coronavirus cases reported in the United States. Two states, New York and New Jersey, account for more than half the U.S total. The situation in New York is bad and getting worse:

More than a third of the country’s cases are in New York — which has been in a partial lockdown for a week as officials try to slow the spread of the virus and hospitals scramble to keep up with the patients streaming in.
The state’s healthcare system is already overwhelmed. One hospital was forced to create a makeshift morgue and another reported 13 patient deaths in 24 hours. New York and its National Guard are now assembling four 1,000-bed temporary, overflow hospitals in existing buildings.

If you look at the state-by-state numbers, you’ll see that, as a percentage of population, the Wuhan virus has had much less impact in California and Florida, compared to New York, while Texas, with only 1,731 cases, has been particularly fortunate thus far. Dig down a little deeper in the numbers, and you discover that in Florida, for example, their COVID-19 cases have been highly concentrated in three South Florida counties — Dade (869), Broward (631) and (241) — which combined account for nearly 55% (1,741) of the statewide total of cases. These counties have a combined population of about 6 million, which is less than 30% of Florida’s total population of about 21 million. What this suggests is that people living in Florida’s urban centers face substantially higher risk from the virus, and this is probably true nationwide.

Of course, there is no such thing as 100% safety, but during a pandemic of contagious disease, rural life is much safer than city life.




 

‘Chinese Bat Soup Flu’ Update

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Hat-tip to Kurt Schlicter for giving this pandemic a memorable name. It’s going to get worse — perhaps a whole lot worse — before it gets better, but in the meantime, we can figure out what went wrong, and caution about what’s still going wrong. The first and most important thing President Trump needs to do now is to halt domestic flight departures from New York City-area airports:

New Yorkers who flee to Florida during the coronavirus outbreak will have to self quarantine for two weeks when they arrive — or risk facing criminal charges, the Sunshine State’s governor said Monday.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said he was issuing the executive order that would apply to all travelers from New York City, which, as of Monday, has recorded 12,305 cases of the virus. By comparison, Florida so far has 1,100 cases.
The order also applies to areas surrounding the Big Apple, but DeSantis didn’t specify the exact perimeter.
The Florida governor said about 100 flights from New York City and the surrounding area arrive to his state daily. He said he believes at least one person aboard each flight is infected with the illness.
DeSantis at an earlier Monday press conference said, “We are getting huge amounts of people flying in. We are looking at how to address those flights.”
“In New York (City), when they did the stay-at-home order, what did people do? A lot of people fled the city and they are going to stay with their parents or fly (out),” DeSantis said.

With a large elderly population, Florida is uniquely vulnerable, and New York is now the U.S. epicenter of the Chinese Bat Soup Flu pandemic. New York and New Jersey combined have 23,719 reported cases of the virus, which is more than half (55.6%) of all U.S. cases (42,663). It is irresponsible to allow residents of such a “red zone” to hop on a plane and fly anywhere in the country, taking the virus with them. If you have 100 people on a plane leaving LaGuardia, JFK or Newark, chances are at least one of those passengers will be infected. Do you want them flying to your state? Ground those planes, Mr. President.

To get an idea of the way these pandemics can spread, here’s a story about a bunch of people who got sick after attending a March 5 party in Connecticut, and here’s a story about how one nursing home in Washington State became a “red zone.” While I have always been an optimist about America’s ability to fight this disease — and remember, I was potentially exposed to the virus when I covered CPAC — we cannot afford the kind of stupid errors that create these “red zones.” You don’t want the job of explaining to your kids that Grandma died because you didn’t practice proper hygiene and “social distancing.”

If we can just maintain quarantine conditions another week or two, there is every reason to believe that we will be past the the worst of it:

Those of us trying to predict what direction the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic will take in the United States have been paying close attention to reports from Italy. And until Sunday, the outlook there kept going from bad to worse.
For nearly two weeks after the Italian government imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 9, the daily number of coronavirus deaths mounted rapidly. On Friday, it was reported that 627 Italians died from the disease, as the country’s cumulative death toll passed 4,000. This was shocking, but then on Saturday, Italy reported that 793 more people had died from the virus.
If, like me, you have been laser-focused on this situation for the past week, you mentally braced yourself for Italy to report an even larger number on Sunday, but then breathed a sigh of relief when it was reported that only 651 Italians died of coronavirus. This was small consolation, as Italy — a nation with a population about 60 million — has already suffered more than 6,000 dead in this pandemic, with a total of more than 60,000 coronavirus cases and thousands of new infections still being reported every day. Yet Sunday’s numbers from Italy were a much-needed cause for hope, and this was followed by a further decrease in Monday’s reported deaths — down to 602, a 24-percent decline from Saturday’s peak. . . .

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




 

#Coronavirus: The Italian Catastrophe and the Pandemic Danger to America

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Everybody complaining about the economic impact of shutdowns, quarantines and “shelter-in-place” orders to deal with the Chinese coronavirus pandemic should take a hard look at Italy. As I have pointed out, Italy was particularly vulnerable to this disease because they had a large number of Chinese workers — 300,000 nationwide — mostly employed in the fashion industry. (Also, Italy had more Chinese tourists than any other European country, about 5 million annually.) A lot Chinese workers in Italy traveled to China for the Lunar New Year celebration Jan. 24, and then evidently brought the virus back with them when they returned to Italy in late January/early February.

As pointed out by Tyler O’Neill at PJMedia and Stacey Matthews at Legal Insurrection, the initial response to the Wuhan virus outbreak in Italy was impeded by social justice concerns about anti-Chinese “racism.” The mayor of Florence, for example, took to social media in early February to promote the politically correct message “hug a Chinese”!

 

The fear of inciting anti-Chinese “racism” among the Italian populace had a harmful impact on that country’s initial reaction to the outbreak of a disease which indeed originated in China, but when Italy finally got serious about the pandemic, they got very serious.

On March 9, a nationwide lockdown order went into effect. At that time, there had been fewer than 500 coronavirus deaths in Italy. Now, less than two weeks later, the cumulative death toll is approaching 5,000, and Saturday there were nearly 800 coronavirus deaths in a single day reported in Italy. Some accounts suggest Italy is wrongly exaggerating their coronavirus death toll, but I think this suggestion is dubious. Even if Italy’s death toll includes cancer patients, AIDS patients or diabetes sufferers who might have died even if they hadn’t caught this virus, such considerations do not reduce the expenditure of resources devoted to treating these vulnerable people with underlying health issues. America has lots of vulnerable people, too, and if they get the Wuhan virus, nurses and doctors will have to treat them. That is the problem.

While I have never been someone who automatically trusts “experts,” the concerns of medical experts about the Wuhan virus pandemic deserve our careful consideration. What worries them is that there is a finite number of beds in intensive-care units, and a finite number of ventilators, which are needed to treat the severe respiratory problems that this disease causes. Reports from Italy indicate that, even apart from the coronavirus death tolls — which is scary enough — their medical facilities are being strained to the max in an effort to keep up with the number of patients requiring ICU treatment.

“Well,” says my patriotic American reader, “we’re better than Italy.”

True enough, but there are limits to what even American ingenuity can accomplish. Let us assume that President Trump waives all the regulations that might otherwise slow U.S. production of ventilators and other medical supplies necessary to deal with coronavirus patients. But what about doctors and nurses? We can’t educate thousands of new medical professionals in a matter of weeks, so the human resources necessary to treat tens of thousands of coronavirus patients is going to be strained — overtime shifts, 70-hour weeks, etc. — and every hour of a nurse’s time spent treating a coronavirus patient is an hour not spent treating patients with other medical problems.

Imagine being an expectant mother nearing your delivery date, when hospitals are trying to cope with this deadly viral pandemic!

Do you see now why the situation in Italy is so scary?

On the day Italy imposed a nationwide lockdown, they reported 97 new deaths. That seemed shocking at the time — a hundred a day! — but in the past 12 days, Italy’s daily death-toll has increased eight-fold. There are about 60 million people in Italy, whereas we have about 330 million here. If we cannot bring this pandemic under control — if we can’t “flatten the curve,” as they say — our number of coronavirus deaths could rapidly escalate to the point where many hundreds of Americans are dying every day. As I pointed out Saturday, 11 states have 87% of reported U.S. coronavirus deaths, so the other 39 states are comparatively safe. That’s good news, if you live in Iowa, Idaho, Alabama or one of the other states with zero deaths so far. If you don’t live in one of the pandemic “hot” zones — Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, New Orleans, etc. — the economic impact of lockdowns and quarantines may seem excessive, but the alternative is a loss of the safety you’ve had so far.

We can watch the progress of the pandemic in Italy and extrapolate the probable course the Wuhan virus outbreak here. The bad news is, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Italy went into lockdown about a week before similar measures were imposed in most U.S. cities, and yet the Italian outbreak continues to escalate. We can therefore project that the number of American cases will continue doubling every three days or so for the foreseeable future, and the death toll will keep mounting. Death by coronavirus generally takes two or three weeks from the time the patient first exhibits symptoms, so that patients who will die during the week of April 6-12, who were exposed to the virus a week ago, may just now be experiencing their first fever, cough, etc.

The good news is that, eventually, the Wuhan virus pandemic in Italy will peak, and the daily death toll will decline. My hunch — and it’s just a hunch — is that Italy will pass that peak sometime in the next 10-14 days. The cumulative number of coronavirus cases reported in Italy will still keep increasing (because it’s cumulative, after all), but the number of deaths reported each day will start going down, and once that happens, it will be possible to begin thinking about how soon it will be safe to end the quarantine orders, to re-open bars and restaurants, etc. Our situation in the U.S. will probably lag a week or two behind the progress in Italy, so by late April, the worst of the Chinese virus scare could be over.

Let’s hope so, anyway. In the meantime, we’ve got at least another month of “social distancing” ahead of us, and I must once again urge everyone to read this article about symptoms of the disease.




 

Madness: Teachers Accuse NYC Schools of Covering Up Chinese Coronavirus Threat

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New York City is now the U.S. epicenter of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, with more than 8,000 cases and 60 deaths from the disease. The most shocking fact is how deeply the city’s school system is implicated in this outbreak. People need to go to prison for this:

One after another, sick Brooklyn Technical High School teachers called union chapter leader Nate Bonheimer last week, to tell him they’d tested positive for COVID-19.
By Friday, five of them had shared the devastating news. But after being notified about each one, the city Department of Education still ordered the 6,000-student school’s 350 staffers to show up for work last week, saying the building had been cleaned.
“The DOE did not close the school for any of the cases,” said Bonheimer, who worries that inaction exposed others to the dreaded infection.
The city failed to follow a March 9 directive by the state Education Department that “requires an initial 24-hour closure, in order to begin an investigation to determine the contacts that the individual may have had within the school environment.”
DOE did not attempt to identify close contacts, Bonheimer said. “They did not alert the people who needed to know the most to protect themselves, their families and everyone else they came into contact with.”
One infected teacher was so torn by the secrecy he took it upon himself to personally let all his students know his condition.
Around the city, teachers and administrators are outraged that Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza resisted a drum beat to close the public schools in the name of safety. . . .
Some DOE employees believe de Blasio and Carranza deliberately kept the lid on the COVID-19 cases popping up, putting kids and families at risk.
“The blood is on their hands,” one said.
DOE staffers think the two city leaders tried to cover up the cases because they wanted to keep the 1.1-million-student system running despite increasing pressure to shut it down. Finally, with Gov. Andrew Cuomo about to do it, the mayor relented and closed the schools for students on March 16. . . .

Pause to think about this. On March 12, Maryland and Ohio — which have but a fraction of the number of cases in New York — ordered the closure of schools, yet New York City’s schools stayed open until March 16. Now brace yourself for something that will boil your blood:

The information freeze started March 10, when Carranza, in an email obtained by The Post, told administrators not to alert city health officials about COVID-19 cases among students or staff.
“At the moment, there is no reason for any school to call [the Health Department] to report potential or confirmed cases,” Carranza wrote, repeating the statement later in the same email. . . .
At several campuses and DOE offices citywide, multiple staffers have tested positive but affected buildings remained open while workers, students and parents were kept in the dark, whistleblowers said.
At the Grand Street campus in Williamsburg, which houses three high schools, a teacher returned from a trip to China over the February break. Despite reports of the outbreak, the teacher did not self-quarantine, but returned to teach kids in all three schools Feb. 26 through Feb. 29, a staffer said.
The teacher then became sick and stopped working. The school was not closed, and employees were not notified, insiders said.
Up to four other staffers have since become sick, they said.

This is sheer madness. Why would a teacher travel to China at a time when this dangerous virus outbreak was going on there? I mean, Trump shut off incoming flights from China on Feb. 3, and yet this Brooklyn teacher went to China nearly three weeks later, and taught for four days before falling ill? And then — to add insult to injury — the city’s department of education suppressed the information about this COVID-19 case? This is criminal negligence. Hell, it’s nearly manslaughter!

People in the Democrat-controlled fiefdom of New York City — the voters who elected this dishonest scumbag De Blasio, and who send vile subhuman monsters like Chuck Schumer to Congress — think they’re smarter than all the ordinary folks in “flyover country” who vote Republican. New Yorkers should be ashamed of themselves, but if they had any sense of shame, they wouldn’t vote for Democrats, would they?

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

By the way, as a public service, I ask that everybody carefully read this article about how symptoms of the disease manifest, and share it with everyone in your social networks. It could save many lives.




 

#Coronavirus: The ‘Grisly Calculus’

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First, news from the Associated Press:

Illinois and New York state joined California on Friday in ordering all residents to stay in their homes unless they have vital reasons to go out, restricting the movement of more than 70 million Americans in the most sweeping measures undertaken yet in the U.S. to contain the coronavirus.
The states’ governors acted in a bid to fend off the kind of onslaught that has caused the health system in southern Europe to buckle. The lockdowns encompass the three biggest cities in America — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — as well as No. 8 San Diego and No. 14 San Francisco.

OK, the reason we have been getting scary warnings from public officials is because (a) they’ve seen what happened in Italy, and (b) there are limits to the number of urgent-care facilities available to treat severe cases of Wuhan coronavirus. In Italy, the death toll, which was 197 two weeks ago (March 6) is now 4,032, and they reported 627 deaths in the past 24 hours. As of 8:36 p.m. ET Friday, CNN was reporting that there had been 241 U.S. deaths from coronavirus, so if the pandemic here follows the trajectory in Italy, we could have more than 1,000 total deaths by Wednesday, and over 2,000 deaths by the end of the month.

Notice I’m counting deaths, rather than the reported number of infections. The reason for this is that death is a fixed target, whereas identifying people who are infected is variable. It has been reported that about 80% of people infected with Wuhan coronavirus have only mild symptoms — a few days of sniffling and sneezing, no different than the common cold — and some have no symptoms at all. There has been a shortage of tests for the virus, and many U.S. patients have only been tested in the past few days, so we can expect a significant upswing in the number of known cases over the next week or so, but that does not necessarily mean the actual number of cases is increasing. Therefore, I’m focusing strictly on the number of deaths from the virus.

According to CNN, these are the top 10 states:

1. Washington ……. 82 deaths
2. New York ……….. 39 deaths
3. California ……….. 23 deaths
4. Louisiana ……….. 14 deaths
5. Georgia ………….. 13 deaths
6. New Jersey …….. 11 deaths
7. Florida ……………. 9 deaths
8. Texas ………………. 5 deaths
9. Illinois ……………… 5 deaths
10. Colorado …………. 4 deaths
(tie) Connecticut …… 4 deaths

Of the total U.S. deaths (241), these 11 states account for 87%, and the top three states account for 60% of the total. In other words, 39 states so far have only 13% of the total U.S. deaths. While we can expect some shifts as the number of deaths nationwide increase, it is unlikely that the overall distribution will change significantly. That is to say, the 21 states that have so far reported zero deaths from Wuhan coronavirus (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming) almost certainly will never be among the states most severely hit by this pandemic. A certain number of people in those states will get sick and die, but “social distancing” will limit the transmission of the virus, so that the worst impact of the disease will be in those communities where it is now most widespread. Most restaurants and bars are already closed, “shelter in place” orders have been imposed in several states and localities, and the areas now (relatively) free of the virus will probably be spared the worst of it. How soon will we know?

The key will be to keep track of (a) the total number of U.S. deaths, and (b) the percentage of deaths in the top 10 states in comparison to the rest of the country. As I say, the number of people reported as infected may increase rapidly without telling us very much. You could test positive for Wuhan coronavirus and never get very sick at all. It’s the serious cases requiring hospitalization that will put a strain on our health-care system, and the number of deaths will be a good barometer of how that’s going.

If you don’t have any symptoms, you don’t need to be tested. The media are panicking about the lack of testing because guess what? The media are based in urban centers where the risk of getting this disease is much higher than it is for Americans living out in the boondocks. An NBC News employee has died of Wuhan coronavirus, and two other NBC News staffers have tested positive for the virus. The panic over the disease is higher in “blue” states for a reason, as Ron Brownstein explains:

In several key respects, the outbreak’s early stages are unfolding very differently in Republican- and Democratic-leaning parts of the country. That disconnect is already shaping, even distorting, the nation’s response to this unprecedented challenge—and it could determine the pandemic’s ultimate political consequences as well.
A flurry of new national polls released this week reveals that while anxiety about the disease is rising on both sides of the partisan divide, Democrats consistently express much more concern about it than Republicans do, and they are much more likely to say they have changed their personal behavior as a result. A similar gap separates people who live in large metropolitan centers, which have become the foundation of the Democratic electoral coalition, from those who live in the small towns and rural areas that are the modern bedrock of the GOP. . . .
So far, the greatest clusters of the disease, and the most aggressive responses to it, have indeed been centered in a few large, Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas, including Seattle, New York, San Francisco, and Boston. At yesterday’s White House press briefing, Deborah Birx, the administration’s response coordinator, said half of the nation’s cases so far are located in just 10 counties. . . .
Democrats now dominate the places in the U.S. most integrated into the global economy, which may be more likely to receive international visitors or see their own residents travel abroad.
On the case-tracking website maintained by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering, each of the four states with the largest number of coronavirus cases is a Democratic-leaning place along the coast: New York, Washington, California, and New Jersey. Florida, a coastal, internationally oriented state that leans slightly toward the GOP, ranks fifth. Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Texas, each with at least one big urban center that functions as a gateway for tourism and trade, come in next. And though the Johns Hopkins project isn’t publishing precise county and municipal data on the outbreak, the biggest clusters of disease have all erupted in a few large metropolitan areas.

So if, like me, you live in a rural area and don’t travel abroad, your risk of exposure to Wuhan coronavirus is smaller than people who live in Democrat-dominated urban areas — including New York and D.C. where the national press corps is based. The existing lockdowns, and the effectiveness of the “social distancing” regime, can be expected to limit the spread of the disease to areas currently unaffected by the pandemic. So while the number of deaths nationwide will continue to increase — and, based on what’s happened in Italy, we will probably see the rate of increase accelerate — most of those deaths will be in the urban centers. The elderly and people with underlying medical problems are at greater risk everywhere, but they are at less risk in rural areas than in cities.

Heather Mac Donald has pointed out that “there were 38,800 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2019 . . . an average of over one hundred traffic deaths every day.” Even in Italy, the country hit hardest by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, there have been fewer than 5,000 deaths. Comparing the coronavirus risk to other potential causes of death is a “grisly calculus,” Mac Donald admits, but it is the only way to put this into proper perspective and avoid panic.

In the meantime, don’t eat any bats and avoid people who do eat bats.