The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Italy Takes a Turn for the Worse

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 […]

‘Chinese Bat Soup Flu’ Update

  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 […]

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

  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 […]

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

  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 […]

#Coronavirus: The ‘Grisly Calculus’

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. […]

Coronavirus: Why Italy?

  It was reported yesterday that Italy now has more coronavirus deaths than China, and that there were zero new cases in Wuhan. Everyone immediately became skeptical: Is Beijing lying again? But there’s another important question: Why has this pandemic hit Italy so hard? Saturday, I suggested the likely answer: Almost no one in the […]

Stop Pretending We Don’t Know Exactly How and Where This Pandemic Started

  Two words you should add to your vocabulary — zoonosis and zoonotic: A zoonosis (plural zoonoses, or zoonotic diseases) is an infectious disease caused by bacteria, viruses, or parasites that spread from non-human animals (usually vertebrates) to humans. Major modern diseases such as Ebola virus disease and salmonellosis are zoonoses. The Wuhan coronavirus is a […]

Fear Not: Why Older Americans Are Less Panicked About Wuhan Coronavirus

  Fear can be rational or irrational. If you live in West Baltimore, for example, being afraid of violent crime is entirely rational. Yet even if you live in a low-crime rural area, you may take precautions — a home alarm system, firearms ownership, etc. — without being accused of paranoia, because “better safe than […]

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