The Other McCain

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

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

Posted on | April 14, 2020 | 1 Comment

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.




 

Category: Health Care

In The Mailbox: 04.13.20

Posted on | April 13, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Texans Are Still Armed
EBL: Democrats & Media Desperately Trying To Spin Disease Disaster
Twitchy: POTUS Savages Media With Video Clips For Downplaying COVID-19 Threat; Networks Pull Away
Louder With Crowder: NYT Deletes Tweet About Joe Biden Sexual Assault Charge
Vox Popoli: And Then They Came For Anime, also, Corona-Chan Hates Fatties

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Easter & Truth
American Conservative: Michael Gerson’s Tedious Anti-Trumpism
American Greatness: Herd Immunity vs. Herd Mentality, also, The Resistance Fights To Keep The Country Locked Down
American Power: Playmate Iryna Updates
American Thinker: How Long Has Corona-Chan Really Been In America? also, I’m a High-Risk Person, And I Object To The Coronavirus Panic
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Remember Elian Gonzalez? Twenty Years Ago Today
Baldilocks: The Illegal & Unconstitutional Actions Of President Barack Obama, Part I
BattleSwarm: Our Horrible, incompetent Media, Coronavirus Edition, also, Say Goodbye To The Clown Car And Hello To BidenWatch!
Cafe Hayek: The Economy Is An Immense Web, Not A Series of Chains
CDR Salamander: Lies, Damn Lies, And A Fired CO
Da Tech Guy: Don’t Think We Ain’t Keeping Score, also, Bleeding The American Economy
Don Surber: Media Roots For COVID-19 Over Hydroxychloroquine, also, Highlights Of The News
First Street Journal: Nothing Quite Says “Freedom Of The Press” Like Government Paying For It
Fred On Everything: It’s A Man’s World
The Geller Report: Coronavirus Is Exposing Little Dictators All Over The Country, also, MI Governor Bans Sales Of Seeds & Gardening Supplies
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, “Chinese Chernobyl”
Hollywood In Toto: FLASHBACK – Lady Gaga Joins Joe Biden For #MeToo PSA, also, Why American Psycho Doesn’t Want Our Love Or Pity
JustOneMinute: A Goofy Poll On The Origin Of Coronavirus
Legal Insurrection: Federal Court Bars Louisville Mayor From Banning Easter Sunday Drive-In Service, also, Government Gone Wild – MI Governor Bans Sale Of “Non-Essentials” Like Seeds For Gardening
Michelle Malkin: Settling Into A New Home
The PanAm Post: Maduro’s Aides Shipped 1.3 Tons Of Cocaine From Venezuela To France, also, WHO’s Red Chinese Loyalties
Power Line: What Would We Do Without Experts? also, Chloroquine Effectiveness Vs. Coronaviruses Documented In 2005
Shark Tank: FL Ag Commissioner Nikki Fried Hypocritically Violates Stay At Home Order
Shot In The Dark: Declaring The Causes That Impel Us
STUMP: Mortality With Meep – Major U.S. Mortality Trends 1955-2017
The Political Hat: Concerning The Coronavirus
This Ain’t Hell: Even A Blind Chipmunk, also, Toilet Paper Cakes Selling Like Toilet Paper
Victory Girls: Anthony Fauci Wrong About A Whole Lot
Volokh Conspiracy: “On Holy Thursday, An American Mayor Criminalized The Communal Celebration Of Easter”
Weasel Zippers: Alyssa Milano Tries To Justify #MeToo Double Standard For Joe Biden, also, Attorney General Barr Taking Action Against Government Officials Who Regulate Religious Services
Mark Steyn: JFK, also, Let It Be

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Category: Linkagery

COVID-19: The Insanity Pandemic

Posted on | April 13, 2020 | Comments Off on COVID-19: The Insanity Pandemic

 

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.




 

Category: Democrats, Health Care, Michigan

COVID-19: The Democrat Disease

Posted on | April 12, 2020 | 3 Comments

 

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.)




 

Category: Democrats, Health Care, Maryland, Racism

The Apocalypse Will Be Blogged

Posted on | April 11, 2020 | Comments Off on The Apocalypse Will Be Blogged

 

Let’s see: Deadly pandemic escapes from a Chinese bioweaponry research lab, swarms of locusts cover Africa and, meanwhile, a volcano erupts:

The Indonesian volcano Anak Krakatau erupted Friday, spewing a large plume of ash 9 miles into the air.
At approximately 11 p.m. local time, the volcano’s loud eruption was reportedly heard by people in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, located more than 90 miles away. Images taken from a webcam near the area show lava flowing from the volcano.
The strong eruption is believed to be the most forceful since December 2018, when it produced a deadly tsunami that killed over 400 people on the coasts of southeastern Sumatra and western Java.
Anak Krakatau, which translates to “the child of Krakatoa,” was formed after Krakatoa erupted in 1883 with a massive explosion 10,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The eruption killed approximately 36,000 people, destroyed hundreds of villages, and ash traveled as far as Europe. Later studies show that eruption likely lowered global temperatures for years.

Not saying it’s a sign of the Apocalypse but . . . OF COURSE it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. Repent, sinners. The end is nigh upon us.




 

Category: Fear. Loathing., Indonesia

The Video You MUST Watch: Origins of the Chinese Communist Virus

Posted on | April 11, 2020 | 1 Comment

Joshua Philipp of the Epoch Times has spent weeks reporting on the pandemic of COVID-19, and this video — nearly an hour long — is full of facts about the case I hadn’t known until I watched it. The official explanation, that the disease originated in a “wet market,” looks very dubious when you consider evidence indicating (not proving, but indicating) its origin in a government research laboratory. This not a conspiracy theory, and Philipp is not saying that China’s Communist Party intentionally inflicted this pandemic on the world. What he is saying is that you shouldn’t trust anything Beijing says about it.

 

Watch it and share it widely with your friends.




 

Category: China

In The Mailbox: 04.10.20

Posted on | April 10, 2020 | 3 Comments

– compiled by Wombat-socho

Happy birthday to Mandy Moore!

When she was much younger.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Just Give Them What They Want
Red Pilled Jew: Must Watch/Must Share – “The Islamization Of Europe”
EBL: Gregorian Chants For Good Friday
Twitchy: PBS Reporter At Coronavirus Briefing Asks Stupidest Question Ever Asked Of Surgeon General
Louder With Crowder: Remember All The Times The Media Downplayed The Coronavirus? We Do.
According To Hoyt: When Insanity Bites, also, Attention Citizens
Monster Hunter Nation: There’s an MHI Story In The Overruled Anthology, also, A Murder Of Manatees, Free This Month
Vox Popoli: Secret King Wins Again! also, Deglobalization Begins

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Great Cleanout Edition
American Conservative: Are We Entering A New Era Of State Nullification?
American Greatness: WHO, Red China Under Fire For China Virus Shenanigans, also, Pandemic Waste In Higher Education
American Thinker: Will The Coronavirus Pandemic Derail China’s Global Ambitions?
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Tax Scam Friday
Babalu Blog: Good Friday Blessings To All
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For April 10
Cafe Hayek: “We” Should Leave Us Alone
CDR Salamander: What The Navy Knew About COVID-19 on 19 MAR 2020, also, No Rush On SECNAV Hearings
Da Tech Guy: A Question For All Our Democrat Friends Who Support Mail-In Voting With No Voter ID – Why Do You Trust Donald Trump So Much?
Don Surber: Gavin Newsom, The New Democrat Heartthrob
First Street Journal: Paul Krugman Warns Of Trump Becoming Dictator While Ignoring Democrat Governors Doing Just That
The Geller Report: Red China Has Had COVID-19 In Its Wuhan Labs For Seven Years, also, Senate Democrats Demand $10 Million For Media But Not One Cent For Small Businesses
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Modeling Versus Real-World Data
Hollywood In Toto: Trolls World Tour Sings A Song Hollywood Should Heed
Legal Insurrection: Government Gone Wild – Wuhan Virus Has Led To Massive Overreach, also, Trump To Block Iran’s $5 Billion IMF Loan Request
Megan McArdle: My Dad Has COVID-19. All We Can Do Is Wait.
Michelle Malkin: The Grand Farce Of American Social Distancing
The PanAm Post: WHO’s Irresponsibility Led To Spread Of Coronavirus, also, Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel Has Taken Over A Venezuelan City
Power Line: “Joe Biden Stands Up For China”, also, Coronavirus In One State
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Torches Senate Democrats For Blocking COVID-19 Funding, however, Mucarsel-Powell Claims Otherwise
Shot In The Dark: Appeal To Authority
STUMP: Mortality With Meep – Baseline Mortality Stats For Comparison
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – Is There A Case For Private Property?
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, also, Claim of November Pandemic Warning To White House & Military Is False
Victory Girls: Mass Graves In NYC Sparking Media Panic Aren’t New
Volokh Conspiracy: Mississippi City Bans Drive-In Church Services
Weasel Zippers: Biden Forgets Name Of H1N1 Virus Halfway Through Saying Its Name, also, AG Barr Says Evidence From Durham Investigation “Far More Troubling” Than Mistakes Or Sloppiness
Mark Steyn: Easter Sequeastered

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Category: Linkagery

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

Posted on | April 10, 2020 | 1 Comment

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.




 

Category: China, Health Care, New York
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