The Other McCain

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

Worse Before It Gets Better: Statistical Risk and the Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted on | March 31, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

For three consecutive days, Italy has reported declining numbers of new coronavirus cases, so that Monday’s number (4,050 new cases) was the lowest they have reported since March 17. At the same time, however, Italy reported 812 deaths from the virus Monday. This was the 10th consecutive day with more than 600 coronavirus deaths and Italy’s cumulative death toll is now 11,591. This is happening in a nation of about 60 million people; U.S. population is 327 million; an Italian-scale coronavirus outbreak in the United State would mean more than 60,000 deaths. So far, only 3,175 Americans have died of the virus. The U.S. death toll is certainly going to continue increasing, but it’s got a long way to go before it could reach anything like the impact in Italy.

What is not getting enough attention in the media is how uneven the impact of the Wuhan virus outbreak is spread in the United States. For example, 42% of deaths from the disease (1,342 out of 3,175) are in New York state, and the vast majority of those are concentrated in New York City and its suburbs. Of the 66,497 cases reported in New York state as of Monday afternoon, the city has 37,453 (56%) and four suburban counties — Westchester (9,326), Suffolk (5,791), Nassau (7,344), Rockland (2,511) — comprise another 38% of statewide cases, so the city and its suburbs account for 94% of all cases in New York State.

More than a third (62,425, or 38%) of all coronavirus cases in the United States are in the New York metropolitan region, without even including the cases in the New Jersey or Connecticut suburbs.

This disparity of impact can be demonstrated by other statistics. Consider the state-by-state coronavirus death tolls. As of this morning, seven states had reported at least 100 deaths from the virus:

New York …………………. 1,342
Washington State ……….. 210
New Jersey ……………….. 198
Louisiana ………………….. 185
Michigan …………………… 184
Georgia …………………….. 102

That is 2,221 deaths, 70% of all U.S. coronavirus deaths. These states have a combined population of 60.6 million, which is less than one-fifth (18.8%) of the total U.S. population of 327.2 million. So 80% of Americans live in states that have suffered less than 20% of COVID-19 deaths, and this explains a lot about political responses to the disease. For example, if you live in Michigan (6,498 cases, 184 deaths in a population of about 10 million), your risk from coronavirus is about six times greater than if you live in Texas (3,184 cases, 47 deaths in a population of about 29.5 million). Yet not everyone in Michigan is equally exposed to the COVID-18 risk, which is highly concentrated near Detroit. Nearly half of the state’s cases are in Detroit (1,801) and surrounding Wayne County (1,394). Add in the suburbs of Oakland County (1,365) and Macomb County (728), and there are 5,288 coronavirus cases in the metro Detroit region, accounting for 81% of Michigan’s total.

If you’re not in one of the “red zones” of this pandemic, the alarmist rhetoric in the media probably strikes you as an irrational panic. The American who lives in eastern Kentucky, northern Texas or upstate New York is not seeing overcrowded local hospitals or reading obituaries of local residents killed by the Wuhan virus. As a matter of statistical probability, your personal risk from the virus is low, and yet every time you turn on TV news, it’s another CORONAVIRUS CRISIS UPDATE, with politicians and medical experts warning that we are approaching a catastrophe, requiring immediate and drastic action.

Part of this disparity, of course, is that the national news media are headquartered in New York, where the coronavirus outbreak is worst. Yet the uneven impact of the disease produces disparities everywhere. Consider the case of Maryland, with a population of about 6.1 million, which currently reports 1,660 cases, or about 27 cases per 100,000 residents. This is far below the level in Michigan (about 65 cases per 100,000 residents), and not even a tenth of New York’s rate (342 cases per 100,000 residents), yet Gov. Larry Hogan issued a statewide lockdown order Monday. Why this drastic action?

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said on Monday that he is taking the coronavirus response seriously as cases in the Washington, D.C. metro area rapidly increase.
“Over the past week, cases have more than quadrupled in the Washington metro area [Washington, D.C. Maryland, and Virginia],” he noted, comparing the trajectory of cases to New York City a few weeks ago.
New York City has now become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, with city hospitals overrun with patients. Citing 66 cases at a Carroll County nursing home, Hogan said that it is a serious issue as cases have doubled in the past two days in the area.

This hits close to home, as my podcasting partner John Hoge lives in Carroll County, which had very few cases of coronavirus before this sudden outbreak at a nursing home there. While we don’t know exactly how this nursing home became infected, the proximity to Baltimore (about 30 miles) and D.C. (about 40 miles) is suggestive of the source.

Look at the county-by-count case numbers in Maryland, and you see that two D.C. suburban counties (Montgomery and Prince George’s) and Baltimore (city and county) have a combined 1,143 cases, which is 69% of the statewide total. In rural Maryland — the Eastern Shore, and from Frederick County westward — there are very few cases. Yet resident of the rural counties are not exempt from the statewide shutdown, and this once again highlights the disparate impact of the pandemic. As much as we might complain about this, the upside is that locking down the “red zones” means that the low-risk areas are more likely to remain low-risk. The upward spikes in coronvirus cases in urban America will continue, while rural America will largely be spared the worst of the pandemic.




 

Category: Health Care, Maryland, Michigan, New York

Damaged Goods

Posted on | March 30, 2020 | Comments Off on Damaged Goods

Whatever happened to Kendra Wilkinson?

Here we are in the middle of a deadly pandemic, and that question probably hasn’t crossed your mind. In fact, I suspect, the question on your mind now is, “Who the heck is Kendra Wilkinson?”

Well, “reality TV star” might be one way to describe her, but you probably never watched any of the shows she was on: The Girls Next Door (2004-2009), Kendra (2009-2012) and Kendra on Top (2012-2017).

Any of that ring a bell? OK, enough with the hints: In The Girls Next Door, Wilkinson starred as one of three live-in girlfriends of Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner. Wilkinson was only 19 when she became involved with Hefner, who was then 78. Read more

Category: Uncategorized

In The Mailbox: 03.30.20

Posted on | March 30, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Concealed Carry Stops Shooting Rampage
EBL: FFS China – Wuhan Wet Market Back In Operation, also, Media & Democrats Have Short Memories
Twitchy: Story of Couple Who Chugged Fish Tank Cleaned To Ward Off COVID-19 Just Got Weirder & Wilder
Louder With Crowder: Bill DiBlasio Gets Called Out As Failure In Handling Coronavirus
Vox Popoli: Let Them Go Bust

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: How Red China’s Lies Brought The World To Its Knees
American Greatness: It’s Not A Choice Between Lives Or The Economy, also, The Wuhan Virus Has Exposed Modern Americans’ Disconnect From Reality
American Thinker: Coronavirus Causing A Right Turn, also, Soros & The Coronavirus Pandemic
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: The Truth About Healthcare In Socialist Cuba & The Castro Regime’s “Medical Missions” Program
BattleSwarm: Joe Rogan Interviews Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm On The Wuhan Coronavirus, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Care Update
Cafe Hayek: Leviathan & Crises
Camp Of The Saints: #WUHAN Wigout – Hysteria Pandemic
CDR Salamander: The French Navy Sorties Against COVID-19
Da Tech Guy: Adventures In Tyranny, also, Lockdown In Illinois Goes From Smiling Faces To A Preview Of Tyranny
Don Surber: Democrats Fear a Cure, also, Biden Versus The Virus
First Street Journal: Just Because Something Is Stupid Doesn’t Mean It Ought To Be Illegal
Fred On Everything: Mexico In The Plague Year
The Geller Report: Cuomo Claims NYS “Basically Bankrupt”, also, China Is Lying – Wuhan Locals Say 42,000 Dead, Crematoria Running 24/7
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, A First World Problem
Hollywood In Toto: Why John Carpenter’s The Fog Deserves Your Respect, also, Social Justice Mob Won’t Claim This Year’s Toughest Heroine
JustOneMinute: Don’t Trust The Experts
Legal Insurrection: ABC/WaPo Poll Shows 15% Of Bernie Supporters Will Vote For Trump, Not Biden, also, Flashback – Rachel Maddow Says It’s “Nonsense” That Hospital Ship Will Be In NYC Soon
Megan McArdle: Why The Defense Production Act Won’t Get Us Ventilators Any Faster
The PanAm Post: Spain’s Ruling Party Gets Funds From Venezuelan Drug Trafficker, also, How Latin American Political Discourse Is Dominated By The Left
Power Line: U.S. COVID-19 Death Rate Remains Low, also, Observations On The Great Hunkering
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Says U.S. Must Cut Off Red Chinese, Russian Cash To Maduro Regime
Shot In The Dark: Casualties Of Pestilence
The Political Hat: The So-Called Explicit Guarantee To Free Heathcare
This Ain’t Hell: Another Four Are Home, also, USS Comfort Arrives In NYC
Victory Girls: Kennedy Center Gets $25 Million In Stimulus Cash, Fires Musicians
Volokh Conspiracy: Using Vulgarities When Speaking To A Policeman Isn’t A Crime
Weasel Zippers: DeBlasio Threatens To Permanently Close Churches & Synagogues That Hold Services, also, France Officially Sanctions Chloroquine To Treat COVID-19
Mark Steyn: Crowd Scenes, also, It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

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Category: Linkagery

ACE: Arizona Woman Poisoned Her Husband With Fish-Tank Cleaner

Posted on | March 30, 2020 | Comments Off on ACE: Arizona Woman Poisoned Her Husband With Fish-Tank Cleaner

Ace of Spades is just flat-out accusing the woman, known only as “Wanda,” of murder in the widely-publicized case where, it was claimed, both she and her 68-year-old husband, known only as “Gary,” ingested an aquarium cleaner because they mistakenly thought it was the same as chloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that President Trump said might be useful in treating coronavirus. I had myself suspected this: If they both ingested the same amount of this poisonous chemical, why did he die and she survive? Having watched many episodes of Forensic Files, I am well aware that poisoning is one way wives commonly kill their husbands, and there was something off-key about this woman’s conveniently political tale of a Trump-inspired “accident.” Well, well, well!

The Arizona woman who said that she and her 68-year-old husband ingested a substance used to clean fish tanks after hearing President Donald Trump tout chloroquine as a cure for the coronavirus has given thousands of dollars to Democratic groups and candidates over the last two years.
The woman’s most recent donations, in late February, were to a Democratic PAC, the 314 Action Fund, that bills itself as the “pro-science resistance” and has vocally criticized the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and held up her case to slam the White House.
Although local and national media outlets withheld the couple’s names, the Washington Free Beacon established their identities through descriptions in local news reports, where the pair were identified by their first names and ages: Gary, 68, and Wanda, 61. The Free Beacon is withholding their identities at Wanda’s request.
Federal Election Commission records show that Wanda has donated thousands of dollars to Democratic electoral groups and candidates over the past two years, including Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and EMILY’s List, a group that aims to elect pro-choice female candidates.
Wanda told the Free Beacon that she and her husband were both Democrats, not Trump supporters. They heard about the potential benefits of chloroquine, an antimalarial drug, in news reports. She decided at the “spur of the moment” to try taking it, but reached for a fish tank cleaner in her pantry that contains chloroquine phosphate, a different and deadly form of the chemical.

Yeah, “spur of the moment” she reaches for the fish tank cleaner, and now her husband’s dead and she blames Trump! Would any competent homicide detective believe that story? I don’t think so.

Most life-insurance policies pay double for accidental deaths. So this was allegedly an “accident.” How much life insurance did Gary have?

Wanda is the Jussie Smollett of the coronavirus pandemic, and last time I checked, Arizona had the death penalty for murder.




 

Category: Crime

FDA Approves ‘Game Changer’ Drug

Posted on | March 30, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

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.




 

Category: Health Care

‘A Society of Emasculated Liars’

Posted on | March 30, 2020 | 1 Comment

In his 2001 book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, the British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple observed:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.
To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

One must actively resist the propaganda of political correctness or else you become complicit in it and compromised by it. This morning, I decided to turn the TV to MSNBC and watch Morning Joe, which offers an example, in the person of Joe Scarborough, of what happens to people who become part of such propaganda machines. There was a time — and it wasn’t really that long ago — when Morning Joe was not a Democratic Party propaganda operation, but the Obama years took their toll on Scarborough and he became just another operative. Something similar can be observed in the cases of Jennifer Rubin and Robert Costa at the Washington Post. There are some organizations with which no honest person would ever wish to be associated, and the Washington Post is such an organization. But I digress . . .

What called my attention to the above quote from Theodore Dalrymple was that it was quoted in the comments on my latest column:

As late as March 11, Mayor Bill de Blasio was still telling New York City residents to carry on life as normal: “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life.” Two days earlier, Italy had announced a national lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, and cases were already beginning to appear in New York, but de Blasio did not close the city’s schools until March 15.
Now that New York City has become the epicenter of this pandemic — more than 32,000 cases as of Sunday, with nearly 700 deaths — Mayor de Blasio’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak appears astonishingly irresponsible. Jim Geraghty of National Review has compiled a timeline of how New York City officials dealt with the crisis, and their recklessness seems mind-boggling in hindsight. Early on, their main concern was that the virus might discourage city residents from attending Chinese New Year celebrations. “I want to remind everyone to enjoy the parade and not change any plans due to misinformation spreading about #coronavirus,” the city’s health commissioner Oxiris Barbot said in a Feb. 9 tweet, promoting festivities in Chinatown. . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator.




 

Category: Donald Trump, Media Bias

Rule 5 Sunday: Elle MacPherson

Posted on | March 29, 2020 | 2 Comments

– compiled by Wombat-socho

Behold, an Australian bombshell who became internationally famous thanks to being frequently featured on the cover of Elle magazine, to say nothing of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues.

“The Body” displaying most of hers in a tasteful fashion.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #937, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five Warmer Weather Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL directs our attention to Lady Gaga, Karin Bohn, Renee Fleming, Nina Stemme, Das Rheingold, the rather sexy President of Slovakia, Shi Zhengli, Orion Carloto, Jane Eaglen, Swing In Place With PMJ, Gotterdammerung, Gina Royale, and Annette Dasch.

This week’s haul from A View From The Beach includes A Stranger Thing – Winona Ryder, Fish Pic Friday – Yellowtail Snapper, Believe All Women, But Not #HerToo, Thursday Tans, Russiagate: It’s Dead, Jim!, Wet Wednesday, Not Available Locally, Alas, Sex and the WuFlu, Muddy Monday, Palm Sunday and I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe of the Week is Betty Grable (and her million dollar legs!) and Red Pilled Jew has some slit skirts for your edification.

Thanks to everyone for their luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

Trump Was RIGHT: Chloroquine Works Against Coronavirus, Doctor Says

Posted on | March 29, 2020 | Comments Off on Trump Was RIGHT: Chloroquine Works Against Coronavirus, Doctor Says

 

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.




 

Category: Donald Trump, Health Care
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