Archive for 2020
April 9, 2020
SO FAR, THIS PANDEMIC HAS NOT BEEN A GREAT SHOWING FOR THE EXPERT CLASS: COVID-19 Projection Models Are Proving to Be Unreliable. “As I detailed in the last post, the revised April 5 model was grossly wrong even in predicting conditions that would obtain on April 5 itself. It had predicted that on that day, New York, the epicenter of the crisis, would need about 24,000 hospital beds, including 6,000 ICU beds. In fact, the model was off by a third — New York had 16,479 hospitalized COVID patients, 4,376 that were in ICU.”
Related: USNS Comfort, Javits Center at fraction of capacity during coronavirus crisis.
The Javits Center military hospital in New York is treating 134 patients — despite a capacity of 1,000 beds that is expected to increase to 2,500 to deal with the spreading coronavirus pandemic, the Pentagon said.
The Comfort, docked in the Hudson River with 500 beds and about 1,000 medical workers aboard, currently has 62 patients and has treated 79 to date.
Similarly, the Javits hospital has a medical staff of about 900, mostly from US Army field hospitals.
Part of the reason for the lack of patients is that hospitalizations are down, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday.
“If the hospitalization rate keeps decreasing the way it is now, then the system should stabilize over these next couple of weeks, which will minimize the need for overflow on the system that we have built in at Javits and at the USNS Comfort,” Cuomo added.
That’s good news, of course, but it does call into question the information on which these plans were made.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Is America a Roaring Giant or a Crying Baby?
There are other vows to recalibrate our relationship with China to ensure that when the next successor to SARS and COVID-19 hits, American lives will not be jeopardized by the duplicity of the Chinese government. At the beginning of the outbreak, Beijing hid the origins, nature, and transmissibility of the virus, then lied about its supposedly brilliant control of the epidemic.
The American public is already asking tough questions.
Does the U.S. really need almost 15,000 people flying in from China each day? At a time when American students owe $1.5 trillion in student loans, it is smart to have some 360,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. colleges? Is it safe to fund hundreds of labs on university campuses that conduct joint research with Chinese academics?
Does the United States really wish to curtail fracking, which has made it the largest producer of natural gas in the world and ensured that a quarantined America has plenty of fuel?
Read the whole thing, of course, because it’s VDH.
THIS COULD BE BIG — BUT OF COURSE, IT DEPENDS ON WHO’S BEING TESTED: Roseland Hospital phlebotomist: 30% of those tested have coronavirus antibody.
A phlebotomist working at Roseland Community Hospital said Thursday that 30% to 50% of patients tested for the coronavirus have antibodies while only around 10% to 20% of those tested have the active virus.
Sumaya Owaynat, a phlebotomy technician, said she tests between 400 and 600 patients on an average day in the parking lot at Roseland Community Hospital. Drive-thru testing is from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m. each day. However, the hospital has a limited number of tests they can give per day.
Owaynat said the number of patients coming through the testing center who appear to have already had coronavirus and gotten over it is far greater than those who currently have the disease.
Stay tuned.
AT AMAZON, save in Arts Crafts and Sewing.
AND THUS, #METOO COMES FULL CIRCLE:
Shot:
—The Washington Examiner, October 5, 2017.
Earlier: Witch fight! The naked hypocrisy of Alyssa Milano.
As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2005, “Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them. McCarthyism was a direct consequence of both the Red Scare and the Brown Scare. And when the tactics they mastered were turned on them, they acted as if they came from nowhere.”
UPDATE: “Keep in mind that this is the same Alyssa Milano who admitted to Sen. Ted Cruz, ‘We are a two-gun household.’”
THE DEATH OF STALIN: Hollywood celebrities struggle to cope with end of Sanders campaign.
(Classical reference in headline.)
COBOL NEVER DIES: Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims. Yeah, I had a post on this a few days ago, but I just love this. COBOL was my third (and basically last) programming language, which I learned in high school after Basic and Fortran.
ROGER KIMBALL: The case for reopening the country now.
GIVEN WHO HE’S MARRIED TO, HE MUST SLEEP VERY LIGHTLY: James Carville Claims Republicans ‘Will Kill People To Stay In Power, Literally.’
DISPATCHES FROM THE MANCHURIAN MEDIA: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Floats Conspiracy That Trump Admin Inflated Death Projections to Take ‘Victory Lap’ When Final Total Was Lower.
NO, CORONAVIRUS DIDN’T COME FROM THE WUHAN MARKET: Joshua Phillips of The Epoch Times leads this documentary that should open eyes to the reality the disease is man-made. This is a must-watch.
QUERCETIN: TO TAKE OR NOT TO TAKE? “A clinical trial is needed, and one is being organized. At this point, all one can say is that quercetin has the possibility of being useful. Since it occurs in nature, it is regulated as a ‘Natural Health Product’ and dietary supplements have long been available, hyped for their antioxidant potential, usually in daily doses of 500-1000 mgs. The daily intake from our diet is, in general, less than 100 mgs, but quercetin supplements have not been linked with any adverse reaction. Although the information about possible efficacy is sketchy, at least taking quercetin supplements is not harmful.”
Related: World’s Fastest Supercomputer Finds 77 Potential COVID-19 Treatments. “The massive supercomputer was tasked with finding compounds that could bind to the ‘spike protein’ or ‘S-protein’ of the virus that it uses to infect host cells. By rendering the protein ineffective, the virus would be inhibited from spreading.
HAS ANYONE TOLD OBAMA? China’s Agriculture Ministry Says Dogs Are No Longer Considered Livestock.
FASTER, PLEASE: “White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Thursday said the U.S. economy should be able to reopen ‘on a rolling basis’ over the next month or two.”
ADAPT. IMPROVISE. OVERCOME. Nightclubs in Mexico allegedly offering ‘home delivery’ sex services during coronavirus pandemic.
BOJO UPDATE: Boris Johnson moved out of intensive care.
