Archive for 2020
May 21, 2020
WHERE DOES SARAH KEEP HER SHOCKED FACE? I NEED IT: Deceptive Editing? Norma McCorvey From Roe v. Wade Didn’t Reject the Pro-Life Cause, Former Lawyer Says.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Treatment of Ron DeSantis vs Andrew Cuomo Is Why People Should Hate the Media. “Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, on the other hand, has been vilified by the mainstream media for a variety of reasons. His greatest sin thus far has been NOT turning into a petty tyrant and proving that giving citizens some freedom isn’t the death sentence that we’ve been told it is.”
SCIENCE: JP Morgan Finds Infection Rates Are Decreasing In States That Ended Lockdowns. “Even after allowing for an appropriate measurement lag.”
DEAR JOURNALISTS: IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE THOUGHT OF AS GARBAGE, TRY NOT BEING GARBAGE. DeSantis Slams Media for ‘Waxing Poetically’ about Impending Florida Outbreak That Never Materialized. “We’ve succeeded, and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative.”
PANTLOAD OF FAIL (CONT’D): ‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?’ The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies. “A negative test result means something different for each test. If somebody tests negative on a viral test, a doctor can be relatively confident that they are not sick right now; if somebody tests negative on an antibody test, they have probably never been infected with or exposed to the coronavirus. (Or they may have been given a false result—antibody tests are notoriously less accurate on an individual level than viral tests.) The problem is that the CDC is clumping negative results from both tests together in its public reporting.”
WHICH IS BAD, BECAUSE I THOUGHT THEY WERE PRETTY AWFUL ALREADY: New York: Health Commissioner Zucker’s nursing-home failures were worse than thought.
SO MUCH FOR THE SCIENCE BEING SETTLED: CDC now says coronavirus ‘does not spread easily’ via contaminated surfaces. “Though it’s not exactly clear when, the federal health agency appears to have recently changed its guidelines from early March that simply said it ‘may be possible’ to spread the virus from contaminated surfaces. The CDC now includes ‘surfaces or objects’ under a section that details ways in which the coronavirus does not readily transmit.”
Seems like this merited more than just a stealth revision on a website.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Michael Barone: COVID-19 shows we’re more risk averse than post-World War II Americans.
Do you remember the 1957-58 Asian flu? Or the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu? I do. I was a teenager during the former, an adult finishing law school during the latter. And I followed the news much more than the average person my age, yet I cannot dredge up more than the dimmest memory of either of those epidemics.
I don’t have any memory of schools closing, though apparently a few did here and there. I have no memories of city or state lockdowns, of closed offices and factories and department stores, of people banned from parks and beaches.
Yet these two influenza epidemics had death tolls roughly comparable to COVID-19. Between 70,000 and 116,000 people in the United States are estimated to have died from Asian flu. That’s between .04% and .07% of the nation’s population, somewhat more than the .03% COVID-19 death rate so far.
The Asian flu, such as COVID-19, was rarely fatal for children and more deadly for the elderly — but it was also a special risk to pregnant women.
The Hong Kong flu, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, had a more precisely estimated U.S. death toll of 100,000 from 1968-70 (years that included the Woodstock festival), or .05% of the total population. Both flus had high death rates among the elderly, but apparently not as high in proportion as COVID-19 has had now.
Once again, there were no nationwide school closings, no multi-month lockdowns, no daily presidential news conferences. Apparently, neither the nation’s leaders nor the vast bulk of its people felt that such drastic measures were called for.
Perhaps some of this calm reaction can be ascribed to confidence that a vaccine would be developed, as other flu vaccines had been developed after the 1918-19 Spanish flu epidemic. But flu vaccines are never entirely effective, and none was widely available until after the Asian and Hong Kong flus had swept over the nation.
Fundamental attitudes can change in a nation over half a century, and the very different responses to this year’s coronavirus epidemic and the influenzas of 50 and 60 years ago suggests that people today are much more risk averse, much more willing to undergo massive inconvenience and disruption to avoid marginal increases in fatal risk.
At least some of this can be explained by different experiences. The Asian and Hong Kong flus arrived in an America amid and at the end of what I call the “Midcentury Moment.” That’s my name for the quarter-century after World War II when Americans enjoyed low-inflation economic growth and a degree of cultural uniformity and respect for institutions that some yearn for today.
Midcentury Americans had living memories of World War II, with its 405,000 American military deaths. They were troubled not so much by the number of military deaths in Korea (36,000) and Vietnam (58,000) as by our leaders’ failure, after years of effort, to achieve victory.
Contrast this with the shrillness of outcries over orders of magnitude fewer military deaths in Iraq (4,497) and Afghanistan (2,216). Yes, every death is a tragedy, but those numbers total less than the average number of deaths in America every day (7,707) in 2018. But today’s Americans, beneficiaries of a victory in the Cold War that was almost entirely bloodless, seem to blanch at paying any human price at all.
To be fair, that’s the result of two generations of deliberate cultural manipulation.
STRIKING BACK AT THE CALIFORNIA LEGISLATURE’S PLAN TO REPEAL PROPOSITION 209: Yesterday, we got great support from Jason Riley at the Wall Street Journal with a piece entitled In California the Dream of Racial Preferences Never Dies. Thank you, Jason!
HAL ARKES & GEORGE DENT AT THE MARTIN CENTER: Shouldn’t the assumptions behind race-based admissions policies be rigorously tested?