AT AMAZON, save in Home Improvement.

TAR, FEATHERS: HOA Threatens to Foreclose on Residents Conducting Business from Home During Lockdown

THIS WAS NOT A SUCCESSFUL PROCUREMENT: After Nearly 4 Years in Service, the USS Zumwalt Is Almost Ready To Fight. “The first-of-its-kind warship transformed from a ship designed to provide gunfire support for U.S. Marine landings to one designed to range across oceans and engage enemy fleets with long range missiles. In the meantime, the ship’s two 155-millimeter guns—the reason why they were built in the first place—are still without ammunition.”

WILLIAM BENNETT & SETH LEIBSOHN: Time for a Second Opinion.

We truly are shutting down America and harming a great many Americans, based on the worst fears that have not been true and are not on the horizon. We are scaring the hell out of the citizenry. A few additional statistics help counsel a lowering of our national temperature: The vast majority of deaths from the virus are of people over the age of 70 with underlying frailties. The focus on New York where, of course, most of the media is based, is also flooding and distorting the picture for the rest of the country. Of course we need to pay attention to ground zero, which is New York. But what happens there is not what is happening everywhere. For example, our most populous state, California shows 149 deaths, 11% of the total in New York. Texas, our second most populous state, shows nothing like the death toll in New York, with 47 deaths, about 3.5% of the total in the Empire State.

Read the whole thing.

THIS DOES NOT SURPRISE ME: Study: Cognitive ability is a whole-brain phenomenon.

WELCOME BACK, COTTER: A Herald reporter’s exit from quarantine.

Nearly two weeks ago, I began to have moderate coronavirus-like symptoms. Chest tightness and aches, some shortness of breath, fatigue and dehydration. But I didn’t have the very key symptoms — any significant cough or a fever.

Doctors recommend that if you aren’t very sick and aren’t having breathing issues, then just stay home, call your provider and gut it out. So a week ago Monday, I called a telehealth service, and I spoke with a doctor who became very quickly worked up about the possibility that I could be having a heart attack, and said I should go to the the emergency room immediately.

I thought that was unlikely, as I’m 28 and in otherwise generally good health, but I headed to Massachusetts General Hospital anyway. Fortunately, I was not having a heart attack, the MGH doctors concluded; the chest problem must be viral, they said after an EKG, blood work and a chest X-ray — but they couldn’t test me for coronavirus because I didn’t have enough of the symptoms to meet their protocols at a time when tests are being rationed. The staff, who were great, gave me a social-distancing version of a pat on the back and told me to told me to manage my symptoms with over-the-counter drugs. They said to come back if things took a turn.

Knock on wood, they haven’t, and I’m on the road to recovery, feeling pretty good.

At this point, I hope this actually is COVID-19, because then I probably won’t get it again — so I’d be able to worry much less about transmitting it to my parents, or being felled by some fresh produce at the grocery store that the last person sneezed on.

The doctors say it’s too early to know much about immunity, but it would be a surprise if people who’d had the disease could get it again soon. That would be great news for those of us who have it — especially if we actually know if we had it.

Well, the FDA has authorized a two-minute antibody test for coronavirus, so soon you will.

THEY GOT THIS HALF-RIGHT: Colorado oil, gas regulators hit pause on new rules because of coronavirus.

But: “State agency says consideration of new rules should take place in face-to-face meetings; environmentalists say if rule-making delayed, so to should permit approvals.”

The Democrats in charge are anti-domestic energy, period.

EXPECT MORE OF THESE: Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Arizona Board Of Regents Demanding Repayment Of Room & Board For Students Displaced By Covid-19.

GET WELL SOON: CNN anchor Chris Cuomo tests positive for coronavirus.

BOEING: The Air Force’s Troubled Boeing KC-46 Tankers Leak Fuel Excessively. “The announcement comes weeks after the Air Force said it would not use the aircraft for aerial refueling missions except in a major emergency.”

C’mon, Boeing — this shouldn’t be so difficult. The Air Force got serious about in-flight refueling back in the late 1940s — with Boeing planes — and the KC-46 is based on the 767 which first flew almost 40 years ago.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Social Distancing: Hold the Line. ‘This virus is unforgiving to unwise choices.’ “You should perceive your entire family to function as a single individual unit: If one person puts themselves at risk, everyone in the unit is at risk. Seemingly small social chains get large and complex with alarming speed. If your son visits his girlfriend, and you later sneak over for coffee with a neighbor, your neighbor is now connected to the infected office worker that your son’s girlfriend’s mother shook hands with. This sounds silly, it’s not. This is not a joke or hypothetical. We as epidemiologists see it borne out in the data time and time again. Conversely, any break in that chain breaks disease transmission along that chain.”

I’ll just add that I see people acting as if this is graded on a curve: “At least I’m doing better than X.” The disease doesn’t care if you’re doing better, and you don’t get extra credit for trying. You either avoid it or you don’t.

BROKEN GLASS VOTERS: More Than Twice as Many Voters Are Enthusiastic About Voting for Trump Compared to Biden.

NYU MUZZLING FACULTY ON FRONT LINES OF CORONAVIRUS FIGHT: Delays in communication during a pandemic can cost lives, whatever the intent. That’s one of the main lessons people should already have learned from this pandemic. There is zero reason for our own universities and academic hospitals to make this mistake as well.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: After Complaints, Trump’s DHS Says Gun Stores Are ‘Essential’ Businesses.’ Looking at You, LA.

BANE, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Cape Codders’ petition: ‘Close the bridges.’

ECONOMICS: The Cost of Ventilators Just Skyrocketed — And New York Needs Thousands More. “New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says the price of ventilators has soared from less than $20,000 to more than $50,000.”

Cuomo said last week that New York state has roughly 12,000 ventilators, but will likely need as many as 40,000 at the projected height of the pandemic. But since no state will remain untouched by the virus, both states and the federal government are now jockeying for ventilators. And that’s pushing prices up.

“We’ve created a situation where you literally have hundreds of entities looking to buy the same exact materials basically from the same place, which is China, ironically enough,” Cuomo said.

“The ventilators are now over $50,000, if you can find them,” he added. “The ventilators didn’t change that much in two weeks. The prices went up because literally we are driving the prices up. But we need to give our front line, our health care professionals, the supplies they need. And we need to do it now.”

High prices will lead to increased supply which will lower prices. Cap prices and the increased supplies will never materialize. This is Econ 101 stuff, which confuses even supposedly intelligent people.

Next Up: The wisdom of making one badly-run country your sole supplier of seemingly everything.

HIGHER EDUCATION FOCUSES ON THE IMPORTANT STUFF: Free speech group: U. California system cannot ban term ‘Chinese virus.’

JOE BIDEN AND THE VANISHED POLITICAL AGE:

This is what makes Joe Biden, supposedly the Democrats’ vanilla option, so interesting. More than any presidential nominee since John McCain, he hearkens back to that more decorous era. Biden entered the Senate in 1973. For historians of congressional clubbiness, that was after Sen. Everett Dirksen was keeping a clock in his office on which every number was a five, but before Sens. Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd were cruising around town like two rakes in a buddy comedy. This was the age of New England Irish eminences like Dodd and Kennedy, of Southern good ol’ boy segregationists like James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia. And those were just the Democrats.

That whips had to keep in line such different personalities shows how tricky legislating could be. The political parties weren’t yet organized into coastal elites and deplorables, but they also weren’t still divided along Reconstruction lines of North and South. Within each coexisted a hodgepodge of opinions and regional interests, with amiability often the only common denominator. Also, whiskey. ‘I suspect,’ Sen. Talmadge once wrote, ‘alcoholism is as much of an occupational disease among politicians as black lung is among coal miners.’ He was speaking from personal experience: in 1979, he admitted publicly to having a drinking problem. Dirksen, meanwhile, was known for plying obstinate holdouts with booze.

This more genial Washington helped ratify some of the most consequential legislation of the 20th century. It’s largely gone now and for largely understandable reasons. Yet it’s also essential if you want to understand Joe Biden, a man from the ancien régime struggling to adapt to the new order.

It’s a fun read, but surprisingly, the conservative Spectator USA omits Joe’s own role in the transition from the clubbable, pubbable old days of Congress to our present (well, pre-Wuhan Virus) moment: Joe Biden Owes Clarence Thomas an Apology. “After all, it was Biden who helped turn Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into nasty, hyper-politicized smear-fests that set the precedent for the Kavanaugh hearing.”