I SEE A LOT OF PEOPLE TRYING TO SPIN THIS STORY AS ZOMG! TRUMP IS PUSHING POISON!!! Man dies after ingesting chloroquine in an attempt to prevent coronavirus.
But: “The toxic ingredient they consumed was not the medication form of chloroquine, used to treat malaria in humans. Instead, it was an ingredient listed on a parasite treatment for fish.”
OPEN THREAD: Explore your thoughts and opinions.
ACTION: New York launches new COVID-19 drug trials; more underway in China. “New York, ‘ground zero’ for the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, is taking the lead on drug testing, with trials beginning this week on three drugs believed to have potential for treatment. Trials to assess the efficacy and safety of the anti-malaria drug chloroquine, its sister agent hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin will join trials of other drugs going on globally, including tests of an HIV drug and an antiviral.”
Related: David Lat Undergoing ‘Experimental’ Drug Therapy, His Husband Says.
Lat, the founder of the legal blog Above the Law and now a widely recognized legal recruiter who still writes columns for Above the Law, has been hospitalized at NYU Langone Hospital since March 16 due to a worsening COVID-19 infection. For more than a week before being admitted to the hospital, Lat, 44, had experienced intermittent fevers, joint aches, chills, fatigue and coughing. Labored breathing set in by March 15, forcing him to go to his nearest emergency room to seek a coronavirus test. . . .
Lat went from receiving oxygen and being in stable condition last week at NYU Langone, as he posted Twitter threads about his coronavirus battle that he titled “Above the Hospital Bed,” to being put on a ventilator and placed in an intensive care unit late Friday night or early Saturday.
In an interview on March 18, Lat said that he’s generally been a very healthy person. He’s run two New York City marathons and until recently did intense interval training each week and walked about 25 miles a week, as well. He did note, though, that he has exercise-induced asthma.
According to Shemtob, 36, the doctors at NYU Langone on Saturday or late Friday prescribed Lat a Z-Pak (azithromycin) and the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine. They also are treating him with an IL 6-inhibitor to fight the inflammation of Lat’s lungs.
Get well, soon, David.
EPIDEMIOLOGISTS AS THE NEW GURUS: WHAT ABOUT THE EXCESS DEATH RATE?
To understand the meaning of all the deaths in Italy, it would be extraordinarily helpful to know one figure that I’ve never seen discussed: the number of excess deaths; that is, the number over and above what is usual this time of year in Italy.
I have no doubt the number is higher than usual and that there are excess deaths, particularly in certain regions of the north where the virus has been concentrated. But how much higher? Italy ordinarily has a particularly high rate of death from the flu, which makes the “excess death” figure especially important to know. Are significant numbers of the deaths we’re seeing in Italy deaths that would be taking place anyway from the flu or other illnesses we’re accustomed to? And if so, how many?
Speaking of Italy: Coronavirus: The Price of Luxury — Fashion’s “Made in Italy” tag is connected to a Chinese disease.
NEVER LET A PANDEMIC GO TO WASTE: New Totalitarian Pandemic Power-Grab Idea: Permanently Close Some City Streets to Cars.
Jerry Brown’s “road diet:” coming to a blue region near you:
“HEY, AT LEAST POLLUTION IS DOWN:” Liberal Outlets Tout Climate Change Silver Lining During Pandemic.
Related: Why wind power isn’t the solution for hospitals at this critical time: Darling, is the Wind Blowing? I’d Like to Go to the Hospital For COVID-19.
DAN MCLAUGHLIN: The Lockdown Debate Requires Transparent Disagreement. “Aaron Ginn wrote a long, charts-and-statistics-filled blog post at Medium arguing that the available public health data shows that COVID-19 is less easily transmitted, less fatal, and more likely to fade away with the hot weather than the conventional wisdom would have you believe. Medium deleted the post, which is now hosted at ZeroHedge. Deleting arguments like Ginn’s is a bad and dangerous way to handle the still-roiling debate over what governments and society should do in order to react to the disease.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Virus is Not Invisible, But It’s Exposing Who’s Irreplaceable.
I think one of the strangest of all sequelae to the virus and the lockdowns might be the millions of high-paid Americans whose absences were hardly missed either by the public or count much in subsequent economic analyses of damage to the economy.
In a sophisticated society under lockdown, is it more existentially valuable to know how to fix a toilet, replace a circuit breaker, or change a tire, or to be a New York fashion designer, a Hollywood actor, or a corporate merger lawyer? At 9 p.m., when you go downtown in need of a critical prescription, are you really all that furious that a law-abiding citizen who has a gun and concealed permit is also in line—or would you be more relieved that gun control laws might ensure that his ilk never enters an all-night pharmacy?
So who is important and who not?
We were often told globalized elites on the coast were the deserved 21st-century winners, while the suckers and rubes in-between had better learn coding or head to the fracking fields.
But who now is more important than the trucker who drives 12-hours straight to deliver toilet paper to Costco? Or the mid-level manager of Target who calibrates supply and demand and is on the phone all day juggling deliveries before his store opens? Or the checker at the local supermarket who knows that the hundreds of customers inches away from her pose risks of infection, and yet she ensures that people walk out with food in their carts? The farmworker who is on the tractor all night to ensure that millions of carrots and lettuce don’t rot? The muddy frackers in West Texas who make it possible that natural gas reaches the home of the quarantined broker in Houston? The ER nurse on her fifth coronavirus of the day who matter-of-factly saves lives?
Do we really need to ask such questions of whether the presence of the czar for diversity and inclusion at Yale is missed as much as the often-caricatured cop on patrol at 2 a.m. in New Haven?
No, no we don’t.
DATA! GIVE ME DATA! DATA IS MY PRECIOUS! I’ve been recommending the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Dashboard, that is Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), as a source for real data on the Chinese coronavirus。 There are a number of other data dashboards being built using the same data. A Medium article COVID-19 Open Source Dashboard today by Christoph Schönenberger shows a particularly nice one. For the geekly among you, it’s open-sourced so you can have fun modifying it.
BRITAIN ENTERS CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN.
In the past few minutes, Boris Johnson has announced that the UK is going into lockdown from this evening. In a statement in Downing Street (which you can read in full here), he announced that people will not be allowed to leave their homes unless they are doing so for the following:
– shopping for basic necessities
– one form of exercise a day such as a run, walk or cycle and either alone or with other members of the same household
– medical needs or caring for a vulnerable person
– travelling to or from work but only when absolutely necessary.
The police will be given the power to fine people and disperse gatherings and all non-essential shops and events such as weddings and baptisms will be banned.
I absolutely understand the need, but it will be interesting to see how — and for how long — it plays out, given that the British police have been inching towards Airstrip One mode for quite some time. In 2018, when British cops were threatening social media critics after the NHS banished 23-month-old Alfie Evans to the Spartan hillside, British ex-pat Charles C.W. Cooke tweeted, “Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out to me that police in the U.K. spend all their time on Twitter threatening people with jail time for frivolous things, and now I can’t stop seeing it.”
ROGER SIMON: Dems on a Death Trip as They Play Politics in a Pandemic.
Not if the Gray Lady can help it:
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
—Twitchy, today.
On Sunday afternoon, Christine Pelosi, daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, voiced her opposition to a particular headline to Politico’s Meredith Shiner, via Twitter:
@politico @meredithshiner Your “Liberals Target Palin” headline is unhelpful. How bout a non-violent non-gun verb for your story? #Giffords”
* * * * * * * *
The headline was changed to “Liberals blame Sarah Palin in wake of Tucson shooting.” The top paragraph and the image accompanying the story were also changed.
—The Daily Caller, January 10, 2011.
AMERICA’S TRADITION OF FEDERALISM LEAVES PROGRESSIVES PUZZLED:
Daily Beast Editor and MSNBC contributor Sam Stein marveled on Twitter at the response of local officials and the private sector, tweeting “I’m not the first person to make this observation but it truly is remarkable the degree to which local and state officials, as well as private entities and businesses, are making these massive public health policy decisions while the feds seem to be moving much more slowly.”
Another salient accidental light bulb appeared over the head of Daily Beast editor Molly Jong Fast, a fervent critic of President Donald Trump, when she tweeted “So the states are basically governing themselves because our president doesn’t know how to ‘president’ at all?”
There’s plenty to criticize about the Trump administration’s initial response to the virus appearing stateside, but Stein and Jong-Fast have the story completely backward. Letting the states handle responses from community to community is exactly what a president should do, and precisely what Trump is doing.
Read the whole thing.
CHRIS CILLIZZA IS THE STAR OF TODAY’S BIGGEST SELF-OWN: CNN Analyst Tries to Own Trump, Fails: ‘Viruses Don’t, Uh, Recognize Borders.’
THIS ONE IS PAYWALLED BUT THEY’LL GIVE YOU A DISCOUNT IF YOU USE “HOYT” AS YOUR CODE ON SUBSCRIPTION. I WOKE UP AT FOUR THIRTY AM AND COULDN’T SLEEP, SO I WROTE THIS: I Have Questions About Our Response to COVID-19.
How come the homeless aren’t dying in droves?
ROGER KIMBALL: The Democrats just made a huge mistake — They are exploiting a national emergency for the grubbiest of partisan motives.
Or as America’s Paper of Record notes: Dems Worried Stimulus Bill Would Stimulate Economy.
Democrats are counting on their party operatives with bylines to spin this for them and/or for the past two days to be forgotten by November — and in both cases, they could be right.
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