Archive for 2020
April 5, 2020
FOR PUBLIC HEALTH MEASURES TO SUCCEED THERE MUST BE TRUST. FOR THERE TO BE TRUST THERE MUST BE TRANSPARENCY. Colorado: State refuses to let public see local virus spread model.
I’M NOT AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST, BUT: Following up on yesterday’s post on the low level of Covid-19 infections in Australia… Hawaii, population 1.5 million, has only 351 confirmed Covid-19 cases, and three deaths, despite Honolulu being a densely-packed urban area and tons of tourist traffic from Asia in December and January. Puerto Rico, population 3.2 million, has only 452 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 18 deaths, despite a huge amount of traffic between the New York area and the island, and San Juan being a densely-packed city. Like I said, I’m not an epidemiologist, but I’d love to know if someone who is has provided an explanation for these statistics beyond sunshine, humidity, and hot weather. (Note: New Orleans has been consistently hot since March 10, and if that doesn’t slow the spread of the virus, it would definitely throw a monkey wrench into the weather theory, though not necessarily into the “protective nature of Vitamin D” theory, as I suspect residents of San Juan and Honolulu get a lot more sun in the Winter than do residents of New Orleans. P.S. I’m aware that Mardis Gras was likely a “super spreader event,” but if hot weather is protective, the rate of spread in March and April should be slower than in colder climates).
UPDATE: Yes, I know that Guayaquil, Ecuador, right on the equator, has been hard-hit. But conditions in a Third-World country (per capita GPD $6,000) are quite different than the U.S. and Australia, and it’s doubtful in any event that we can get useful data out of their public health system.
QUESTIONING CORONAVIRUS ORIGINS IS NOT A CONSPIRACY: “It’s not a good look for media outlets to again fall in line with the narrative coming out of China, a country whose officials have also accused the US Army of engineering the virus and releasing it into Wuhan. Twitter refused to ban those officials, and there was no mass snark tweeting or fact checking done by the same journalists who called Cotton a crackpot. Maybe that’s because it’s easier for members of the American media to attack a senator from a party that most of them ideologically oppose on a personal level. Or maybe it is something much more nefarious — that the media companies who sign the paychecks are much more invested in China and therefore willing to cede editorial standards in their coverage to the CCP. Maybe that’s also worth looking into.”
ESSENTIAL READING ON DEMOCRATS’ ANTI-TRUMP CORONAVIRUS CHRONOLOGY: Attorney Par Excellence Cleta Mitchell lays it out, excruciating (for Pelosi, et. al.) gaps and all:
“If Pelosi believes the president should have done something at the beginning, when exactly does she think was the ‘beginning’? Was it during the impeachment proceedings that Pelosi instigated? Should Pelosi bear some responsibility for what she perceives as the president’s failure to focus on the coronavirus back in January?
“The single most important step taken by President Trump was his closing of U.S. travel with China, which happened on Jan. 31, something the president reminds us at every briefing.
“He’s right, but what he doesn’t say is he made that decision at a time the CDC was assuring us the risk to America was low, the WHO was covering for China, Democrats were trying to impeach the president, and Biden was attacking the decision as xenophobic.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UCLA student drops ‘indoctrinating’ class after prof’s instruction to advocate for illegal immigrants.
THERE ARE NO POINTS AWARDED FOR BEING RIGHT TOO EARLY: The Media Owe Senator Tom Cotton an Apology. “One of the biggest issues people have with the mainstream press these days is that some of its members are so insulated that they end up buying into and promoting false narratives without actually checking these narratives’ veracity. That seems to be exactly what happened in mid February, when major outlets overwhelmingly smeared Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) as a conspiracy theorist for asking legitimate questions about the origins of the current COVID-19 pandemic.”
The process is this: A Republican said it, and it’s not like what all my friends are saying in unison, so it must be crazy.
Senior sources in the British government say that while ‘the balance of scientific advice’ is still that the deadly virus was first transmitted to humans from a live animal market in Wuhan, a leak from a laboratory in the Chinese city is ‘no longer being discounted’.
One member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s emergency committee said last night that while the latest intelligence did not dispute the virus was ‘zoonotic’ – originating in animals – it did not rule out that the virus first spread to humans after leaking from a Wuhan laboratory.
The member of the ‘Cobra’ comittee, which receives detailed classified briefings from the security services, said: ‘There is a credible alternative view [to the zoonotic theory] based on the nature of the virus. Perhaps it is no coincidence that there is that laboratory in Wuhan. It is not discounted.’
Well, I very much doubt that the Chinese will come clean on this, but it’s another reason to isolate China from the world community, both as punishment and precaution.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH: Boom: Greg Gutfeld Busts Media Matters Again With What They Were Saying About Fox and Virus In January. “I’d like to thank Media Matters for verifying that Fox news’ The Five was very early in warning about the serious threat of COVID19,” YouTuber Tim Pool adds.
IF YOU SHUT DOWN TOO LATE, YOU REOPEN EVEN LATER: Italy’s Virus Shutdown Came Too Late. What Happens Now? “Italy underestimated the outbreak, then became one of the first countries to order a national lockdown to contain it. A month later, officials warn it is still too soon to reopen.”
AT AMAZON, Genluna Paisley One Dozen Cowboy Bandanas.
EMPTY SHELVES AND TOILET PAPER SHORTAGES: POLL: Most people unimpressed with their 30-day free trial of Communism.
THE VIEW OF THE WORLD FROM SLATE AVENUE: Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick writes: From 9/11 to COVID-19. The last time New York was the center of a catastrophe, America rallied behind it. The nation’s reaction to its coronavirus outbreak is a different story.
It was always a fairy tale, but it was surely a nice one. Columbine’s tragedy was America’s tragedy. Las Vegas happened to all of us. Parkland, Florida, was everyone’s worst national nightmare. Regional differences were downplayed so we could grieve together. But Donald Trump came along to remind us that Puerto Rico is not really America, and Detroit is not really America, and California is definitively not America. It was an easy myth to puncture, and he has deftly and rapidly ensured that no city or state will ever be America’s battered sweetheart again. We are all on our own.
New York almost makes it too easy. The city has long been associated with unbounded greed and wealth, cultural elitism, and ethnic diversity. That encompasses Ted Cruz’s sneering dog whistle about “New York values” in 2016, and Trump’s newfound loathing of the city he called home for his entire life—a city he was maligning long before the coronavirus came along. Despite the country’s love affair with New York in the wake of 9/11 or even Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it’s also always been the case that the city coexists uncomfortably with the fantasy of rugged cowboys, wide-open spaces, and manly white men dominating nature, an American story Trump and his acolytes seem to love above all things.
Nobody can blame the coronavirus itself on this president, though we must keep track of how his failure to take action will cost untold American lives. But even as we sit here, waiting, it is worth remembering that Trump has led a three-year project in which leadership consists of laying blame, constantly and relentlessly, on everyone and anyone, and the more inchoate that group is, the better. Victims are to be further victimized, always. We have been so carefully trained in this response that even without Trump’s insistence that the media, Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, and thieving New York doctors are to blame for the rampant spread of the virus, we could fall easily into the habit of doing it ourselves. We haven’t had to do that; the president has still happily led the charge. The strangest thing is simply that New York is the same greedy, insomniac, starving, pushy, wisecracking, bighearted place it was in the days after 9/11. Americans need to hate her today because everyone needs to hate everything and everyone now. Just when we needed to rally together in a fight against death, we are realizing we’ve been primed to fight one another to the death instead. Even if the myriad historical acts of pulling together after national tragedies were planted in fantasy more than fact, the alternative—a vicious and slashing vilification of the other—will not keep any of us safe or free.
That last sentence is a classic case of projection. Isn’t she aware that the rest of the nation is also dealing with the same pandemic? And is a massively diverse group of people who don’t think in lockstep? I could be mistaken, but I don’t believe that Saul Steinberg drew his classic “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cover as a how-to guide to life for insular Manhattanites.
There’s also more than a hint of Pauline Kaelism in Lithwick’s writing:
“Kael famously commented, after the 1972 Presidential election, ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.’”
Flashback to the Kavanaugh hearings last year: Trump takes another bite out of Dahlia Lithwick’s brain: “The demoralizing reality of life….Every day is the same, but still awful.” It’s the same end of the world, lashing out tone as the above passage; I too look forward to writing again about the day to day trench warfare of partisan politics as opposed to what actually is the demoralizing reality of mid-2020.
And to the very early days of Instapundit in the fall of 2001, when Glenn warned that Lithwick was heading into “Maureen Dowd territory.” Advantage: Instapundit!
NEW FROM KEN LIZZI: Captain: Falchion’s Company Book Two.
Running a mercenary company may be a bloody business, but it’s still a business. Falchion, now captain of his own outfit, faces not only opposing mercenary companies just as deadly as his own, and the magical threats posed by psychotic wizards, but also stingy, second-guessing employers. When his employers realize their allies in a three-party war are using them as a cat’s-paw and will likely turn on them, Falchion finds himself taking on two opposing armies, twin-sorceresses driven by religious fanaticism, and a mercenary commander holding a personal grudge.
THIS IS HOW THE PEOPLE MAKING THESE DECISIONS VIEW YOU. AND WHAT THEY’RE OVERLOOKING: Assume a Spherical Cow of Uniform Density in a Frictionless Vacuum.
NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE: Clyburn Defends Calling Coronavirus an Opportunity to ‘Restructure Government.’
I agree. Lay off the “non-essential” employees, and make all the regulation-suspensions permanent.
Related (From Ed): Dem Supercut: Virus Is Opportunity to Reshape How We Do Business and Get Things We Want.
TALES OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE:
NYC real estate broker losing $250,000 because of coronavirus pandemic.
‘I lost not one but three jobs because of the coronavirus’.
Airbnb host went from making $3,800 a month to $0 amid coronavirus.
Staten Island car dealer still has to pay $500K in interest while lot closed.
Caterer spent $20,000 on expanding business — then coronavirus hit.
Dog walker asks clients to pay him half-salary during coronavirus.
Important correction, though: these losses are NOT due to coronavirus. They’re due to the decision to place a country of 320 million under house arrest, instead of merely trying to protect those at highest risk.
Also note these people are in NYC and so, due to population density/way of living at higher risk than people in the rest of the country who don’t ride subways and don’t live in apartment buildings.
And yet, these losses are all over. Why? Because our “betters” think we’re all Manhattan. Or because they just like power. Your choice.