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Do you mind if I steal this line?
I have been saying, “Put The Shovel Down.”, for years. (I try to say it like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, when he says Put The Candle Back!)
But yours is fresh and disarming.
Don’t forget a lot of doubt has been cast on the actual reason for some percentage of these deaths. But it’s likely that happens in a normal flu season, I guess.
Hear, hear.
We don’t need to beat a dead horse so I’ll try to be succinct. My response has been directed towards your comment that those analogizing this to the flu will be proven right. I disagree, not in the least because that view “takes advantage” of the successful measure implemented to date. If the answer to the question isn’t pretty clear right now (and I think that it is), I believe that it will be before we’re done. We can revisit this at the appropriate time.
I don’t know that this will be regarded on the greatest American blunder. That depends on events yet to occur. If this is the triumph of collectivism, then this would be the biggest blunder. But if somehow we can keep Trump in office and continue to push a minimal regulatory agenda and a strict constructionist judiciary, we might just survive this.
Not much of an improvement, and a lot of projection going on here. Though you claim to want to get beyond “ideology”, you seem obsessed with labeling some as in the Trump-loving or Trump-hating fringes. Into which camp do you place Richard Epstein in order to defame him? Might be best, for all, if you just take their arguments on the merits, and not try to psychoanalyze their motives.
If the victories that the Communist-based DNC continue, you can very much believe that the historians some decades down the line will find the actions of governors in bowing to Bill Gates and to Fauci were exactly as it should be.
The DNC’s biggest victory was this 2.2 trillion dollar CARES Act. Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of it is that it hands over large amounts of money to those hospitals and their administrators & their personnel who claim with lack of any type of scrutiny that their patients were COVID patients. And that the deaths were from COVID cases.
Nurses on social media are claiming they’ re encouraged to fully “admit” that a patient in their care died due to COVID. Two weeks ago, we had a state senator from MN stating that he was sent a 7 page document that more or less forced his hand as far as how to categorize the deaths of patients in his care.
The link to Dr Scott Jensen, state senator, is here: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/item/35392-minn-state-senator-cdc-says-unconfirmed-cause-of-death-can-be-attributed-to-covid-19
So with hospitals also getting anywhere from 19K to 300K dollars for admitting that a patient in their care is COVID, the #’s will continue to escalate. End of Pt One
I remember the Carter years, and we all knew at the time that it was a disaster. It does take time to understand how to compare it in historical context though.
I recall that after Obama arrived, I thought “worst case, he’s another Carter”. Then, after a few years, I realized it was more accurate to say “best case, he’s only as bad as Carter”. Perspective…
Part Two: Then with hospitals inclined to over report COVID, the continual spiking of numbers of COVID cases will allow the media, who at this point are really employees of Big Pharma, to influence the public that Big Bad COVID is not yet over with its deadly hold over our populace.
Then we will continue to be told how we citizens must diligently and patriotically continue to shelter in place. After all, last week, we had Bill Gates himself saying that we’re now in the “acute phase” but then over the next 6 to 9 weeks, we might be allowed to go into a protracted “stay at home but have our jobs there for us to take up our time” situation.
If this was a pandemic I would agree. But it is not. We know that now. We know that thanks to the independent study brought about by Stanford University researchers, which can be read here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1
Here is the interview on ABC with David Muir and Bill and Melinda Gates. Notice how well relaxed Bill Gates seems to be in his new position as emperor of the world.
It is he and his henchman Fauci who’ re determining our lives right now. They’ re oblivious of the Stanford study that was about to be released as the Gates discuss “how this will unravel.” Both Bill and Melinda are happy to explain the way it works is this: We in the public are in the acute phase, but some 6 to 8 or 9 weeks in the future, it will ease slightly while the government prepares to test each and every one of us for whether we have been exposed to COVID, whether we have it and whether we could possibly contaminate others.
Fauci has stated that perhaps family members will need to be separated so as not to expose one another.
The juicy parts of the interview start at the 3 minute mark:
And remember – how this works: Stanford has done a decent study which has mostly been ignored by the lame stream, Big
Pharma owned media. So it follows that Johns Hopkins, so well endowed by its 1.2 billions of dollars received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, most certainly will put out a ‘new better study’ that will tell us how pandemic the illness is.
And that newer study will get plenty of press from the Major Media people.
Didn’t put Epstein in any Trump camp. Read again. Epstein’s arguments on the merits were embarrassingly poor because he could not get beyond his ideological blinders.
To be fair to the author, that was not the conclusion of the original post, which raised the question to promote discussion and offered several views and aspects of the arguments bearing on the question. And it has provoked a debate!
No we have not come to the end of this virus, but now that we know hydroxychloroquine helps greatly, we don’t need to continue to worry about some “surge in COVID” stretching hospitals out beyond their capacity. Nor do we need to wrorry about availabliity of ventilators. With HCQ as a go to treatment, it means patient will only rarely require such.
The one thing that hydroxychloroquine has going against it is that it is 20 bucks a month, as afar as its cost. So we are going to continue to see so many badly done and most likely fraudulent studies that it is more harm than benefit.
I am quite sure that if hydroxychloroquine was $ 1,500 a month, it would be mandated treatment by now.
Another treatment being considered is DIAMOX.
Sorry, still not following you. What ideological blinder are you talking about? Does his general tendency as a libertarian make him view the effects of the Wuhan virus in a particular way? It could influence his approach to balancing the preservation of our constitutional rights with a state’s interest to protect public health, but I should hope each of us has developed a worldview based on rational study and our learned experiences.
Without a doubt this is the dumbest thing I’ve lived through.
What choice do we have other than to hope that we reach herd immunity as fast as possible? The infectiousness of this disease would seem to help bring about that immunity faster. There is no way to hide from the virus.
I regret that I have but one like to give this comment.
We are in April and the CDC graph shows that flu season ends promptly in March, with no significant April activity, so clearly the April deaths attributed to Covid-19 are all bogus. Or Covid-19 is not behaving seasonally like a flu and, as Florida and Iran could have told us, warm weather is not the trick. I can be apprehensive about the virus and the civil rights issues at the same time. I contain multitudes.
In the meantime, let’s cherry puck stats because NIH and the CDC are too busy planning world domination to do the national level testing survey that gives us the national number on antibody production. I think they’ve done it and are sitting on the numbers because they tell an inconvenient truth, but they might just be fumbling the order to postpone finding out their inconvenient truth.
Let’s admit that Italy and NYC are scary and 90% of US counties are a yawn fest and get down to the serious business of conducting emergency measures where the emergency exists and, of course, destroy all medical testing kits made by the CCP and scrub those numbers.
Thank you for this note– as I have pointed out to one of the comments above, some of our colleagues seem to have missed the part of the title which read “Will History Judge…….” and I appreciate your bringing that to the fore once again.
Sincerely, Jim
Excellent point– to go back to the MacDonald article, she proved what folly the “one size fits all” approach of Cuomo is to upstate New York which is being massively punished due to a problem which is restricted almost entirely to the New York City area.
The scientific experts were saying that doing nothing about the pandemic would result in 2.2 million dead, 30% of the country infected, and the health care system completely overrun by orders of magnitude. This estimation didn’t require a computer model, it was simple common sense based on this history of pandemics. So doing nothing was out of the question.
Back when this first started I lamented that if efforts to suppress the virus were successful then people would be saying that the efforts were never necessary. Never have I been so prescient as then. They are now questioning the necessity of those efforts with rabid intensity beyond all reason. If crime rates become low subsequent to strict law enforcement do conservatives question the necessity of strict law enforcement?
As of right now the number of active cases in the US is still rising. That is, the number of new cases every day still exceeds the number of people recovering from the disease every day. The job is only half done, if that. If we let up the virus will surely flare up again, most people still being susceptible to it.
To be sure, there are a lot of restrictions that were probably excessive and should be rescinded, a lot of businesses shut could be safely opened, but the main effort to suppress the virus must continue.
Leaders have been following standard procedure, which is to follow the advice of experts. Doing otherwise would be irresponsible and dangerous.
That’s not a fact at all. It’s completely untrue.
No. The experts provide guidance on what can happen given assumptions based on less than perfect information. Political leaders have the responsibility to temper the response based on considerations outside the purview of experts in a limited area. Should epidemiologists decide what the Federal Reserve does in response to the lockdown?
Political leaders of this country would not have acted as they did without the initial response of other nations, US businesses which shut down prior to any US government action, and early adoption of social distancing in hot spot areas prior to government action.
It’s more accurate to me to say government mis-reacted than overreacted. It should have been taken as seriously as it did given how quickly it could spread. The stay-at-home orders and shutting down small businesses should have been, at most, a 2-week order with strict hygienic recommendations put in place afterwards.
The “No big deal” crowd does worry me though when it makes less burdensome measures like masks a symbol of state oppression. Measures like masks are both tools to slow the spread and instill confidence to return to normal life for the 80% of the country that does think this is a big deal.
As somebody posted somewhere above (or on another thread), if we listened to “experts” we’d probably ban tobacco and alcohol, red meat, sugar, have a nationwide 20 mph speed limit, and everyone would be required to wear crash helmets at all times.
“experts” have a very narrow focus. It’s up to policy makers to synthesize the desires and stated preferences of those “experts” with more practical concerns.
With respect, I would be most appreciative if you could cite me to the model or models which have been accurate. All of my reading and study indicates that my statement is well supported by objective evidence.
If you have evidence that some of these models have been right on target, I would like to see that evidence, as I, again with the utmost of respect, feel that is a much more productive way to approach a dialogue like this than simply suggesting someone — in this case, moi — made up a statement for purposes of winning an argument.
Actually, in your home state, as in mine, across the Sabine, some might have another word for that kind of debate technique, one which has been known to instigate most unpleasant consequences.
I will await your kind response.
Sincerely, Jim
It’s easy to know what to do in hindsight. Political leaders had no choice but to prepare for the worst case.
The concern was based on the prediction that COVID-19 would spread rapidly and swamp the medical system leaving everyone without medical care and resulting in loss of life just based on that. There has never been any danger that seasonal flu would do that.
There is always a risk that seasonal flu will overwhelm the medical system. That’s why we have flu shots and the response to flu is so widely familiar to the average American. Of course there was lots of uncertainty about COVID. But leadership is doing the thing that’s not easy. It’s what Reagan and Volcker did to save the economy, the GW Bush Iraq surge, or ever Churchill with Coventry. It’s easy to say “my experts told me and I must listen to them”. It’s hard to say there may be a better way. Blindly doing what one group of experts say is leading from behind,