The only thing we have to fear is letting fear overwhelm our sense of purpose and determination. We need to focus on facts and not fear. And I think that there’s been a lot that’s been done to try to promote fear, to promote worst-case scenarios, to drive hysteria.
Florida was going to be just like New York when it came to the Coronavirus. Well, let’s look at the tale of the tape.
Obviously a much different picture. This is equal population per 100,000 much, much less. Even if you did absolute numbers, we have 2 million more people, New York, far, far and above what Florida is. Same thing with hospitalizations. Hospitalization rate, that is a mere fraction of what you see, not just in New York, but many other States. And so saying Florida was going to be like New York was wrong and people need to know was wrong.
It brings up an interesting question about the nature of American civil life. Is my primary duty to my government or to my neighbors? For me the answer is clearly the latter. The idea that I should be the entity ensuring everyone lives by the letter of the law is anathema. Should we call the police when there is a serious crime happening? Sure, of course. Should we call the police because someone is cutting hair in their backyard? No.
The American people are smart, they understand what is going on, and they are doing a good job handling what has been asked of them. But they also need to be trusted, we don’t need a state-driven crackdown on people living their lives and we certainly don’t need citizens looking over their shoulders waiting to be sold down the river by fretful neighbors.
So,f no. I will not be telling on neighbors who cut hair, or throw a small BBQ, or sit on their stoops without social distancing, or let their kids play together in the park. That is not a door that should ever be opened in a free society. Thankfully, it is one that my fellow New Yorkers and I do not see fit to go through.
One of the most difficult things that an actor learns to do is to say a line, after having already having said it dozens if not hundreds of times, and make it seem like the first time they ever said it. This involves playing a trick on the brain, convincing yourself that you are doing something that you aren’t really doing. The initial challenge is to understand and deliver the words when you first experience them; the harder challenge is to sustain that moment of realization. America’s coronavirus response is now in that second phase.
An excellent example of how performative this has all become is CNN Anchor Chris Cuomo and presidential candidate Joe Biden broadcasting from their basements. In both cases, appearing in the basement began as a fast solution to the problem of isolation, in Cuomo’s case because he caught the Chinese virus, and in Biden’s out of fear that he might. But over the past month, both CNN and the Biden campaign have had time to create alternatives. So why are they still in the basement?
In recent weeks, an idea has been floated that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) should impose a mask-wearing requirement on all U.S. airline passengers. This call has come primarily from airline employee unions, along with their allies in Congress. U.S. carriers and the FAA have so far resisted a passenger-masking mandate, although airlines are increasingly imposing their own passenger mask policies. Universal mask-wearing may be a wise protective measure. But the question of whether or not the FAA should promulgate a mask mandate has overshadowed another important question: Does the FAA have the authority to require passengers to wear masks in the first place?
The final answer would rest with the courts, but the balance of evidence suggests the FAA does not possess the clear power to issue and enforce a mask rule.
A UPMC doctor on Thursday made a case the death rate for people infected with the new coronavirus may be as low as 0.25% — far lower than the mortality rates of 2-4% or even higher cited in the early days of the pandemic.
Dr. Donald Yealy based it partly on studies of levels of coronavirus antibodies detected in people in New York and California, and partly on COVID-19 deaths in the Pittsburgh region. The studies found that 5-20% of people had been exposed to the coronavirus, with many noticing only mild illness or none at all, he said.
Good News in the Fight Against the Virus, on a Wide Variety of Fronts
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/good-news-in-the-fight-against-the-virus-on-a-wide-variety-of-fronts/
This morning brings really encouraging news from South Korea, suggesting that those “reinfections” or “re-activations” that doctors in that country had previously reported “came because fragments of the virus remained in their bodies and showed up in test kits.” Apparently the tests the South Koreans were using were “so sensitive that [they] can still pick up parts of the small amount of RNA from a cell even after the person has recovered from COVID-19.”
Pharmaceutical and biotech companies, in collaboration with scientists in academia and government, are working flat-out to develop drugs and vaccines to treat or prevent COVID-19.
Although a vaccine is still months away, policymakers and the public should ask now: If and when their efforts succeed, will there be sufficient manufacturing capacity to meet the likely enormous demand?
Fortunately, thanks to legislation passed by Congress back in 2004, President Donald Trump and his administration already have the authority they need to support and incentivize private companies with the relevant expertise and skills to build out manufacturing capacity as quickly as humanly possible.
Private industry faces significant risks in building manufacturing capacity at this stage. Given the national interest in making a vaccine available, the president should task his administration with acting now to prepare this capacity.
Health security is critical to national security. The Covid-19 pandemic is a moment to re-evaluate U.S. dependence on China for pharmaceutical ingredients and to solidify the pharmaceutical supply chain in advance of proliferating threats.
In less than two months, the United States has drastically expanded its police powers and control of things that are ordinarily none of the government’s business. So where is the ACLU when we need it? After all, it saw this coming.
In January 2008, it issued a report called “Pandemic Preparedness: The Need for a Public Health—Not a Law Enforcement/National Security—Approach,” which criticized governments for adopting pandemic preparedness plans that “ignored effective steps that states could take to mitigate an epidemic, such as reinvigorating their public health infrastructure, and instead resorted to punitive, police-state tactics, such as forced examinations, vaccination and treatment, and criminal sanctions for those individuals who did not follow the rules.”
The report identified numerous flaws in the pandemic preparation plans, including several that now flash across our television screens daily. For example, it chided the plans for assuming the worst-case scenario would occur, saying: “Worst case scenario planning encourages counterproductive overreactions in which law-enforcement techniques and drastic anti-civil liberties measures are used as the first resort, rather than the last resort.” The report also criticized calls to “ban public gatherings, isolate symptomatic individuals, restrict the movement of individuals, or compel vaccination or treatment.”
Pandemics breed fear, of course. And governments often respond to fear with toughness. But the ACLU’s 2008 report warned that saying “we must ‘trade liberty for security’ is both false and dangerous.” It emphasized that “the law enforcement/national security approach” to fighting a pandemic “converts the exception into the rule by treating everyone in the general population as a potential threat who warrants coercive treatment.
Murphy signed an executive order Wednesday allowing parks and golf courses to reopen, with restrictions, starting Saturday morning. The governor said his decision to reverse course had little to do with the public pushback against closing these locations in the first place.
Rather, he said, his decision was based on similar actions that have been taken in neighboring Pennsylvania and New York.
But unfortunately, rather than looking at homeschooling as a way to help children make the best of the current moment, some opponents are seeking to tear it down. It’s a sad continuation of an education system that doesn’t view success through the eyes of individual students but prioritizes itself: a massive government monopoly that gets more money for each student it retains and lashes out at any alternative that might attract students and parents.
Whether you agree or disagree with the closing of businesses and orders to stay home, you'd have to acknowledge that it's right out of George Orwell’s classic, 1984. Petty state bureaucrats telling us to report people who may possibly be breaching social-distancing measures wreaks of an authoritative “Big Brother” controlling our every move.
Once rights are stripped away, it's hard to get them back. When was the last time you saw a toll booth removed on a highway? We’re still required to take off our shoes before boarding a plane.
It's not like we haven’t seen this happen in the recent past. After Sept. 11, we sacrificed our liberties for safety. According to a piece in the New York Times, looking back at the terror attacks 10 years later, “The Patriot Act undeniably expanded the government’s surveillance powers and the scope of some criminal laws.”
