… As supply-chain bottlenecks are sorted out, the kvetching about tests by many governors sounds increasingly like an excuse not to take responsibility for a plan to reopen.
“You are using a free-market model in a public health emergency,” Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, recently said. Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam has called President Trump “delusional” for suggesting there’s enough coronavirus testing capacity for states to safely reopen.
What’s delusional is to suggest that states must be able to test every citizen on demand. As Anthony Fauci has explained, someone may test negative one day but positive the next. The incubation period can be between two and 14 days, which means infections can easily be missed even with widespread testing.
Florida and other U.S. states eased restrictions against the new coronavirus, and Italy reopened most of its factories Monday as the global number of confirmed infections crossed 3.5 million with nearly a quarter-million deaths.
Missouri businesses were permitted to open their doors with restrictions in place, restaurants and salons in Nebraska could prepare for customers and Ohio manufacturers limited by the pandemic could resume operations.
In Florida, restaurants and stores in most parts of the state could reopen at 25% of their indoor capacity Monday, while schools, bars, gyms and salons remained closed.
Governors across the U.S. have reopened business or detailed plans to do so in a patchwork of orders that vary by speed and approach. Even in U.S. states where restrictions aren’t being lifted, local authorities in some areas are making plans to reopen. Two California counties, Sutter and Yuba, have said that some businesses such as salons, spas and tattoo parlors can open Monday under modified guidelines.
Sweden has been the world’s Covid-19 outlier, pursuing social distancing but rejecting mandatory lockdown. Schools, bars and restaurants are open – albeit with strong voluntary social distancing compliance and streets that often look almost as empty as Britain’s. Has this been enough? Sweden’s public health agency has now published a study of its R number, a metric which the UK is using to judge the success of the lockdown. The UK objective is to push R below one, by which it means it wants the number of new cases to fall. Last week, the UK’s R number was estimated at 0.8 (± 0.2 points), a figure described as an achievement of lockdown. But Sweden’s reading is 0.85, with a smaller error margin of ±0.02pts.
This raises an interesting question: might voluntary lockdowns work just as well? And might they keep the virus at a manageable level with lower social and economic costs?
The UK government has used modelling from Imperial College London, which makes some clear assumptions about lockdown. Imperial's graph, below, shows its argument: shielding, voluntary social distancing, even school closures are shown to make very little difference to the spread of the virus (ie, the R number). But lockdown, by contrast, is shown to be a game-changer with "the R" sinking immediately. This graph below, if taken at face value, makes an open-and-shut case for lockdown.
He explained: "It's just not a very fair battle or fight. And I'm glad for the guys that get to open up, but I sure wish it was us, too."
A lot of cities and towns in our country border neighboring states, but few are quite like this city that sits in two states but has one name and one traditionally vibrant business district along State Street.
Thanks to very different approaches to reopening states, the businesses on the Tennessee side were open Saturday, while the Virginia-side businesses, with the exception of curbside pickup operations at the Burger Bar and the legendary Blakey-Mitchel men's clothing store a few blocks away, are nearly all closed. The Virginia stay-at-home order remains in place at least through June 10.
People are sorting through the lessons that can be learned from the coronavirus crisis, on issues from the adequacy of medical stockpiles to emergency food supplies. The pandemic has highlighted real weakness in American preparedness, while heroic health-care workers show up to work every day trying to save lives at great personal cost. But a dirty little secret has come to light: As the number of infections rose, leaders have openly discussed rationed care as preset policy.
For years, number-crunchers have worked to create math for judging whether people’s lives should be saved based on a quality-of-life calculation. Reporting on medical rationing in light of the Wuhan virus, The New York Times’ Sheri Fink observed, “In the United States, some guidelines already exist for this grim task. In an effort little known even among doctors, federal grant programs helped hospitals, states and the Veterans Health Administration develop what are essentially rationing plans for a severe pandemic. Now those plans, some of which may be outdated, are being revisited for the coronavirus outbreak.”
What’s interesting about the experiment is that Whitmer’s actions mandate action (or inaction) on the part of individuals — “thou shalt not travel” — whereas Kemp’s actions will allow individuals to do what they want. If they want to go back to work, they may. If they want to go to a hair salon, they may. But if they do not want to go, they are not required to.
Kemp’s approach, in other words, grants individual liberty while Whitmer’s takes it away.
At this moment, Georgia and Michigan are competing with one another and with the other 48 states. In the short term, governors are looking at their colleagues to see who’s got the most sensible plan going forward. In the long term, the competition is the same — except the stakes are citizens themselves as they look around and make decisions on where to live.
Confirming what European authorities have already reported: China is exporting defective masks
According to a study conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which was first reported by Business Insider, a majority of imported masks — nearly all of which were manufactured in China — may not function as intended or adequately protect health care workers from infection with the coronavirus…
The coronavirus is killing thousands. So is the lockdown
Counting and attributing deaths to the coronavirus is not easy. That’s one reason it’s useful to look at “excess deaths” to judge the toll and severity of this plague in various parts of the world.
Excess deaths are basically the answer to a subtraction problem. Look at how many deaths typically occur in a given city, state, or country in a given week or month, adjust for population change, and then see how many people died there in that week or month in 2020.
The grim fact is that a lot more people are dying these days than normally do. From March 1 to April 18, the death rate from all causes combined tripled in New York City. That’s the extreme case. But in my state, about 1,100 more people died than were expected to die. In the country as a whole, we’ve just had four straight weeks with death numbers well above the expected.
Over the past four weeks, we've had 50,000 excess deaths across the United States.
This juxtaposition of perversion is probably the most powerful display of the America we knew and loved being turned upside down beyond the worst nightmares of our early founders… Illinois has released 4,000 prisoners, including 64 murderers and child sex offenders, under the faulty science of stopping a viral spread. Chicago is also notorious for releasing the worst criminal aliens imaginable and infamous for releasing gang-bangers and gun felons who violate their parole. Yet that same faulty science is leading to policies of arresting political dissenters who are fighting unconstitutional house arrest edicts.
Murderers released, everyday Americans placed under house arrest and threatened with jail time!
What are the results? In one of the most unreported stories in the country right now, murders have skyrocketed in Chicago even though everything is shut down. While some places are experiencing almost no crime (as one would expect with a panicked lockdown), Chicago murders are tracking ahead of this time last year, and there have been 73 more shooting victims than last year. Again, that is simply astounding given that almost a quarter of the year so far has been spent on lockdown.
Dozens of Canadians have died because they couldn't get heart surgery under hospital coronavirus policies that delayed many procedures viewed as nonurgent, according to the Toronto Sun.
Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott announced the deaths last week, which were found in a study by researchers associated with the United Health Network.
Elliott said 35 people died in Ontario because of delayed heart surgeries, an unintended — although not totally unforeseen — consequence of hospital policies meant to put more resources toward treating COVID-19…
Ontario, like many U.S. states, has postponed nonemergency surgeries to free up personal protective equipment and hospital beds for potential surges in COVID-19 patients. But, like in many U.S. states, anticipated surges did not arrive, leaving thousands of hospital beds empty and thousands of important non-coronavirus procedures delayed indefinitely.
Last month, police departments in Daytona Beach and Connecticut unveiled what was initially touted as a potential new tool against a pandemic: drones capable of taking a person’s temperature from 300 feet in the air.
Both agencies quickly backtracked on using the machines to track the novel coronavirus after backlash from civil liberty groups warning about the implications of a “Big Doctor” in the sky singling out people simply for running a fever, when it might be nothing more than a more common and less deadly flu.
They raised other concerns as well: Are cops supposed to be monitoring health information that is private under federal law? Are drone readings, even with sophisticated infrared sensors, a trustworthy way to protect public health without violating individual rights?
