I’m an emergency physician at St. Barnabas Hospital in The Bronx. I have been in the ER every day these last few weeks, either supervising or providing direct care. I contracted a COVID-19 infection very early in the outbreak, as did two of my daughters, one of whom is a nurse. We are all well, thank God.
COVID-19 has been the worst health care disaster of my 30-year career, because of its intensity, duration and potential for lasting impact. The lasting impact is what worries me the most. And it’s why I now believe we should end the lockdown and rapidly get back to work.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday announced new plans to scrutinize the largest recipients of emergency small business loans and signaled potential criminal penalties if big companies misrepresented their financial situation to secure the money.
Mnuchin in a CNBC interview scolded Wall Street-backed firms that received tens of millions of dollars in Paycheck Protection Program loans, which can be forgiven if businesses maintain their payrolls.
Sweden, unlike its Nordic neighbors Denmark and Norway – and virtually every other country in the western world – has resisted extensive lockdown restrictions to stem the coronavirus outbreak. Instead, it's largely kept society, including schools and restaurants open, and relied on voluntary social-distancing measures that appeal to the public's sense of self-restraint. Polls show the strategy is broadly supported by most Swedes.
Scientists in Sweden and abroad have accused the country of dangerously pursuing "herd immunity" – the idea that by building a broad base of recovered infections in society the disease will eventually stop spreading because a majority of people will not be susceptible. "Herd immunity" is usually achieved by vaccination and takes place when a large enough percentage of the population are immune.
A judge in Illinois has ruled that Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s extended stay-at-home order exceeds his authority and violates individual civil rights.
Republican state Rep. Darren Bailey filed a motion last week to prevent the Democratic governor "from taking any action ... which orders Darren Bailey to stay at home, or at his place of residence, as well as limiting his ability to travel within the state."
A dozen of America’s top scientists and a collection of billionaires and industry titans say they have the answer to the coronavirus pandemic, and they found a backdoor to deliver their plan to the White House.
Traffic got a little busier along Main Street, but otherwise, it was hard to tell that coronavirus restrictions were ending in the tiny Montana town of Roundup.
That’s because it’s largely business as usual in the town of 1,800 people. Nonessential stores could reopen as a statewide shutdown ended this week, but most shops in Roundup — the pharmacy, the hardware store, two small grocers — were essential and never closed.
A florist and a thrift shop reopened Monday, apparently two of the only stores that had to shut down at all. Bars and restaurants remain shuttered and getting takeout is still the only option until May 4, when they can open with restrictions.
It’s time for plain talk on testing.
Plain fact one:
We have nowhere near enough tests, and it’s not clear how many week or months away we are from having them. Facts are stubborn things, and so is math.
Ideally, we would test everyone in the country with symptoms of COVID-19, every one of their contacts, every hospitalized patient, and many people in places such as nursing homes, homeless shelters, prisons, and jails where the virus can spread explosively and kill quickly. That would be over a million tests a day, more than four times more than we are doing now. And that’s without even considering testing others at risk, such as health care and other essential workers who don’t have symptoms. That would require millions of more tests per day.
It is wrong to restrict the freedoms of everyone, destroy economic prosperity, and in many cases deny people the opportunity to work — all in the name of “saving their lives” while, in fact, more than 80 percent of the population has little or nothing to fear from the coronavirus. The restrictions on those younger than 65 years of age should be lifted immediately.
Approximately 2.8 million Americans die each year out of a population of 330 million, which means the average American has about one out of 118 chances of dying in any given year, from all causes. Those over 65 have about one chance in 33 of dying, while those who are 30 or younger have less than one chance in a thousand of dying, again from all causes.
Deaths from COVID-19 are even more skewed in favor of the young. Those who are 24 or younger have about one chance in a million of dying from COVID-19 (almost too small to measure). Those who are 65 or over have about one chance in 1,250 of dying from COVID-19 — a very small fraction of all of the other things that will kill them.
Another key issue to be studied is the governmental response. There is a lot of talk right now about which countries are doing best, but the honest answer is that it is too early to tell what the right long‐ term approach was. When this is all over, we will be able to evaluate the actions that each country took and determine what worked and what did not. It is unfortunate that everyone was put to the test, but now we have useful data on all the responses. Let’s sort through it to develop guidelines for the future.
...If you look at the data from Google about how much people are moving around or social distancing, you'll find that before the government issued any of these orders that people had to shelter in place, stay at home or shut down businesses, businesses were telling people to work from home. People were avoiding each other. So the question becomes, given the responses that people are going to undertake on their own, what marginal benefit is the government going to be able to yield by issuing a stay-at-home order or requiring people to wear masks? Because it may not reduce transmission very much at all if people are already doing all of those things themselves.
