RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/489968-governors-should-focus-on-tackling-coronavirus-rather-than-shift-blame

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called on the federal government to take control of the medical supply market. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker demanded that President Trump take charge and said “precious months” were wasted waiting for federal action. Some critics are even more direct in demanding a federal takeover, including a national quarantine.

It is the legal version of panic shopping. Many seem to long for federal takeovers, if not martial law. Yet like all panic shopping, they are buying into far more than they need while not doing as much as they could with what they have. For decades, governors tried to retain principal authority over public emergencies, but they did very little with those powers. While many are doing impressive work now, some governors seem as eager to contain the blame as the coronavirus. Call it political distancing.

Even if Trump nationalized the crisis by deploying troops, imposing price controls, and forcing production of ventilators, the Constitution has left most police authority and public health safety to the states in our system of federalism. The Framers believed liberties and powers were safest when held closest to citizens in local and state governments. Elected officials at the local and state levels are more readily held accountable than unknown Washington bureaucrats. Of course, with authority comes responsibility, and the latter notion is not always as welcomed as the former.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/28/its-not-a-choice-between-lives-or-the-economy/

““First do no harm.” Dr. Lee is right to warn that the panicked response to this new virus has neglected that age-old medical advice. “Unless,” he notes, “we tighten criteria for recording death due only to the virus (as opposed to it being present in those who died from other conditions), the official figures may show a lot more deaths apparently caused by the virus than [are] actually the case. What then? How do we measure the health consequences of taking people’s lives, jobs, leisure and purpose away from them to protect them from an anticipated threat? Which causes the least harm?”

President Trump has shown great leadership during this manufactured crisis. Let’s hope he continues to ponder his observation that we do not want to get ourselves into a situation in which the cure is worse than the disease.

There seem to be shortages of everything these days, not least a shortage of commentary on the COVID-19 virus, also known as the Chinese virus, the Wuhan flu, known to some as the Chinese Communist Party virus, or the CCP virus for short.

Since there has been so little discussion of this disease in the news or in the blogosphere, I thought I would weigh in with a word or two.

Regular readers will know that I have already, these past few weeks, had occasion to say something about this disease, and the reaction to the disease, here and at other venues. I seem to be in a distinct minority in thinking that the best reaction to the disease was not furnished by the protagonist of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

Let me begin, therefore, by acknowledging that this new virus can make people, especially older people, and most particularly older with other health problems very sick indeed.

COVID-19 is the big and nastier brother of SARS, another Chinese import, which made its way around the world in the early 2000s and killed nearly 800 people. “SARS” stands for “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome,” which can be the dreaded effect of COVID-19 infection and which explains why you are hearing so much about medical ventilators at the moment.