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April 2020

Andrew Cuomo is in for a reckoning for placing COVID-19 patients into vulnerable NY nursing homes By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/andrew_cuomo_is_in_for_a_reckoning_for_placing_covid19_patients_into_vulnerable_ny_nursing_homes.html

Remember when the New York City official, Scott Stringer, declared that President Trump had “blood on his hands” over his coronavirus response?

He ought to have been directing his remarks to the vaunted Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, instead.  His policies are precisely why New York has the worst coronavirus record of any U.S. city, and he’s going to have to start answering questions.

Here’s how bad it was, from the Daily Wire:

On March 25, New York’s Health Department issued a mandate that state nursing homes could not refuse COVID-19-positive patients who were “medically stable,” meaning facilities that housed the most vulnerable populations were forced to introduce the virus into their midst.

A nursing home in Queens received two coronavirus patients who had been discharged from a hospital (but were still contagious and in need of care) – along with a box containing body bags, The New York Post reported. An executive at the facility told the Post it had been free of the coronavirus prior to accepting those two patients. The executive also said that along with the two patients arrived a shipment of personal protective equipment and the body bags.

Patriotic Americans against Tyranny by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15936/patriotic-americans-against-tyranny

Perhaps the last time any of us saw nearly 80% of Americans agree on any issue was our resolute response to the 9/11 attacks by terrorists or our nation’s spirit following Pearl Harbor.

Today’s findings send a strong and unmistakable message to all politicians, pundits, and policy makers that there is no room for politics in a COVID-19 era….

[P]utting aside our differences and concentrating on policies that will protect our nation today and far into the future is our shared path forward.

America has no patience for any politicians who seek to use the COVID-19 crisis to advance their own partisan agenda.

That is the bottom line from a recently completed national survey by McLaughlin & Associates that reveals how this pandemic has united our nation in a manner not seen since we came together as one to retaliate against aggressor nations that would harm our democracy.

‘Truly demented’: Just when you thought Rep. Adam Schiff couldn’t sink lower, he said this about consequences of Senate not removing Trump

https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2020/04/25/truly-demented-just-when-you-thought-rep-adam-schiff-couldnt-sink-lower-he-said-this-about-consequences-of-senate-not-removing-trump/

All our readers already know that Rep. Adam Schiff is a shameless, pathetic liar, so we won’t delve into that much further other than to say here’s another doozy of an example why:

Rep. @AdamSchiff is now suggesting that deaths caused by Coronavirus occurred because Trump was not impeached..
“I don’t think we had any idea how much damage he would go on to do.. There are 50,000 Americans now who are dead in significant part because of his incompetence..”

Dan Bongino summed Schiff up nicely:

✔ @dbongino

Known liar, clown, fraud, oxygen thief, serial hoaxster, and all-around garbage-person, sleazy Adam Schiff is doing everything he can to make this awful situation worse. There aren’t many people walking this planet who’ve done more damage than this sleazeball.

China Says It Is ‘Victim’ of Coronavirus Disinformation, Accuses U.S. of ‘Hiding Something’ By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/china-says-it-is-victim-of-coronavirus-disinformation-accuses-u-s-of-hiding-something/

The Chinese government went on the attack Monday against U.S. criticism of the Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, claiming it is a “victim” of disinformation surrounding the pandemic and accusing the U.S. of “hiding something.”

“China always stands against disinformation campaign. We are victim rather than producer of disinformation,” the Chinese foreign ministry wrote on its Twitter account. “Peddling disinformation and recrimination are by no means prescription for international anti-pandemic cooperation and should be rejected by all.”

Moments later, the foreign ministry added a tweet hammering the U.S. response to the coronavirus and suggesting that the U.S. government has been dishonest about the pandemic with the American public.

“Growing doubts over the US government’s handling of the #COVID19, e.g. When did the first infection occur in the US? Is the US government hiding something? Why they opt to blame others? American people and the international community need an answer from the US government,” the foreign ministry tweeted.

Schumer to Introduce Bill to Stop Trump From Placing Name on Stimulus Checks By Zachary Stieber (huh?)

https://www.theepochtimes.com/schumer-to-introduce-bill-to-stop-trump-from-placing-name-on-stimulus-checks_3328708.html

President Donald Trump’s name will not be on stimulus checks sent to Americans if a bill soon to be introduced by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) passes through Congress.

Republicans control the Senate and are unlikely to support the bill, which Schumer plans on introducing soon.

Dubbed the No Politics in Pandemic Recovery Act, or No PR Act, the legislation would bar using taxpayer funds “for any publicity or promotional activity that includes the names, likeness, or signature” of President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence.

“President Trump unfortunately appears to see the pandemic as just another opportunity to promote his own political interests. The No PR Act puts an end to the president’s exploitation of taxpayer money for promotional material that only benefits his reelection campaign,” Schumer said in a statement sent to news outlets. “Delaying the release of stimulus checks so his signature could be added is a waste of time and money.”

Schumer’s office didn’t respond to a request for more information.

China-Style Internet Control Is One Of The Worst Ideas For Solving Coronavirus By Ilya Shapiro

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/27/china-style-internet-control-is-one-of-the-worst-ideas-for-solving-coronavirus/

Including the line ‘China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong’ discredits any piece of writing that discusses civil liberties and the rule of law.

My former law professor Jack Goldsmith, now at Harvard Law School, and Andrew Keane Woods of the University of Arizona Law School, have a remarkable article in The Atlantic that defends technology companies’ surveillance and speech controls regarding coronavirus information. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet,” they write, “and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”

I’m a constitutional lawyer, not a tech-regulation expert, so I’ll defer on the relevant policy issues to Goldsmith, who co-authored the insightful “Who Controls the Internet?” back in 2006, and Woods, a Cambridge Ph.D. who focuses on this area in his teaching and writing. But what I found stunning about their article wasn’t policy prescriptions—of which there are few—but the blaming of American constitutional culture for preventing the sort of government interventions that might help us during the current pandemic.

Here’s the nut graf: “The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.”

In other words, people would have better coronavirus-related news, and public-health officials would have better contact-tracing programs, if it weren’t for our Constitution’s pesky protections for speech and privacy. “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”

Now, even if it’s true that the U.S. government could more effectively target criminal activity, let alone “fake news”—whichever ideological side gets to define it—if it could elide constitutional rights, is that something we’re seriously willing to consider doing? Including the line “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” discredits any discussion of civil liberties and the rule of law.

And that’s before we even weigh the trade-offs. My Cato colleagues who work on technology policy say that the digital contact-tracing programs being proposed—those for which Goldsmith and Woods want a more flexible constitutional structure—wouldn’t even achieve the goals of traditional contact-tracing, which seeks to identify and isolate disease carriers.

Why No COVID-19 Models Have Been Accurate, And How To Fix That By Jon McCloskey

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/27/why-no-covid-19-models-have-been-accurate-and-how-to-fix-that/

The decisions that are being made during this crisis are far too important and complex to be based on such imprecise data and with such unreliable results.

There’s been a lot of armchair analysis about various models being used to predict outcomes of COVID-19. For those of us who have built spatial and statistical models, all of this discussion brings to mind George Box’s dictum, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”—or useless, as the case may be.

The problem with data-driven models, especially when data is lacking, can be easily explained. First of all, in terms of helping decision makers make quality decisions, statistical hypothesis testing and data analysis is just one tool in a large tool box.

It’s based on what we generally call reductionist theory. In short, the tool examines parts of a system (usually by estimating an average or mean) and then makes inferences to the whole system. The tool is usually quite good at testing hypotheses under carefully controlled experimental conditions.

For example, the success of the pharmaceutical industry is, in part, due to the fact that they can design and implement controlled experiments in a laboratory. However, even under controlled experimental procedures, the tool has limitations and is subject to sampling error. In reality, the true mean (the true number or answer we are seeking) is unknowable because we cannot possibly measure everything or everybody, and model estimates always have a certain amount of error.

These Models Are Unreliable

Simple confidence intervals can provide good insight into the precision and reliability, or usefulness, of the part estimated by reductionist models. With the COVID-19 models, the so-called “news” appears to be using either the confidence interval from one model or actual estimated values (i.e., means) from different models as a way of reporting a range of the “predicted” number of people who may contract or die from the disease (e.g., 60,000 to 2 million).

A PLAGUE OF CREDENTIALED “EXPERTS” BY SARAH HOYT

Someday 2020 will be behind us, and we’ll tell our kids and grandkids about the year we were smitten by the plague.

By which I don’t mean COVID-19, which is at best a nasty disease with death tolls the equivalent of a bad flu year – if we accept the numbers we’re being fed by an establishment desperate to cash in on the cash bonus for each COVID-19 diagnosis – but the plague that has laid this country low, destroyed our economy and brought us to a place that no external enemy could have brought: this plague of experts. Or perhaps I should say “experts” since most of them have behind them only a long string of failed prognostications, followed by promotion within the “civil servant” echelons.

Yes, I am talking about Doctors Birx and Fauci. I’m already seeing people pointing fingers at the president and complaining that he’s relied too much on these “experts.”

In fact, some months ago I saw people complaining in the comments at one of the conservative sites that the president hires “establishment” people which he then has to fire. Why can’t he hire the people who will be good and not beholden to the – largely left – political establishment?

Which brings us to the real plague of experts.

Sure, what happened in 2020 and taking our economy down to protect us from what will emerge in retrospect as a not particularly lethal illness is a problem.

If we survive – we’ll survive, right – and there is still a Republic at the end of this, we’ll need to talk about the plague of experts as a systemic problem.

You see, just like COVID-19 is a virus similar to those that cause the common cold, this overreaction to COVID-19 bears a strong resemblance to “expert-directed” faux pas in everything from aviation to business to healthcare to, yes, politics.

In the early 21st century – largely because of a hyper-litigious society, in which everyone and anyone might sue you for discrimination – we’re faced with the inability to judge merit or competency.

The China Rethink China prospered while buying off greedy American elites. Now that alarm bells are ringing in Washington, who will answer the call? Lee Smith

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/lee-smith-china-coronavirus-2

The novel coronavirus that swept out of the Chinese city of Wuhan in midwinter to infect millions around the globe has now forced world leaders to reassess their relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The superpower conflict between the United States and Soviet Union helped push China onto center stage nearly 50 years ago. Over the past three decades, Beijing has come to dominate the international system, thanks not only to the world’s largest pool of cheap, unregulated labor and a burgeoning consumer marketplace, but also the craven delusions and greed of Western political and business elites, especially in the United States. COVID-19 has now compelled the most significant geostrategic rethink since the end of the Cold War.

Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016 in part because large sections of the American public, especially in former industrial states, believed that Trump was the only candidate willing to protect them from the devastation wrought on the U.S. economy and social fabric by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and their partners in Congress. “China is not our friend,” Trump tweeted in 2013. “They are not our ally. They want to overtake us, and if we don’t get smart and tough soon, they will.”

Trump promised he’d take American manufacturing jobs back from China. He said he’d be tough with the Chinese on trade, and as president he imposed tariffs that brought Beijing to the negotiating table. In mid-January, as PRC officials were in Washington signing phase one of the deal, Beijing was lying about the nature of the coronavirus, saying there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. There was. Perhaps as many as 5 million Wuhan residents left the city after the virus erupted and before the Jan. 23 quarantine. China’s mendacity prevented cautionary measures that might have been taken earlier to prevent the respiratory disease from spreading to the four corners of the world. Worse, according to historian Niall Ferguson, China had closed down domestic flights from Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, but continued to let international flights leave the country—including to the United States.

Science says: It’s time to start easing the lockdowns: Scott Atlas, M.D.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/26/science-says-its-time-to-start-easing-the-coronavirus-lockdowns/

Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford Medical Center.

The consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been enormous, and New York has suffered more than anywhere else in the world. Compared as a separate country, the New York area would rank, by far, as No. 1 for deaths per capita.

The New York-New Jersey-Connecticut tri-state area accounts for approximately 60 percent of all US deaths. Theories abound, but the New York area itself is different: New York is the top port of entry for the hundreds of thousands of tourists coming to the US every month from China; Gotham has a uniquely high density of living that swells daily by millions from workers and tourists; and Manhattan sees some 1.6 million commuters daily, mostly on crowded public transit, including 320,000 from Jersey alone.

Yet the pandemic toll is falling, dramatically so in New York, ­including both hospitalizations and deaths per day. Few doubt that the unprecedented isolation policies had a significant ­impact on “flattening the curves.”

Now, we face another, even greater problem: how to sensibly re-enter normal life. This must be based on what we now know, not on worst-case projections, using facts and fundamental medical knowledge, not fear or single-vision policies.

First, we know the risk of ­dying from COVID-19 is far lower than initially thought, and not significant for the overwhelming majority of those infected.