RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/how_the_coronavirus_changed_president_trump_and_america.html

The media are piling on President Trump for not instilling confidence during the COVID-19 crisis: “There is no new Trump.”  “Don’t be fooled.”  “The new Trump is the same as the old Trump.”  “He’s incapable of leading us out of it.”  “Trump shrugs off responsibility.”  “He’s putting the blame on the Chinese.”  “Trump is fundamentally unfit — intellectually, morally, temperamentally and psychologically.”  The media could not be more wrong.

As explained in my book, Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump, his personality — replete with intelligence, imagination, consistency, charisma, organization, and optimism — is well designed for modern America.  But I did not think Trump’s personality would evolve in the Oval Office.  I was wrong, deeply wrong.  He has changed, profoundly, and for the better.

During the March 17 Tuesday White House coronavirus press conference, a reporter asked if President Trump’s mood was more somber on Monday’s briefing.  With great seriousness, Trump outlined how he had been solemn from the get-go — in January, restricting travel with China.  Although he may genuinely believe that self-description, what he has progressively revealed of himself in this crisis is different.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-psychology-of-viral-paradoxes/

There are a lot of known unknowns and paradoxes in these times of uncertainty. Here are a few.

1) Trump is criticized as both “racist” and “xenophobic” in his condemnations of the “Chinese” virus, while he’s also criticized for “appeasing” President Xi when he makes friendly references to their coronavirus chats. How can Trump be both?

Is he merely erratic? Perhaps any smart president at this moment would prefer both to galvanize Americans about the threat of Chinese near monopolies of industries key to the U.S. in extremis (such as medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and rare earths) and  yet to not to so offend our  only importer that it cuts off a vulnerable U.S. in the middle of a crisis.

2) The media hype the increased number of cases (the denominator) without much attention to the number of deaths (the numerator) caused by, or perhaps mostly by, the virus. The numerator, however, is not increasing daily at a rate that’s commensurate with the denominator, despite a number of important other extenuating criteria:

a) Those seeking tests are mostly those with some sort of malaise or exposure, and yet they test overwhelmingly (so far) negative, perhaps at rates, depending on locale, of 80 percent to 90 percent negative (an increasingly not widely reported fact), and thus they may underrepresent percentages of the infected in the general population.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/when-will-it-end/

Congressman Chip Roy (R., Texas) argued on the homepage Friday that the “government needs to make a decision about when we are going to free up the economy.” From the true premises that uncertainty is bad for the economy and that an indefinite shutdown of social life is as uncertain as it gets, Roy makes the case that the government must select a date to lift the shutdown — a virus “D-Day.” By that date, the government will vow to have the epidemic under control, and it’ll mobilize all federal, state, and local resources toward keeping that vow. Our current path risks economic devastation and its attendant downsides.

There’s something attractive about this argument, but in an article in The New Atlantis, Ari Schulman gives the obvious objection:

It is not possible to place meaningful estimates on the true economic cost of [the worst-case scenario in which the virus spreads unchecked], except to say that there is good reason to believe it would be worse than the current shutdown. We simply do not have a good frame through which to view this future. Our world is too different from 1918 for the Spanish flu pandemic to offer much guidance. . . .

The most urgent task for the president and national leaders is to articulate the purpose of the shutdown, what it aims to achieve, and how we will know when we have. The current answer — “15 days to slow the spread” — is arbitrary and unpersuasive. The question is not How many more weeks or months? but Under what conditions can we relax blanket national closures?

Various answers suggest themselves. We might say that the shutdown can end when the case curve bends: That is, when new daily confirmed cases peak and decline. We might also look for the share of tests returning positive to steadily decline, suggesting that testing is finally widespread enough to capture most cases. Perhaps most importantly, we might look for a peak and decline in Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths.

That doesn’t mean the shutdown is the only way to deal with the pandemic. As Schulman goes on to argue, the U.S. was forced to take such an extreme measure only because our early response was insufficient:

We already have a gold standard for fighting epidemics: early identification of symptomatic patients, contact tracing, isolation of those infected and exposed, and widespread random sampling of the population to detect new outbreaks among unidentified contacts. Only by identifying and isolating the sick can the healthy get back to work.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/03/covid-19-the-blunt-instrument-of-suppression/

“‘A country which is fully employed, or close to it, is in a better position to fight a public health emergency than one confronting an impending recession or depression. As jobs are shed and stock markets plummet the need is to at least consider a different approach to the coronavirus pandemic.”

The precautionary principle was in vogue some years ago in the context of the climate debate. However, the argument is a general one. It turns on the outcome of something being so bad that even a small probability of it occurring is unacceptable. In other words, its expected cost (the probability of it occurring multiplied by the costs it would impose if it were to occur) would almost certainly exceed any costs of putting in place measures to prevent it from occurring.

The precautionary principle has a frailty as a guide for taking preventive action. The costs of taking action are real and tangible, whereas the costs of not taking action are speculative. What has this to do with combatting the coronavirus pandemic? It provides a foil. The situation facing us effectively stands the precautionary principle on its head.

To explain. Whereas the costs of inaction on the health of the population due to the virus can be calculated with a fair degree of confidence by epidemiologists, albeit along a scale; the costs of taking a range of aggressive actions to curb the spread of the virus are speculative. At worst, the social and economic costs of such actions could be so high as to outweigh their public-health benefits. And this is what I would like to discuss in light of an influential report (“Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand”) issued on March 16 by the Imperial College London on behalf of its Covid-19 Response Team. The “IC Report” is based on epidemiological modelling.