RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/covid-19-point-of-care-rapid-test

In June 1981, the rapid-response newsletter of the Center for Disease Control, the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, published news of an unusual pneumonia in otherwise healthy young men in Los Angeles. It would take four years from those first recorded cases of AIDS to the first FDA-approved test for HIV, and over a decade before the first rapid test. And so, if just a year ago, any of my colleagues had told me that we could have a point-of-care rapid test after mere months of a new pathogen’s emergence, I would have regarded it as hopelessly optimistic.

Yet that is what the first-of-its-kind alliance between the U.S. biotechnology industry and the federal government has delivered. Just four months after the emergence of Covid-19, a dizzying array of tests is available to patients, physicians, and researchers. The initial tests, dependent on identifying the viral genome, have now been supplanted by much faster, much less expensive antibody tests. Unlike genomic tests, which require laboratory equipment and take several hours to complete, the new antibody-based tests are portable, and some don’t require any special materials other than saline. The antibody tests may answer questions not only about a patient’s current state but also about whether he has been exposed in the past by measuring antibodies that the immune system creates in response to the coronavirus. Finally, just today, the FDA announced that it is granting authorization for the first Covid-19 test that can be taken at home, affording an opportunity for many people in at-risk groups who have forgone testing up to now. By all measures, the emergency regime set up by the FDA has opened the floodgates of innovation on one of the most vexing problems of responding to a viral outbreak, and with great success.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/1-in-5-new-york-city-residents-infected-with-ccp-virus-antibody-testing-shows_3324032.html

Preliminary results from antibody testing in New York state found a 13.9 percent infection rate, officials announced Thursday, suggesting 2.7 million in the state have been infected by the CCP virus.

People who test positive are believed to have had the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease, in the past. Some patients with virus never show symptoms and have no idea they were infected. Experts believe past infection could make people immune to the virus, though that theory has not been confirmed.

Preliminary results from 3,000 tests carried out across 19 New York counties found 13.9 percent of those tested have antibodies against COVID-19. But that figure climbed to 21.2 percent in New York City and dropped to 3.6 percent in counties outside the city, Long Island, and Westchester and Rockland counties.

The percent positive on Long Island was 16.7 percent and 11.7 percent in Westchester and Rockland counties combined.

Forty three percent of those tested were in New York City, 14.4 percent were on Long Island, 9.8 percent were in Westchester and Rockland counties, and 32.8 percent of them were in the rest of the state.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/23/looks-like-trump-was-right-about-the-coronavirus-fatality-rate/

Two new studies suggest that President Trump was right in early March when he guessed the fatality rate for coronavirus is under 1 percent.

In early March, President Donald Trump was lambasted for saying on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show that he had a hunch the coronavirus fatality rate, which the World Health Organization pegged then at 3 to 4 percent, was in fact much lower, under 1 percent. Many commentators, myself included pointed out that the beginning of a pandemic medical crisis was not the time to be floating hunches. But, as we always knew was possible, it looks now like the president might well have been right.

New data from random antibody tests conducted in New York State suggest that as many as 2.7 million people statewide have had the coronavirus. That along with the just over 15,000 deaths that have occurred leads to a fatality rate for the virus of .5 percent according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Here is what Trump said on March 4:

“Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor.”

He went on to say:

“I think that that number (the WHO number) is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.”

Democrats and media pundits blasted Trump for spreading “misinformation.”

While this data is preliminary, it is backed up by another study in Los Angeles that found 40 times more people had carried the virus then were previously known. This dropped the fatality rate in LA from 4.5 percent to .1-.3 percent.

It is difficult to stress how important these findings are. The 5-week lockdown that has destroyed the American economy was put in place by contemplating what looks to be rather absurd numbers by the WHO.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/22/the-chinese-coronavirus-is-this-generations-tiananmen-test/

We are suffering a catastrophe of the Chinese Communist Party’s making. It must be held accountable, made to pay for the destruction it has caused, putting every lever of American power on the table to ensure it.

Observers of the Chinese coronavirus crisis have cast it, with good reason, as a potential Chernobyl for General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party regime.

America, too, is faced with a challenge with relevant historical parallels, separate and apart from the wartime comparisons regarding the mobilization and sacrifices of our countrymen.

As with the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, we are once again at an inflection point in our relationship with China, faced with the carnage caused most directly by a malevolent CCP.

The Chinese coronavirus crisis may well represent this generation’s Tiananmen Square test.

The test is as follows: With the CCP inflicting incalculable costs in blood and treasure through its unique role in spreading the coronavirus, and its related menacing behavior, will we demand reparations, or will we let the regime off scot-free, emboldening it, and encouraging it to act with impunity and still more reckless abandon in its quest for hegemony going forward?

We failed this test in 1989.

Then, when presented with the image of “Tank Man,” we did something even worse than turning our back on him. Our immediate response to the CCP’s massacre of democracy protesters was toothless. But ultimately, we proceeded still further to embrace the Communist regime, effectively rewarding its villainy by integrating it into the global economic, financial, and geopolitical system.