Virus thoughts from VDH. I don’t buy the 1-2% number. I think it will ultimately be shown to be much lower than that.
[Update a few minutes later]
More from VDH: Viral Prerequisites and Nationalist Lessons in Time of Plague.
[Update late morning]
Why herd immunity is not a solution, at least not without a vaccine.
I agree on principle, but I continue to believe that the ratio of infections to deaths is much less than one percent.
[Update a few minutes later]
Time for a second opinion.
The CCP has been lying from the beginning, and continues to, yet their media organs the NYT, WaPo, CNN et al continue to carry their water, because Orange Man Bad.
Mark Levin said on his show last night that the Soviet Union never damaged our country (and the world) the way that the CCP has. I’m not sure that’s true, if you look at the decades-long damage it did, but it certainly never killed people and destroyed wealth this quickly.
[Tuesday-morning update]
The Chinese Communist Party versus America.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
Why China must be held accountable.
I’d start by recognizing Taiwan.
[Update a while later]
How China’s lies brought the world to its knees.
New York is starting to trial them for treatment of the virus.
If this works, it’s good news on at least two fronts: It will help save lives, and it would indicate that getting infected and recovering does confer immunity.
[Monday-morning update]
Germany is going to issue certificates of immunity. We should be doing this as well, once we get the antibody testing going; it will allow people to go back to work. Knowing who has antibodies will be even more important than knowing who is infected.
[Bumped]
It’s not for detecting antibodies, but Abbot now has a device that can detect positive for the virus within five minutes, and all clear in fifteen. Would have been nice to have it a couple months ago, but better late than never.
[Update late morning]
None of this is new, but it’s nice to see it laid out in one place.
We really need an antibody test ASAP, because that would allow those immunized (assuming that it confers immunity) to go back to work. As noted above, it may be that in order to work in or eat at a restaurant, at least for a while, one will have to present their papers.
[Update a couple minutes later]
WW III is a war against infectious diseases.
We’ve been at war with them since the beginning of civilization, but we’re developing much better weapons now.
[Update just before noon]
We have a difficult five weeks ahead of us. Also:
To Paraphrase Rumsfeld, You Go into a Crisis with the President You Have
“I realize complaining about President Trump’s Twitter feed is like complaining about the existence of rain in Seattle. But in recent days, as the country has faced a worsening viral epidemic that has claimed an increasing number of lives and brought commerce to a halt, the president has found time to repeatedly tweet about how great the television ratings of his briefings are, made up a new nickname for the governor of Michigan, retweeted Gateway Pundit’s claim that ‘Fox News fired Trish Regan for telling the truth about President Trump,’ — this was over her ‘Coronavirus Impeachment Scam’ segment — boasted about how high his poll numbers are and how the Washington Post is understating his public support, declared that the U.S. government would not pay for the security protection of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and also retweeted a two-year-old tweet from Florida governor Ron DeSantis about Andrew McCabe. He tweeted that he was thinking about instituting a quarantine of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, which is probably the perfect way to get people to leave a particular area in expectation of a quarantine. A few hours later Trump announced, via Twitter, that a travel advisory was sufficient.
Perhaps most egregiously, President Trump tweeted that he had ‘much respect’ for Chinese president Xi, who is probably more responsible for this worldwide pandemic than any other human being on earth.
This president cares about what he chooses to care about, and he prioritizes what he prioritizes, even amidst a global pandemic that is killing several hundred Americans per day and stands as the greatest challenge to this country in at least a generation. We will have to get through this with a president who simply cannot stop obsessing over television ratings, what’s being said about him on television, Fox News personnel moves, whether governors are giving him sufficient praise, minor decisions involving the royal family, and how nice the leader of China is.”
[Early-afternoon update]
Yes, we should random test the general population ASAP.
The FDA has issued an authorization for emergency use.
That’s nice, considering how much we’ve been fighting red tape since this started. But early results have been encouraging. Italy and France have been not just allowing, but prescribing it.
[Update a while later]
No, Dan Diamond at Politico, there is not “scant evidence.” But you just keep being garbage.
[Update a few minutes later]
It’s not enough that we have to fight the virus; we have to continue to fight the FDA.
I agree with Glenn: “The thing is, Trump can intervene in these things, but there’s still delay, and there’s only so much a President can do to chivvy along the bureaucracy. I think he should announce that he’ll have a team of managers from outside government evaluate the performance of the FDA, CDC, NIH when this is over, with those found to have under-performed to be sacked.”
Bureaucracy can be just as deadly as a virus. The good news is that all of this is feeding the public’s desire to drain the DC swamp.
They’ll get to have a say in November.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Trump is slashing red tape again like he was 39.
[Update late morning]
Speaking of garbage journalism, read the latest from Treacher: “I can’t even imagine what poor Yamiche Alcindor from the PBS NewsHour is going through right now. It really puts my own petty concerns into perspective.”
I have to say that one of the people in whom I’ve been most disappointed in terms of TDS is S. E. Cupp. I used to have a lot of respect for her.
[Update a few minutes later]
[Noon update]
To get back to the original post topic, a doctor in New York has successfully treated almost 700 patients with no failures.
This might really be the magic bullet. If it’s prophylactic, the key is to ramp up production immediately, to get the economy going again.
[Update mid afternoon]
This could have saved a lot of people a century ago; let’s hope it helps now.
…has exposed Americans’ disconnect from reality.
[Update a while later]
Nancy Pelosi and the politics pandemic.
[Update a while later]
Goodbye, Green New Deal.
Set aside, for the moment, any reservations you might have about the coronavirus-emergency regime, and set aside your views on climate change, too, whatever they may be. Instead, ask yourself this: If Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in order to prevent possibly severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?
Not a prayer.
[Update later morning]
Yes, the president is not wrong: Pelosi is a sick puppy.
Great.
Regulation kills.
[Update a few minutes later]
Distillers have to fight the FDA bureaucracy to produce hand sanitizer.
The American people think it’s been doing a terrible job of covering the coronavirus. The American people are right.
After too many decades, almost a century, the people have pulled aside the curtain, and the man behind it has been exposed.
Hey, I’d like to end them, too, but his solution–to go vegetarian–is not nutritionally viable to me. It would be in no way a dietary improvement.
It sure would be great if we could somehow manufacture meat without the suffering, though. It’s a technology that would be very useful for spaceflight.