Trump addresses the nation on coronavirus

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the speech.

I can’t find a good full text from which to cut-and-paste excerpts (that C-SPAN link doesn’t allow cut-and-paste), but he has banned travel from Europe (except the UK) for the 30 days starting Friday. He also is requesting 50 billion dollars in loans to states to help them respond, and an 8.3 billion dollar funding bill for the CDC and related agencies.

He added “No nation is more prepared or more resilient than the United States. We are all in this together.” Well, we may all be in this together, but those who hate Trump – and their numbers are legion – will criticize every single move he makes on this and those he doesn’t make. Russiagate didn’t work, Ukrainegate, impeachment didn’t work, but they have high hopes that COVID-19 will do him in.

I suppose I mean they would like to “do him in” politically. But probably some of them wouldn’t mind if it was literally.

[ADDENDUM: Ace has examples of some of the dissing of the speech. Predictably, they especially hate the travel ban. Do something, do something, but don’t ban travel (even temporarily) to or from affected countries. Open borders forever!

Although they probably can’t accuse him of racism for this particular travel ban, because this time it’s Europe.]

Pneumonia primer

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was in my 40s and quite healthy, I got viral pneumonia. I caught it from my son and husband, who were likewise young and healthy. Fortunately, we all recovered uneventfully, but it still knocked us all out for a while and made an impression.

I’d already been impressed by pneumonia’s power, however. Twenty years earlier, a favorite relative had come within a hair of dying from pneumonia. He was in his twenties and healthy as a horse, but for reasons no one could understand, pneumonia swiftly overtook him, landed him in the hospital and the ICU, and it was touch-and-go for quite some time.

In more recent years I’ve seen pneumonia – and septic shock from pneumonia – kill another relative dear to me. One day she was suffering from a slight cold, and within twenty-four hours she was hospitalized and in a coma on what turned out to be her deathbed. She wasn’t young (60s) and had some pre-existing conditions, but it was nevertheless astounding and dismal to see how swiftly she was felled.

I saw something similar a decade ago with another friend, a woman who was healthy and in her early 50s and nearly died from H1N1. The difference is that she lived.

Why am I going into all of this? Because in all the talk about COVID-19 I don’t think most people appreciate that when it kills, it’s through the same basic mechanism as pneumonia, and this phenomenon is with us anyway. The only real question is whether COVID-19 is likely to cause a truly significant uptick in the number of people to whom this happens. But what is lost in all this is that pneumonia is always a killer, is always with us, and waxes and wanes with some better years and some worse ones. Somehow the world has managed to deal with this year after year without undue panic or canceling public get-togethers. And yet the risk is always there, as the cases I have described anecdotally illustrate.

This description of how COVID-19 can be fatal is no different from what often happens when flu kills through pneumonia or when the other various forms of pneumonia kill. The article says “The progression from mild or moderate to severe can occur ‘very, very quickly,’ said Bruce Aylward, a WHO assistant director-general.” Of course it can. That is not just a characteristic of COVID-19. It is a characteristic of pneumonia in general, which tends to ordinarily strike the same population most vulnerable to COVID-19: the elderly and those already weakened by serious illness.

To give you more of an epidemiological look at pneumonia, see this article, which focuses on cases in the UK in 2012, but has some worldwide data as well. In the UK, around 220,000 people are diagnosed with pneumonia a year. There was a spike in 2009 because of H1N1, from around 355 diagnosed per 100,000 people to 409 diagnosed per 100,000 people.

Pneumonia is much more common in the elderly, but there are a significant number of cases in all age groups, and the disease is generally characterized as “common.” The death toll from pneumonia in the UK in 2012 was 28,952. That means that if we assume the average 220,000 of diagnoses, the death rate for diagnosed cases (not hospitalized cases; diagnosed cases) in 2012 was 13%. That’s an extraordinarily high baseline toll that pneumonia takes of its many victims in a relatively ordinary year in the UK.

US statistics are different and significantly better, but still troubling: “About 1 million adults in the US seek care in a hospital due to pneumonia every year, and 50,000 die from this disease.” That’s a death rate of 5% in the hospitalized, significantly less than the rate in the UK but still high (and apples to oranges, because that high death rate in the UK was of the diagnosed rather than just the hospitalized, which makes that UK death rate even worse in comparison).

How many people in the US get pneumonia every year? Apparently, about 5.6 million, of which about 1 in 5 end up hospitalized with five percent of the hospitalized dying of the disease. Putting all those numbers together, the death rate in the US among those diagnosed would be 1%, and that represents a lot of people because a lot of people get the disease every year.

These UK and US statistics serve to point out how different death rates can be from the same illness even in supposedly developed countries in the West, depending on all sorts of factors including the state of the health care system. Similar country-to-country differentials can be expected with COVID-19, and similar differentials have already been found.

So, why don’t we close the schools and theaters and cancel parades because of all our pneumonia deaths? More to the point, why doesn’t the UK? Because we’re used to it; it’s a phenomenon that’s familiar to us and we don’t see any reason to change our lives because of it. If someone is particularly susceptible, that person would be more inclined to avoid crowds and to wash his or her hands very often, and those who are relatively healthy should also wash hands often and stay away from those with active illness, too, if possible. That’s just common sense.

But we can’t completely avoid the risk. And novel diseases such as H1N1 and COVID-19 have come along, and will continue to come along, with some frequency. Meanwhile, the old diseases march on.

Bernie is Biden’s non-opponent

The New Neo Posted on by

Bernie Sanders made an announcement today, and it wasn’t that he would drop out. It was that he would soldier on for a while, and in the meantime he gave Biden the questions for a take-home exam:

Despite the fact that once again, Sanders has been unable to amass the delegates needed to clinch the nomination, he vowed Wednesday to continue fighting (at least until Sunday), providing anecdotal evidence of support across the country who really likes him, but will vote for Biden anyway…

Sanders says he has a lock on the youth vote…and that he looks forward to debating Biden Sunday night. He also went down a laundry list of things he plans to ask Biden, which seems an odd strategy. Unless of course this is all calculated as a means to bring Sanders supporters into Biden’s camp when he inevitably drops out (they won’t) by allowing Biden the chance to tell them exactly what they want to hear — my money’s on that.

This basic outcome has been clear ever since Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropped out in extreme haste prior to Super Tuesday. On March 7, I wrote this:

…I don’t really think Bernie wants the presidency or wants to run against Trump. He’d rather talk. He knows his chances of winning the whole thing are less than Biden’s. He also is a true believer, and he knows that Biden as president and the Democrats in control will move the country far to the left anyway, so if Biden gets elected it’s good enough for Bernie.

Bernie’s job of moving the Overton Window has been accomplished. The Democrats embrace the left, and Biden just does a much better job than Bernie of hiding what the ultimate goal is. The future of the party belongs (they believe) to the AOCs…And so Bernie will be content.

Bernie is content, and he will do his part. Now that they’ve eliminated anyone who really intends to seriously challenge Biden, Bernie’s part is to do exactly what he’s doing now. He presents the pretense of opposition without actual opposition. He gives Biden the questions in advance, so that the people who prep him for these appearances can make sure he has answers ready.

But then Biden (and/or his advisors/) gets to decide which of two possible approaches to take.The first is the one described in that earlier quote: “bring Sanders supporters into Biden’s camp when [Sanders] inevitably drops out…by allowing Biden the chance to tell them exactly what they want to hear.” That would be one way to do it, but that might give the right more ammunition to call Biden Bernie-lite during the general.

An alternative approach would be for Biden to move to the right during his encounter with Sanders’ questions. The goal would be to solidify his pose as a moderate, which he and the DNC see as their path to the presidency and to resuming power after the little four-year detour known as Trump.

And by “power,” they mean permanent power.

The 1619 Project don’t need no steenking historians

The New Neo Posted on by

Worth reading:

In fact, a small industry has grown up consisting of historians and historically minded social scientists who are, one by one, refuting all of the serious claims of the 1619 Project…

Since the launch of The 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones [Times writer and promoter of the project] has booked at least 40 speaking engagements at colleges, universities, and nonprofit organizations. At these events, she presents the “1619 Project-view” of history on her own or as part of a panel, often followed by a Q&A with the audience. Dialogue? Yes, but not with critics…

…[A]n unambiguously historical project ought prominently to feature historians. Hannah-Jones, trained as a journalist, founded a project designed to reframe all of American history. She then goes on to engage with fewer historians than I can count on one hand. This is a mockery of authentic historical scholarship and exposes Hannah-Jones’ ulterior motives…

Nikole Hannah-Jones clearly has no interest in engaging with historians or having her historical arguments challenged. The 1619 Project’s claims are unorthodox and controversial but are presented as unquestionable truths. A bevy of accomplished historians have come out against these ideas and have been all but entirely ignored by Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. Why are they so afraid?

They’re so afraid because they know it would destroy their argument and message. They also know they really have nothing to fear, because the leftists who control the universities and the school system at this point will continue to book them and to spread their propaganda in order to indoctrinate a growing number of youths, and will give them a pass on debating any actual historians except the very few who support them.

That article did clear up one thing. I’d been puzzled by the fact that some of the historians critiquing the 1619 Project have been people on the left. But here’s the explanation, and it makes sense to me: they are “upset with the Times for preferring racial grievance to class grievance.”

[NOTE: The title of this post is a reference to this movie moment.]

Joe’s a fighter

The New Neo Posted on by

Joe “Palooka” Biden strikes again:

I’m not at all sure this reaction was a function of the decline that seems to have come to Biden with age, however. To me, this is in line with Biden’s basic personality, the one he has long projected: a “regular” Joe, a fighter, who tells it like it is – and regularly abuses voters in the process.

Why panic is popular

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was a child I liked to read. Actually, I still like to read – obviously. But as a child there was a limit to the books to which I had access. The library only let me into the children’s section until I reached a certain age – twelve, I believe. That made a tremendous dent in my reading choices.

But when I was around ten, a bookstore catalogue started coming to our house. I would pore over it for hours, studying the selections and planning to buy one or two. I had a little money saved up from birthdays and such, and in those days mail order stores accepted cash. And so one of the first books I purchased was the venerable Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Obviously, a blogger in the making.

I didn’t read the whole thing, but I read enough, and understood enough, to get the picture: sometimes a sort of contagion swept a group of people, or the entire world, and they came under the grip of some sort of hope or fear that wasn’t warranted by facts. It’s a lesson that proved to be valuable, although of course it’s not always easy to tell what’s reasonable and what’s unreasonable.

Which brings us to this recent comment by “KyndyllG”:

It’s been well over a month since responsible health organizations and medical professionals began encountering, and producing reports about, significant numbers of mild and asymptomatic cases of COVID-19. This undermined, to at least some extent, the original reports out of China, which are the source of all of the panic. There has been a sort of online tug-of-war ever since.

If anyone or anything says something or issues a report or statement that should make reasonable people reconsider fear, doom and panic, a swarm of people show up to make posts that translate to, “No! No! Panic! More doom!” It’s weird. I’m not really a tinfoil hat brigade member, but after watching this for more than a month, I really do wonder if there’s organized groups trying to gin up ongoing panic at the forum/social media level.

I don’t know the answer to that last part. I suspect there are some such groups, but I think the cause of the phenomenon so far is mostly a combination of a host of additional factors. The first, of course (as previously mentioned in various posts), is that panic sells, in the sense of engendering viewership and clicks. The second (also previously mentioned) is the constant effort by the left and the MSM to harm Trump.

But the other factors are just part of human nature. One is that this is in part a statistical, and therefore a math and logic, issue. In order to understand illness and epidemiology, a person must understand not just math but the difference between death rates in the population versus death rates among the sick; how a sickness is defined and what percentage of those who are infected enter into the statistics at all; and how vulnerability, treatment, and statistics-keeping as well as reporting and candor varies from country to country and time to time.

I have come to the conclusion that most people either have trouble with all of that and/or let their emotions override their ability to process it. And granted, it’s quite complex. Maybe even boring to most people. So when a politician or a member of the news, or even a blogger or even a commenter on a blog gives a figure that sounds authoritative, and the reader/listener is already afraid, fear can escalate beyond what seems reasonable, given the facts.

Then of course there is what you might call the “unknown unknowns.” There is a tremendous limit to our knowledge, particularly at the beginning of the gathering of information about what appears to be a novel disease. For example, with H1N1, it took many years to get any real sense of the statistics and what they meant, and even now much of it is just an estimate. That’s the nature of the game. So fear can often rush into this semi-vacuum.

And then there’s what one might call the trust issue. A great many people have grown to deeply distrust the MSM, the authorities, the health care system, and just about everyone else who might be speaking on the subject. And since there is a huge spectrum of opinions, the reader can pick and choose as he or she wishes. You can get your fear du jour or your reassurance du jour, and being objective is probably rather rare.

It’s also the case that perceived threats that are novel tend to generate more fear than threats to which we’ve become accustomed. That’s another one of those “human nature” phenomena. It’s the main reasons why arguments – which I’ve even mounted myself on this blog, and plan to continue to mount – that compare COVID-19 to pneumonia or flu or H1N1 fail to reach most people. They may not realize it, but on some level they’ve accepted those risks but they don’t want to accept a new one.

Permanent Daylight Saving Time

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article about the move to make Daylight Saving Time permanent.

Hear, hear! I say. Being a nightowl, I very much prefer having more hours of daylight at the end of the day. But I’m aware that for those who must get up very very early, permanent Daylight Saving Time would mean a lot of darkness in the morning and even for the morning commute.

If you live in more southernly latitudes of the US, it probably wouldn’t affect you too much. But the further north you go, the more extreme the winter darkness. So this question could pit the morning people against the night people.

I’m a night person:

A doctor counsels calm

The New Neo Posted on by

This post at Legal Insurrection links to and quotes a Canadian doctor on the subject of the coronavirus panic. Although I’m not a doctor, it expresses my feelings and online research quite well.

Here is the gist of it:

I am not scared of Covid-19. I am concerned about the implications of a novel infectious agent that has spread the world over and continues to find new footholds in different soil. I am rightly concerned for the welfare of those who are elderly, in frail health or disenfranchised who stand to suffer mostly, and disproportionately, at the hands of this new scourge. But I am not scared of Covid-19.

What I am scared about is the loss of reason and wave of fear that has induced the masses of society into a spellbinding spiral of panic, stockpiling obscene quantities of anything that could fill a bomb shelter adequately in a post-apocalyptic world. I am scared of the N95 masks that are stolen from hospitals and urgent care clinics where they are actually needed for front line healthcare providers and instead are being donned in airports, malls, and coffee lounges, perpetuating even more fear and suspicion of others. I am scared that our hospitals will be overwhelmed with anyone who thinks they ” probably don’t have it but may as well get checked out no matter what because you just never know…” and those with heart failure, emphysema, pneumonia and strokes will pay the price for overfilled ER waiting rooms with only so many doctors and nurses to assess.

I am scared that travel restrictions will become so far reaching that weddings will be canceled, graduations missed and family reunions will not materialize…

I’m scared those same epidemic fears will limit trade, harm partnerships in multiple sectors, business and otherwise and ultimately culminate in a global recession.

But mostly, I’m scared about what message we are telling our kids when faced with a threat. Instead of reason, rationality, openmindedness and altruism, we are telling them to panic, be fearful, suspicious, reactionary and self-interested.

Covid-19 is nowhere near over. It will be coming to a city, a hospital, a friend, even a family member near you at some point. Expect it. Stop waiting to be surprised further. The fact is the virus itself will not likely do much harm when it arrives. But our own behaviors and “fight for yourself above all else” attitude could prove disastrous.

I implore you all. Temper fear with reason, panic with patience and uncertainty with education. We have an opportunity to learn a great deal about health hygiene and limiting the spread of innumerable transmissible diseases in our society. Let’s meet this challenge together in the best spirit of compassion for others, patience, and above all, an unfailing effort to seek truth, facts and knowledge as opposed to conjecture, speculation and catastrophizing.

Facts not fear. Clean hands. Open hearts.
Our children will thank us for it.

I wonder if this voice will be heard. Today, it doesn’t feel like it.

COVID-19: Panic in the streets and on the Street

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently I went to the store for some stuff and decided to look for some hand sanitizer, since it’s what people are recommending.

It wasn’t really surprising, but it was as though a plague of Purell-seeking locusts had hit. And that was true of several stores I visited. And then there’s price-gouging online.

Not only hand sanitizer, but anything remotely related to it and all ingredients that might go to make homebrew sanitizer. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and that most definitely includes the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic of 2009, which I’ve compared to the present situation in this post. I may do another post comparing the two, because I find the statistics vs. the reactions in each case quite interesting as well as edifying. But suffice to say that at this point we are reacting with far more panic than we did then, and I believe this is at least partly by design, for political reasons, and partly because of the growth of social media. Eleven years isn’t all that long, but there have been a lot of societal changes in that particular span.

Today the stock market is down. Way down. The stock market has been inflated (in my opinion) for a long time, and it’s still pretty high, but you can smell the fear. In my yahoo email inbox, there was some sort of alert (in red) about the stock market fall that said it was from coronavirus. I’ve never asked for email breaking news alerts and had never received any before, and I discovered that – without my asking – yahoo had helpfully changed my settings to include such alerts. It took me a while to figure out how to switch them off.

Apparently the drop today was connected to a Russian vs. Saudi oil price war that is linked to virus fears but also sparked by a failure of those countries to agree on pricing.

Economics is not my forte, as I’ve said many times before, but I count on some of my readers to discuss this with greater acumen in the comments. Here’s what that link says:

China alone accounts for about a third of new consumption of oil each year, and Asia more broadly about 50 percent of new consumption, she added.

If the demand slows down in the region because people aren’t traveling or factories aren’t producing as a result of the coronavirus, oil prices will sink.

When there has been an imbalance between supply and demand of oil in the past, oil-producing countries have agreed to reduce the supply to shore up prices, said Manouchehr Takin, an international oil and energy consultant who previously worked for OPEC.

But this time, OPEC — the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries — and Russia failed to agree on a way to deal with the price fall caused by the virus.

Analysts told NBC News that Saudi Arabia had pushed for even deeper cuts to production, but Russia had disagreed and appeared unwilling to bear the brunt of more cuts…

“That is a huge development for the market because the partnership between Saudi and Russia has been the only thing that’s been keeping a floor under oil prices,” Birch said.

So, even though the number of coronavirus cases both in China and around the world appears to be quite low, and even though it does not appear to be especially lethal, the panic about it has panicked the markets and especially the oil sector. And then, instead of cooperating on dealing with oil prices, the Saudis and Russia (it seems, particularly Russia) are making things worse.

This is actually very worrisome, because panic breeds panic. It’s contagious, as it were.

DNA testing: think before you spit into that tube

The New Neo Posted on by

DNA testing has a few pitfalls, the best-known of which is probably potential privacy issues. At this point, unless a person posts results on one of the unprotected sites, I think privacy isn’t a big concern, although it certainly could become so. More commonly, though – and more immediately – there are unexpected revelations that can blow a family apart and generate personal angst. Watch:

This is surprisingly common, because apparently there was a lot of hanky-panky going on back in the day. And this can be true of ancestors who seem to have been the most staid and upright members of the community, but who in fact had sowed a surprising number of wild oats in their time.

Back then, people didn’t see popular commercial DNA-testing coming. They thought their secrets would remain secrets. No more.

Why are so many of Iran’s leaders sick with coronavirus?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve read quite a bit of coverage about how COVID-19 seems to be affecting a lot of people in Iran, and most of them mention that a great many Iranian officials appear to have been taken ill. Some have even died, including the so-called “Butcher of Tehran” (see this). Twenty-three members of the Iranian parliament are reported to be infected.

This is curious, and a different pattern even than in China, one of the other hardest-hit countries. Why are so many government officials ill in Iran? It’s almost as though they’d taken a cruise on the Diamond Princess, and I don’t mean that facetiously. What gives? Why such a high infection rate among Iran’s elite? One would expect a death rate on the high side among those infected because of their tendency to be of advanced age. But why were so many exposed already, so early in the epidemic?

I haven’t found much that can explain that expect for this possible reason:

Family members of Abolghasem told media that he contracted the virus “while on duty.” This is a interesting revelation given the media reports claiming that IRGC was operating flights into China as late as February 25.

“Revolutionary Guard owned Mahan Air has continued its flights to four Chinese cities in the past three weeks despite consistent denials by Iranian officials,” the Czech Republic-based Radio Farda reported last week. It is unclear why IRGC would operate secretive flights into China despite the known risk of outbreak.

The flights by Mahan Air are often linked to carrying Iranian terror operatives and weapons supplies. “Mahan Air has transported IRGC-QF [Quds Forces] operatives, weapons, equipment, and funds abroad” to supply terrorist groups across the Middle East,” U.S. Treasury said in a December 2019 report.

The high-profile death highlights the spread of coronavirus among the Iranian regime’s top brass. Iran’s former Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Sheikholeslam also succumbed to the disease. Besides country’s Vice President Ebtekar, deputy Health Minister and 23 members of Parliament have also contracted the disease.

Was the virus introduced to the leadership of Iran because of close and personal involvement with China that was not curtailed even after the disease was spreading in China? Seems likely. And of course, no one believes a thing the Iranian leadership says anymore, so don’t look to them for an explanation.

Do you remember the MSM announcing the death count every day during H1N1 epidemic, death by death by death?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t recall it, and you probably don’t either, because I don’t think it ever happened. The pandemic was covered by the press, but not in anything like the way the COVID-19 illness is being covered now.

Because Obama was president, and therefore there was no need to intentionally stir up alarm and panic in order to hurt him.

Obama waited until late October of 2009, about 6 months into the pandemic, to declare it a national emergency. By that time, at least a thousand and perhaps many more had died in this country (I’ve had some trouble locating the exact figure). And one of the hallmarks of H1N1 was that it tended to kill younger people more often than older people:

Deaths relating to this new strain of influenza began appearing in the US in late April, and by early June 15, states had reported fatalities related to or directly occurring from the virus. These deaths totaled at 4,000 as of November 15, 2009…

On October 24, 2009, President Barack Obama declared Swine Flu a national emergency in the United States. On November 12, 2009, the CDC reported an estimated 22 million Americans had been infected with 2009 A H1N1 and 4,000 Americans have died. On December 10, 2009, the CDC reported an estimated 50 million Americans or 1 in 6 people had been infected with the 2009 A H1N1 Virus and 10,000 Americans had died, by which time the vaccine was beginning to be widely distributed to the general public by several states. On December 23, 2009 the CDC reported a reduction of the disease by 59% percent and the disease was expected to end in the United States in January 2010.

On January 15, 2010, the CDC released new estimate figures for swine flu, saying it has sickened about 55 million Americans and killed about 11,160 from April through mid-December. On February 12, 2010, the CDC released updated estimate figures for swine flu, reporting that, in total, 57 million Americans had been sickened, 257,000 had been hospitalised and 11,690 people had died (including 1,180 children) due to swine flu from April through to mid-January.

That’s just in the US, and it involves about eight months. I recall it being reported in the MSM in a rather general way, but I don’t recall any criticism of Obama and it certainly wasn’t an issue in the 2012 election.

Here’s an article from CNN that covered Obama’s declaration of an emergency. It’s very straightforward – just the facts, ma’am, just the facts. Nothing critical of Obama and nothing especially designed to stoke fears or to especially allay them. Here’s an NPR article from September of that year. Similar.

I’ve tried to find something critical of Obama for the delay while the deaths mounted up. I’ve tried to find articles during that period giving a day-by-day count of the mounting deaths.I haven’t been able to locate anything like that, although that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The articles that I have found are typically factual and sober, and even minimizing, such as this one from NBC:

“I think the term emergency declaration sounds more dramatic than it really is,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a research professor and chairman of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Tropical Medicine at George Washington University. “It’s largely an administrative move that’s more preemptive …” He said such a step would give emergency rooms and hospitals the flexibility they need.

The national emergency declaration was the second of two steps needed to give Sebelius extraordinary powers during a crisis…

“As a nation, we have prepared at all levels of government, and as individuals and communities, taking unprecedented steps to counter the emerging pandemic,” Obama wrote in Saturday’s declaration.

I could go on, but you get the idea.