Trump declares national emergency at news conference; Dow rises

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the news conference. I’ve queued it up for when Trump starts speaking:

It was long, it was comprehensive, and apparently it was reassuring.

I have only watched a little bit of it, but Trump seemed very knowledgeable and in charge, and the forces brought to bear on fighting this are impressive. He appeared “presidential,” which always hurt the left. That won’t stop a lot of people from trashing him, of course, but perhaps less effectively than before.

[NOTE: On the Dow rise and some press reaction.]

This video shows what the MSM is about

The New Neo Posted on by

After I watched this video, I felt the urge to send it to everyone I know. For just a split second I thought that, if they saw it, they couldn’t deny what they’re seeing.

But almost immediately after I had that thought, I realized that they could deny it and that they would deny it. They’d say that the news people involved used the phrase “Wuhan coronavirus” or “Chinese coronavirus” innocently and descriptively, but when Trump used the same words it meant something entirely different and was a racist dog whistle because racism engulfs his heart and mind.

I can’t watch the video without becoming furious and yet being impressed by what it reveals so succinctly about the MSM members involved: their poisonous hypocrisy and treacherous mendacity, delivered with such sober serious faces:

On the meaning of “pandemic”

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that WHO has declared COVID-19 a pandemic, it’s time for a definition.

The word “pandemic” can describe extreme situations like that in 1918, or milder situations that we barely remember, with far fewer deaths. If you look at the definition of the word, you’ll note that it doesn’t really have much to do with number of deaths so much as geography [my emphasis]:

For the sake of clarification, WHO does not use the old system of 6 phases — that ranged from phase 1 (no reports of animal influenza causing human infections) to phase 6 (a pandemic) — that some people may be familiar with from H1N1 in 2009.

In a virtual press conference in May 2009 on the influenza pandemic, Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General ad interim for Health Security and Environment, WHO said “An easy way to think about pandemic … is to say: a pandemic is a global outbreak. Then you might ask yourself: ‘What is a global outbreak’? Global outbreak means that we see both spread of the agent … and then we see disease activities in addition to the spread of the virus.”

In planning for a possible influenza pandemic, the WHO published a document on pandemic preparedness guidance in 1999, revised in 2005 and in February 2009, defining phases and appropriate actions for each phase in an aide memoir titled WHO pandemic phase descriptions and main actions by phase. The 2009 revision, including definitions of a pandemic and the phases leading to its declaration, were finalized in February 2009. The pandemic H1N1 2009 virus was neither on the horizon at that time nor mentioned in the document. All versions of this document refer to influenza. The phases are defined by the spread of the disease; virulence and mortality are not mentioned in the current WHO definition, although these factors have previously been included.

Also, in a March 2 post, I recommended reading an article with a quote I called “fact-based.” It went like this [emphasis mine]:

On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate [for COVID-19] is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

Those pandemic influenzas of 1957 and 1968 were actually pretty bad, especially the one in 1957, which I happen to remember. But as I concluded in that same post, when I describe the 1957 pandemic:

There certainly was newspaper coverage then, and news filtered down to children – including me. But somehow the country didn’t self-destruct.

The stock market continues down

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not even going to include a link, because you know it’s happening, and you’re probably following it yourself.

Some people are seeing this as a buying opportunity. I’m staying put, though – implementing a little social distancing from the market, something I always try to practice anyway in good times and bad.

What’s driving the fall? I think that – among the usual suspects like automated selling, which exacerbates such swings – it’s quite simply fear of the unknown. The fear is driven by the media and the left, but it’s not limited to that. When entire countries quarantine and/or adopt other draconian measures in an effort to stop the spread of a novel disease that no one quite understands, then people panic. Nightmare apocalyptic scenarios rush in, as well as “facts” that are not really facts, driven by the news cycle and the rumor mill that constitutes social media.

Facts can’t combat it, at least not now. “Wait and see” isn’t the way a lot of people are operating, either.

People may tire of the relentless push of the doomsday scenario, especially if doomsday fails to materialize and the number of COVID infections get under control and the patterns become more understandable and less frightening. Unfortunately, though, in this day and age, for many people, “under control” means zero risk. Zero risk is impossible. But the need for it is what drives phenomena such as that of the anti-vaxxers.

So, have it out in the comments here.

The question of asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, as well as its reproduction number

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep seeing and hearing references to the supposed fact that COVID-19 is known to be spread by asymptomatic people infected with the virus, in addition of course to symptomatic people. It was one of the first things I heard about the illness, and one of the most worrisome for obvious reasons.

I’ve continued to check to see if there’s official word on whether data has borne that out, and so far that doesn’t seem to be the case – and that, if such transmission happens, it’s rare.

Now, you don’t have to believe the officials. But I’m certainly more inclined to believe them than I believe some random person online, or in the MSM, or even a supposedly expert talking head on TV. Even without asymptomatic spread, of course, it’s wise to be cautious. I think in the next month or so much more will become known about the disease and about what the scope of it will be, and we may even learn that asymptomatic spread is definitely a thing.

But at the moment, this is typical of what I’m seeing from more official sources:

When can an infected person spread COVID-19 virus to others?

While not completely known, its likely mirrors that of other coronaviruses, in that spread occurs with fever and respiratory symptoms. While there have been initial reports of asymptomatic transmission, the CDC states that the data are not clear at this stage that asymptomatic spread occurs.

On a more general topic connected to COVID-19, another thing that’s good to remember is that, as the number of diagnosed cases goes up in the US, the number of infected people is partly a function of more testing. So beware of news that says something like “the number of cases doubled in 2 days” without also telling you what the change was in the number of tested people, and why. Of course, we should expect the number of cases to go up, but taking a certain reported rate of increase and imagining that’s the real rate of increase is premature.

As the CDC site says:

In addition to CDC, many public health laboratories are now testing for the virus that causes COVID-19.

With this increase in testing, more and more states are reporting cases of COVID-19 to CDC.

And while we’re at it, on the subject of the statistic known as the virus’ reproduction number – this article is helpful in learning about the meaning of such a figure and how it’s arrived at (hat tip: “Art Deco”). A few excerpts:

The formal definition of a disease’s R0 is the number of cases, on average, an infected person will cause during their infectious period…

The basic reproduction number represents the maximum epidemic potential of a pathogen. It describes what would happen if an infectious person were to enter a fully susceptible community, and therefore is an estimate based on an idealized scenario.

The effective reproduction number depends on the population’s current susceptibility. This measure of transmission potential is likely lower than the basic reproduction number, based on factors like whether some of the people are vaccinated against the disease, or whether some people have immunity due to prior exposure with the pathogen. Therefore, the effective R0 changes over time and is an estimate based on a more realistic situation within the population.

It’s important to realize that both the basic and effective R0 are situation-dependent. It’s affected by the properties of the pathogen, such as how infectious it is. It’s affected by the host population – for instance, how susceptible people are due to nutritional status or other illnesses that may compromise one’s immune system. And it’s affected by the environment, including things like demographics, socioeconomic and climatic factors.

The article then goes into some estimates of the reproduction rate of COVID-19. I’ll skip that, because the article is old and I don’t know whether those figures are outdated, but I’m going to assume they are. But these principles are basic ones:

…[P]rojections of the future number of cases of coronavirus are fraught with high levels of uncertainty and will likely be somewhat inaccurate.

The difficulties arise for a number of reasons.

First, the basic properties of this viral pathogen – like the infectious period – are as yet unknown.

Second, researchers don’t know how many mild cases or infections that don’t result in symptoms have been missed by surveillance but nevertheless are spreading the disease.

Third, the majority of people who come down with this new coronavirus do recover, and are likely then immune to coming down with it again. It’s unclear how the changing susceptibility of the population will affect the future spread of infection…

Finally, and likely the most important reason, no one knows the future impacts of current disease control measures. Epidemiologists’ current estimates of R0 say nothing about how measures such as isolation or quarantine efforts will influence the virus’ future spread.

We still don’t really know those things, and so we don’t really know the significance of whatever reproduction rates we are finding at the moment for COVID-19. Of course, a lower rate would be better than a higher one. But even a high rate, if it’s accompanied by a much lower ratio of serious disease or death compared to mild disease or asymptomatic infection, wouldn’t be so very bad. The very worst diseases have a high reproduction rate and a high percentage of deaths to infections.

To give you an example of that sort of illness, we have the terrible scourge of smallpox. Those of us who are of a certain age have a vaccination scar (mine is so small you can hardly see it). Those scars represent a victory of science over one of the worst diseases to afflict humankind. But I doubt that most young people have any knowledge of the phenomenon at all:

The risk of death following contracting the disease was about 30%, with higher rates among babies. Often those who survived had extensive scarring of their skin, and some were left blind…

Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence. As recently as 1967, 15 million cases occurred a year.

So the death rate in infected people was 30%. What about the reproduction number?:

Gani and Leach have recently evaluated historical smallpox data and estimated values of 3.5–6 for the basic reproduction number R0 of smallpox (after discounting for hospital-associated cases). This means that each case would infect 3.5–6 other people on average if the population were completely susceptible.

That link reports on a study conducted on historical data from an outbreak in 1967 among a Nigerian group that refused vaccination:

The basic reproduction number, R0, was 6.87 (95 percent confidence interval (CI): 4.52, 10.1) for the whole course of infectivity, and RF = 0.164 (95 percent CI: 0, 1.31) for the fever period that preceded the rash.

You can see how a disease with such lethality and such high contagion could cause devastation. You can also see, from that last quote, how the reproduction can differ between an early (although symptomatic) stage of a disease and a later stage. It’s not a fixed amount.

I don’t know about you, but when I read about something like smallpox, I am very very very grateful for that little scar on my arm – and for all of us who were vaccinated back when smallpox still haunted the earth, and therefore played our tiny parts in its becoming a historical curiosity. Let’s keep it that way.

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.