Health Chief’s Early Missteps Set Back Coronavirus Response

HHS Secretary Alex Azar waited for weeks to brief the president and oversold his agency’s progress

By Rebecca Ballhaus & Stephanie Armour of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"On Jan. 29, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told President Trump the coronavirus epidemic was under control.

The U.S. government had never mounted a better interagency response to a crisis, Mr. Azar told the president in a meeting held eight days after the U.S. announced its first case, according to administration officials. At the time, the administration’s focus was on containing the virus.

When other officials asked about diagnostic testing, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, began to answer. Mr. Azar cut him off, telling the president it was “the fastest we’ve ever created a test,” the officials recalled, and that more than one million tests would be available within weeks.

That didn’t happen. The CDC began shipping tests the following week, only to discover a flaw that forced it to recall the test from state public-health laboratories. When White House advisers later in February criticized Mr. Azar for the delays caused by the recall, he lashed out at Dr. Redfield, accusing the CDC director of misleading him on the timing of a fix. “Did you lie to me?” one of the officials recalled him yelling.

Six weeks after that Jan. 29 meeting, the federal government declared a national emergency and issued guidelines that effectively closed down the country. Mr. Azar, who had been at the center of the decision-making from the outset, was eventually sidelined.

Many factors muddled the administration’s early response to the coronavirus as officials debated the severity of the threat, including comments from Mr. Trump that minimized the risk. But interviews with more than two dozen administration officials and others involved in the government’s coronavirus effort show that Mr. Azar waited for weeks to brief the president on the threat, oversold his agency’s progress in the early days and didn’t coordinate effectively across the health-care divisions under his purview.

The ramp-up of the nation’s diagnostic testing for the disease caused by coronavirus, which many health experts regard as critical for limiting new infections and safely reopening the economy, has been slower than promised and hampered by obstacles. As of Wednesday, more than four million government and private-lab tests had been administered. The president now says states bear the primary responsibility for testing, and that the federal government plays only a supporting role."

"The CDC’s Dr. Redfield alerted Mr. Azar to the coronavirus threat on Jan. 3. Mr. Azar asked the National Security Council to monitor what was happening in China, but waited two weeks to brief the president on the potential severity, calling him to assure him the agency was ready to handle any cases in the U.S."

"FDA chief Stephen Hahn asked HHS in January if he could start contacting diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies about possible shortages of personal protective gear and other equipment, administration officials said. He was told no. An FDA official said the agency was already conducting outreach to companies.

Mr. Azar told associates such calls would alarm the industry and make the administration look unprepared, people familiar with the matter said. HHS officials waited weeks to contact manufacturers about possible shortages of medical supplies, the people said."

"On Jan. 28, Mr. Azar told reporters that for the individual American, the virus “should not be an impact on their day-to-day life,” adding that the administration was taking “aggressive action.” The next day, the White House announced that Mr. Azar would lead the task force responding to coronavirus. In the task force meeting that day, he assured the president that everything was under control."

"Administration officials said they were alarmed by the absence on the task force of the FDA’s Dr. Hahn, which they said hampered coordination between the FDA and commercial labs on testing, and CMS administrator Seema Verma.

Mr. Azar dismissed those concerns, administration officials said. In the interview, Mr. Azar said the White House determined who would join the task force, and that he met with agency leaders."

"Mr. Azar’s declaration of a public-health emergency on Jan. 31 meant that any lab that wanted to develop a test had to first seek approval from the FDA. The FDA didn’t clear any labs to conduct testing until Feb. 29, nearly a month later. For weeks, HHS blocked efforts to allow other labs’ involvement because Mr. Azar wanted the CDC to make and distribute the nation’s diagnostic tests.

Mr. Azar told associates he favored the CDC making its own test, rather than importing ones distributed by the World Health Organization, because the WHO tests weren’t reliable, citing a study published in the Chinese Journal of Epidemiology. That study has since been retracted.

Developing a test proved more complicated than anticipated. Days after the CDC began shipping tests in the first week of February, labs began calling. The tests were giving invalid results.

Mr. Azar was incensed. An FDA official flew to CDC headquarters in Atlanta and visited the lab that had prepared the tests. The lab was a mess and it became clear the tests had likely been contaminated"

"Throughout February, Mr. Azar continued to assure the president and the rest of the task force that HHS had the situation under control"

"Dr. Redfield never gave Mr. Azar a timeline for when the testing problem would be fixed, because he didn’t know what was causing the problem"

"On Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, a CDC official, said the agency was preparing for a potential pandemic and that community spread of the virus was likely. The stock market plunged.

At a media briefing later that day, Mr. Azar sought to quell concerns, saying the virus was “contained.”"

Big Oil to the Coronavirus Rescue

Look whose products are crucial for fighting off Covid-19

WSJ Editorial.

"Anti-carbon activists don’t sleep even during a pandemic, and earlier this week New York City Council members introduced a resolution to divest from banks invested in fossil fuels. Perhaps they don’t know that hand sanitizer and personal protective equipment come from hydrocarbons synthesized by their arch-villain Exxon Mobil.
 
Exxon’s predecessor Standard Oil invented isopropyl alcohol (IPA), the key ingredient in disinfectants and hand sanitizer, in 1920. Its Baton Rouge chemical plant is now the world’s largest producer of IPA. While refineries have been throttled back, Exxon has ramped up IPA production by 3,000 tons per month, which is enough to produce 50 million four-ounce bottles of sanitizer.

The oil giant recently noted in a press release that the state of New York has turned to the Baton Rouge plant for critical supplies. Gov. Andrew Cuomo should be grateful Exxon isn’t holding a grudge after the state’s four-year inquisition for allegedly deceiving itself about its climate impact, which finally ended last December when a state judge tossed the state lawsuit as entirely without merit.

Exxon is also increasing production of a specialized polypropylene that is used in medical masks and gowns by about 1,000 tons per month, which is enough to manufacture up to 200 million medical masks or 20 million gowns. At the same time, it is applying its expertise in material science to develop new face shields that utilize a filtration fabric.

Working with Boeing, Exxon plans to manufacture as many as 40,000 masks an hour. According to an Exxon engineer, this new design and production method won’t be vulnerable to the supply-chain hiccups that have led to widespread mask shortages. No Defense Production Act coercion necessary.

As for the cries to divest from fossil fuels, oil and gas generate energy but are also the feedstock for an inestimable number of essential products. Do liberals want to divest from using those to fight off the coronavirus?"

The Coronavirus Crisis Shows Experts Aren’t Enough

As the pandemic shows, there are no purely technical solutions for problems that demand political leadership

By Yuval Levin. He is director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. Excerpts:

"The world’s leading epidemiologists at first underestimated the potential of the novel coronavirus to give rise to a catastrophe. Early this winter, Dr. Fauci himself could be heard offering assurances that it was unlikely the pandemic would spread across the globe. At the end of January, Dr. Wang Linfa, a Duke researcher who was a member of the team that discovered SARS, told the medical journalism website STAT that the new virus didn’t seem distinctly dangerous. “It’s too early to say if a SARS-like event will happen,” Dr. Wang said. “But I have a gut feeling it won’t.”

Such gut feelings are the currency of expert policy advisers. They can mislead, but they can also offer priceless intuition, and there is no alternative to relying on them. Policy makers have no recourse to purely objective technical advice that does not involve such judgment. And ultimately, the statesman’s task is itself a form of such expertise. The president’s job, and not only in times of crisis, frequently involves listening to experts disagree with one another and taking responsibility for choosing among them, plotting a course through opportunities and dangers. The capacity to do this well involves its own sort of practical wisdom, an expertise in judging expertise.

Technocratic government by experts and populist government by public whim are both impossible fantasies. Our elected officials need expert advice when dealing with complex scientific, economic and social challenges. But that advice does not resolve those problems for them. We empower them to judge, to choose and to act in an uncertain world. Expertise informs the work of republican self-government, but it cannot replace it."

Tyler Cowen Says "The Regulatory State Is Failing Us" on COVID-19

From Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic Monthly. Excerpts:"

"Friedersdorf: What are the most significant failures of America’s regulatory state as it relates to the pandemic?

Cowen: Let me give you a few examples:

1. New York state regulations, until very recently, forced nursing homes to accept COVID-19-positive patients being discharged from hospitals. Nursing homes, especially in the northeast, have been an epicenter for COVID-19 casualties. By law, they were forced to accept more than 4,500 COVID-19-positive patients, often without proper PPE for their staff.
2. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed its own test procedures early on, but those proved to be faulty and based on contaminated materials. At the same time, the CDC legally prevented Americans from pursuing other testing options. That is a major reason America fell behind in the testing race, and with its late start, America was not able to buy up enough testing materials before those items became very scarce.
3. One particular method of COVID-19 testing has been up and running in Washington State, supported by the governor, local officials, and the Gates Foundation. This testing has been saving lives, and it does not endanger anyone. The FDA recently shut down such testing on the basis of a sheer technicality, and scientists find this decision baffling.
4. The World Health Organization, our own CDC, and Dr. [Anthony] Fauci all told Americans that masks were ineffective and not important. It turns out masks can help a great deal in limiting virus transmission, and later the WHO reversed its stance. The American government is still sending mixed signals.
5. One Texas entrepreneur offered to gear up his factory, early on, to make masks in great quantities. The Department of Health and Human Services let his offer lie fallow, as the agency was too slow, uncertain, and tied up in bureaucracy."

"as for PPE, regulations have done more to discourage supply than to boost it, and here I would cite required permits for mask factories, procurement failures, trade restrictions, and anti-price-gouging laws, which limit supply. Give hospitals more money and let them bid for masks."

"Regulation should be more goal-oriented, and less prescriptive in terms of the details. It should be easier to exercise judgment to meet particular worthy ends, rather than being hamstrung by restrictions and details. Regulation should recognize that emergency situations will come along when very fast action will be needed. Our current regulatory state is not built around those ideas, and its culture is accordingly complacent, and compliance- and process-oriented rather than success-oriented. These days, the American public sector just isn’t very good at getting things done."

Florida has proven that a measured, evidence-based response to reopening works

See Let the Sun Shine In by Michael Hendrix the Manhattan Institute.

"For a moment in April, the Internet tried to cancel Florida. Photos showing crowds flocking to Jacksonville Beach amid the Covid-19 pandemic brought the hashtag #FloridaMorons to the top of Twitter. The media eagerly spun scenes of ignorant spring breakers endangering themselves and others. Nearly two months after America’s first case of coronavirus, here was Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, joining neighboring state Georgia’s “experiment in human sacrifice” by letting locals lift restrictions on their own.

Nearly a month later, Jacksonville’s Duval County reports new Covid-19 hospitalizations in the single digits. Rates of hospitalizations, cases, and deaths remain steady across Florida. So far, fewer Floridians have died of the novel coronavirus than in New York’s nursing homes alone (2,259 compared with 5,800, at least). More than half of the state’s known cases of Covid-19 are found in just four South Florida counties—the top out-of-state destinations for fleeing New Yorkers. As Politico recently concluded, “Florida just doesn’t look nearly as bad as the national news media and sky-is-falling critics have been predicting for about two months now.”

There’s still a lot that we don’t know about mitigating Covid-19, but Florida’s approach—a decentralized health response with targeted lockdowns and quarantines reinforced by voluntary social distancing—appears to have worked. Other populous states adopting this approach, such as Tennessee, have seen similar success. Governor DeSantis’s experience suggests that it is possible to keep a lid on the coronavirus even while gradually reopening.

Florida is large and diverse. North Florida and the Panhandle are the reason for the saying that the farther north you go in Florida, the further south you get; the I-4 corridor, running from Tampa through Orlando to Daytona Beach, is pure Middle America. South Florida is the polyglot “New Havana,” a bubbling melting pot between the Gulf and Gold Coasts. Unsurprisingly, then, DeSantis gave counties leeway in responding to Covid-19. “The epidemic is not going to affect this state uniformly,” he told National Review.

Miami-Dade County, for instance, shuttered all its nonessential businesses before New York City, and it was local leaders who first closed many of Florida’s beaches and cracked down on large gatherings. When Florida did issue a stay-at-home order (two days after New York), it targeted the state’s 4 million seniors and residents with underlying medical conditions. Statewide rules issued on April 1 broadly limited “nonessential” activities and business, but by this point Floridians had already imposed their own restrictions on themselves.

Meantime, the state government in Tallahassee was ramping up testing and issuing personal protective equipment (PPE), ultimately totaling more than 7 million masks and a million gloves. By late April, the state was conducting some 12,000 daily Covid-19 tests, with capacity for more, and drive-through facilities alone had conducted more than 100,000 tests by early May. (New York, by contrast, was doing 20,000 tests daily in mid-April, at least 100,000 below what it needed, considering the size of its outbreak.) State-based labs were soon running 30,000 samples daily. Decentralizing testing has meant that Jacksonville’s testing volume, for instance, now runs far above federal guidelines. And the state’s rate of positive samples—a sign of testing capacity relative to size of outbreak—stands at 2.41 percent as of May 24, well below the World Health Organization’s threshold of 5 percent for safely reopening.

Florida’s response to Covid-19 focused on nursing homes. More than a third of the nation’s Covid deaths have occurred among the residents and staff of long-term-care facilities—a share that jumps as high as 80 percent in Minnesota and West Virginia. Florida counts more than 350,000 people living or working in such facilities, and the state has one of the highest shares of residents over the age of 65. At the start of the outbreak, Florida deployed rapid-response teams to these facilities to test, treat, and, if necessary, isolate or quarantine residents testing positive for the virus. The state issued PPE to these facilities and mandated its use. While New York was moving sick patients into nursing homes, Florida was moving them out. On March 15, DeSantis prohibited the transfer of Covid-19-positive patients into long-term-care facilities and established Covid-only homes for getting residents out who could not be properly isolated or treated. By contrast, New York governor Andrew Cuomo—celebrated in the media, while DeSantis was condemned—required that infected patients be admitted into nursing homes, where Cuomo himself had said the virus could spread “like fire through grass.”

As DeSantis saw growing numbers of cases from out-of-state visitors, he promptly ordered travelers to self-quarantine for 14 days, a measure that the governor believes “no doubt” saved lives. Florida’s targeted, data-driven approach to tackling the coronavirus may be the most realistic strategy when many are still trying to understand how Covid-19 spreads—and how to stop it. The Department of Health produces a daily report for the governor tracking the outbreak and new hotspots, such as state prisons, or The Villages, a sprawling retirement community with more than 125,000 people, which hasn’t had a single resident hospitalized for more than a week. Contrary to what recent media coverage would suggest, Florida’s Covid-19 open-data dashboard has earned praise from officials like Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator.

DeSantis is not the only governor whose performance is going largely uncredited. Tennessee’s governor Bill Lee is an unsung hero of the pandemic. Lee declared a state of emergency in March and told residents to “do your part, stay apart.” The state’s largest cities—Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville—issued stay-at-home orders as cases appeared, but Lee held off on statewide mandates. Studies have since shown that such early, targeted lockdowns, combined with state guidance, appear to be more effective at mitigating the spread of the virus than late-stage total lockdowns. Lee focused on ramping up Tennessee’s testing capacity, ultimately hitting more testing benchmarks than any other state. During the height of the pandemic, Tennessee’s testing rate was three times that of neighboring Kentucky—and all tests were provided free of charge, regardless of symptoms.

Lee’s performance—and its media treatment—contrast sharply with that of neighboring governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky. Louisville’s Courier-Journal has praised Beshear’s response while declaring that Lee has “taken more heat than Prince’s Hot Chicken for his slow response to the coronavirus outbreak.” Even an ocean away, Beshear won praise: the U.K.’s Guardian celebrated his “quick pandemic response, his calm, empathetic briefings” and likened him to “Mr. Rogers.” Yet Kentucky has now suffered more deaths than Tennessee from the virus, though the latter state’s population is half again larger.

In states such as Tennessee and Florida, where lockdowns are ending, infection rates are declining, not increasing, as JPMorgan Chase found, “even after allowing for an appropriate measurement lag.” Rising case counts, where they occur, have more to do with increases in testing capacity than renewed outbreaks. This should encourage some humility from observers who feared the worst with reopening, especially in a media environment overwhelmingly concentrated in the blue, urban hubs that have suffered so much more from this viral outbreak than the redder states now likelier to reopen. Even today, after the virus has spread to all corners of the country, the Tri-State area alone accounts for 43 percent of the nation’s deaths. Indeed, the closer one gets to New York City, the higher the death toll from Covid-19. No wonder that, at the height of the pandemic, some 420,000 people fled the Big Apple to its suburbs and to South Florida.

Florida’s beaches and businesses are slowly opening, county by county, and life is returning to a semblance of normalcy. Retailers and restaurants, hair and nail salons, gyms and hotels are opening with reduced occupancy; soon, “phase two” will allow gatherings of up to 50 people and further loosen occupancy limits. Partially opened Tampa was among the first U.S. cities to let restaurants extend dining space onto closed streets and open sidewalks, helping them stay in business while preserving social distancing.

Florida considers numerous factors in deciding when and how to reopen, such as whether the state is controlling the virus’s spread, containing new cases, ensuring hospital capacity, and monitoring vulnerable populations. It turns out that most Americans are not heedlessly returning to “normal” as viral videos suggest, but are wearing masks and social distancing on their own, including in Florida.

The United States has reached a grim milestone: 100,000 deaths from Covid-19. In addition to its toll in lives, the virus has also ushered in an economic downturn as deep as the Great Depression nearly a century ago, with more than 38 million Americans having filed for unemployment. Each state’s experience differs, with each paying its own price in lives or livelihoods. Governors should be judged by their own state’s record going into and coming out of this crisis. It’s a standard that surely elevates governors like Ron DeSantis and Bill Lee—and likely condemns Andrew Cuomo."

Disease Expert Says COVID-19 Lockdowns Are Not Based on Science. History Shows He Could Be Right

The debate over COVID-19 lockdowns has thrust Sweden into the global spotlight. Anders Tegnell, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said he's confident Sweden's approach is the right one.

By Jon Miltimore of FEE.

"As nations around the world begin to ease lockdown restrictions passed amid the scariest pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu, a new battle is brewing among disease experts and the punditry class.
On one side, are lockdown proponents who compare lockdown skeptics to anti-vaxxers who endanger lives because they are drunk on "freedom" and want to prematurely ease restrictions, which they say could result in a new spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Lockdown skeptics, on the other hand, draw the battlelines differently.

“On one side are ideologues heavily invested in the idea of lockdown, regardless of the cost,” The Wall Street Journal recently described one skeptic’s take. “On the other are scientists with data that the lockdowns are overkill.”

While there is room for middle ground here—I know several medical professionals who say lockdowns made sense initially to “flatten the curve,” but that stage is now over—it’s fair to say the political debate around lockdowns has become largely a two-front war.

As I wrote last week, the costs of lockdowns become clearer every day: nations around the world staggering into recessions and Great Depression-level unemployment. The benefits of the lockdowns, at least for lockdown skeptics, are less easy to quantify.

“There is no correlation between fatalities and lockdown stringency,” columnist Simon Jenkins recently observed in The Guardian. “The most stringent lockdowns—as in China, Italy, Spain, New Zealand and Britain—have yielded both high and low deaths per million.”

The debate over lockdowns has naturally thrust Sweden, which has foregone a hardline approach to the COVID-19 pandemic in favor of a softer one encouraging voluntary action, into the global spotlight. The results of Sweden’s policy have so far been mixed.

While Sweden’s outbreak has to date been deadlier than its Scandanavian neighbors, The New York Times recently conceded that “it’s still better off than many countries that enforced strict lockdowns.”

While Sweden has endured a great deal of criticism for its “laissez-faire” approach, Anders Tegnell, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, recently defended his policies, stating that while a degree of social distancing is the right approach, lockdowns are not grounded in actual science.

“Nothing to do with [them] has a scientific basis,” Tegnell said, according to The Guardian.

It’s an astonishing claim. If the lockdowns are not based on science, what are they based on? As it happens, The New York Times recently traced the history of social US social distancing policy.

The origins apparently stem from a trip President George W. Bush made to the library in the summer of 2005 over concerns about bioterrorism, which prompted him to read The Great Influenza, a book on the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 written by John M. Barry.

Shortly thereafter, the Bush administration enlisted two federal government doctors, Carter Mecher and Richard Hatchett, to develop ideas to implement during the next pandemic. Mecher⁠— who “had almost no pandemic policy expertise,” according to the Times⁠—then met with Dr. Robert J. Glass, a New Mexico scientist at Sandia who specialized in developing models to explain how complex systems function.

And that’s where the story gets interesting. Via The Times:

Dr. Glass’s daughter Laura, then 14, had done a class project in which she built a model of social networks at her Albuquerque high school, and when Dr. Glass looked at it, he was intrigued.
Students are so closely tied together — in social networks and on school buses and in classrooms — that they were a near-perfect vehicle for a contagious disease to spread.
Dr. Glass piggybacked on his daughter’s work to explore with her what effect breaking up these networks would have on knocking down the disease.
The outcome of their research was startling. By closing the schools in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, only 500 people got sick. If they remained open, half of the population would be infected.
“My God, we could use the same results she has and work from there,” Dr. Glass recalled thinking. He took their preliminary data and built on it by running it through the supercomputers at Sandia, more typically used to engineer nuclear weapons. (His daughter’s project was entered in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2006.)
Dr. Mecher received the results at his office in Washington and was amazed.
If cities closed their public schools, the data suggested, the spread of a disease would be significantly slowed, making this move perhaps the most important of all of the social distancing options they were considering.

If the Times is correct, it would appear that federal social distancing policy is to some extent the brainchild of a trip George W. Bush made to the library in the summer of 2005 and a 14-year-old girl’s science project. (You can read more about Laura’s Glass’s science project, which reportedly took third place at the 2006 Intel fair in Indianapolis, in this Albuquerque Journal article.)

To be clear, there’s no direct evidence to my knowledge that this is what Tegnell, who earned a PhD in Medicine from Linköping University in 2003 and a MSc in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2004, was referring to when he said the lockdowns are not based on science.

Moreover, there’s nothing to say the lockdowns don’t work simply because the policy stems from George W. Bush and a child’s school project. (The lockdowns will ultimately be judged on their results, not their intellectual genesis.)

Nevertheless, Tegnell’s assertion that there is no “scientific basis” for the lockdowns deserves attention. There’s a tendency to assume central planning is inherently rational and scientific, but this is hardly true. Karl Marx, perhaps the most famous central planner in history, was horribly unscientific in his methods, explained the historian Paul Johnson.

“[Marx] failed precisely because he was unscientific: he would not investigate the facts himself, or use objectively the facts investigated by others,” Johnson observed in the book Intellectuals. “From start to finish, not just Capital but all his work reflects a disregard for truth which at times amounts to contempt. That is the primary reason why Marxism, as a system, cannot produce the results claimed for it; and to call it ‘scientific’ is preposterous.”

For his part, Tegnell says the science of COVID-19 is becoming clear on at least one point, whatever the models of Laura Glass’s hypothetical town said in 2006.

“We feel more and more confident about [not] closing schools,” Tegnell told TV host Trevor Noah in a May interview. “It’s not something that really is going to be effective for this kind of disease. Schools don’t seem to be very much of a motor of this epidemic.”"

Epidemiologist: Sweden’s COVID Response Isn’t Unorthodox. The Rest of the World’s Is

While nations today appear comfortable instituting mass lockdowns to prevent the spread of a deadly respiratory virus, the practice appears to be unprecedented.

By Jon Miltimore of FEE.

"Sweden’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic continues to draw scrutiny, both praise and criticism. One thing critics and supporters agree on is that Sweden’s “lighter touch” approach, which encourages social distancing through softer measures in lieu of mass closures, is unorthodox or exceptional.

This is not entirely true, however.

As Sweden’s top infectious disease expert recently explained, Sweden’s approach to the pandemic is more orthodox than the current lockdown approach, at least compared to historical standards.

“Are the people closing society completely, which has really never been done before, more or less orthodox than Sweden?” Anders Tegnell asked recently. “[Sweden is doing] what we usually do in public health: giving lots of responsibility to the population, trying to achieve a good dialogue with the population, and achieve good results with that.”

Tegnell’s point deserves attention. While nations today appear comfortable instituting mass lockdowns to prevent the spread of a deadly respiratory virus, the practice appears to be unprecedented.

History shows that isolating sick people is a practice that goes back thousands of years. The first recorded practice appears to come from the Old Testament, which mandates in some verses, such as Numbers 5: 2-3, the isolation of people with leprosy.

There is also historical precedent for quarantining people suspected of being carriers of deadly disease. This practice, according to FiveThirtyEight, appears to date back to the 14th century, when the Croatian city of Dubrovnik began quarantining merchants and other travelers outside the city for 30 days in case they had become infected with the plague during their travels.

History suggests Tegnell is correct: the practice of states ordering millions of healthy people to remain in isolation for weeks on end appears to have had no precedent—until China ordered the largest mass quarantine in human history.

This matters for several reasons. For one, because we’re in uncharted waters, we have no way of knowing how effective such a quarantine will be. Prior to the experiment, health policy experts expressed skepticism of the strategy.

“There are reasons to be skeptical of the efficacy of quarantine, for respiratory diseases [like coronavirus] in particular,” Wendy Parmet, director of the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University Law School, told FiveThirtyEight in February.

Second, we have no way of knowing the costs of mass lockdowns—though we are beginning to see them: mass unemployment, hundreds of thousands of businesses going under, retirements wiped out, surging government spending, and widespread emotional distress.

If the current approach to the COVID pandemic is unprecedented, it invites questions. Particularly, why now? Why this time?

After all, the United States has had no shortage of deadly epidemics. From the Yellow Fever of 1793 in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital to the Spanish Flu of 1918 to the "Asian flu" pandemic of 1957–58, Americans have struggled mightily against diseases that have in many cases been more deadly than COVID-19.

Indeed, as recently as 2006, when the world was grappling with the fast-mutating Avian Flu, lockdowns were “viewed as impractical, unnecessary and politically infeasible,” The New York Times reports.

One of the leading critics of the policy at the time was Dr. D.A. Henderson, who led the international effort to eradicate smallpox.

“Dr. Henderson was convinced that it made no sense to force schools to close or public gatherings to stop. Teenagers would escape their homes to hang out at the mall,” the Times reports. “School lunch programs would close, and impoverished children would not have enough to eat. Hospital staffs would have a hard time going to work if their children were at home.”

State-enforced social distancing would “result in significant disruption of the social functioning of communities and result in possibly serious economic problems,” Henderson wrote in a 2006 academic paper, responding to a federal social distancing proposal whose origins stemmed from a 14-year-old girl’s science project and a trip to the library made by George W. Bush.

Henderson, who died in 2016, proposed a different course: Let the pandemic run its course, treat and isolate the sick, and work rapidly to develop a vaccine.

Henderson ultimately lost that argument. But again, the question is, why?

Utopianism and collectivism are a dangerous cocktail of ideas, it seems. The concoction has given intellectuals an outsized faith in the efficacy of central planning.

Henderson’s approach of letting a pandemic run its course while treating the sick simply wasn’t palatable to experts and bureaucracies who had concluded long ago that central planning could solve any problem, even the spread of a highly-contagious, invisible virus carried by millions of asymptomatic humans.

“The Modern Era was to be one of plans and proposals, which is to say futurist to the point of bigotry,” the great historian Jacquest Barzun wrote in his classic work From Dawn to Decadence.
As Anders Tegnell has argued, the lockdowns are not really based on science. It’s more accurate to say the lockdowns are based on ideology. One might even say faith.

It was this faith that led dozens of governments around the world to enforce lockdowns that have done very little to contain COVID-19 but have wreaked mass economic and psychological havoc.

If central planning is the new orthodoxy—a word defined as an “adherence to correct or accepted creeds, especially in religion”—Sweden should wear its “unorthodox” label as a badge of honor."

COVID-19 stimulus, of $9,000 per capita, ended with entities with good connections

See Do You Feel $9,000 Richer, Punk? The bad policy and worse politics of coronavirus stimulus spending by Matt Welch of Reason.

"As Congress squabbles over the next multitrillion-dollar phase of coronavirus relief, it's worth asking the question: Do you feel $9,000 richer since March?

Unless you were an early investor in the vaccine-chasing Moderna Therapeutics, the answer is likely "no." And yet the estimated $3 trillion price tag on the first four batches of COVID-19 stimulus, divided by 330 million increasingly underemployed U.S. residents, equals $9,000 per capita, which has ended up where government payouts usually go: to entities with better connections than you.

There was the $50 billion to airline companies—$25 billion in loan guarantees, $25 billion in grants—which promptly slashed worker hours while burning fuel on empty flights at the government's request. There were the concierge-service clients of banking behemoths Citibank, U.S. Bank, and J.P. Morgan Chase, who got to the front of the line for the feds' $349 billion loan program for small businesses. And don't forget the Federal Reserve, which is propping up Wall Street by doing what Fed Chair Jerome Powell recently characterized on 60 Minutes as "a multiple of the programs that were done during the last crisis."

You would think that politicians and other elites would have learned from their never-popular response to the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Back then, the bailout/stimulus combo averaged out to a little less than $7,000 per U.S. resident, not that normies saw much of it. With few exceptions, the money went toward propping up banks, socializing the losses of private capitalists, and backfilling the fiduciary irresponsibility of states.

If the federal government didn't pass a huge emergency bailout, then-President George W. Bush warned in September 2008, "More banks could fail, including some in your community. The stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet. Foreclosures would rise dramatically. And if you own a business or a farm, you would find it harder and more expensive to get credit. More businesses would close their doors, and millions of Americans could lose their jobs."

Well, all of that happened anyway, as did the most anemic recovery in post-war history. As a direct consequence, so did populist anti-bailout political movements on both the right (Tea Party) and left (Occupy Wall Street). If the response to the 2008 financial crisis helped bring us Donald Trump and the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), what might an even bigger and less effective response to the more injurious coronavirus bring?

"Millions of Americans are seeing that the government spent trillions of dollars and still didn't get it right," Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) told me last month, during his brief flirtation with the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. "They didn't get help to the people who need it most. Instead, most of the assistance went to people who have great connections, who run big corporations. Those people, they got it really fast."

Why does this happen every time? As economists like to say, incentives matter. Sure, Congress could have just mailed us each a $9,000 check—or maybe $7,000, spending the rest on medical system capacity. But then the two major parties wouldn't have been able to go back to their favored and most supportive constituencies and brag about their special treatment. Sure, there might be an eventual backlash, but as President Trump once said (before COVID-19) about a future debt crisis, "Yeah, but I won't be here."

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), that inexplicable media darling, complained in a recent press conference that all these helicopters full of money—government spending in the U.S. has doubled over just the past two decades—hasn't managed to, you know, produce anything. "Every president has talked about the need to rebuild our infrastructure, our roads, our bridges, our airports," Cuomo said. "Our country doesn't build airports anymore….We haven't built a new airport in 25 years.

Governments, unlike businesses, have guaranteed (if fluctuating) revenue streams, in the form of taxes. The federal government has the added leeway of borrowing, apparently without limits. The more of GDP that gets soaked up and spit out by this process, the more that economic and political activity will be about directing and capturing the flow to line the pockets of bankers, corporate executives, and union bosses.

We can no longer build fancy bridges or even new subway stops, but we sure as heck can pad the pensions of transit employees and make sure the Lakers get a loan.

So what does Congress do for an encore? House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) wants to double down on another $3 trillion. No, we'll need $10 trillion to stave off another great depression, they tell us in The Atlantic.

Maybe by the time they reach eleventy trillion, we might see more than a $1,200 check. But I wouldn't bet on it."

81 Percent of NYPD's Social Distancing Summonses Were Issued to Blacks and Latinos: 'It's the New Stop and Frisk'

By Adrian Carrasquillo of Newsweek. Excerpts:

"Data released Friday by the New York Police Department (NYPD) shows that 81 percent of coronavirus enforcement summonses from March 16 to May 5 were issued to black and Latino residents.

"Of the 374 summonses issued in regard to social distancing, the respondents for 193 of those summonses are black and the respondents for 111 of those summonses are Hispanic," an NYPD press release said.

"It's the new form of stop-and-frisk," Melissa Mark-Viverito, the former New York City Council Speaker and current congressional candidate for New York's 15th district, told Newsweek. "We went through this battle with stop-and-frisk, of the disproportionate enforcement and over-criminalizing of our communities. It's a mentality that continues to permeate, but unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me."

Whites, who are 32 percent of the population of New York City, only received 51 summonses, accounting for 13 percent of them.

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The data comes after images and videos were widely shared online of police interactions with residents of color that drew criticism, including officer Francisco X. Garcia violently knocking down a bystander after a social distancing violation by two separate people. In the cellphone video, Garcia can be seen angrily throwing the bystander, who is black, to the ground while repeatedly punching him and sitting on him until another officer handcuffed him."

The data on summonses comes just a day after the Brooklyn district attorney's office released arrest figures showing that out of the 40 people who were arrested due to coronavirus social-distancing enforcement, 35 were black, four were Latino, and one was white."

Left-Leaning Magazine: Rand Paul Appears to Be Right about School Closures

Are school closures an effective way to contain the spread of COVID-19? A bevy of international evidence says no.

By Jon Miltimore. He is the Managing Editor of FEE.org.

"On May 12, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo scolded Rand Paul for comments the Senator made in a congressional hearing the previous day, stating Paul had “a sickness of the soul.”

Paul, while speaking to infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, had questioned the national COVID-19 strategy of encouraging schools to close, noting that many rural areas had not reached pandemic levels.

“We never really reached any pandemic levels in Kentucky and other states. We have less deaths in Kentucky than we have in an average flu season. It’s not to say this isn’t deadly, but really outside of New England, we’ve had a relatively benign course for this virus, nationwide,” Paul told Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “And I think the one size fits all, that we’re going to have a national strategy and nobody’s going to go to school, is kind of ridiculous. We really ought to be doing it school district by school district and the power needs to be dispersed, because people make wrong predictions.”

Cuomo’s critique was harsh, but not particularly unique. Paul’s comments incited an avalanche of criticism from the media (as well as praise from the right and from other commentators skeptical of the efficacy of lockdowns).

Despite the backlash, Paul on Friday doubled-down on his position, pointing out that the fatality rate of the virus is 0.00008 percent for individuals under age 25, or about one in 1.25 million.
“Open our schools now!” Paul declared in a tweet that went viral.

Once again, Paul’s tweet was met with criticism. However, it all received support from an unlikely place.

Writing at Mother Jones, a left-leaning American magazine, Kevin Drum said an abundance of research supports Paul’s assertion that school closures are an ineffective way to contain the spread of COVID-19, and may actually increase deaths.

“[The] best evidence we have seems to suggest that school closures have a fairly minimal effect taken on their own, and a zero or maybe even negative effect when you net out the increase in COVID-19 deaths that they cause indirectly,” writes Drum, a longtime blogger at The Washington Monthly.
Drum is careful to point out that we don’t yet know conclusively that school closures don’t work⁠—”at the moment, there is no conclusive proof,” he correctly observes—but he points to five studies that suggest Paul is onto something.

First, there is a study in Health Affairs published on May 14 that suggests school closures aren’t just ineffective, but actually increase COVID-19 deaths (see graph below).

Second, there is a JAMA Network study that notes the experiences in China and Taiwan don’t support the hypothesis that school closures decrease the spread of COVID.

Although no official data are available, to our knowledge, on the effectiveness of school closure during the COVID-19 epidemic, the poor relevance of this restrictive measure seems confirmed by the evidence that in Taiwan, the spread of COVID-19 was minimized without widespread planned school closures….The poor effect of school closure during coronavirus epidemics has already been evidenced in some studies carried out during the SARS epidemic. In China, it was found that school closure for 2 months was not significantly effective for disease prevention mainly because of the very low incidence of symptomatic disease among school-aged children.

Then there is an April study in the Lancet.

“Our model estimates that if the infection mortality rate of COVID-19 increases from 2.00% to 2.35% when the health-care workforce declines by 15.0%, school closures could lead to a greater number of deaths than they prevent,” concluded Professor Eli P. Fenichel and Jude Bayham, PhD.
And there was a “rapid systematic review” of a body of scientific literature investigating the effects of school closures.

Recent modelling studies of COVID-19 predict that school closures alone would prevent only 2–4% of deaths, much less than other social distancing interventions. Policy makers need to be aware of the equivocal evidence when considering school closures for COVID-19, and that combinations of social distancing measures should be considered.

Finally, there is a study in Science based on data from Wuhan and Shanghai which found that while “school closures cannot interrupt transmission on their own, they can reduce peak incidence by 40-60% and delay the epidemic.”

We’re still learning about COVID-19, but based on what we do know, Drum says it’s probable that school closures: a) have little effect; b) are likely not worth the “tremendous” impact they have on children and parents.

It’s worth noting that Drum, who is politically liberal, recognizes that this data and perspective may not be welcome news. Indeed, the headline of the Mother Jones article is, “Today’s Unpopular Opinion: Rand Paul Might Be Right About School Closures.”

This is odd, when you think about it. After all, the research suggests the virus can be contained as effectively (or more effectively) without closing schools. That means schools can remain open, which means more children learning in classrooms, and fewer stuck at home.

Why would this be unwelcome news?

The answer, it would seem, is that people want to believe that the lockdowns saved lives. That closing schools saved lives. That the stay-at-home policy worked precisely as intended.

This is odd, but not unusual. For decades, economists have observed this is a perennial problem with central planners and proponents of central planning.

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results,” Milton Friedman famously observed.

It’s a common but tragic mistake, one that gives life to many government programs.

If the COVID pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that an astonishing number of Americans⁠—particularly politicians and media⁠—want to judge policies on their intent, not their results.

Once we begin to judge stay-at-home policies by their results, not their intentions, we’ll awaken to a dark truth: the lockdowns didn’t work and never should have happened."

Federal Rules Holding Up Lab-Developed COVID-19 Tests

How streamlined regulations could help America react to COVID-19

By Ross Marchand. He is the director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. 

"With inconsistent rules getting in the way of COVID testing, America’s dysfunctional regulatory system has made it more difficult for America to cope with the Coronavirus.

While laboratories face the nearly impossible task of complying with two different sets of regulations, shady companies with little real expertise are selling kits that don’t actually test for the Coronavirus.

Fortunately, legislation introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) would unshackle laboratories and provide clear rules to give Americans access to reliable testing products. Americans deserve to know whether they have Coronavirus in a safe and timely manner. The current two-step bureaucratic process to develop a test is unnecessary and people are still struggling to get tested.

In plenty of places across America, it feels like self-isolation and stay-at-home orders will never end. Daily new cases number in the tens of thousands and hospitals continue to try and cope with the patients but more than a month after Americans were told by the authorities to shelter-in-place, less than 3 percent of the U.S. population has been tested for the virus.

The problem is that demand for testing far outstrips supply. As Modern Healthcare contributors Kelsy Ketchum and Leo O’Connor note, “the U.S. testing pipeline faced early problems. While the situation is improving, the country still has not caught up.”

As infection numbers spiked in late February, the Association of Public Health Laboratories had to beg the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for permission to develop tests that could accurately detect COVID-19 in patients. The FDA eventually agreed, offering laboratories “emergency use authorizations (EUAs)” to develop their own tests but these research facilities are still facing an uphill regulatory battle and must deal with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in addition to FDA bureaucrats.

Traditionally, CMS has taken the lead in inspecting laboratories and verifying laboratory-developed tests. This governmental body under normal conditions limits scientists’ ability to view lab specimens (and make diagnoses) remotely and requires separate regulatory certificates for different laboratories operating at the same facility. CMS finally relaxed these onerous restrictions at the end of March, while still requiring and monitoring labs’ proficiency tests to make sure that the lab is correctly evaluating their results. But in addition to continued (albeit flexible) regulatory oversight by the CMS, laboratories must also answer to FDA bureaucrats.

While these research professionals languish under excessive bureaucracy, snake oil salesmen are pedaling “scientific” products that don’t actually test for Coronavirus.

FierceBiotech reporter Conor Hale reports that, “Since mid-March, the FDA has let manufacturers distribute unauthorized antibody tests, provided they validate the tests themselves and do not advertise them as a standalone method of diagnosing a patient.”

By early May, nearly 200 antibody diagnostic products were circulating around the country while many of the testing kits remained unproven. After the National Institutes of Health found, through independent evaluation, that some of these tests are performing poorly, the FDA decided to tighten the screws again and require agency approval based on test effectiveness data.

Even with new, stricter enforcement, tests developed by a laboratory face higher regulatory hurdles than antibody tests being rolled out by private companies. Handicapping laboratories with two different regulators—the CMS and FDA—effectively keeps the most promising products developed by the brightest minds off the market.

Fortunately, the Verified Innovative Testing in American Laboratories (VITAL) Act (S. 3512) would ensure that the FDA has no regulatory authority over laboratory-developed tests. Under the proposed new regulatory structure, CMS oversight would be sufficient for developing tests.

Sen. Paul’s proposal would also require the CMS to update its rules and guidelines to keep regulations streamlined and reflective of current realities. The agency would become a one-stop-shop for approval, allowing laboratories to bypass the byzantine FDA.

Bureaucrats should be empowering scientists to help treat patients, instead of creating a regulatory obstacle course."

Economic Lockdowns Kill People–Yes Literally

It’s important to understand that the trade-off isn’t just the economy vs. lives. It’s also lives vs. lives.

By Emile Phaneuf. He has a Master's degree in Economics from Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala, an MA in Political Science and BA in International Relations from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

"A recent Bloomberg article discussed the opposing arguments in the debate over COVID-19 lockdowns. The article described the epidemiological way of thinking versus the economic way of thinking. In the simplest terms, epidemiologists think in terms of reducing the spread of disease, while economists think in terms of balancing trade-offs.

While expert epidemiologists are much needed during a pandemic, if we fail to think as economists, we may find ourselves with policies that cause more pain and deaths than necessary. It is also important to understand regarding the present crisis that economists do not only deal with trade-offs between lives and economy as the Bloomberg article asserts. But rather, we also deal with lives versus lives—both without lockdowns and with them. That is, COVID-19 causes deaths, but so do lockdowns, although it is somewhat more difficult to see them in the latter case.

These casualities will be more visible if we view the lockdowns through the lens of economics.
Economists have long understood the “it takes a village” concept in a radical sense. A global division of labor and many of us specializing in incredibly niche lines of work make it possible for 7.6 billion people to survive at once. A great real-world demonstration of this comes from a TED Talk in which a young man describes how he bought the cheapest electric bread toaster he could find (costing under four British pounds) to reverse engineer it in order to make a toaster of his own from scratch. Once he disassembled it, he found that it had about 400 parts (wires, springs, screws, plastic casing, among many others) from manufacturers all over the world.

Making a simple toaster from scratch, he learned, is much more difficult than he had imagined. But he kept trying, finding that he had to go into mines to extract his own iron, copper and mica, convert the iron ore into steel, make his own plastic casing from potato starch (as he had no oil to begin with), and so on. After a number of months of trying to make his electronic toaster, the final product turned out to be completely unworkable—not to mention, an aesthetic disaster.

But let us step back to review the “unseen.” The manufacturers of those 400 or so electronic parts in the store-bought toaster could not possibly know all of the final goods in which their electronic parts were ultimately used. They had buyers of their products, who distributed and exported the products, who sold to industrial supply companies in various markets, who sold to other manufacturers, who often exported further, and so on. That is, from manufacturer to consumer, products exchanged many hands—forming a “globe-spanning web of interconnectedness” and made possible through the price mechanism. As F.A. Hayek once put it:

[We] are all working for people whom we do not know and are being supported by the work of people we do not know... Profit is the signal which tells us what we must do in order to serve people whom we do not know.

Now we must elaborate on the previous point made about dealing with the loss of real flesh-and-blood human lives—not only in the absence of lockdowns but also because of them.

It is not only that people need money as the fruit of their labor in order to buy food for survival (which is true). It is also not only that the highly destructive inflationary and high-debt policies embraced by governments around the world in response to COVID mean that we will all suffer a great deal financially, which has a downward push on human life expectancy (as people living in more affluent nations live longer), and an upward push on infant mortality rates (as less affluent nations have higher infant mortality rates). It is also not only that there will be additional deaths caused by depression from job loss, suicides, substance abuse, and the like (so-called “deaths of despair”).

It is that we as contributors of labor, capital and ideas cannot possibly know the extent to which our individual contributions plug into that intricate and delicate “web of interconnectedness” and the ramifications of our forced removal of those contributions through government-imposed lockdowns.
Remember those electronic parts that go into toasters? Medical equipment needs many of these same parts. But as the manufacturers of these parts around the world are not able to know all the ways in which their products are ultimately used in final goods, they would hardly be in a position to lobby their respective governments to allow them to continue production as approved “essential” businesses during lockdowns. As a result, we see increased scarcity of medical equipment, which is particularly counterproductive for the current pandemic.

To be clear, the economic way of thinking does not lead us to dogmatically disfavor lockdowns simply because we find them inconvenient. What economic thinking does is moves us beyond merely thinking in terms of the immediate consequences to also considering the long-term consequences. It moves our attention beyond merely what is easily seen and reported by heads of state each night on television (number of COVID-related cases and deaths during a lockdown) and has us also consider what is unseen: including deaths caused by lockdowns. We cannot possibly support the lives of 7.6 billion humans on earth if we are not allowed to produce. It takes a global village to make it all work—not the “intelligent design” of mere mortals in the halls of power."

43% Of COVID-19 Deaths Are In Nursing Homes & Assisted Living Facilities Housing 0.6% Of U.S.

By Avik Roy. Excerpts:

"Americans are vigorously debating the merits of continuing to lock down the U.S. economy to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A single statistic may hold the key to resolving this debate: the astounding share of deaths occurring in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

Nursing homes and assisted living facilities: The #1 COVID problem

2.1 million Americans, representing 0.62% of the U.S. population, reside in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. (Nursing homes are residences for seniors needing help with activities of daily living, such as taking a shower or getting dressed, who also require 24/7 medical supervision; assisted living facilities are designed for seniors who need help with activities of daily living, but don’t require full-time on-site medical supervision.)

According to an analysis that Gregg Girvan and I conducted for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, as of May 22, in the 39 states that currently report such figures, an astounding 43% of all COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

(Among states reporting their death totals, 42% of COVID deaths have taken place in long-term care facilities; we estimate the share as 43% for the full U.S. population, based on incorporating the demographics of the non-reporting states.)

Let that sink in: 43% of all COVID-19 deaths are taking place in facilities that house 0.62% of the U.S. population.

And 43% could be an undercount. States like New York exclude from their nursing home death tallies those who die in a hospital, even if they were originally infected in an assisted living facility. Outside of New York, more than half of all deaths from COVID-19 are of residents in long-term care facilities."

"The tragedy is that it didn’t have to be this way. On March 17, as the pandemic was just beginning to accelerate, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis warned that “even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses have been known for decades [to] have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect people in nursing homes.” Ioannidis was ignored.

New York, New Jersey, Michigan forced nursing homes to accept infected patients

Instead, states like New York, New Jersey, and Michigan actually ordered nursing homes to accept patients with active COVID-19 infections who were being discharged from hospitals.
The most charitable interpretation of these orders is that they were designed to ensure that states would not overcrowd their ICUs. But well after hospitalizations peaked, governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo were doubling down on their mandates.

As recently as April 23, Cuomo declared that nursing homes “don’t have a right to object” to accepting elderly patients with active COVID infections. “That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that.” Only on May 10—after the deaths of nearly 3,000 New York residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities—did Cuomo stand down and partially rescind his order."


"Why Florida has performed better with vulnerable seniors

Contrast the decisions by governors like Cuomo with those of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In Florida, all nursing home workers were required to be screened for COVID-19 symptoms before entering a facility. On March 15, before most states had locked down, DeSantis signed an executive order that banned nursing home visitations from friends and family, and also banned hospitals from discharging SARS-CoV-2-infected patients into long-term care facilities.

“Every day on these calls [with hospitals], I would hear the same comments and questions around, ‘We need to get these individuals returned back to the nursing home,’” said Mary Mayhew, who runs Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration. “We drew a hard line early on. I said repeatedly to the hospital, to the CEOs, to the discharge planners, to the chief medical officers, ‘I understand that for 20 years it’s been ingrained, especially through Medicare reimbursement policy, to get individuals in and out. That is not our focus today. I’m not going to send anyone back to a nursing home who has the slightest risk of being positive.’ What we said constantly is let’s not have two cases become 20 or five become 50. If you don’t manage this individual as you return them back, you will have far more being transferred back to the hospital.”

Florida also prioritized long-term care facilities for personal protective equipment, or PPE, with the understanding that it was just as important, if not more so, to protect workers at nursing homes and assisted living facilities. “If I can send PPE to the nursing homes, and they can prevent an outbreak there, that’s going to do more to lower the burden on hospitals than me just sending them another 500,000 N95 masks,” said DeSantis."

"The optimistic take: Those outside of nursing homes are at lower risk

There is one silver lining—or perhaps bronze lining—to the COVID long-term care tragedy. The fact that nearly half of all COVID-19 deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities means that the 99.4 percent of the country that doesn’t live in those places is roughly half as likely to die of the disease."

New York health website deletes Cuomo's order linked to nursing home fatalities

By Gregg Re of Fox News. Excerpt:

"New York officials have scrubbed Gov. Andrew Cuomo's March 25 order requiring nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients from the state health department website -- even as Cuomo's office insists that the order, which has been linked to thousands of nursing home deaths, remains in effect.

The web page that once contained the order now directs to a page indicating that the file is "not found." The archive indicates that the deletion occurred sometime after May 5, around the time that criticism over New York's nursing home fatalities intensified.

A copy of the page saved by the Internet archive Wayback Machine, however, shows that Cuomo's order stated: "No resident shall be denied readmission or admission to the NH [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs [Nursing homes] are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission."

On May 10, Cuomo issued a new directive stating that hospitals cannot send patients back to nursing homes in the state unless they tested negative for the virus. The move appeared to largely invalidate the March 25 directive.

However, senior Cuomo communications director Peter Ajemian insisted in an email to Fox News that it was "not accurate" to state that Cuomo had "reversed" the March 25 order.

"He didn't reverse or rescind anything," Ajemian wrote at the time. "The order is still in effect. He did add a directive, this one directed at hospitals, saying they must test patients and the patients must be negative before being sent back to a nursing home. And he is requiring nursing homes to test staff twice a week.""

Nobel Laureate Scientist: Lockdown ‘May Have’ Cost More Lives Than It Saved, Damage Far Worse Than Positives

By Ryan Saavedra of The Daily Wire.

"A Nobel Prize winning scientist, who correctly predicted in the early days of the pandemic that the initial models were overestimating how bad the outbreak would be, said over the weekend that he believes that the lockdown may end up costing more lives than it saved, and that the economic devastation from the lockdown will outweigh the lives that were lost.

The Telegraph reported:

Michael Levitt, a Stanford University professor who correctly predicted the initial trajectory of the pandemic, sent messages to Professor Neil Ferguson in March telling the influential government advisor he had over-estimated the potential death toll by “10 or 12 times.”
The Imperial College professor’s modelling, a major factor in the Government’s apparent abandoning of a so-called herd-immunity policy, was part of an unnecessary “panic virus” which spread among global political leaders, Prof Levitt now tells the Telegraph.

“I think lockdown saved no lives,” Levitt said, adding that social distancing measures, hygiene, and wearing masks should have been sufficient. “I think it may have cost lives. It will have saved a few road accident lives – things like that – but social damage – domestic abuse, divorces, alcoholism – has been extreme. And then you have those who were not treated for other conditions.”

“I think that the real virus was the panic virus,” Levitt continued. “For reasons that were not clear to me, I think the leaders panicked and the people panicked and I think there was a huge lack of discussion.”

“I think the lockdown will cause much more damage than the deaths saved,” Levitt added. “The problem with epidemiologists is that they feel their job is to frighten people into lockdown, social distancing. So you say ‘there’s going to be a million deaths’ and when there are only 25,000 you say ‘it’s good you listened to my advice’. This happened with Ebola and bird flu. It’s just part of the madness.”

Imperial College epidemiologist Professor Ferguson, who had claimed that 500,000 people in the U.K. would die without a lockdown, resigned in disgrace earlier this month after he was caught breaking the quarantine that he had advocated for to allegedly have an affair with a married woman.

Politico reported:

A government spokesman confirmed Tuesday that Neil Ferguson had resigned from the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), after the Telegraph reported he had received at least two visits from his married lover and therefore broken social distancing rules.

“I accept I made an error of judgment and took the wrong course of action,” Ferguson said. “I have therefore stepped back from my involvement in Sage.”

David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco, told the Daily Telegraph, that the model created by Ferguson was a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming.”

Richards added, “In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.”"

600 Physicians Say Lockdowns Are A ‘Mass Casualty Incident’

By Grace-Marie Turner of Forbes.

"More than 600 of the nation’s physicians sent a letter to President Trump this week calling the coronavirus shutdowns a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing negative health consequences” to millions of non COVID patients.

“The downstream health effects...are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error," according to the letter initiated by Simone Gold, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles.

“Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%,” the letter said. Other silent casualties:  “150,000 Americans per month who would have had new cancer detected through routine screening.”

From missed cancer diagnoses to untreated heart attacks and strokes to increased risks of suicides, “We are alarmed at what appears to be a lack of consideration for the future health of our patients.”
Patients fearful of visiting hospitals and doctors’ offices are dying because COVID-phobia is keeping them from seeking care. One patient died at home of a heart attack rather than go to an emergency room. The number of severe heart attacks being treated in nine U.S hospitals surveyed dropped by nearly 40% since March. Cardiologists are worried “a second wave of deaths” indirectly caused by the virus is likely.

The physicians’ letter focuses on the impact on Americans’ physical and mental health.  “The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure. In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse.

“It is impossible to overstate the short, medium, and long-term harm to people’s health with a continued shutdown,” the letter says. “Losing a job is one of life’s most stressful events, and the effect on a person’s health is not lessened because it also has happened to 30 million [now 38 million] other people.  Keeping schools and universities closed is incalculably detrimental for children, teenagers, and young adults for decades to come.”

While all 50 states are relaxing lockdowns to some extent, some local officials are threatening to keep stay-at-home orders in place until August.  Many schools and universities say they may remain closed for the remainder of 2020.

“Ending the lockdowns are not about Wall Street or disregard for people’s lives; it about saving lives,” said Dr. Marilyn Singleton, a California anesthesiologist and one of the signers of the letter. “We cannot let this disease change the U.S. from a free, energetic society to a society of broken souls dependent on government handouts.” She blogs about the huge damage the virus reaction is doing to the fabric of society.

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, also warns that restrictions are having a huge negative impact on non-COVID patients.

“Even patients who do get admitted to hospital, say for a heart problem, are prisoners. No one can be with them. Visitation at a rare single-story hospital was through closed outside window, talking via telephone,” she wrote us.  “To get permission to go to the window you have to make an appointment (only one group of two per day!), put on a mask, get your temperature taken, and get a visitor's badge of the proper color of the day.”

How many cases of COVID-19 are prevented by these practices? “Zero,” Dr. Orient says.  But the “ loss of patient morale, loss of oversight of care, especially at night are incalculable.”

Virtually all hospitals halted “elective” procedures to make beds available for what was expected to be a flood of COVID-19 patients.  Beds stayed empty, causing harm to patients and resulting in enormous financial distress to hospitals, especially those with limited reserves.

Even states like New York that have had tough lockdowns are starting to allow elective hospital procedures in some regions.  But it’s more like turning up a dimmer switch. In Pennsylvania, the chair of the Geisinger Heart Institute, Dr. Alfred Casale, said the opening will be slow while the facility is reconfigured for COVID-19 social distancing and enhanced hygiene.

Will patients come back?  COVID-phobia is deathly real.

Patients still are fearful about going to hospitals for heart attacks and even for broken bones and deep lacerations. Despite heroic efforts by physicians to deeply sanitize their offices, millions have cancelled appointments and are missing infusion therapies and even chemotherapy treatments. This deferred care is expected to lead to patients who are sicker when they do come in for care and more deaths from patients not receiving care for stroke, heart attacks, etc.

NPR reported about a Washington state resident who had what she described as the “worst headache of her life.”

She waited almost a week before going to the hospital where doctors discovered she had a brain bleed that had gone untreated.  She had multiple strokes and died. “This is something that most of the time we're able to prevent,” said her neurosurgeon, Dr. Abhineet Chowdhary, director of the Overlake Neuroscience Institute in Bellevue, Wash.

As the number of deaths from the virus begin to decline, we are likely to awaken to this new wave of casualties the 600 physicians are warning about. We should be listening to the doctors, and heed their advice immediately.

UPDATE‪: An Associated Press article by Michael Biesecker and Jason Dearen that includes a description of the 600-physician letter is headlined "GOP fronts ‘pro-Trump’ doctors to prescribe rapid reopening,” which has led to criticism of Gold and her colleagues on social media. However, as the article acknowledges in the text, “Gold denied she was coordinating her efforts with Trump’s reelection campaign.” Gold echoed those comments to us, saying, “This was 100% physician grassroots. There was 0% GOP.”"