Horowitz: Coronavirus hospitalizations down to lowest levels of pandemic. So where is our exit strategy?

Coronavirus hospitalizations down to lowest levels of pandemic. So where is our exit strategy?
Daniel Horowitz, Conservative Review. August 18, 2020

It’s now becoming clear, from every state and country that has reached saturation levels of the virus, that the virus burns out roughly around the 20% seroprevalence benchmark, not at the 80% threshold the fearmongers predicted. Whether it’s Sweden, New York, or Arizona, the virus is going to do what it does – meaning it spreads for about six weeks in a given region and then moves on. The only question is whether we will continue to destroy our society, mental health, and economy or achieve herd immunity without adding the man-made death toll. Herd immunity is going to happen, whether we aim for it or not.

Please read the entire article. It's full of hard facts and statistics that the media has been actively suppressing in order to keep you panicked and afraid.

CBS News: Vote-by-mail experiment reveals potential problems within postal voting system ahead of November election

Vote-by-mail experiment reveals potential problems within postal voting system ahead of November election
CBS News. July 24, 2020, 8:58 AM

Many Americans are expected to vote by mail for the first time in November 2020 because of coronavirus concerns, so "CBS This Morning" sent out 100 mock ballots, simulating 100 voters in locations across Philadelphia, in an experiment to see how long one should give themselves to make sure their vote counts.
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For the experiment, a P.O. box was set up to represent a local election office. A few days after the initial ballots were mailed, 100 more were sent.

The mock ballots used the same size envelope and same class of mail as real ballots, and even had mock votes folded in to approximate the weight. The biggest difference: real mail-in ballots have a logo that is meant to expedite them. "CBS This Morning" was unable to include [it in] the trial.

A week after initial ballots were sent, most ballots appeared to be missing from the P.O. box.
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Out of the initial batch mailed a week earlier, 97 out of 100 votes had arrived. Three simulated persons, or 3% of voters, were effectively disenfranchised by mail by giving their ballots a week to arrive. In a close election, 3% could be pivotal.

Four days after mailing the second batch of mock ballots, 21% of the votes hadn't arrived.

Needless to say, I am not surprised by this. And neither are the Philadelphia residents CBS interviewed. In the video, everybody interviewed said that they wouldn't trust the post office with something as important as their vote. Election officials work very hard to make sure they count every vote they receive by the deadline, but they have no way to make sure the ballots are delivered to them on time.

I, myself, have had critical mail go missing. Not a vote, but one of my estimated tax payments went missing last year. I had to have my bank issue a stop-payment on the cheque and mail another. I'm just glad the government didn't force me to pay a penalty after that screw-up.

My advice to you:

• If you have to mail something important, send it two weeks before it needs to arrive. Consider paying for a return receipt (as proof that it was delivered) and/or sending it priority mail in order to increase the odds of on-time delivery.
• Vote in person. I know everybody is worried about getting the coronavirus, but unless you're in a high-risk category, the risk is going to be very low. Especially if you keep your distance from others. I don't know about all locations, but where I live, polling places enforce social distancing. It's less risky than going to the grocery store. If you're OK with going out shopping, then you should be OK with going to vote.

Red State: Mike Rowe Answers a Fan Letter About COVID-19 — It Probably Wasn’t the Answer They Expected

Mike Rowe Answers a Fan Letter About COVID-19 — It Probably Wasn’t the Answer They Expected
by Becca Lower. 10:00 am on July 24, 2020

[A] fan asked Mike a question about the Wuhan coronavirus… and I’m not too sure she got the answer she expected.

She wrote:

“Mike. In a recent post, you said you’ve been to Tennessee and Georgia, giving speeches and filming for your new show. Before that, you were on the road shooting for Dirty Jobs. Is it really so important to film a television show in the midst of pandemic? Is it responsible of you to encourage this kind of behavior when infection rates are spiking? Don’t you watch the news? More and more cases every day – aren’t you concerned?

The answer is far too long to re-post here, but please go and read the entire article to see Mike's wonderfully well thought-out answer. You may not want to change anything you're doing after reading it, but hopefully it will help you replace media-hyped fear with facts and reasoned analysis.

IEEE Spectrum: Handheld Vagus Nerve Stimulator Gets Emergency Approval for COVID-19 Use

Handheld Vagus Nerve Stimulator Gets Emergency Approval for COVID-19 Use
By Samuel K. Moore. 22 Jul 2020 | 16:30 GMT

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted an emergency use authorization for treating suspected COVID-19 patients with a non-invasive vagus nerve stimulator. The handheld device, made by electroCore, in Basking Ridge, N.J., sends a train of electric pulses through the skin to a nerve in the neck. Research has shown this pulse train causes airways in the lungs to open and may also have a more general anti-inflammatory effect.

According to FDA’s authorization, the gammaCore Sapphire CV device can be used either at home or in a clinic or hospital to “acutely treat adult patients with known or suspected COVID-19 who are experiencing exacerbation of asthma-related [shortness of breath] and reduced airflow, and for whom approved drug therapies are not tolerated or provide insufficient symptom relief.”

This is a really cool piece of tech. Now I wonder how many different conditions this device might be able to treat using different frequencies and power levels.

Horowitz: New study: Millennials think their risk from COVID-19 is exponentially more than the true threat

New study: Millennials think their risk from COVID-19 is exponentially more than the true threat
By Daniel Horowitz. July 14, 2020

Four researchers published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research studying people’s perceived personal health risks associated with COVID-19. The most striking result of their survey of 1,500 Americans from May 6 to May 13 is that the younger the age of the respondent, the more the individual seemed concerned about the virus being deadly to them – the exact inverse of the true threat assessment of the virus.
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When asked by the four researchers, who hail from Harvard, Oxford, and Università Bocconi, out of “1,000 people very similar to you” how many would die from COVID-19 over the next nine weeks, the median estimated guess by respondents aged 18-34 was 20, or 2%. In other words, the average Millennial thought that 2% of everyone like them would die within nine weeks from the virus. In contrast, in contrast, the respondents aged 70 years or older, which is exponentially more at risk, asses their risk of dying at about 1%.

What is the infection fatality rate (IFR) for younger people? The CDC estimates a 0.05% IFR for everyone in the age cohort of 0-49. Other estimates based on Spain serology tests broken down by age suggest an even lower IFR for those 18-49.

The article goes on to point out that people in this age group routinely engage in behaviors that are stastically far more likely to result in death or injury. But they don't consider it a big deal, in large part because they don't have social media constantly hyping the dangers of these activities.

Which pretty much confirms what I've been saying for quite a while. The media and social media is massively exaggerating the deadliness of this disease and people are basing life-affecting decisions on these inflated figures.

Exaggerating a disease and demonizing those who disagree with the exaggeration may get you more viewers and it might even convince some people to change who they vote for in November, but it is ultimately destructive to the entire population that these articles claim to be trying to help.

Eclectic Light: Face masks, face screens, and breathing

Face masks, face screens, and breathing
By hoakley. July 11, 2020

There’s no more controversial issue in the prevention of Covid-19 than face masks. Unfortunately, as is so often the case now, a great deal of nonsense and non-science has been spread, and has been passed around as dogma. This article looks at one often-neglected area: face masks, screens, and the mechanics of breathing. Can a face mask cause difficulty breathing? Do masks result in the build-up of carbon dioxide? And why isn’t there good research into face masks?
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It’s incredibly frustrating that the type of face mask most commonly worn by the public has been the subject of such little research. There are good and careful studies of the potential benefits of clinical masks, including ‘regular’ and N95 types, but next to nothing on cloth masks.
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Until people understand face masks, screens, breathing and protection this will just remain a mess of disinformation and misunderstanding. It’s also an invaluable surrogate for politicians: maintaining isolation and distancing has high economic costs; shifting responsibility onto people to choose and use protective masks instead costs the state almost nothing, and puts the blame onto the wearer if they still get or spread Covid-19. The moral is surely that, outside of care settings, you should maintain full distancing and hygiene regardless, and that a mask can then only augment your protection. The moment that you rely on your mask as sole protection you have lost control of the risk.

You should definitely read the complete article. There's a lot of very good information about the nature of breathing, and what clinical masks can and can not do.

It also shows that recent laws and executive orders mandating masks in public (and in stores, and restaurants, and everywhere else) are simply "security theater". They look good on camera for the press, but don't actually accomplish anything.

The fact that all of these state orders demand that clinical masks be reserved for health-care professionals and first responders, and that everybody else is required to use cloth masks, including home-made masks and bandannas, means that large percentages of the population, while complying with orders, are not accomplishing anything and are at just as much risk as they would be by not wearing a mask at all.

But it is a really good excuse to punish people who choose to refuse to obey these (frequently illegal and unconstitutional) orders. The mask may not do a thing to protect your health, but if you can be arrested and subject to a $500 fine for non-compliance, then you're probably going to wear them anyway.

Daniel Payne: Fauci omits context, feeds alarm with warning of 100,000 coronavirus infections a day

Fauci omits context, feeds alarm with warning of 100,000 coronavirus infections a day
By Daniel Payne, Just The News. July 5, 2020 - 10:29pm

Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before the Senate this week that the United States could soon see as many as 100,000 new coronavirus cases per day, feeding alarmist narratives that have spread rapidly through the media: Surging COVID-19 infections, hospital systems under strain, and the prospect of a "second wave" of the virus potentially throwing much of the nation back into open-ended lockdowns.

Yet estimates cited by other U.S. public health authorities and academic researchers indicate we may have already far surpassed 100,000 new infections per day, the vast majority of them mild and/or asymptomatic. If so, the U.S. would now be significantly closer to herd immunity — and the end of the pandemic — than widely assumed.
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Serology tests across the globe have pointed to infection rates anywhere from 16 to 80 times higher than confirmed numbers. Even the lower end of those projections would again point to daily infection rates vastly higher than what health officials are recording now.

The exact extent of the coronavirus pandemic will almost certainly never be known: Even viral outbreaks as regular and predictable as seasonal influenza, for example, are indexed primarily through estimates rather than actual observed cases. But it is increasingly clear that the disease is nowhere near as deadly as feared several months ago, and that it may have infected tens of millions of people with only a small percentage of them even noticing.

In other words, figures don't lie, but liars can figure.

Or, never let facts get in the way of a scary political narrative.

Daniel Horowitz: More evidence that most coronavirus cases are now weaker than the flu

More evidence that most coronavirus cases are now weaker than the flu
Daniel Horowitz, Conservative Review. July 1, 2020

Evidence continues to mount that the new infections throughout much of the country are extremely mild, with the exception of some serious cases coming over the border from Mexico. Those two facts continue to be obscured from our policy debate over containing the virus in the southern states. The governors of California, Arizona, and Texas refuse to recognize that the mild nature of these cases is good news going forward, and they continue to ignore the threat of serious cases from the border.
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As I pointed out regarding Florida, cases have been spiking for weeks, yet the deaths and numbers of serious cases are not rising. ... Also, much of the increase is superficial and illusory because of mass testing, multiple tests to return to work, and people coming back to the hospitals for normal care that was previously suspended. Such patients are automatically tested for the virus, regardless of their reason for admission. It appears that the virus has now spread to younger people but is also milder than it was when it first hit in earnest in March and April.
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what we are seeing in Texas and elsewhere is actually a fulfillment of what we all hoped for – a flattened curve of mild cases and hospitals that are able to handle severe cases, but ultimately few deaths. “Overall, based upon what we are seeing at our facilities, the above information is really more of a positive story,” wrote the emergency clinic executive to Berenson. “You have more people who are testing positive with minimal symptoms. This means that the fatality rate is less than commonly reported.”

This article is far too big to properly summarize in a few paragraphs. Please go and read the full article to get the whole story.

This is great news. What we are seeing (outside of the New York metropolitan area) is exactly what we were hoping for. A flattened curve where the hospitals are able to handle the severe cases and everybody else is able to recover on their own. Most of the rest you're hearing in the news is just political grandstanding for the November election and has nothing at all to do with public safety.

Townhall: Fauci Admits Why Americans Were Initially Misled About Wearing Masks

Fauci Admits Why Americans Were Initially Misled About Wearing Masks
Leah Barkoukis. Posted: Jun 17, 2020 8:40 AM

At the start of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., federal officials told the public they did not need to wear face masks. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said they only made people feel better but were pretty much pointless.
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As time went on, the tone changed, and Americans were encouraged to wear face masks, with many places requiring them.

Now Fauci has admitted that the reason Americans were initially discouraged from using them is because there was a shortage, as Adams acknowledged in the second part of his February tweet.

In other words, the US government deliberately lied to the people.

How many other things have they lied about? And, knowing this, how can we trust anything they say?

Conservative Review: Could half the uninfected population already be partially immune?

Horowitz: Bombshell study: Could half the uninfected population already be partially immune?
Daniel Horowitz, May 27, 2020

Could nearly half the population not already infected with SARS-CoV-2 be immune to it from having already contracted other forms of coronavirus in recent years?

That is one implication of a major study conducted by over a dozen researchers from several microbiology and immunology institutions in the U.S.

The purveyors of panic are warning of a second wave of the virus and that even if we are correct in asserting that the general fatality rate is extremely low for most people, it will still result in millions of deaths worldwide if we need 70 percent of the population to get the virus in order to achieve herd immunity. Putting aside the fact that their strategy of lockdown doesn’t provide a solution to this hypothetical problem either, even as it kills more people from the collateral damage, there is now promising evidence that more people might already be immune to the virus.

The study is built upon the principle that T cells play a central role in destroying viruses and providing immunity. Not only were these cells discovered in all the blood samples of confirmed recovered COVID-19 patients, but they were also found in 6 of the 11 blood samples from 2015-2018, before those individual donors could possibly have contracted the virus.

It's still too early to be sure, but if further studies come to the same conclusion, this will be great news.

Daily Caller: Andrew Cuomo’s Nursing Home Order Deleted From New York Health Department Website

Andrew Cuomo’s Nursing Home Order Deleted From New York Health Department Website
Peter Hasson, May 27, 2020

Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March 25 order requiring nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to accept recovering coronavirus patients has disappeared from the New York State Department of Health’s website.

The webpage for Cuomo’s order says the document is “not found,” though it can still be seen on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It took the governor roughly six weeks to reverse the order, which has been blamed for the high death rate among New York’s elderly.

The order’s disappearance, which was first reported by Fox News on Tuesday, comes as Cuomo has faced increasing levels of criticism for his handling of coronavirus. A Cuomo spokesperson told Fox News the order’s disappearance was part of a routine website update.

Revisionist history all the way down. Make a horrible decision that kills thousands of people. Then blame other people. Then delete the evidence.

Next up, we should expect Democrats to deny that the order ever existed and accuse the rest of us of making it up.

Too bad all those nursing home administrators have signed paper copies of their orders. It won't be nearly as easy to delete all of them.

FiveThirtyEight: A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling

A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling
By Zach Weinersmith, Maggie Koerth, Laura Bronner and Jasmine Mithani. Published Apr. 13, 2020

Here we are... In the middle of a pandemic... Staring out our living room windows like aquarium fish. The questions on everybody's minds: "How bad will this really get?". "How long am I going to have to live cooped up like this?"

We all want answers. And given the volume of research and data being collected about the novel coronavirus, it seems like answers ought to exist. And numbers are certainly out there. Trouble is, they're kind of all over the place.

A great comic-narrative explaining why we have no straight answers and are not likely to get any for quite some time. It's nobody's fault, but the result of lots of people trying to draw meaningful conclusions based on data that is inconsistent and highly uncertain.

h/t Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Federalist: Inaccurate Virus Models Are Panicking Officials Into Ill-Advised Lockdowns

Inaccurate Virus Models Are Panicking Officials Into Ill-Advised Lockdowns
By Madeline Osburn March 25, 2020

How a handful of Democratic activists created alarming, but bogus data sets to scare local and state officials into making rash, economy-killing mandates.

As U.S. state and local officials halt the economy and quarantine their communities over the Wuhan virus crisis, one would hope our leaders were making such major decisions based on well-sourced data and statistical analysis. That is not the case.

A scan of statements made by media, state governors, local leaders, county judges, and more show many relying on the same source, an online mapping tool called COVID Act Now. The website says it is “built to enable political leaders to quickly make decisions in their Coronavirus response informed by best available data and modeling.”

An interactive map provides users a catastrophic forecast for each state, should they wait to implement COVID Act Now’s suggested strict measures to “flatten the curve.” But a closer look at how many of COVID Act Now’s predictions have already fallen short, and how they became a ubiquitous resource across the country overnight, suggests something more sinister.

Just like global warming ('scuze me, climate change) alarmism is based on inaccurate facts and bogus simulations, so is this. Only this time their exaggerations are intended to convince the country to impose martial law, nationalize all businesses and put the entire population on welfare.

Stalin himself, couldn't want more.

Gateway Pundit: Now 3 International Studies Find Chloroquine with Azithromycin Shows 100% Success Rate in Treating Coronavirus in 6 Days! (VIDEO)

Now 3 International Studies Find Chloroquine with Azithromycin Shows 100% Success Rate in Treating Coronavirus in 6 Days! (VIDEO)
by Jim Hoft, March 19, 2020

There are now THREE international studies — China, Australia and France — that found that Chloroquine with Azithromycin Shows 100% Success Rate in Treating Coronavirus in 6 Days!

We have reported on the success of Chloroquine earlier today and this week.

President Trump announced on Thursday morning that the CDC had approved use of the drug in treating coronavirus patients.

But tonight we heard more from Rep. Mark Green, a former Army Flight Surgeon, that the combination of Chloroquine with Azithromycin cleared the virus in 3 days in 100% of the patients in the study.

Great news! Now, can we start treating people and get society up and running again?

R Street: Small Regulatory Reforms That Can Help People During the COVID Pandemic

Small Regulatory Reforms That Can Help People During the COVID Pandemic
Mar 18, 2020

While the federal and state governments figure out the appropriate way to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, there are plenty of narrow regulatory reforms they can implement to help people deal with the fallout. This is not to say that regulatory reform is the only solution, but it can be helpful as people struggle to access medical care and food.

All of these are common-sense proposals. While we definitely need government action in some areas to help fight this virus, there are many areas where we would be best served if government would get out of the way and let those with critical skills and jobs do what they do best without getting bogged down in red tape.

Gateway Pundit: Evidence Shows Director General of World Health Organization Severely Overstated the Fatality Rate of the Coronavirus Leading to the Greatest Global Panic in History

Evidence Shows Director General of World Health Organization Severely Overstated the Fatality Rate of the Coronavirus Leading to the Greatest Global Panic in History
by Joe Hoft. March 17, 2020

The Director General of the WHO spoke on March 3, 2020 and shared this related to the coronavirus:

While many people globally have built up immunity to seasonal flu strains, COVID-19 is a new virus to which no one has immunity. That means more people are susceptible to infection, and some will suffer severe disease.

Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.

This statement led to the greatest panic in world history as the media all over the world shared and repeated that the coronavirus was many, many times more deadly than the common flu.

The problem is his statement is false. It was not accurate!

The Gateway Pundit reported yesterday, that the coronavirus fatality rate reported by the media was completely inaccurate and the actual rate is less than the current seasonal flu – the media was lying again. The false reporting of the coronavirus fatality rate of 3.4% in the media started with the statements made by the WHO in early March.

Here’s a summary of the analysis from yesterday proving the Director General’s statement was very misleading and materially false:

N/A – not available

h/t Pamela Geller

Read the original article for a point-by-point detailed explanation of the headline's point.

Of course, we know that this virus outbreak is serious, but the WHO and the press are exaggerating the facts, resulting in a world-wide panic. I don't want to start a discussion about why they are doing this, but it is wrong and needs to stop.

COVID-19 is not 34x as deadly as this year's flu, but is in fact 1/3 as deadly. Because people are acting as if it is 100x more deadly than reality, we are deliberately shutting down the global economy when it is not necessary. Our panicked reaction is going to cause far far more damage than the virus itself.

Johns Hopkins: Coronavirus Disease 2019 vs. the Flu

Coronavirus Disease 2019 vs. the Flu
Lisa Lockerd Maragakis, M.D., M.P.H.

Influenza “the flu” and COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, are both infectious respiratory illnesses. Although the symptoms of COVID-19 and the flu can look similar, the two illnesses are caused by different viruses.

As of Mar. 8, 2020, the flu is showing much more of an impact on Americans than COVID-19. You can find up-to-date information on COVID-19 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Lisa Maragakis, M.D., M.P.H., senior director of infection prevention at Johns Hopkins, explains how the flu and COVID-19 are similar and how they are different.

To all those who are panicking over COVID-19 (no thanks to media coverage that seems to want a global panic), scroll down to the end, where mortality is compared:

COVID-19: Approximately 3,653 deaths reported worldwide; 17 deaths in the U.S., as of Mar. 8, 2020.

Flu: 291,000 to 646,000 deaths worldwide; 12,000 to 61,000 deaths in the U.S. per year.

The COVID-19 situation is changing rapidly. Since this disease is caused by a new virus, people do not have immunity to it, and a vaccine may be many months away. Doctors and scientists are working on estimating the mortality rate of COVID-19, but at present, it is thought to be higher than that of most strains of the flu.

Even given the final cautionary paragraph, it's important to point out that the flu claims orders of magnitude more lives every year than COVID-19.

Of course, you should take reasonable precautions. But they are the same precautions you should be taking every year because of the flu. Shutting down all of civilization out of fear of what might happen in the future is just ridiculous.

Tips to help guard against coronavirus

On yesterday's Mark Levin Show (March 3, 2020), a caller provides good advice, based on medical facts, about how to protect against the coronavirus.

Corornavirus and media scare tactics

Before I begin, let me make it clear that I believe the coronavirus outbreak in China is extremely serious. This is not something to take lightly and reasonable precautions are important to prevent it from becoming an outbreak in other countries.

That having been said, the media is using very misleading reporting in an attempt to exaggerate the facts. I guess they believe panicking the population is a good way to sell newspapers. Or demand unnecessarily aggressive action by the government.

Case in point, take a look at this article from the Palm Beach Post: Coronavirus scare: 30 students, 3 teachers at Benjamin School await word on exposure.

After reading that click-bait headline, you are led to believe that 33 people have been exposed and that an outbreak is imminent. But if you actually read the text of the article, the person who allegedly infected these 33 people had the flu, not the coronavirus. Lots of people are being tested, but none have tested positive. And "breaking news" that the students have been allowed back to school. In other words, lots of people were scared but there was no coronavirus infection.

The article goes on with the fear-mongering when it misrepresents the CDC's statistics. The article quotes a very short excerpt from a CDC press statement, saying "So far, the CDC has confirmed only five cases of coronavirus in the United States. It is also following 110 potential cases, or 'persons under investigation' in 26 states and that 'this is a cumulative number and will only increase.'".

Despite being a direct quote, it is very misleading. It implies that we need to be scared because an ever increasing number of people are being tested. But if you go look at the CDC's summary of cases in the US you will see that the count of "patients under investigation" includes all the people who have tested negative. The number of people who have tested positive in the US remains at 5, where it has been all week.

Maybe I'm not understanding this correctly, but if you test hundreds of people and only five are positive, with the rest of the completed results being negative, why is that a sign of an imminent problem?

If you actually click the link to the press briefing cited by the Palm Beach Post, you see the rest of the quote, omitted by the newspaper because that part is reassuring, not scary:

... To date we have 110 of what we’re calling persons under investigation or PUIs from 26 states. This is a cumulative number and will only increase. We still only have five confirmed positives and 32 that have tested negative. There have been no new confirmed cases overnight. ...

In other words, follow the same common sense that you should follow all the time. Wash frequently. Avoid spending time around sick people. If you feel sick, see a doctor. And don't trust the media to give you accurate information.

Update: The CDC has updated their status page. As of February 19th, there have been 15 people (3% of patients under investigation) in the US who have tested positive, 412 people (86%) tested negative and 52 people (11%) whose tests are still pending.

It is worth noting that a TV news report from February 17th was claiming that were 29 confirmed cases in the United states, even though the CDC report from two days later reports half that number. Either the media is lying or they are getting their numbers from some source other than the CDC, but have chosen to not name that source. Just another example of media scare-tactics.