Posts Tagged ‘covid-19’

Covid-19: What the media and the Democrats don’t want you to realize

Posted: June 23, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

After the media and the Democrats trashed the response of the Trump administration’s actions toward the pandemic, few analysts have circled back to assess the success of the federal government.

Overall, the administration did quite well in facing the most horrific disease outbreak in a century.

The only way to accurately assess the overall effectiveness is to compare apples to apples, or death rates to 100,000 people. To wit, the United States did better than Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and about the same as the Netherlands and Ireland. Germany and South Korea did better.

The cancellation of flights from China held down the infection rate; the cancellation of flights from Europe could have come earlier.

The patchwork of shutdowns and social distancing across almost every U.S. state has succeeded in stopping the exponential spread of the virus; the subsequent government subsidies have helped the economy.

Remember the ventilator shortage? It never materialized. Now the United States has a considerable surplus after mobilizing production by the likes of General Motors.

Remember the hospital bed shortage? On March 18, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a dire warning. Within 45 days, New York City would need 110,000 hospital beds to treat those suffering from Covid-19, and it only had 53,000 available. In the end, New York hit a peak for hospitalizations on April 12 at 18,825–well below the worst-case scenario.

Across the nation, the healthcare system became strained in some states, such as New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts, but it held up to the increased demand.

The problem is New York and other states was the inadequate oversight of nursing homes and long-health facilities, where about 40 percent of the 120,000 victims died.

Although the federal government sets standards for these facilities that receive Medicare, state and local governments are responsible for overseeing the quality of care. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and others failed miserably, while Florida and a few others did not.

Multiple vaccines for the coronavirus have begun clinical trials on humans. According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 100 possible vaccines in various stages of development around the world.

Earlier predictions argued it could be more than a year and a half before a vaccine was proven effective and ready to use. Now one is expected some time in the beginning of next year.

“From a vaccine development, we are doing incredibly well in that we’ve got a large number of entities trying to develop the vaccine,” says Gerard Anderson, a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Meanwhile, the antiviral drug Remdesivir has been found to shorten the average hospital stays of coronavirus patients.

Remember that study that argued hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, was dangerous? It turns out the data were false, and the study was withdrawn from a prominent medical journal.

Some shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPEs, occurred during the initial outbreak. That shortage was caused, in part, by virus-related disruptions in the supply chain from manufacturers in China, Anderson says.

Again, the United States now has a vast surplus. As of June 12, the government and industry had delivered more than 140 million N95 masks, 600 million surgical and procedural masks, 20 million eye and face shields, 265 million gowns and coveralls, and 14 billion gloves.

The Centers for Disease Control bungled test kits after the initial outbreak—part of the reason why Trump bypassed the organization. Again, the country now has a vast stockpile of testing kits and is performing roughly 500,000 examinations a day, with more than 20 million done in total.

But the media and the Democrats have shifted away from the positive steps the Trump administration made during the pandemic to the issue of racism. It’s the whack-a-mole strategy they’ve played from Russiagate to Racegate.

COVID-19 Wealth Transfer

Posted: June 13, 2020 by ng36b in Uncomfortable Truths
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COVID-19 is exacerbating many things, but one that is flying under the radar right now is a pending, unprecedented wealth transfer from old to young. The transfer of wealth from the Boomer generation to Millenials was already being discussed in 2014 due to its shear size (somewhere between 30 and 60 trillion dollars). While some people predicted it wouldn’t be as large because of rising health care and long-term care costs, those will be cut short by the disease.

This is important for a few reasons. First, COVID-19 wiped out any senior care center it touched. These centers all too often make their money by sucking the benefits from their members, to the point they have no wealth left to transfer to heirs. Now that many of the members have died, there will be a transfer of funds surviving family members, likely to spur a bit of the economy. Because COVID-19 hit the older population much more so than younger, it’s not a surprise that the economy can bounce back faster than expected.

Given the poor performance of senior centers, I would expect many people to be hesitant to trust them with aging boomer parents in the future. Once the full truth comes out, especially about how places like Michigan and New York knowingly put COVID-positive seniors back in homes, it will become the scandal of 2020. I’d expect to see a rise in senior centers that boast a better cleaning and isolation regiment, as well as people adding mother-in-law suites to provide for parents in the future.

Lastly, COVID-19 is likely to spur quick changes on Medicare. Medicare as a program has never been setup for long-term success. Taxing the working people to pay for seniors only works if you have a large, growing population and a relatively short lifespan. Given that people live longer and have less children, those economic don’t work when health care costs rise. But COVID-19 exposed medical treatment costs as perhaps more driven by red tape than anything else. Regardless, the lack of taxpayer funds due to unemployment will likely bring in some much needed change to the system.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Government officials are picking and choosing which individuals get to exercise which rights

Posted: June 11, 2020 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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I’m living in midsized town called Webster Massachusetts.  Because of the Coronavirus lockdowns the Memorial Day parade was canceled in my town along with fireworks on July 4th.  The local high school canceled graduation.  Businesses were forced to close.  There are three Catholic Churches here, along with a Baptist Church, and several other denominations; all of which have not held services for months. While all of this was not going on a Black Lives Matter protest was held. 

I have no problem with the Black Lives Matter protest being held in my town even though I have many issues with the sponsoring organization, mainly their connection with many attacks on police officers, their anti police officer message, and their Marxist message.  I completely support their right to hold protests and to spread their message.  It bothers me greatly that all of us locals are denied so many of our most fundamental rights while an outside group was able to exercise their rights.

This type of injustice is going on all across this great nation.  Yes free speech and freedom to assemble are such fundamental rights that they are listed in the First Amendment.  The right of all of us to attend which ever church service we wish to as often as we wish is also listed in the First Amendment. 

The right of all of us to do as we please, to come and go as we please, to work where we please, and to run what type of business we want to are all covered under liberty. This most fundamental right is being denied to tens of millions across this nation.   Some individuals are allowed to come and go because they are deemed essential workers, and some businesses are allowed to open because they are classified as essential.  Far too often these classifications do not make sense.  They are made for political reasons.  Governments should never pick and choose winners and losers.  Liberty is a fundamental right that can only be denied to individuals who have been found guilty in a court of law

The Black Lives protests are welcomed by local and state officials.  Conservative groups in many states held protests against the unjust lockdowns.   Were these anti lockdown protests welcomed as warmly?  Were any conservative protests denied or harassed?  I haven’t heard of any instances of conservative permits being denied or harassment but I’m guessing they happened.  If you are aware of any please let me know in the comments.

These lockdowns are unjust along with the business closings.  It is wall past time to restore the liberty and rights of everyone in the United States by opening every state back fully.

The creation of media bias

Posted: June 9, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

While taking an online course created by the University of Texas and the Knight Foundation, I hoped to learn more about reporting on the Covid-19 crisis.

Instead, I got an informative look at the creation and propagation of media bias throughout the world.

Had the class involved only a few students, the result would have been a small group of individuals subjected to an anti-Trump bias. Instead, nearly 10,000 people from countries throughout the world received examples of how NOT to report.

The instructor, science reporter Maryn McKenna, barely cloaked her bias throughout the four-week class.

In the first week, the class got the bias of writer Sonia Shah.

“[W]hat really surprised me about the way this pandemic is unfolding is the huge political failure in the United States. I think that really was not expected. You know, I think we’ve all been kind of confused about the U.S. response and, you know, the political moment we’re in where we have all of these right-wing populist leaders around the world,” she opined.

That would run counter to recent studies that found the U.S. lockdown may have saved 60 million Americans from contracting the disease.

In the second week, the class read one of the instructor’s articles in The New Republic, an avowedly leftist publication, entitled “The Plague Years: How the rise of right-wing nationalism is jeopardizing the world’s health.” 

“Nationalism, xenophobia, the new right-wing populism in Europe and the United States, are raising our risk,” said Ronald Klain, who was the White House Ebola response coordinator for President Barack Obama, told her. 

The article is a classic example of confirmation bias, where she sought out sources to confirm her beliefs.

In the third week, the instructor blamed President Trump and Fox News for saying hydroxychloroquine might help people to recover from Covid-19. Her criticism was based on a study that has been subsequently found to have had numerous errors. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/health/coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine.html

McKenna also highlighted an obvious piece of propaganda from a student from China:

“China’s President Xi Jinping…pledged to make any potential vaccine developed by China a ‘global public good’ once it was put into use. This move would be China’s contribution to achieving accessibility and affordability of a vaccine in developing countries as well.”

Moreover, the instructor makes a particular point to forecast that it would take 10 to 15 years to discover a vaccine.

Then the coup de grace in the final week. In rapid succession, the instructor interviewed the head of the CDC under Obama, who criticized the current U.S. policies. But, ahem, she failed to ask him about Obama’s and his failures during the H1N1 pandemic.

Then, you can’t make this stuff up, came fiction writer Annalee Newitz.

“We’re seeing our political institutions become more unstable. We’re seeing environmental problems exacerbated as regulations over environmental waste. We’re seeing more problems around climate change because environmental regulations are being relaxed during these difficult times. … We’re facing starvation in California, even though we have plenty of food, but lots of people are now undernourished and malnourished and aren’t able to eat,” Newitz told the instructor, who didn’t question this nonsense.

Famine?

I repeatedly tried to contact the instructor, who apparently ignored my emails.

One of the organizers, University of Texas professor Rosental Alves, responded to my complaints.  

Alves said: “This is the only complaint I have received from anyone among the nearly 9,000 people registered in this MOOC. It’s also the first time I’ve received a political bias complaint since I started our distance learning program for journalists 17 years ago. I will look into it.” 

I’ve heard nothing more.

I declined my certificate of completion of the class on reporting about Covid-19. Instead, I might ask for a certificate in watching media bias unfold to nearly 10,000 people, who, unlike me, may have limited backgrounds in assessing how the media can suborn the truth and propagate the false. 

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