Saint Donald and the COVID-19 Dragon

 

I’m going to try to give some useful information along with my political rants today. For starters, here is the John Hopkins website for COVID-19, otherwise known by many other names such as the Chinese Virus  (John Hopkins link). Now I know that may make some of our Asian citizens feel angry, mad, or embarrassed. As far as angry or mad-too bad. As far as embarrassed, then possibly they will try twice as hard as any other citizen to help control and eliminate this thing, kind of like the German, Italian, and Japanese citizens did during WW2. For those of Chinese descent who feel nothing from the use of the term, very good. You shouldn’t feel anything because the term refers to the place where the thing started, not you, just as the Spanish Flu doesn’t reflect ill on Spanish people. Also of course this term, Chinese Virus, does refer to the current leaders in China, who dragged their feet before they let the world know what it was in for. So Communist China gave the world the virus. Communist USSR gave us Chernobyl. Gee, Bernie, we love your hero regimes. And since the pandemic is under control in China, the commies might want to send a hospital ship to Genoa since the pandemic is far from being abated in Italy. Just as a jester of good faith, right?

A couple of interesting facts from the John Hopkins website:

Look at the number of infections, number of deaths, and number of recovered in the following ratio roughly: 460,000:20,000:120,000.  Okay great, of those who are no longer infected, that we know of, 1 in 6 die, which is pretty darn high. In Italy the ratio death to recovery is almost 1:1. Very bad.

So much for not starting out politically. One note, last I looked the death toll worldwide, well over 50% came from the EU. So much for that wonderful socialized medicine they have. Well, you really can’t completely blame the medical system for it, rather a large part of the blame lays at the feet of political correctness, i.e. too much worry about offending people, Chinese tourists, who indeed need to be a little offended. Maybe they’ll go home a scream at their party leaders, who need to be screamed at. 

Developing Medical Treatments for the Virus:

If you listen to the news, those who cut and pasted the statements of President Trump and Dr. Fauci, leaving out a few key words and sentences to make their point, you would think Trump got his information about the potential cures from some drunken quack recluse in some hick village. Fact of the matter is Trump was right and Fauci was right, for different reasons.

Let’s start with Fauci, although he said that the quinine cure is not proven-yes, and only anecdotal-technically no, unless you call a medical university run test on a small number of patients as anecdotal.  There is an anecdotal circumstance, article here, where one man claims, and he appears to be right, that the quinine cure saved his life. One man= anecdotal. But it is also true that University of South Queensland and a group in France did studies, howbeit on a limited number of patients, and they believe it is a cure. Now, it obviously must be tested on a larger number of patients to make their claim stand up statistically, but their study is more than anecdotal. Now Dr. Savage has referred to another study, limited in nature, where quinine treatment is no more successful than regular treatments. Okay this study had a control group, but the others, run by scientists must have as well. Clearly more work needs to be done, but it seems also clear that none of these should be dismissed out of hand.

The story on the French study is here (link article) and involved 20 patients. You can run statistics using only 20 experiments, but the results are very iffy. Indeed, they need to run the procedure on probably no less than 100 patients in order to give a statistically reliable result. Of course, more is  merrier, and statistically firmer. 1000 patients would give results you could definitely hang your hat on.

Trump is right because there is data out there, although thin, and because it is good to give us light at the end of the tunnel. Fauci is right because the data is thin, and it needs to be beefed up before we jump at it.

Herd Immunity:

Trump says he would like us back at work by Easter. I don’t think he’ll get that, but he might get something a few weeks later. Biden and Freddo Como had a fit that Trump would sacrifice the elderly to save the economy. Freddo, who isn’t too bright, said how dare we sacrifice the Greatest Generation just to save the economy. Well, one thing, the economy is necessary to keep the medicine, medical innovation, care takers, food, supplies, etc. etc. coming in- so at some point you have to stop burning the candle at both ends. And a second thing, Freddo, I hate to tell you- the Greatest Generation is already dead. My dad, entered WW 2 at age 21. He died 4.5 years ago at age 93. I’m sure there are a hand full of others who have outlived him, but they are just a few hundred.  People my age are, who are the children of the Greatest Generation are in the high risk group for the virus, and Freddo we don’t have to be sacrificed just because everyone goes back to work- we just have to be isolated until the rest of the herd builds immunity.

Folks aren’t you glad that Democrats, Socialist Progressives, and outright straight forward commies aren’t in charge? They can’t think their way through a simple logical progression let alone something this complex.

Okay Herd Immunity, what is it? It was explained to me by a vet. Say there is a microorganism that causes major problems to cattle. We’ll call it cow pox, and the pox has a known infection rate, then it can be calculated or learned through experience how fast the pox will move through a herd of cattle, and it is possible to then determine how many cows need to be vaccinated such that the pox will not be able to find a sufficient number of hosts to spread, and lacking sufficient number of hosts, it dies. Say 60% of the herd needs to be vaccinated. Then by vaccinating 60% of the cows, you can be assured that if a cow gets the pox, then the pox will die rather than spread throughout the herd.

How does this apply to people since we don’t have a vaccine for the Chinese Virus yet? Well, the idea is to hide all of the high risk people from the virus, and let then let the virus rage through the rest of the herd. As it rages through, most people who get it will suffer minor illness and will also become immune to it. Eventually the virus will die out from lack of victims, then the high risk people can rejoin the herd. If the virus ever gets started again, it will die out before it spreads because the majority of people are immune. Now, some people who are not high risk will unexpectedly need to be hospitalized during the raging of the virus, but these will be few enough that the hospitals will not be overrun, and most of those people will also survive.

It may come down to herd immunity, whether we like it or not and despite the best attempts to limit and contain the virus through social distancing, which itself is intended to cause the virus spread to slow or stop because of lack of available hosts.    

The Battle between Trump and Faucci:

The media likes to make it out that there is a battle between these two. On being pestered about this Fauci seemed extremely irritated and said, “Every time I told the president that something needed to be done for scientific reasons, he did what I said. Every time I told the president to not do something for scientific reasons, he took my advice on that, too. So shut up and quit spreading counterproductive rumors.”

Oops, you mean the dilemma Biden- Man of Science; Trump-Crazy Voodoo Doctor, doesn’t stand up? I bet you haven’t heard that Fauci news clip played over and over, have you? 

Politics of the Virus or Any Other National Emergency:

A true, and I dare say, successful bureaucrat is a charismatic bullshitter. Their nature is to talk big and eloquently but to never ever do anything, because doing something has the onus of potential failure, and failure can be a career killer.  And a career politician is a career bureaucrat. They would much rather have their glamorous bill that excites the public fail, then to pass. That’s the best outcome: They can tell their loyal groupies that they tried and they never have to face the consequences of having their stupid bill cause social disruption.

Hence, they are timid creatures, much more comfortable being out of power and criticizing those in power. “Yelling from the cheap seats, “as ABC (America’s Bartending Chick) would say. By the way, haven’t heard much from her lately.

Trump probably has made some mistakes in this process, but would we expect Biden, Pelosi, or Bernie to have done better? Start with Pelosi, whose wildest dreams have come true as the American economy and people die from this thing. She may yet see us capitulate to a Parliamentary form of governance, where she is the top dog.

Would she be better at running this? Let’s look at her track record. What has come out of the House over the last two years while she was in charge? Yeah, you’re right, she’s engaged in typical bureaucratic behavior, that is smoke and mirrors, i.e. she’s done nothing that could result in an initiative that she could be judged by; that is she has done nothing that could backfire into her face and go wrong, or that the public could judge to be bad, wrong, stupid, and a mistake. Instead she has launched endless inquiries into Trump. It’s flash and dash that neither helped the American people, nor hurt the American people. She’s engaged in low risk bureaucratic bullshit, but in truth she and the Democratic Party have hurt the American people by: One, not attempting to engage in any program that would be helpful. In retrospect, over her 40 plus years in Congress has she ever suggested that we should bring our drug and medical supply production home from China so that we could pump out medical necessities in an emergency- like a pandemic for instance? It doesn’t look like any of these career politicians spent a weekend or even a night, considering the ramifications to our medical system when pressured by a national medical emergency, yet they are quick to blame Trump for not remedying this situation instantly. They have been there for 30, 40, sometimes 50 years with the ability to recognize our vulnerability and yet they offered no solution-they never even recognized the problem until it slapped them in the face.

And they have the hubris to blame Trump for not fixing it in two weeks, or for having not recognized it in his three years in office while they harangued him like a pack of wolves.
Yes, I would say that Pelosi’s bureaucratic jive has indeed hurt America, both over the last three years that she has spend distracting and disabling the executive branch, and over that last 40 years while she, in her brilliance did nothing to increase the robustness of our health care system. Indeed, she probably did several things to harm it if one were to analyze her activities.

No, I don’t think Pelosi, running this country as head of Parliament, is a solution that will get us out of this one, and make us, like South Korea, more prepared for the next one.

Would Nutty Bernie have done better?  Nutty Bernie who has split his life between being a welfare recipient and a prevaricating politician? The guy that keeps praising Cuba? The guy that loved Russia when it was commie, but hates it now? That guy would know how to handle things, right? I think the questions answer themselves. Image though, where Trump called together the captains of industry and asked them to step up and find ways to produce the supplies that our doctors and nurses need, Bernie would roll up his sleeves and nationalize the industries, turn the factories over to the proletariat and cause such turmoil that all production would have stopped, but no big deal, he could, like his heroes in the Soviet Union did about Chernobyl, just claim it never happened, or like his friends in China, hide it for months, letting the world unknowingly absorb their virus vectors. You know the Chinese, whom Bernie said raised so many people out of poverty. Yeah, they raised their people out of poverty by collaborating with American capitalists and delivering cheap labor to US manufacturing processes. In other words, capitalism not communism raised the Chinese people out of poverty, but Bernie never let facts influence his ideology. 

Speaking of private industry working with government to satisfy a need, what would Joe Biden do? His announcement: “I have appointed my son, Hunter Biden, to lead a team of scientists to solve this problem.” He likes to reiterate how he would work with scientists, as if he just discovered they exist. Does he think Dr. Fauci is a voodoo doctor and that Trump’s team is made of shamans?

Well the democrats would like to get a bunch of science ignorant people to believe that somehow Joe will bring science to the problem. Yes, and even about 90% of college graduates are science ignorant.

For me, given the choice of a career bureaucrat or an industrialist, I’ll pick the industrialist to get things done, and I’ll pick the bureaucrat to whine and cast aspersions every step of the way, and then if the industrialist is successful in the end, the bureaucrat will find a way to claim the victory.

In my opinion, what has Trump done right and what has he done wrong?

1. Early on, he stopped all travel from China-that was right.  Brilliant Cluck Schumer called Trump a xenophobe for that.  Typical career bureaucratic aspersion.
2. Cut air travel from Europe, when the EU, with its socialist medicine, became (and still is) the hardest hit region-that was right. Democrats complain that people were mislead into believing that they needed to come home right away. Still think that was wrong, Democrats?
3. Enlisted the help of the private sector-that was right. Bernie, Biden and Pelosi think he should have taken control of private sectors facilities. Do you really want them in power? Now these industries are on track to deliver millions of masks, face shields, respirators and thousands of ventilators. Bernie and ABC’s socialist would be wearing yellow bibs and carrying signs in the streets.
4. Asked old and other high risk folks to shelter in place-again right.
5. Asked that the nation to shelter in place- maybe right, and maybe very wrong. We’ll see. Many governors, mainly Democrats have essentially declared martial law and have ordered the shutdown of all non-essential functions- but have they thought it out? Or are they even capable of thinking out what is essential and what is non-essential? Have they made arrangements for everyone to get essentials, and particularly the elderly to get essentials delivered so that they do not have to go out and expose themselves to risks? All of this shelter in place business is intended to modulate flow of critical patients so to NOT overwhelm hospital capacity. So far, shelter in place looks like the Wild West: no toilet paper, no stock items, spotty and unreliable delivery forcing the elderly to mingle with the contagious in public places-i.e. it’s a cluster fuck. If the government is going to pull this bullshit and shut down the economy, then they need to achieve the end they intend to achieve. They need to get their best people on it and identify the high risk people and meet their needs, otherwise all this suffering by the entire economy is a fart in the wind.
6. Testing-failure, indeed a huge failure, but it lies at Fauci’s doorstep. I’m sure Trump didn’t tell him how to handle the testing, but rather it was the other way around. So what are we talking about?  I was told by a doctor friend that the reason South Korea and other places have been able to test more people and get the results faster than the US is because they adopted the WHO, World Health Organization, process. We opted for a more complex test that provides complex results that identify a spectrum of diseases. Sometimes you have to decide whether it is time to do something cute or whether to march straight forward. With this testing thing, it was, and still is, time to march straight ahead like General Grant and meet the enemy head on, i.e. test for the virus fast and furious. Testing is key to understanding the scope of the problem, and indeed crafting the appropriate response.  Lately, I believe they have recognized the failure of the early testing method and have changed course- NOW! That is what I’m talking about, thinking on your feet!  
7. Economic stimulus- maybe. This is a mixed bag of Democrats trying herd the dead, dying, and economically damaged into their concentration camps. I see it the way Ben Shapiro sees it: The government has shutdown the economy. The government needs to make everyone whole, without confiscating they businesses or enslaving them.

We have a long way to go, and it isn’t too late for the governments, both state and federal, to adjust and mitigate some of their early failures. Some pluses to note: Worldwide there are a multiple of vaccines that are already being tested. Due to modern methodologies there is a good chance that some of these will be available in record time.  And we have those anecdotal medicinal cures. I’m sure they are being studied further, and maybe one will indeed prove to be the silver bullet.