The Real Coronavirus Chronology Shows Trump Was On Top Of It While Biden Was Mocking The Danger

No media or Nancy Pelosi false narratives or phony Joe Biden campaign ad can change the truth about the real chronology of the coronavirus.

Cleta Mitchell reporting for The Federalist

The leftist national media incessantly reports that the spread of the coronavirus is, well, President Trump’s fault. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, always good for the most incendiary and least helpful comments in any difficult situation, said on Sunday, “the president — his denial at the beginning was deadly.”

Then in Joe Biden’s latest effort to be relevant, his campaign has released an ad attacking President Trump for not being sufficiently responsive to the threats of the coronavirus from the “beginning.”

Here is a key fact: In the beginning, China lied. People died. Although the first case of the coronavirus was reported in Wuhan, China in early December 2019, the Chinese authorities continued through January 2020 to downplay the potential for the disease to spread.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reinforced China’s falsehoods, saying on Jan. 14 that “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China.” This was five to six weeks after the opposite was confirmed to be the case in Wuhan.

Biden’s supposed chronicle of Trump administration failures derides the president’s statement on Jan. 22, saying, “We have it totally under control, it is one person, coming in from China…” What was actually happening in the United States on Jan. 22? It was one person coming in from China. And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had yet to confirm the human-to-human spread of the virus.

So, what did we know? When did we know it?

On Jan. 17, the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that American citizens returning from travel-restricted countries were being rerouted to specific airports, where they would be screened and isolated. CDC on that day also stated that, “based on current information, the risk from 2019-nCoV to the American public is currently deemed to be low.”

Japan, S. Korea, Thailand reported their first cases of coronavirus on Jan. 20.

On Jan. 21, the first case of coronavirus in the United States was reported, of a man who had traveled from Wuhan, China. That is the case President Trump referred to the next day

The Biden ad skips from Jan. 22 to Feb. 27, ignoring crucial developments during that time period.

Jan. 24: The CDC confirmed the second U.S. case of coronavirus, adding again that “based on what we know right now, the immediate risk to America remains low.”

Jan. 28: The WHO published another statement about the coronavirus, with a photograph and headline saying: “WHO, China leaders discuss next steps in battle against coronavirus outbreak.” Pictured are WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping. According to the release, “The WHO delegation highly appreciated the actions China has implemented in response to the outbreak, its speed in identifying the virus and openness to sharing information with WHO and other countries.”

Think about that: On Jan. 28, the WHO praised China for its “speed and openness” in dealing with the virus. The same day, President Trump expanded U.S. airport screenings to identify travelers showing symptoms and instituted mandatory quarantines.

On Jan. 30, the WHO declared a global health emergency of international concern.

On Jan. 30, the CDC confirmed publicly for the first time the person-to-person spread of Wuhan virus and applauded WHO’s decision. That day, the president created the White House Coronavirus Task Force to coordinate efforts regarding this new disease.

The next day, Jan. 31, the president declared coronavirus a U.S. public health emergency and issued the ban on travel between the United States and China. On that same day, the Senate voted on the production of additional documents in the impeachment trial of President Trump. Campaigning in Iowa that day, Biden criticized President Trump’s China travel ban, saying during an Iowa campaign event, “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia.”

Feb. 4: The White House directed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to step up coronavirus diagnostic testing procedures.

Feb. 5: The CDC issued a public statement saying, “While we continue to believe the immediate risk of 2019nCoV exposure to the general public is low, CDC is undertaking measures to help keep that risk low.”

Feb. 18: The CDC reaffirmed that the “risk to Americans from coronavirus is low.”

Feb. 20: The administration raised travel warnings to their highest level for Japan and South Korea.

It was not until Feb. 26 that the first case of suspected local transmission in the United States was announced by the CDC. President Trump that day named Vice President Pence to lead the Coronavirus Task Force. The next day, Feb. 27, Pence named Dr. Deborah Birx to serve as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator.

On Feb. 29, the first death from the coronavirus was recorded in the United States. On that date, President Trump halted travel with Iran.

On March 11, the WHO declared coronavirus a worldwide pandemic. The next day, on March 12, President Trump imposed travel restrictions on Europe and elsewhere. Biden criticized that decision also.

Then, on March 13, President Trump declared a national emergency.

If Pelosi believes the president should have done something at the beginning, when exactly does she think was the ‘beginning’? Was it during the impeachment proceedings that Pelosi instigated? Should Pelosi bear some responsibility for what she perceives as the president’s failure to focus on the coronavirus back in January?

The single most important step taken by President Trump was his closing of U.S. travel with China, which happened on Jan. 31, something the president reminds us at every briefing.

He’s right, but what he doesn’t say is he made that decision at a time the CDC was assuring us the risk to America was low, the WHO was covering for China, Democrats were trying to impeach the president, and Biden was attacking the decision as xenophobic.

It is impossible to overestimate the number of American lives saved by that momentous decision by President Trump on January 31. And no media or Pelosi false narratives or phony Biden campaign ad can change the truth about the real chronology of the coronavirus.

CNN Publishes

The Babylon Bee 🐝

CNN Publishes
Real News Story For April Fools' Day April 1st, 2019

ATLANTA, GA—Fooling thousands of readers in a prank that the cable news organization said was "just for fun," CNN published a real news story for April Fools' Day this year.

The story simply contained a list of facts, with no embellishment, editorializing, or invented details. The story also didn't cite shaky "anonymous sources" and only quoted firsthand witnesses to the event. It was completely factual without any errors whatsoever.

Baffled CNN fans immediately knew something was up.

"I was reading this story, and I was like, 'Wait, what is this?'" said one man in New York who relies on CNN for his fake news every morning. "They really got me good. Then I looked up at the calendar and I realized I'd been duped. A classic gag!"

"Those little rascals!" he added, shaking his head and laughing goodnaturedly. "As long as they return to their regularly scheduled fake news tomorrow, we're good. We're good."

Oregon veteran, 95, beats coronavirus: ‘I survived Guam, I can get through this bulls–t’

A 95-year-old World War II vet living in Oregon has beaten COVID-19, according to a report.
Bill Kelly, of McMinnville, finished his recovery Monday at the home he shares with four relatives after being diagnosed with the coronavirus on March 17, The Oregonian reports.
“Grandpa Bill’s pretty hardcore,” his granddaughter, Rose Ayers-Etherington, 41, told the newspaper.
Kelly, who lived through the Great Depression and was among the first US soldiers to set foot in the South Pacific during WWII, started feeling unwell with a low-grade fever on March 15, the newspaper reports.

Due to several underlying medical conditions, including kidney disease, a congenital heart condition and high blood pressure, Kelly went to a hospital and was kept overnight, Ayers-Etherington said.
Kelly returned home the following day after his condition improved, but his granddaughter’s husband — who works as a medical evacuation pilot — had recently transported patients who were potentially exposed to COVID-19.
That led doctors to test Kelly for the virus out of an abundance of caution despite his mild symptoms, his granddaughter said.
 Ayers-Etherington’s husband, Isaac, is the only other person who has been tested for COVID-19 in the home they share with her grandfather, her mother, husband, and their two children — ages 5 and 11 months. Her husband’s test came back negative, the newspaper reports.

No one in the home developed any symptoms as Kelly spent the first week in isolation in a bedroom. Relatives disinfected any surface he touched and did their best to steer entirely clear of him when he left the bedroom while wearing a mask, relatives said.
“But it was still nerve-wracking,” Ayers-Etherington said. “We were just drinking hot tea all the time. Taking zinc. Washing our hands constantly.”
 Isaac Etherington, 42, said they treated Kelly “like a leper” during his first seven days of isolation.
But Kelly — who is known to be “tough as nails,” according to his granddaughter — bunkered down with plenty of classic movies and copious amounts of water and rest.
“We’re going just fine here,” Kelly told the newspaper. “We’re toughing it out. I’ve got two great-grandsons to keep me busy. I’ve been very fortunate.”
In a Facebook post earlier this month, Ayers-Etherington revealed her grandfather’s diagnosis but added he was “kicking it in the butt” despite a litany of pre-existing medical conditions.
“In his words, ‘I survived the foxholes of Guam, I can get through this [coronavirus] bull—-,'” she wrote. “He has strong mental resolve. He has seen tough times and knows how to get through them.”
Ayers-Etherington said she was in no way downplaying the “seriousness” of COVID-19.
“It’s real and it’s here and it needs to be respected,” she wrote.
“Just hoping grandpa Bill’s story will encourage you and put a smile on your face. Also, the rest of us are healthy.”

https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/oregon-veteran-95-beats-coronavirus-i-survived-guam-i-can-get-through-this-bulls-t/

Hockey Sticks, Changing Goal Posts, and Hysteria

There’s still time to find a balance between public health and 

the economy: Trump must find it before April 30.

Julie Kelly for American Greatness

Last year, Glacier National Park in Montana began removing signs that warned visitors the park’s gigantic glaciers would start melting away by 2020 due to global warming. Park officials altered other climate change flair such as brochures and displays to postpone the threat to sometime in “future generations.”

Like so many claims about the catastrophic consequences of anthropogenic global warming, predictions about disappearing glaciers were quickly memory-holed. And, as usual, the experts behind the flawed science that misled millions of people to believe their actions would cause the destruction of one of nature’s most awesome sights didn’t apologize. No scientist or government official even had the guts to stand up and say, “Oops, my bad.”

Quite to the contrary—prophets of nonexistent doom are often cheered as heroes no matter how many times they’ve been wrong.

Take Dr. Michael Mann, for example. The Pennsylvania State University author of the infamous “hockey stick” graph is still considered a god among the international climate change set; his graph launched the modern-day climate movement even though his work has been widely refuted by scientists and hacked emails showed how he and his fellow researchers manipulated data to “prove” their theory.

Now, we have the latest version of the hockey stick graph and it is related to COVID-19. The alarming visual indicates a huge spike in estimated deaths and hospitalizations in the United States from coronavirus infections over the next few weeks. Last week, a researcher at the University of Washington released a study that appears to serve as the scientific justification to extend the CDCs social distancing guidelines until at least April 30.

Christopher Murray, director of the university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, warns that daily fatalities will climb from zero on February 24 to a high of 2,214 on April 15. (Much like Mann’s hockey stick graph that claimed to show warming temperatures, data from the period before the spike cannot be accurate since the first case of coronavirus in the U.S. was reported in mid-January. If it’s as contagious and as lethal as we’ve been told, hundreds if not thousands of people would already have died from the disease in the first two months of the year unbeknownst to healthcare providers.)

By May 2, based on Murray’s model, more than 60,000 Americans will be dead; by the beginning of August, nearly 84,000 of our fellow countrymen will have succumbed to the disease.

The need for hospital beds, intensive care units, and ventilators will far outpace supply, according to Murray. By this Friday, U.S. hospitals will need more than 135,000 beds, nearly 26,000 ICUs and more than 20,000 ventilators to accommodate COVID-19 patients.

And this disaster scenario will occur even with the draconian measures enacted at the federal, state and local level to slow the disease’s death march.

“The estimated excess demand on hospital systems is predicated on the enactment of social distancing measures in all states that have not done so already within the next week and maintenance of these measures throughout the epidemic, emphasizing the importance of implementing, enforcing, and maintaining these measures to mitigate hospital system overload and prevent deaths,” wrote Murray.

From Common Sense to House Arrest

The White House, apparently, is listening. After first disputing an outlandish study produced by the UK’s Imperial College that projected a few million Americans would die from COVID-19 this year, Dr. Deborah Birx presented Murray’s report to the president over the weekend. Birx referred to Murray’s model in a Rose Garden briefing on Sunday.

“It’s anywhere, in the model, between 80,000 and 160,000, maybe potentially 200,000 succumbing to this,” Birx cautioned. “That’s with mitigation.” She insisted that the current measures would need to continue “with a level of intensity.”

During a confusing press briefing Tuesday evening, Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, presented the models to the American public. The president solemnly prepared the country for a “very tough two weeks” that could witness the death of 100,000 to 200,000 Americans. But neither Birx nor Fauci could convincingly explain the data supporting the ominous charts—while Birx seemed married to the ultimate death toll, Fauci tap-danced around the study’s projections, wish-casting about better outcomes and riffing about how new information would improve the model’s efficacy.

So in a matter of weeks, relying on sketchy and incomplete data, government experts have pivoted from offering common-sense steps to fight a virus to declaring government-imposed house arrest. “Flattening the curve” is old news; preventing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans requires tyrannical diktats that a month ago freedom-loving Americans could scarcely imagine.

COVID-19 wasn’t transmitted person-to-person before it was transmitted person-to-person. Masks weren’t necessary; now, they might be part of a required uniform should anyone dare to leave the house. It’s like a bad flu; now it’s way worse than the flu.

Governors are one-upping each other in an egregious power play that defies science, common sense, and decency in a despicable trampling of constitutional rights. The appeal to authority, a common tactic to quash any dissent in the climate change debate, is in full effect as laypeople are warned not to question the advice of credentialed medical and health professionals.

The consequences of this collective overreach—and that’s putting it mildly—have been mind-boggling. The world’s most vibrant economy is at a standstill. Millions of hourly employees are being laid off or let go as unemployment claims skyrocket to historic levels with the worst yet to come. Small business owners fear bankruptcy. The stock market is tanking while politicians on both sides of the aisle, along with the president, concoct bailout plans to fix the economic disaster they helped create.

School children and college students are done with public classes for at least five months. Job offers to college graduates have disappeared. Weddings, graduation ceremonies, and funerals are prohibited. Places of worship are shuttered; religious leaders who defy a government guideline—not a law on the books—to serve their flock are being arrested. Daily joys like a stroll on the beach or dinner at a restaurant or a game of pickup basketball or a round of golf have been stripped from our lives with shockingly little protest. And an army of Karens are policing public spaces to tattle on Facebook if anyone refuses to submit.

Sick people suffer alone; seniors are cut off from family and friends. Lonely children are further isolated as schools close down and their teachers and friends are out of reach. Panic and fear are weaponized to dictate individual behavior.

Echoes of Climate Alarmism

It all has an eerie ring to those of us who’ve covered the climate movement. (Barack Obama connected climate and coronavirus in a tweet on Tuesday: “We’ve seen all too terribly the consequences of those who denied warnings of a pandemic. We can’t afford any more consequences of climate denial.”)

And just as happened with the climate change agenda, farfetched models with incomplete, untested data drive public policy decisions. Anyone who disputes the experts or challenges the assumptions must hate the environment or the children or the future. (In the case of COVID-19, you must hate grandma.) Anyone who laments the destruction of the economy is a heartless, greedy money-grubber. “Profits over people!” the detractors are taunted. The goalposts keep moving, doomsday is extended, but harsher and harsher actions are nonetheless demanded from above.

So, what if, as Trump accurately said just a week ago, the cure is worse than the disease? What if Murray’s models are woefully off by a factor of five or even 10 but it’s too late to salvage jobs or small businesses? His data is already way off: As of March 31, Murray predicted the U.S. would need 98,000 hospital beds for COVID-19 patients but only 22,000 were hospitalized that day.

Will the White House, much like Glacier National Park, just change the message while the agitators escape any accountability?

The president is trying to do the right thing but this is a breaking point. If Trump ruins the economy and torches his solid economic achievements based on a handful of flawed models and the evolving opinions of unsure advisors, it will be hard to walk it back. If these figures don’t move to support Murray’s modeling—and fast—Trump needs to reconsider his plan.

There’s still time to find a balance between public health and the economy: Trump must find it before April 30.

How Techies Ignored the ...

by Andrea O'Sullivan for ReasonMagazine

How Techies Ignored the Bureaucrats 

and 

Helped the COVID-19 Response

They were mocked for sounding the alarm. Now they're the ones providing the solutions.

3.31.2020

(Anyaivanova / Dreamstime.com) 

Thank God for the tech scene. When our established institutions fail in the face of existential threats, at least we have the quick thinking and resourcefulness of America's computer jockeys to help us muddle through.

Silicon Valley was among the first to sound the alarm about a strange new virus emanating from China. While public health agencies and their media water-bearers were downplaying the growing COVID-19 threat by fluposting and pooh-poohing facemasks, onlookers in tech noted a geometric trend and started preparing accordingly.

People acted like they were crazy. One infamous Recode article chortled at the tech industry's early and prudent substitution of virus-transmitting handshakes for other less-germy forms of greeting. There go the nutty techies, trying to stem the tide of pestilence! If only more people had followed those California weirdos' leads. Of course, outlets that had been spreading COVID-19 denialism and shaming preppers in February are now demanding indefinite shutdowns without skipping a beat.

Meanwhile, because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had botched the SARS-CoV-2 test rollout, it was officially recommending that only symptomatic patients with known exposure get tested, even though this would miss many infected people. Did government leaders come clean with a mea culpa? No, they downplayed the severity of the problem, discouraged Americans from preparing, and encouraged people to go out into crowds.

The problem with an exponential trend is that by the time it's obvious that we should change our behavior, it's already too late. This is why it was so easy to mock the early adapters to the developing pandemic scenario. But they weren't insane; they were prescient. Their whole job is to study and get ahead of emerging trends in business and technology. More people should have taken them seriously.

Either way, after being among the first to identify and communicate the problem, the tech community is now forging ahead with targeted COVID-19 responses.

There is no master plan. A global grab-bag of coders, designers, DIYers, tinkerers, makers, and bioengineers have simply decided to turn their talents to where they think they're most needed. And they're not asking for permission, either. There's no time to pretend like our many dumb regulations are worth worrying about right now. The technologically-inclined are just doing what they feel they have to do, whether Uncle Sam likes it or not—although in this case, the feds seem relieved that someone is taking up the slack.

Examples abound. Consider the debacle with the CDC-created tests. Infectious disease experts in the early hotspot of Seattle grew impatient with federal dithering. Rather than waiting for the CDC to get its diagnostic act together, a group of doctors with the Seattle Flu Study developed and started running their own test without CDC approval. Their act of civil disobedience resulted in a major, but tragic, breakthrough in public health surveillance: they learned through their testing that the virus had already been circulating in Seattle for several weeks. Might they have learned earlier and been able to prepare if not for such public

 incompetence?

The CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) eventually started relaxing testing regulations as the human cost of these blunders became clearer. There's still room for improvement. Startups like Everylywell, Carbon Health, and Nurx developed tests that people can take at home so they don't have to risk getting infected at a test site. Awesome! But the FDA said "nein!" and made these startups stop their tests and destroy their samples. Well, maybe there's a DIY solution: researchers are crowdsourcing an accessible open source test that more people can use on their own.

The maker scene has also been quick to hack together low cost alternatives to badly needed medical supplies. Volunteers in six continents enlist in a public Google doc extolling their talents, locations, and how they'd like to help. A couple in New York is printing face shields for testing clinics. Italian hospitals received cheap new ventilator valves that would otherwise cost $11,000. Teams of tinkerers brainstorm together on low cost ventilator schematics so that more healthcare workers can assemble functioning equipment with whatever supplies they've got around them.

Many of these endeavors are on shaky regulatory grounds. Surgical masks, for example, are usually subject to FDA regulation. The modern day Betsey Rosses weaving CAD files for personal protective equipment can follow regulatory best practices, but they're probably not asking permission first.

Even regulators seem to realize that their actions can cause more harm than good. Interestingly, except in a few cases, the government has largely decided to turn a blind eye or loosen up regulations. Now is not the time to nitpick about, like, how many masks are allowed to be sterilized each day.

The official response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been profoundly disappointing, if not entirely unexpected. But a nation with such a wealth of technical talent should be able to coordinate an early and effective public-private response to existential threats. The U.S. failure to prepare for COVID-19 reveals a deep lack of state capacity.

Imagine how much more effective this outpouring of American inventiveness would have been with a competent state partner from the start. After heeding early analyses of a troubling trend, planners could quickly look to identify what we need and how to get it. Sources of regulatory friction could be pruned at the outset. And public health experts could provide counsel on the trade-offs between experimentation and safety, providing some ground rules for the rapid innovation that would come.

It's too late for that now. Thankfully, after unfortunate weeks of dithering, the U.S. establishment has finally started leveraging our strategic corporate and technological resources to better address the COVID-19 pandemic. Some official organs are still spreading misinformation about the effectiveness of mass mask-wearing, but it's a start.

This kind of primal national crisis is precisely when official institutions should shine. It is revealing that our odds of success have hinged mostly on an ad hoc collective of virushackers being able to ignore or override the institutions founded explicitly for this kind of crisis. For now, they work together to tamp down an invisible enemy. But once that is vanquished, many will have lost even more faith in the establishment. When such an appealing alternative presents itself, why bother with the outdated, overpriced, and ineffective model?

The Coronavirus Is Making (State) Borders Great Again

The media don’t seem to understand federalism—that governors, not the president, are the proper authorities to manage quarantines and disaster response.

John Daniel Davidson writing for The Federalist

As the coronavirus pandemic worsens, governors across the country are understandably ratcheting up quarantine orders. On Sunday, Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott expanded a two-week quarantine requirement on out-of-state travelers from Louisiana, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and Miami. Previously, the order covered anyone flying into Texas from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and New Orleans. Abbott ordered state troopers to enforce the order on motorists driving into the state from Louisiana with the possibility of a $1,000 fine and up to six months in jail for those who don’t comply.

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo announced Friday the state police will stop anyone with New York license plates and ordering them to self-quarantine for two weeks, which New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo denounced. On Sunday, Raimondo revised the order—by expanding it to include motorists from all states.

The governors of Florida, Delaware, and South Carolina have all issued some version of a quarantine requirement on out-of-state travelers. Alaska and Hawaii have had such orders in place for more than a week. Expect more states to follow suit in the coming days.

What to make of all this? The conventional wisdom in Washington is that this is all about President Trump and his failure of leadership, with governors now acting like mini-Trumps, eschewing the federal government, going their own way, and sowing chaos.

This way of thinking is best exemplified by Politico Playbook’s headline for Monday: “Trump’s nationalism has gone domestic.” The general idea seems to be that governors exercising police powers in an emergency is somehow the equivalent of Trump brushing off the United Nations, that by making decisions without waiting for the federal government’s say-so, governors are “helping Trump create an alternative narrative of culpability: that the ‘open borders’ crowd in the blue states let the virus in, while he tried to keep it out.”

Like McKay Coppins’ recent article in The Atlantic about the supposed “social distancing culture war,” this is an awkward and lazy attempt to project partisan politics onto the vicissitudes of pandemic response in a way that makes Trump and his supporters look bad.

It’s also exactly the wrong way to think about what’s happening in state capitols right now. The relationship between the federal government and the states isn’t at all analogous to the relationship between the U.N. and its member states—and to suggest so is to misunderstand completely the nature and structure of our constitutional system.

For all the sickness and death the coronavirus is causing, and for all the economic ruin our political leaders have sown in their response to it, this crisis is a powerful reminder that state borders matter, and that a federal republic like ours divides sovereignty between federal and state governments for a reason.

Simply put, there is no way the federal government can make decisions about who should be subject to a two-week quarantine, how to enforce such an order, or for how long to keep it in place. Such decisions properly fall under the purview of state governors, whose police powers in an emergency far exceed those of the president—hard as that might be for Washington-based journalists to fathom.

Indeed, the media seems to think the country revolves around Capitol Hill. That’s why the mainstream media overreacted a couple weeks back when Trump told governors to secure their own medical supplies to fight the coronavirus. It wasn’t because Trump didn’t want to help but because, as he said at the time, it would be faster for governors to act on their own.

The Media Need Remedial Lessons in Federalism

All of this seems to be more than the blue-check media can handle. The spectacle of governors issuing quarantine orders for travelers from certain parts of the country prompted Vox to publish a meandering yet hysterical piece last week on how it would tear the country apart and dismantle the post-New Deal order—as if that would be a bad thing.

In Vox’s view, federalism itself is a dangerous anachronism. The federal government should be in charge of the national safety net, including pandemic response, with governors acting merely as regional administrators for the federal bureaucracy in Washington.

But governors are not regional administrators, and states are not merely administrative departments ruled by Washington. What the media interprets as “chaos” among the states is our federalist system working as it should.

Our federalist system isn’t just an accident of history, it was intentional choice by our Founders. In a republic, most things that fall under the purview of government can and should be done at the most local level possible, in part because local officials know best what their communities need but also—and more importantly—because local residents can better hold local officials accountable for their actions.

This is as true during a pandemic as it is in normal times, maybe more so. If we’ve learned anything about the coronavirus so far, it’s that the disease spreads much more quickly in densely populated areas that rely on mass transit. That’s one reason New York City has a much higher rate of infection than, say, Los Angeles.

Naturally, dense megacities are going to need different responses to the virus than rural areas—and more resources from the federal government. The arrival of the USNS Comfort, a U.S. Navy hospital ship, to New York Harbor on Monday is a good example of that.

By the same token, less densely populated areas of country will want to protect themselves from contagion emanating from large cities, hence the quarantine requirements you see governors imposing on travelers.

A federalist system of course doesn’t mean that governors are always going to make the right decision. On Monday, for example, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam promulgated a stay-at-home order until June 10. No one really knows why he would do such a thing, since there’s no way to know, right now, whether such an order will make sense months from now.

But one thing is certain. The people of Virginia, many of whom will suffer economic ruin as a result of Northam’s order, will have a chance to let the governor know what they think of his leadership if he ever runs for political office again.

That’s as it should be. Some state leaders will rise to the challenge during this pandemic and provide sound leadership, some won’t. The desire for them all to be relegated to administrators carrying out orders from Washington is deeply misguided and, in a time of pandemic, dangerous.

This Is NOT a Recession- This Is...

by Hunter Hastings for Mises

This Is Not a Recession—

This Is a Government-

Imposed Shutdown of the Private Sector

Economists and Wall Street analysts are using the word recession to describe the looming plunge in output in the US economy. We’ll just make the point early that economists, exhibiting the typical emptiness of their failed science, can’t even agree on the definition of recession.

Undeterred by lacking a definition, the geniuses at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere on Wall Street are unrestrained in predicting the imminent arrival of the condition they can’t describe.

As is always the case, people understand the condition that economists can’t even describe in theory. They understand the lost jobs and wages, the reduction in activity at the businesses where they work. They understand fewer shifts, fewer hours, a smaller paycheck, or layoffs or furloughs, unemployment, and the need to ask the government for handouts to get by and to feed their families, when they’d rather be helping themselves. They understand uncertainty and disruption. They feel the fear of not knowing their own economic future. Recessions, like all economics, are subjectively experienced in the human mind, in individuals, in families, in communities.

We have an understanding of why recessions occur cyclically (although economists can’t agree, of course). Business growth, the opposite of recession, is driven by savings and investment in new capacity, new and more productive machines, new software, new roads, bigger ships, and all the capital that people put to work to produce more goods and services. Investment is a calculated bet on time: if a business spends this money now on new production that will occur in the future, they calculate a positive return on that investment. Recessions occur when governments get in the way and distort the calculation. They issue too much credit at too low a price, and the business calculus misfires. The low cost of credit entered into the investment calculation gives a false positive. When the investment is actually undertaken, it fails to deliver the expected profit. Projects are shut down. Jobs are lost.

We have seen this cycle many times. The failed investment calculus may apply to dot-com companies (2000), home mortgages (2008), or one or more of many other sectors. Typically, the malinvestment is quickly shaken out and economic growth resumes.

But wait. The coming recession in 2020, so coldly and unfeelingly computed in the cloud by Goldman Sachs, is not like this. 

We are about to enter a production slowdown—a collapse, really—not because some businesses miscalculated their investments, but because government intervened drastically and without warning to shut down all businesses. 

How did they do that? By taking away the freedoms of the people whose energy and application drive economic growth. Government told them to stay home. Don’t go to work. Don’t go to bars and restaurants and cinemas. Don’t take your kids to school. Don’t build cars or airplanes or computers or houses. Don’t provide hospitality at hotels. Don’t perform the tasks that constitute a growing economy, where everyone who works serves everyone who consumes and everybody thrives.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the monumental error we made in allowing government to do this—to withdraw our economic freedoms with such damaging consequences. Let us try to understand the thinking and the motivations behind this tsunami of government hubris.

First, it is based on the worst error of government: central planning. Despite all repeated evidence to the contrary, and despite their endless failures, governments believe they can predict and change the direction of the future based on mathematical modeling of the human condition. The models are computed using the government experts’ own assumptions, thereby achieving a self-referential circularity. They’re right, because they’re right.

In the current case, the government experts input a wide range of unproven assumptions about coronavirus incidence and infection rates and the exchange of infection between individuals. They arrive at predictions of infection for the population. There are wildly fluctuating model outcomes and predictions, so they pick the worst case.

The second step is the giant leap from the theoretical output of the models to the fantasy that government action can be taken against real people in order to change the inputs to the model. Reinfection rates too high? Order people to change their behavior to get no closer to each other than six feet (another assumption from some model somewhere). Tell them to stay home and abandon all economic activity. Lock down the state. Lock down the country.

Why are they doing this? Because they can. They have not actually given a reason. To save lives? Whose? Why now and not in previous flu seasons, which are much more deadly? To reduce pressure on the healthcare sector? Find other ways to do it. Which one of us has been asked whether he wants to sacrifice his livelihood in return for a theoretically reduced probability of a COVID-19 infection? They have the models, and they have the political power to order us around. Control and power over individuals is the only justification.

Worse, this escalation in the power of government, which has reached the point where they can order us not to leave our homes and enforce the order at the point of a gun, will prove irreversible. We won’t be able to unremember what they did to us. It will be indelibly recorded in history. Governments will point to this instance to justify future, worse instances.

We must start to resist.

Reprinted from LewRockwell.com.

Hunter Hastings is a member of the Mises Institute, Business Consultant, and co-chair of the 

Rescue California Educational Foundation. He is also host of the Economics for Entrepreneurs podcast.

Health Care Workers Need Masks and...

by Zach Weissmueller for ReasonMagazine

Health Care Workers Need Masks 

(and the Rest of Us Need Them, Too)

DIY manufacturers scramble to reduce shortages, 

as public health officials send mixed messages 

about the efficacy of broader use.

3.31.2020

"Everyone at this point is kind of on their own, making ready for being able to reuse―especially masks―but also things like gowns and plastic sheets to be able to keep our barriers when we're doing difficult procedures with patients," says Case Newsom, an emergency medicine doctor based in Denver. 

Doctors around the country are running dangerously low on N95 masks, which protocol says they should wear and then dispose of every time they walk out of an infected patient's room. So they're reusing the same masks repeatedly and learning to sew their own surgical masks.

"My colleagues on the East Coast…are facing significant shortages," says Newsom. "So they're busy at work creating UV decontamination ovens on their own because those are expensive and difficult to come by, but easy enough to produce." 

The federal government estimates that medical professionals will need 3.5 billion masks if the worst-case projections come true. The U.S. currently had about 1 percent of that number on hand at the beginning of March.

Charities and major corporations have donated masks to hospitals, and manufacturers like Honeywell and 3M have stepped up production.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has asked President Donald Trump to use the Defense Production Act to force companies to start making masks.

And yet official channels likely won't come close to meeting the needs of health care workers, so some technologists are taking matters into their own hands. But will government officials adhere to existing regulations and slow down these efforts? And if mask production increased to serve the entire population, could it hasten the end of the extreme social distancing crippling our economy?

Matt Chisholm is a spokesperson for the Open PPE Project, which is developing a protocol for the production of N95 masks, which experts believe provide fairly reliable protection against COVID-19.

They're planning to open their own factory in Michigan and to develop a manufacturing blueprint that anyone can use.

"Some of the early challenges we've seen are [from] the regulatory state," says Chisholm. 

Masks require Food and Drug Administration approval for sale to medical facilities, though the agency indicated an increased willingness to approve emergency use authorizations in late March.

The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), regulates filtration mask factories. According to Chisholm, an official with the agency told his team that it will take 45 to 90 days to get approval for a new mask production facility.

"That obviously poses some challenges for the current crisis," says Chisholm. "You could theoretically end up with 45 to 90 days' worth of supplies that are in a warehouse instead of out on the frontline saving lives. So we see that as a problem." 

Chisholm suggests accrediting universities that have the testing capabilities to certify the effectiveness of the masks.

Meanwhile, 3D-printing enthusiasts are sidestepping regulatory approval altogether by teaching people how to make their own masks.

The DIY mask approach has taken off in the Czech Republic in particular, where surgical mask sewing efforts are being coordinated over the internet by people providing instructions and tips, as well as mapping facilities and areas where masks are most needed.

"The CDC is stating that we're to be using bandanas if it comes down to it," says Newsom. "I understand that it's not a perfect solution. But, that being said, anything, I think, would be better than the sort of last resort of [healthcare workers] having to [make] their own." 

And some say that ubiquitous mask-wearing could make it safer to end extreme social distancing.

But public health agencies have issued conflicting information about their efficacy.

On February 29, the Surgeon General urged the public to stop buying masks, claiming they're ineffective at stopping the transmission of COVID-19 and could even increase one's likelihood of catching it. The CDC and World Health Organization have recommended mask-wearing only for those displaying symptoms or for those who are in direct contact with infected individuals.

But critics say this is inaccurate and that public health officials may have purposely spread misinformation to discourage people from running out and buying masks, making it even harder for doctors, nurses, and first responders to obtain them.

Mask-wearing is widespread in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which seem to have better controlled COVID-19 without prolonged lockdowns. Hong Kong's public health officials have called for mask-wearing on public transit and in the workplace.

There's some evidence that masks help stop the spread of the flu.

And though strong evidence that face masks prevent respiratory infections is still "scarce" due to a lack of rigorous study, according to a March 2020 paper published in The Lancet, there is a chance that "community transmission might be reduced if everyone…wear[s] face masks."

"We should prioritize the health care workers," says Oxford researcher Elaine Feng, who co-authored the paper. "But that should not be the rationale for telling the public that face masks [are] not effective."

Feng says that with increasing evidence that people showing no symptoms of COVID-19 can transmit the virus, wider adoption of masks in public spaces would be prudent.

"In Asian countries, it's more likely to be a civic duty for people to wear a face mask," says Feng. "We think that a universal face masks policy during a pandemic could help reduce the stigmatization of people [who choose] to wear face masks, if the supply permits."

The Open PPE Project's priority is producing N95 masks for medical workers at the moment.

"I'm probably not in a place to speculate on the role masks will play beyond medical personnel [right now]," says Chisholm. "We weren't prepared for this, and we need to get back to good and make sure we can arm our frontline personnel with the equipment they need. We also have to be ready for what any pandemic in the future could good bring and manufacturing readiness could really help that."

And Newsom asks that anyone with extra N95 masks or other essential medical gear donate them to medical professionals to help adjust to this new reality.

"It's the nature of our work that we are touching patients that have respiratory problems and we really would benefit from those masks in our hands," says Newsom. "I'm literally witnessing colleagues of mine learning how to hunker down and do protective measures. I mean, but I didn't learn any of that in my residency…The fact that this is all happening [at the] point of care when the need arises goes to show the level of unpreparedness."