COVID POLICE STATE -- PART II

              SR's previous post outlined our initial resistance  to the patently disproportionate and unreasoned government response to the COVID virus.  With so many atrocities and misjudgments littering the landscape with economic and social disaster, it is impractical to encapsulate all objections and rebuttals to this governmental, political, and media malfeasance in a single blog-post.  Consequently, we will attempt to address this multiplicity of COVID issues seriatim, highlighting those items that seem most critical as we descend into what we hope is a temporary totalitarian nightmare.

                                                       

           The Heroes of World War II Weren't into Social Distancing

                Dr. Fauci's Concession that COVID is like Seasonal Flu.  COVID skeptics like SR have heretofore regarded the President's COVID adviser and resident expert Dr. Anthony Fauci as rather alarmist and pessimistic, at least in comparison to the President's sound emphasis that "the cure may be worse than the disease."  Now, however, Dr. Fauci has apparently joined those of us who have stressed that the coronavirus is similar in severity to the seasonal flu.  In an article published in the respected New England Journal of Medicine on March 26, Dr. Fauci and two reputable co-authors state as follows (emphasis added): 

                    "[T]he currently reported case fatality rate [for COVID-19] is approximately 2%.  In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of symptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively."

Fauci et al, New England Journal of Medicine, March 26, 2020.

                This strengthens the view that the most extreme government measures employed against COVID-19 are based upon hysteria rather than reason.  Since the seasonal flu has never generated anything resembling the coercive measures presently employed against COVID-19, the government's wildly extreme reaction to the latter appears to be patently disproportionate.

                ZERO COVID deaths in Japan on March 26, 2020 (despite rejecting extreme measures).  Japan was originally identified as a prime candidate for very severe COVID-19 impact, owing in part to the arrival of large numbers of infected passengers from the heavily infected cruise ship, Diamond Princess.  Notwithstanding this concern, Japan has not heretofore resorted to the type of extreme coercive restraints on freedom that have been followed in the U.S. and elsewhere (Japan did close its schools, but is preparing to re-open them now).  Despite its more temperate approach to quarantine and social distancing mandates, Japan has experienced only a modest number of COVID cases and, in several recent days, apparently zero deaths.  According to the most recently posted data, Japan has experienced 1,693 total COVID cases, and 52 total deaths (compared to, e.g., about 17,000 cases and 1028 deaths in the smaller-populated UK).  Japan has managed this relatively successful containment even though it is among the most densely populated nations in the world, and population density is a primary factor for COVID contagion and mortality.  Japan's experience indicates that the harsh police state measures adapted in many U.S. states and cities are not necessary for a reasonable COVID containment policy.

                Cuomo and the Fraudulent Death Card.  The COVID-Control extremists flatly reject the application of cost-benefit analysis to the coercive, totalitarian measures they impose (like closing schools and businesses and imposing obscene "shelter in place" dictates) to purportedly control the spread of the coronavirus.  They are fully prepared to ruin the nation's economy and quality of life if the ruination will prevent the death of a single 80-year-old dotard from COVID-19 (even though he is apt to die from something else next year).  Lest any reader consider this insensitive, SR is himself 75-years old, and fully prepared to waive any claim to the government's solicitous "protection." 

                New York's obnoxious hereditary governor, Andrew Cuomo, expressed that irrational viewpoint as follows in his brainless dismissal of any economic objections to oppressive COVID coercion (from Reason, March 24, 2020):

                "We're not going to put a dollar figure on human life," said Cuomo (D), who last Friday announced that "we're all in quarantine now" while ordering all "nonessential" businesses to close. The goal, he explained, is to "save lives, period, whatever it costs."  In other words, Cuomo declares that cost/benefit analysis is inapplicable to the adoption of any policy that purports to minimize loss of life.

                Continuing his maudlin, melodramatic demagogy, Cuomo intoned:  "My mother is not expendable, and your mother is not expendable, and our brothers and sisters are not expendable," Cuomo said when asked about "conservatives" who have noted the heavy burdens imposed by sweeping restrictions on movement, business operations, and work. "And we're not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable." 

                With rhetorical violins droning in the background, Cuomo portrayed rational cost considerations in the following melodramatic vein:  "We'll just sacrifice old people; they're old people anyway. And the old get left behind….We're going to move on, and if you can't keep up, well, you just fall by the wayside of life." He described the consideration of the economic and social costs of extreme COVID containment measures  as "some modern, Darwinian theory of natural selection." 

                Cuomo is, plainly put, a mawkish, melodramatic jackass.  We are lucky he was nowhere near the controls when Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower made the decisions which won World War II, but at the known cost of untold legions of lives.  Cuomo would have cancelled D-Day, in order to "save lives, period, whatever it costs."

                As one of the "old people" who Cuomo purported to protect, my response to him is:  "Shove it, you irrational jackass, and speak for yourself.  Elderly people with any brains and any guts do not expect the younger generation to forfeit their claim to economic, social, educational, and recreational opportunities merely to reduce our risk of catching, and possibly succumbing to, the COVID virus." 

              There are many times when some unspecified loss of life, or more accurately the risk of such, is an inescapable cost of achieving the greater good, and this is one of them.  In the long run, millions of lives will be ruined and even lost due to the obvious adverse consequences of COVID coercion and quarantine.  Further, millions of youngsters have now forfeited the most momentous experiences of their young lives due to the shortsighted stupidity of their elders in cancelling the concluding months of an academic year – high school or college.

                The shutdown of businesses, commerce, travel, athletics, and ordinary economic activity in the name of COVID Containment has already reduced to ruin an economy that was booming on all fronts and obliterated the investments of millions of ordinary Americans.  Equally, the shutting of schools and the attendant confinement of millions of healthy, energetic youngsters to their homes is a social, recreational, educational, and morale disaster of immeasurable dimensions. 

                Already, literally millions of American youngsters have been deprived of that once in a lifetime opportunity to compete as a senior in the basketball, lacrosse, track, swimming, or baseball championships or playoffs for which they have spent years in preparation. They will never recover this golden opportunity of their youth.  And all because of the government's, the media's, and the politicians' hysterical overreaction to a so-called virus epidemic that, with each day, resembles ever more closely the seasonal flu that is noticed by no one but the vaccination makers.

                The Media and the Left Root for the Virus and Resist a Cure.  The media and political left's furious resistance to the prospect of a readily available cure for COVID-19 removes any doubt that they view this crisis as their supreme opportunity to defeat President Trump and seize power in a leftist coup.

                The President has properly called attention to the prospect that chloroquine, or hydroxychloroquine, may prove an effective cure to COVID-19.  Since the President's duly qualified statements,  physicians and scientists in China, Norway, Australia, France, Italy and elsewhere have confirmed tests and treatments demonstrating the efficacy of chloroquine (especially in combination with the well-known anti-cold Z-pac).  

                 With each day, the evidence that chloroquine is a good cure for COVID-19 becomes more persuasive.  And the media and political left's adamant and steadfast rejection of this stunningly positive development conclusively confirms what SR and others have recognized all along – the political left, the democrats, and their media allies resolutely reject the prospect that the COVID crisis will be reduced, contained, or resolved  before the presidential election in November.

                The media and political left are actively rooting against the success of the chloroquine cure because they want the COVID crisis to persist, undermine the economy, and assure the defeat of President Trump next November.  On this issue in particular, they have conclusively proven themselves to be the enemies of the people.