Fear is killing us. Time to end it.

[Legion]

Now would be a good time for President Trump to bite the bullet and liberate the American economy from this stranglehold and let people get back to work.

It is also time for the drastic restructuring of America’s mainstream media and the entrenched political class it serves without regard for facts, for it is overwhelmingly leftist, anti-American, untruthful and alarmist.


https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/economic_shutdown_its_time_to_end_it.html

[Legion]

What do you campaign on when your candidate is a doddering old man on the cusp of clinically diagnosable dementia and who has as history of corruption, self-dealing, and toadying to Communist China?

Well, if you are the DEMOCRAT party, you campaign on the theme that President Trump deliberately killed Americans during this Wuhan virus pandemic scare.

James Carville led off the attack.





Just to be clear, what Carville is talking about is a decision by the US Supreme Court that a federal judge in Wisconsin could not arbitrarily change the ‘time, place, and manner’ of the state primary election.

The insinuation that anyone was actually put in danger of death by the decision is either blatant dishonesty or panic-driven drivel. If it occurred in a vacuum, then one would think little of it.

But it didn’t.

This issue here was that a panic-stricken governor of a state with a total of 6,000 cases of Wuhan virus and a total of 226 (at this writing) Wuhan-related deaths wanted to hoard some 500 ventilators. When the federal government stepped in to ensure a more equitable distribution, the Denver Post went full bloody-shirt: "How many ventilators would we be getting if we had a Republican governor and a second Republican senator? Would that indicate we had more Republican lives in our state worth saving for Trump and resources would start flowing"?

This lays out the kind of campaign the DEMOCRATS have to wage in order to have a prayer of winning the White House in November.

They must attack the voting system and they must continue to wreck the economy.

The only way they can do that is by continuing to drive the Wuhan virus panic and claim that any let-up of the bizarre restrictions on American mobility and commerce now in place are example of the willingness of President Trump to "kill Americans to stay in power".

Of course, this is another ill-disguised attempt to persuade all 50 states to ban in-person voting this November.



https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2020/04/10/815720/

[Legion]

A president has a lot of challenging decisions to make.

But there are few as important as the decision that President Trump now has to make: when to open up the economy again and begin scaling back some guidelines?

• Too soon, it might cost lives.
• Too late, it will cost lives and even more jobs, with a destroyed economy.

President Trump indicated he was feeling the weight of that decision.

“I will have to make a decision, and I only hope to God it is the right decision. But I would say without question, it is the biggest decision I’ll have ever had to make,” he said during his regular coronavirus briefing on Friday. He said he would soon name the advisers, including governors, mayors, economists, and doctors, who would help plot a course to recovery as part of what he called an “opening-up-our-country council.”


https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/04/11/trump-to-name-advisers-on-tuesday-to-help-chart-course-to-reopen-country/

[Legion]

President Trump will announce a council of business and medical leaders to help him with the “biggest decision I’ve ever had to make” on when to reopen America for business.

Public health experts pointed to hopeful signs that the spread of the coronavirus could be slowing and the final death toll lower than once projected. This had fueled reports that Trump is set to shift focus and appoint an economic taskforce.

“This is beyond economic,” he told reporters.

President Trump added: “I want to get it open as soon as possible. This country was meant to be open and vibrant and great. The facts are going to determine what I do, but we do want to get the country open". He acknowledged: “I don’t know that I’ve had a bigger decision".

The current “stop the spread” federal guidelines finish on 30 April.



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/10/trump-press-briefing-council-taskforce-reopen-us

[Legion]

[moon]

Now would be a good time for President Trump to bite the bullet and liberate the American economy from this stranglehold and let people get back to work.

Another keyboard general sending the troops to their death.

[Legion]

Haw, haw, ........ haw.

[Legion]

According to an estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were approximately 45 million cases of the flu in the United States during the 2017-2018 influenza season, resulting in an estimated 810,000 flu-associated hospitalizations and an estimated 61,000 flu-associated deaths.

It also killed more children than in any non-pandemic year on record, 172. The 2017 vaccine for the flu was only ten percent effective.

In the 2016-17 season, there were an estimated 29 million flu cases in the United States; and estimated 497,000 flu-related hospitalizations and 38,000 flu-related deaths. (For comparison, 36,560 people died in car accidents in 2018 in the United States.)

The CDC reports that “between 291,000 and 646,000 people worldwide die from seasonal influenza-related respiratory illnesses each year.”

According to left-wing NBC News figures the death toll is more than 114,000, and the number of confirmed cases nears 1.9 million, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Isn’t it strange that this season there are hardly any flu deaths? They are all magically called COVID-19. Pneumonia has been wiped off the Cause of Death list.

Considering the numbers from the 2017-2018 influenza season the COVID-19 numbers are nowhere close at this point.

And I don’t remember any lockdown or school closures during the 2017-2018 flu season, which, BTW, lasted 19 weeks.







https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.html

[The Anonymous]

[Legion]

Currently our economy is being decimated, not by a disease but by a series of governmental shutdown orders that have closed most businesses and resulted in millions of layoffs.

These orders were based not on experience, but on models that we now know were wrong.

It is critical to remember that the shutdown strategy was never intended to stop people from getting sick.

When we all emerge from hibernation, the virus will still be there, and some of us (more or less the same number) will still get sick.

The idea was to “flatten the curve” by prolonging the epidemic, so that hospital resources would not be overwhelmed at any one time.

We now know that projections of hospital and ICU use were wildly inaccurate. That means that the “flatten the curve” rationale was bullshit.

Models pointed to large outbreaks of the virus washing over the country this week. Right now hospitals are managing just fine almost everywhere—well below capacity, in fact.

Even in Blue York Shitty, the estimates of the beds and ventilators needed has been grossly wide of the mark.

They’d estimated a need for 140,000 beds by last Friday, but only needed 8,500.

Looking around the country, it doesn’t appear that any hospitals are using the emergency facilities they urgently threw up around the country.

Even Louisiana got through its surge without being overwhelmed.

Washington DC is supposedly 8 days past the peak as gauged by the ridiculous IHME model, and nothing of note has happened.

The expected epidemics haven’t materialized, indicating that there are big problems with the models, which made baseless assumptions about either the disease’s case fatality rate or its contagiousness (or both).

Note that social distancing should only now just be affecting hospital capacity – given that there’s a 3-week lag between when social distancing can begin to bring down new infections that can then progress to hospitalization severity.

Most places only locked down at the end of March, so the lack of hospital utilization right now isn’t due to social distancing.












https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/04/some-rational-perspectives-on-covid-19.php

[Legion]

In the first employment report after social distancing measures had taken hold in many US states, the Department of Labor announced that 3.3 million people had filed jobless claims.

A week later, in the first week in April, an additional 6.6 million claims came in—almost unfathomable compared with the previous record of 695,000, which was set in 1982.

As bad as those numbers are, though, they greatly understate the crisis, since they don’t take into account many part-time, self-*employed, and gig workers who are also losing their livelihoods.

Some predict that US GDP will drop as much as 30% to 50% by summer.

President Trump warned against letting “the cure be worse than the problem itself” and talked about getting the country back to business.

Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist and former member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, warned that “an optimistic projection” for the cost of closing nonessential businesses until July was almost $10,000 per American household. He told the failing Blue York Crimes that shutting down economic activity to slow the virus would be more damaging than doing nothing at all.

One of the biggest fears is that those least able to withstand the downturn will be hit hardest—low-wage service workers in restaurants and hotels, and the growing number of people in the gig economy. "For the last two decades, service workers have become an increasingly large part of the labor force as many of the mid-level office and manufacturing jobs previously open to people without college degrees have dried up", David Autor, a labor economist at MIT.

It’s people in these service jobs, already low paid and often with few health and other benefits, who will struggle the most. “On a good day they are vulnerable, and on a bad day they are even more vulnerable,” Autor says. “And this is a very bad day.”

Cities like Las Vegas and Orlando, “places with gargantuan leisure hospitality economies,” will be badly affected, says Mark Muro, coauthor of a report from the Brookings Institution analyzing the numbers. But any region with a large service economy is vulnerable.

The people losing these low-wage service jobs were already experiencing skyrocketing mortality rates from what economists have begun calling “deaths of despair,” caused by alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.

For every day that normal economic activity is shut down, a huge number of Americans won’t be earning an income. Many already live paycheck to paycheck. Many may in fact succumb to diseases of despair. Families will fall apart under the stress. Hard-hit cities will feel abandoned.

In a piece called “National Coronavirus Response: A roadmap to reopening,” former FDA director Scott Gottlieb also argued for ramping up the economy and then isolating those infected rather shutting in the entire population.




https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/08/998785/stop-covid-or-save-the-economy-we-can-do-both/

[Doc Dutch]

Another keyboard general sending the troops to their death.

The good news is that, as much as Trump wants to do it, he knows the consequences of a sharp spike in US deaths --- President Biden in January 2021.

[Earl]

The deaths and economic loss around the world is the responsibility of the China virus that the Chinese failed to contain.

[Doc Dutch]

The deaths and economic loss around the world is the responsibility of the China virus that the Chinese failed to contain.

What is your solution?

FWIW, it's like being caught in a cross-fire between gang-bangers; sure, it's their fault for shooting, but if you have a bullet in you, what is your priority: blaming them or saving your own ass?

Trump can blame China all he wants, but he knows that won't be the main factor driving the election.

[Micawber]

It's killing Trump, time to put him out of his misery.