Jts5665

UNEXPECTEDLY: L.A. Bureaucrats Shut Down Restaurants for Selling Groceries Without a Permit. “You cannot just decide you want to sell groceries,” said Barbara Ferrer, the director of L.A. County Public Health.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): You say “groceries,” I say groundbreaking “raw, un-handled food restaurant.”

The post DOJ Audit Finds Even More Problems With FBI Surveillance appeared first on The Bongino Report.

For years, a significant critique (mostly from the Left) of health care costs has been that over-investment by private hospitals in premium facilities (e.g. ICU beds, MRI scanners, etc) is part of the reason health care costs have been rising so rapidly.  This is why the response to a study like this from several years ago was not "wow, how fortunate the US has so many ICU beds" but instead "wow, this is what is wrong with US healthcare."  This is why per capital healthcare cost is in the next column, implying a link between more beds and higher costs.  And, this is why the "life expectancy at birth" is included in the chart.  The conclusion was supposed to be "see, the US spends all this money on ICU beds and gets nothing for it."  (Obviously this conclusion would be absurdly narrow-minded even before COVID-19, as US life expectancy is lower than that of many other countries due to lifestyle choices and other factors -- a better comparison would be US life expectancy at 65, where US looks much better).

As a result, many states and municipal authorities have Certificate of Need (CON) processes that require hospitals and other health care providers to get government permission before adding certain types of capacity/infrastructure.  Many of these government agencies actually delegate these decisions to a board populated with representatives of the current local incumbent hospitals, meaning one must get permission from one's competitors before adding capacity (permission unlikely to be given).

This sort of regulation has had acute consequences in the age of COVID-19.  John Phelan has an example from Minnesota.

With the extra time, Minnesota will work desperately to expand its ICU capacity. Local stadiums and hotels will be converted to temporary hospitals. “The attempt here is to strike a proper balance of making sure our economy can function; we protect the most vulnerable; [and] we slow the [infection] rate to buy us time and build out our capacity to deal with this,” Gov. Walz said....

Until 1984, Minnesota operated what were called Certificate of Need (CON) laws. These require government permission before a facility can expand, offer a new service, or purchase certain pieces of equipment. While Minnesota has not operated CON laws since 1984, along with two other states—Arizona and Wisconsin—it maintains several approval processes that function like CON laws.

In 1984, Minnesota enacted a hospital construction moratorium. This prohibits the building of new hospitals as well as “any erection, building, alteration, reconstruction, modernization, improvement, extension, lease or other acquisition by or on behalf of a hospital that increases bed capacity of a hospital.” Whenever hospitals or provider groups propose an exception to the moratorium, the Minnesota Legislature requires the Department of Health to conduct a “public interest review.”

Researcher Patrick Moran explains:

In its review, the Department must consider whether the proposed facility would improve timely access to care or provide new specialized services, the financial impact of the proposed exception on existing hospitals, the impact on the ability of existing hospitals to maintain current staffing levels, the degree to which the facility would provide services to low-income patients, as well as the expressed views of all affected parties. [Emphasis added]

Moran continues:

These reviews must be completed within 90 days of the proposed project. However, the public interest review is not binding. The Minnesota Legislature ultimately decides which exceptions are allowed to go forward. Except for the fact that the Legislature makes the final determination about each project, the public interest review process for new hospitals and hospital beds closely resembles CON statutes in other states. [Emphasis added]

Indeed, it is incredible to note that, as with CON laws, the purpose of this system is to make it harder to provide hospital beds in Minnesota. Moran says: “Policymakers hoped that the moratorium would be more effective than CON in reducing the growth of hospital beds.”

They appear to have been successful. In the twenty years from 1984 through 2004, 16 exceptions were granted permitting just 94 additional licensed beds. As the chart below shows, between 1996 and 2016, the number of licensed beds in Minnesota actually fell by 921 while the population increased by 810,000. Exactly how “the Minnesota Department of Health has concluded that the moratorium is largely ineffective in restraining bed capacity”, as Moran says, is something of mystery.

The reason for this sort of thinking has in part been based on misunderstandings on the Left about markets (similar to Bernie Sanders and his too many deoderants statement).  But it is part based on the reality that the US healthcare system is stuck between two different regulatory models.

• In model 1, which we will call free market, investment by private actors increases supply.  In such a market with a lot of fixed investment, prices are driven down as competitors vie to fill excess capacity.  This is close to the model the US has in veterinary medicine and some non-insurable surgeries like eye correction and plastic surgery, but is far from the model we have in most patient care
• In model 2, which I will call the public utility model, a small number of private companies operate with heavy regulations of services and prices in exchange for a guaranteed return on assets.  Since the size of the asset base drives profits, private players have the incentive to add lots of assets while regulators look on asset additions skeptically

The US patient healthcare system is stuck between these models, which may be a worse spot than either alone.  Dominance of third party payers or even a single government payer tends to drive the system towards model 2.  But model 2 is notoriously bad at producing innovation, often results in poor capital allocation decisions, and sub-optimizes costs compared to model 1.

The post Oops? CBS Airs Footage of Italian Hospital When Reporting on NYC Hospitals appeared first on The Bongino Report.

Jack compiled this post a while back… I can’t imagine why I keep getting kicked off that stupid website.  Jack just copied over my comments, but you’ll get the idea. After the screen caps I’ll explain how to spot Common Internet Shit Gibbons in the Wild

Hey all- Jack Wylder here.
Although we all know Larry’s opinion of the Book of Faces, he nevertheless manages to make it more tolerable for all of us. It’s become more and more obvious, though, that we need to take anything worth taking with us and bring it HERE. Recently Larry was on a friend’s page and decided to have a bit of fun. As soon as I saw it, I knew it needed to be preserved for posterity. (Note: I didn’t bother capturing the posts of the mockee because no one cares what the pinata has to say…) So for your enjoyment, CorreiaTech is proud to present the latest episode of Larry Correia- the Facebook Hunter. Today’s episode: the Common Internet Shit Gibbon….

---

This is Larry again. The CISG’s posts didn’t get copied over, but the specifics and even the topic don’t really matter. I got this dude super riled up.  He about lost his mind and went on a 48 hour posting rampage. It was hilarious.  

You ever post something on social media, and then have some random stranger blunder in screaming at you for wrongthink? You might have attracted a Common Internet Shit Gibbon. You can tell when you are dealing with a Common Internet Shit Gibbon by the following clues:

– They start out by being total dicks to everyone, attack, attack, attack, but when responded to in kind, demand civility and whine about “tone”.

– They just make shit up and throw it at the wall to see what sticks.

– They are really pathetic, but oblivious to it. In fact, they think they’re brilliant, even while being super dumb. 

– When you waste you time refuting any of their bullshit, they immediately create new bullshit. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Their bullshit is endless. Your time is not. 

So when you discover that you’ve got a CISG infestation, the best bet is to just mock them until you get bored, and then block them. Or you can call THE INTERNET HUNTER. (actually, don’t  tag me. I don’t have time, and I’m probably in Facebook jail anyway) 

NEW YORK PHYSICIAN Dr. Vladimir Zelenko has now treated 699 coronavirus patients with 100% success using Hydroxychloroquine Sulfate, Zinc and Z-Pak.

IMPOSSIBLE. TRUMP ENDORSED IT AND SOME GUY DRANK FISH TANK CLEANER, SO IT CAN’T POSSIBLY WORK: Coronavirus cure: French researchers completed new additional study on 80 patients, results show a combination of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin to be effective in treating COVID-19.

In 80 in-patients receiving a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, the team found a clinical improvement in all but one 86 year-old patient who died, and one 74-year old patient still in intensive care unit. The team also found that, by administering hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin, they were able to observe an improvement in all cases, except in one patient who arrived with an advanced form, who was over the age of 86, and in whom the evolution was irreversible, according to a new paper published today in IHU Méditerranée Infection.

“For all other patients in the cohort of 80 people, the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin resulted in a clinical improvement that appeared significant when compared to the natural evolution in patients with a definite outcome, as described in the literature. In a cohort of 191 Chinese inpatients, of whom 95% received antibiotics and 21% received an association of lopinavir and ritonavir, the median duration of fever was 12 days and that of cough 19 days in survivors, with a 28% case-fatality rate (18),” the research team said.

The team went on to say: “Thus, in addition to its direct therapeutic role, this association can play a role in controlling the disease epidemic by limiting the duration of virus shedding, which can last for several weeks in the absence of specific treatment. In our Institute, which contains 75 individual rooms for treating highly contagious patients, we currently have a turnover rate of 1/3 which allows us to receive a large number of these contagious patients with early discharge. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are extremely well-known drugs which have already been prescribed to billions of people.”

“In conclusion, we confirm the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine associated with azithromycin in the treatment of COVID-19 and its potential effectiveness in the early impairment of contagiousness. Given the urgent therapeutic need to manage this disease with effective and safe drugs and given the negligible cost of both hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, we believe that other teams should urgently evaluate this therapeutic strategy both to avoid the spread of the disease and to treat patients before severe irreversible respiratory complications take hold,” the team concluded.

This sounds very promising.

CHINA HOPES YOU WON’T NOTICE THIS: Hong Kong Police Arrest Opposition Politician Under Colonial-Era Law: Police say Cheng Lai-king, a member of the Democratic Party, was arrested for ‘seditious intention’ in relation to Facebook post.

If you want to tell them you noticed, they can be reached here.

WASHINGTON POST WORRIED THAT HOMESCHOOLING DURING COVID-19 LOCKDOWN WILL ‘SET BACK A GENERATION OF CHILDREN.’

 The Post is receiving an impressive — and well deserved — Twitter ratio for their efforts:

Exit quote, as collated by Twitchy: “Two months away from public schools is going to set back a generation? One could argue that a number public schools have been setting kids back for generations.”

GOOD NEWS: Abbott Launches 5-Minute Covid-19 Test for Use Almost Anywhere. “The medical-device maker plans to supply 50,000 tests a day starting April 1, said John Frels, vice president of research and development at Abbott Diagnostics. The molecular test looks for fragments of the coronavirus genome, which can be detected in as little as five minutes when it’s present at high levels. A thorough search to definitively rule out an infection can take up to 13 minutes, he said.”

I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN HE WAS LITERALLY HITLER: Trump Is an Authoritarian Weakman. “Coronavirus would be the perfect opportunity for an autocrat. Trump isn’t taking it.”

Are you kidding me with this, John F. Harris?

The notion of Trump as authoritarian strongman, however, has been cast in an odd light in this pandemic. Would-be tyrants use crisis to consolidate power. Trump, by contrast, has been pilloried from many quarters, including many liberals, for not asserting authority and responsibility more forcefully to combat Covid-19. Rather than seizing on a genuine emergency, Trump was slow to issue an emergency declaration, moved gingerly in employing the Defense Production Act to help overburdened local health systems, and even now seems eager to emphasize that many subjects—closure of schools and businesses, obtaining sufficient ventilators—are primarily problems for state governors to deal with.

Trump’s apparent personal affinity with Putin, and other dictators, has caused foes to conclude that he has an aesthetic attraction to leaders who don’t let procedural niceties of democracy or law get in their way. But he has shown passivity in what by all rights would be a dream scenario for an authoritarian strongman.

Perhaps the way to think of Trump is as an authoritarian weakman.

I guess the argument here is that we’ve been cursed with a dictator who won’t dictate.

Our chattering class has collectively lost its damn minds.

FASTER, PLEASE: “The system, produced by Lenexa, Kansas-based Danolyte Global, is EPA registered to kill even the most resistant microbes including staphylococcus, C. diff, MRSA, listeria, legionella, and the influenza virus. . . . Danolyte Global’s system produces a non-toxic, noncorrosive, EPA-approved solution that can be applied directly to both hard and soft surfaces and applied throughout a room or area using a form of electrostatic spraying. This form of spraying allows the disinfectant solution to attach evenly to all surfaces, even hidden surfaces under tables, beds, seat-cushions, curtains, and equipment.”

CHINESE MEDIA CAUGHT ERASING HISTORY AND ‘WUHAN VIRUS’ FROM REPORTS: China’s Global Times changes ‘Wuhan pneumonia’ to ‘novel coronavirus-related pneumonia’ in January article. 

Unexpectedly.

THE ATLANTIC, NOT THE BABYLON BEE: “Stay Alive, Joe Biden; Democrats need little from the front-runner beyond his corporeal presence.” As Jim Treacher notes, the Atlantic Begs Joe Biden Not to Die.

POWERLINE TRIPLE PLAY: Tinker steps on third, fires to Evers at second who relays to Chance at first?. No, but Scott Johnson once again outs his local left-wing rag, The Minneapolis Star Tribune on behalf of a friend.

From Part 1: “Kevin Roche: My Struggle With The Star Tribune: “Kevin Roche was general counsel of UnitedHealth Group in Minneapolis, then founder and CEO of its Ingenix division. Since leaving UnitedHealth he has invested in and sat on the boards of a number of health care companies…”

The issue:

Kevin wrote a column on the current Coronavirus panic that he sought to place as an advertisement in the Star Tribune on Monday. He titled the column STOP THE ECONOMIC SUICIDE. It is consistent with much of what we have written on Power Line and is well within the scope of respectable opinion, yet Kevin has not yet succeeded in placing the ad.

The struggle to understand why his opinion ad was rejected continues in Part 2 and Part 3.

But the kicker, a Part 3 update: “Kevin advises that the Star Tribune accepted his ad this morning (“not sure why”).”

Heh. Read the email exchanges between Roche and the newspaper’s reps and you’ll know why they caved. Now, when will the Star Tribune honestly report on Ilhan Omar’s crimes?

I am not going to take a position on COVID-19 severity now, if for no other reason as I am not an expert and I think its fine not to clutter the debates about virus responses too much with non-experts (though it is wrong, as discussed below, to censor experts who have heterodox opinions).  I am convinced COVID-19 is "not just the flu" but when I see the governor of Texas being told that there will be a million deaths in Texas alone if there is not a hard quarantine there -- well, I am skeptical.  Like with global warming, the full denier and total alarmist positions are likely both wrong -- with a lot of bad data analysis in the media along the way.  I have decided to focus on the latter.  So here are a few random thoughts:

• The data we have sucks, and thus any conclusions we are drawing mostly suck too.   The data is worse than just being incomplete or bad -- if it was randomly distributed, we could live with that.  But the lack of test kits and how we have deployed the few we have means that the data is severely biased.  We are only testing people who are strongly symptomatic.  If there is a normal distribution of outcomes from this disease, we are only testing on the right side of the distribution.  We have no idea where the median is or how long the tail is to the left side of asymptomatic outcomes.  The only thing we absolutely know about the disease is its not as deadly as the media is portraying as we are missing hundreds of thousands of cases in the denominator of the mortality rates.  The media has also been terrible about reporting on risk factors of those who died.  When a bunch of people died suddenly in Seattle, one had to read down 5 paragraphs into the story to find that they were all over 70 in an old-age home.  Or when prime-of-life people die, facts such as their being type 1 diabetics -- a known severe risk factor for this virus (and one that makes it different from the flu) are left out.
• The media is constantly confusing changes in measurement technique and intensity with changes in the underlying progress of the virus itself.  Changes in case numbers have as much to do with testing patterns and availability than they do with the real spread of the disease.
• While COVID-19 is likely worse than the normal flu, our perceptions of how much worse are strongly affected by observer bias.  Frankly, if every news broadcast every night spent 15 minutes reciting flu deaths each day, we would all be hiding in our homes away from flu.  They present a healthy man in his thirties dying clearly as the tragedy it is, but the spoken or unspoken subtext is, "this is abnormal so this thing is much worse."  But it seems abnormal because we do not report on the very real stories of healthy young people who die of the flu.  My nephew who was 25 years old and totally healthy with no pre-existing conditions died of the flu last month -- and no one featured this tragedy on the national news.
• The data we are getting sucks worse because the media has decided, as one big group, that for our own good they are going to limit all facts about the virus to only the bad ones.  There is a strong sense -- you see it on Twitter both in Twitter's policies as well as Twitter group attacks -- that saying anything that might in any way reduce one's fear of the disease should be banned for our own good.  One of the more prominent examples was Medium removing an article NOT because it was proven wrong but because it took one side of a very open question and it was obviously decided it was "unsafe" to allow that side to even be aired.
  
  This strikes me as a terrible precedent and one with a very slippery slope.  We have had to fight this attitude for years in the climate debate, the bad idea that good science is unacceptable if it gets to the wrong answer.
• The media is never more dangerous than when it understands a little about a scientific topic.  After 40 years of engineering experience with feedback phenomena and exponential effects like positive feedbacks, the media suddenly thinks its the expert now and needs to lecture me that I don't really understand the power of exponential spread.  They are right that exponential disease spread with a highly transmissible virus is dangerous, but their 3rd grade math understanding is so simplistic it makes me scream.  Yes I understand the growth math, but I also understand that the same growth math says that a single bacteria colony in a month of growth should consume the whole Earth and a single chunk of plutonium that fissions indefinitely could destroy the planet.  But neither happens because there are brakes on the doubling process in later iterations.  I don't know in the case of COVID-19 if these brakes are strong or weak, but showing me mindless doubling trees is just insulting.
• Many of the computer model results I am seeing make no sense to me.  I am exhausted with people talking about computer models as if they are some fact, rather than a really opaque calculation on some researcher's set of non-transparent hypotheses.  The only way I respect a computer model is if someone presents it this way, "If X, Y, and Z are true, and you assume A and B, then this model shows what the result might be, with some large error ranges."  Add to this the fact that most modelers run a range of models based on a range of inputs that yield a range of outputs, and then the media picks the most extreme of all these outcomes and presents it as "the model results of experts" without even showing the range of other outcomes.  Arnold Kling wrote something I nodded my head to about COVID-19 and data modelling:

Once you build a model that is so complex that it can only be solved by a computer, you lose control over the way that errors in the data can propagate through the model. For me, it is important to look at data from a perspective of “How much can I trust this? What could make it misleadingly high? What could make it misleadingly low?” before you incorporate that data into a complex model with a lot of parameters.

• It will be interesting to see if anyone goes back to the models making the national news today and reconciles them to actual results.  Certainly no one ever does this in the climate debate, so I am not holding my breath.
• Frankly, I am done with the Precautionary Principle.  This does not mean I am against taking precautions, even strong and expensive precautions, against bad things.  But I am done with the notion that one should ignore the costs of these precautions and not make sensible tradeoffs.  This is even true when trading off the risk to life on one hand with reduction of economic outcomes on the other.  This is in part because reduced economic activity has real effects on human misery and has direct correlations with lifespan and well-being.

Update:  This is exactly the kind of thing I would like to see more of.  Kudos to 538.  When people rattle off ridiculous figures, it causes me to tune out.  I take this seriously.

From George Avery, PhD. MPA

Dr. Avery has a PhD in Health Services Research from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and has conducted significant research in the area of public health emergency preparedness, including five journal articles and two book chapters on the topic. He has served on several CDC advisory boards, including a panel on preparedness and emergency response centers, and consulted for the Defense Department on Medical Civic Action program doctrine. He has edited a special issue of the research journal Bioterrorism and Biodefense and served as a reviewer for the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management as well as Disaster Medicine and Public Health. He is a health services researcher with a medical analytics firm in the Midwest, and has formerly been a professor with the public health program at Purdue and worked from 1990-2000 with the Arkansas Department of Health’s Division of Public Health Laboratories.

 

We are seeing a panic reaction towards the newly emerged SARS-COVID-2 [Wuhan] epidemic, marked by panic buying of items including the much-joked about toilet paper, drastic action by political figures that often impinges on basic civil rights, and potentially devastating lasting economic impact. Much of this has been fueled by naïve and sensationalist reporting of fatality rates, such as a March 10, 2020 report by the Bloomberg news service that implies that 3.4-3.5% of infected individuals die (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/travel-companies-pull-forecasts-italy-extends-ban-virus-update ).  This has caused comparisons to the 1919 Influenza A:H1N1 pandemic and its 2.5% case fatality rate, which would qualify as a level 5 event on the CDC’s Pandemic Severity Index (PSI) and has led to a panicked overreaction worldwide. This case fatality rate, however, to a trained epidemiologist is obviously a significant overestimation of the actual fatality rate from the disease.

Ascertainment bias is a systematic error in statistical estimation of a population parameter resulting from errors in measurement - usually, in undermeasurement of a parameter. In this case, we are underestimating the actual number of cases in the population, which is the denominator in the calculation of the estimated case fatality rate. We are accurately estimating deaths, but to get the case fatality rate, we divide deaths by our estimate of the number of cases. Because that it too low due to measurement error, the estimate of the case fatality rate is too high.

For example, for a hypothetical disease if we have three deaths and observed ten cases, then the case fatality rate is 30% (3/10=0.3 or 30%). If, however, there were actually 300 cases, and only 10 were observed and reported, ascertainment bias has led us to underestimate the cases and overestimate the case fatality rate, which is actually 1% (3/300=0.01 or 1%).

In this case, in the absence of population-based screening to more actually estimate the total number of cases, we are only counting cases who are sick enough to seek health care -- almost all disease reports are made by healthcare professionals. We are missing people who have no more than a cold or who are infected but show no symptoms, individuals who almost certainly make up the overwhelming majority of actual cases. Thus, as in my hypothetical example, we are overestimating the case fatality rate for the disease.

There is, however, data available on SARS-COVID-2 [Wuhan] that allows us to get a better grasp on the actual case fatality rates for the virus.

One case is that of the cruise ship Diamond Princess, which achieved some notoriety from the well-publicized outbreak among its 3711 passengers and crew in January and February of 2006. Held aboard in constricted quarters, the population was subject to 3068 polymerase chain reaction (pcr) tests, which identified 634 individuals (17%) as infected, with over half of these infections (328 ) producing no symptoms. Seven infected passengers died, all of them over the age of 70. Adjusting the data for age, researchers at the London Institute of Tropical Medicine have estimated a fatality rate per infection (IFR) for the epidemic in China of 0.5% (95% CI: 0.2-1.2%) during the same period. This is far below the earlier estimates of 3.4% or greater that were promoting panic over the epidemic.  See Russell et al, Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for COVID-19 using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, MedRXIV 2020 at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v2.full.pdf.

South Korea has also implemented far wider population-based screening than the US, expanding their screening past suspected cases to voluntary population screening in geographies frequented by identified cases. As of March 15, as Stanford University economist Richard Epstein has noted, they performed over 235,000 tests and identified 8, 162 infections with 75 deaths (CFR=0.91%). Again, only about 10% of the deaths were in the population under the age of 60. See https://www.hoover.org/research/coronavirus-isnt-pandemic . While their population screening efforts were far better than that of the United States, this was still not a broad-based screening effort (such as was used on the Diamond Princess), being biased because while it looked at a broader population, it still was enriched with cases by looking only at a segment of the population with a higher risk.  Still, the case fatality rate is significantly below the 3.4% rate that caused the public panic.

What we are likely seeing, in my estimation, is an epidemic with a real case fatality rate between 0.2 and 0.5%, which is similar to the 1957 Asian Influenza A:H2N2 or 1968 Hong Kong Influenza A:H3N2 pandemics, which were also essentially virgin field respiratory epidemics. These pandemics rate, not as PSI5 events, but as PSI2 events on the CDC scale. They are certainly atypical and more severe than a PSI1 event (such as a routine seasonal flu epidemic), but not a shattering event like the 1919 influenza A:H1N1 pandemic. These earlier pandemics essentially tripled the number of deaths due to influenza experienced annually, and were posed little long-term economic or other damage to the population despite being handled without the extreme measures that are currently being adopted or proposed by political figures. Like those pandemic events, SARS-COVID-2 [Wuhan] has its most significant impact on elderly or otherwise compromised individuals, with few fatalities observed in the population under the age of 60. From what we have observed, half of those infected show no symptoms, 40% show mild symptoms such as a cold, and only about 2% advance to serious or critical illness. What is needed now is for politicians and the population to pause, take a deep breath, and address the epidemic with rational measures, such as social distancing of the older population, ring screening around identified cases, quarantine of identified infected individuals, and adequate hospital triage systems to protect other patients and health care staff rom infection in order to preserve our ability to treat the most severe cases. This is a strategy identified by myself and colleagues at Purdue in 2007 to ensure adequate capacity to deal with another true influenza pandemic, and it applies to this one as well.

 

 

BUREAUCRATIC INTERFERENCE: FDA Stops At-Home Tests.

NEWS I HOPE YOU CAN’T USE: 6 things to know if you’re living with someone who has coronavirus, or think you might be.

EPIDEMIOLOGISTS AS THE NEW GURUS: WHAT ABOUT THE EXCESS DEATH RATE?

To understand the meaning of all the deaths in Italy, it would be extraordinarily helpful to know one figure that I’ve never seen discussed: the number of excess deaths; that is, the number over and above what is usual this time of year in Italy.

I have no doubt the number is higher than usual and that there are excess deaths, particularly in certain regions of the north where the virus has been concentrated. But how much higher? Italy ordinarily has a particularly high rate of death from the flu, which makes the “excess death” figure especially important to know. Are significant numbers of the deaths we’re seeing in Italy deaths that would be taking place anyway from the flu or other illnesses we’re accustomed to? And if so, how many?

Speaking of Italy: Coronavirus: The Price of Luxury — Fashion’s “Made in Italy” tag is connected to a Chinese disease.

Proving again the Internet is quite possibly the best (and worst) thing ever invented. Located at the Churchill Northern Studies Center in Churchill, Manitoba, this live cam is located directly underneath the aurora oval–one of the best places on earth to watch the aurora borealis, the spectacular atmospheric phenomenon better known as the Northern Lights.…

I have a feeling those guys can’t be trusted

The post Iranian Officials Stole Over $1 Billion in Coronavirus Aid appeared first on The Bongino Report.

WHEN WILL THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA REPORT GOOD NEWS ON CORONAVIRUS? There are significant signs of hope amid the endless gloomery.

SPACE: Initial findings of artificial impact on asteroid Ryugu.

STONEHENGE HAS NOTHING ON SCOTLAND’S CRANNOGS: Since we’ve all got more reading time during the coronavirus crisis, now is perhaps a good time to expand our range a bit and maybe even discover new interests.  Here’s a start, courtesy of National Geographic:

You’ve heard of the mystery of Stonehenge in England. But archeologists recently discovered that Scotland’s crannogs are even older and more mysterious. I mean, why did those who lived there more than 3,000 years ago build islands of no obvious purpose in the middle of a Loch? Careful what you say by way of answering that question. I’m a McFarland on my mother’s side of the family.

The post Taiwan Warned WHO About Coronavirus in December – and Were Ignored appeared first on The Bongino Report.

TRUST, BUT — OH, HELL, FORGET THE TRUST, JUST VERIFY:

Antonieta Mora had been out gathering fruit when she captured footage of this bizarre skeleton-like insect. The 32-year-old language therapist couldn'...

Thank God the government was fiscally responsible and saved all that money when the times were good. Oh wait.

The post Brace Yourselves for at Least a $2 Trillion Deficit This Year appeared first on The Bongino Report.