What Percentage of COVID-19 Patients Are Likely To Die?

Between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans could die from COVID-19 according to epidemiological model projections cited by coronavirus task force members during a White House press conference on Tuesday. “This could be a hell of a bad two weeks,” said President Trump. “Or maybe even three weeks.” Policies that have locked down the economies of the U.S. and many other countries are based to a considerable extent on the dire projections from a variety of epidemiological models. But are they right, asked my Reason colleague Jacob Sullum.

“I’ve looked at all the models. I’ve spent a lot of time on the models. They don’t tell you anything. You can’t really rely upon models,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who functions as Trump’s coronavirus guru, at a task force meeting, according to the Washington Post. And yet, here we are.

Crudely put, models need validation by matching their projections to actual data. In this case, the outputs of infectious disease models might be compared to how well their projections match data on infection, hospitalization, and mortality trends from past epidemics. Of course, certain parameters such as the basic reproduction number and attack rates will have to be adjusted to take into account the differences between, say, influenza viruses and the novel coronavirus.

It turns out that most infectious disease epidemiological models have not been validated by comparing their outputs to empirical data. A 2018 comprehensive review article in the journal Epidemic of 78 global disease spread models found that model validation is uncommon. Why? Most likely, the researchers suggest, because there is a lack of suitable validation data due to the fact that pandemics are relatively rare events.

A more scathing 2009 study in The American Journal of Epidemiology narrowly focused on the accuracy of various statistical methods for predicting the hospitalization rates of young children for respiratory syncytial virus and/or influenza by matching their projections to seven years of empirical data in Quebec. “No method provided accurate or consistent estimates for both viruses and outcomes,” concluded the researchers. “Because major public health decisions are made and population programs are promoted on the basis of estimates from these statistical methods, investment in their careful validation is essential to guide rational public policy decisions. Until then, their limitations should be made explicit and estimates used cautiously.”

Since models are at best hazy guides to the future, can parsing real-time data from the early stages of this pandemic provide better insights on how it might unfold over the coming months? For example, it would be extremely helpful to know the percentage of infected people who eventually die of the disease.

One often-heard statistic is the “case-fatality rate,” that is, the percentage of people diagnosed with the disease who will die of it. This afternoon that figure stands at 2.5 percent for the U.S. A huge problem is that the magnitude of this figure is significantly inflated because it does not take into account people who are asymptomatic or who suffer and recover at home and thus not come into contact with the medical surveillance system. What we really need to know is the infection-fatality rate, that is, the percentage of all of the people infected who eventually die of the disease.

A new study in Lancet Infectious Diseases attempts to figure out what percentage of infected people in each age cohort will require hospitalization. The researchers aim to determine those rates and the overall case-fatality rate in real time by looking at several constrained COVID-19 datasets derived from near the beginning of the epidemic. These datasets included cases and deaths from a cohort of patients identified in China between January 1 and February 11, and several hundred cases detected outside of China and the passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

Applying adjustments for demography and location, the researchers found that the case-fatality rate for both Chinese and outside cohorts is about 1.4 percent. This basically matches the Chinese case-fatality rate reported in a March Nature Medicine study.

The researchers take the next step and try to estimate the number of undetected cases in Wuhan by applying the observed prevalence of infections among travelers repatriated on six flights from Wuhan over three days between January 30 and February 1. They ultimately calculate that the infection-fatality rate for COVID-19 in China is around 0.66 percent. This is about six times worse than the rate for seasonal influenza.

Notably, the infection fatality rate escalates with age. For infected people under age 50, well under 0.2 percent would likely die. For cohorts 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, and above 80 years of age, the estimated infection fatality rates are 0.6 percent, 1.9 percent, 4.3 percent, and 7.8 percent, respectively.

In an accompanying editorial, University of Miami statistician Shigui Ruan observes, “Even though the fatality rate is low for younger people, it is very clear that any suggestion of COVID-19 being just like influenza is false: even for those aged 20–29 years, once infected with SARS-CoV-2, the mortality rate is 33 times higher than that from seasonal influenza.”

The researchers’ low-end coronavirus attack rate—that is, the percentage of the population that would eventually be infected—is 50 percent. Assuming 50 percent of Americans were eventually infected, that would yield about 1.1 million deaths from COVID-19.

The big caveat here is that the researchers are trying to hit a moving target and could be missing by a mile. The actual lethality of this disease will become clearer in the next few weeks as more data, especially from population screening with antibody tests, comes in.

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A Boomer Elegy: To Millennials & Gen-X’ers, “I Am Sincerely Sorry”

A Boomer Elegy: To Millennials & Gen-X’ers, “I Am Sincerely Sorry”

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

History will probably record that America’s Baby Boom generation threw one helluva party; Gen X was left with the sorry task of cleanup crew; and the Millennials ended up squatting in the repossessed haunted party-house when it was all over.

On behalf of the Boomers, let me try to explain and apologize.

We came along at the end of history’s earlier biggest trauma, the Second World War, following the hard stumble of the Great Depression – which, by the way, for those of you unsure of chronology, followed the First World War, an epic, purposeless slaughter that utterly demoralized Western civilization. What a set-up for my parent’s generation.

My stepfather, the man who raised me, was an interesting, specimen of that gen. Fresh out of college in Boston, he joined the army, became a lieutenant, and by-and-by found himself trapped in the German offensive through the Ardennes Forest, known as the Battle of the Bulge. Unlike some WW2 vets, he was willing to talk about his experiences. His most vivid memory was the difference between the sound of American and German machine guns. Ours went rat-a-tat-tat, theirs went zzzzzzzap, he said, like you couldn’t even detect the interval between the bullets coming at you. It scared the piss out of his men, not a few of whom were cut to pieces. My stepfather merely caught several chunks of shrapnel in his arm and thigh, and was still on the scene when Germany finally surrendered in May, 1945. He was awarded a silver star for valor, but never bragged on it. (My mother barely participated in my upbringing, but that’s another story.)

He went straight to New York City when it was over. His gen’s victory dance was to get straight to work in the economic bonanza just revving up — because the war had happened elsewhere and all our stuff was intact, ready to re-start, to make and sell anything under the sun to the shattered rest-of-the-world, and lend them money to buy it — quite an opportunity for young men highly disciplined and regimented from their recent travails of war.

My stepfather became a classic Mad Man, as in the TV series, working in media, publishing, and PR, a hard-drinking cohort of mostly military vets who would knock down three martinis over lunch with clients (a nearly inconceivable feat, actually, when you think about it), but that showed what the war had done to the soldiers who survived. He died from it at barely sixty, and from smoking two packs of Camel straights a day, another habit of battle.

We Boomer boys had his war as movies and comic books: Sergeant Rock and John Wayne on the beach at Iwo! We had all the fruits of that postwar bonanza. We had Disneyland, the 1964 World’s Fair, the Carousel-of-Progress, and Rock Around the Clock. We eventually had a war of our own, Vietnam, but it was optional for college kids. I declined to go get my ass shot off, of course.

You have no idea what a fantastic bacchanal college was in the 1960s. Let the sunshine in! The great anti-war protests gave us a chance to pretend we were serious, but, believe me, it was much more about finding someone to hook-up with at the teach-ins and the street marches. The birth control pill was a fabulous novelty. We ignored the side-effects — especially the social side effects that led later on to an epidemic of divorces and broken families. When you are a young man, sex is at least half of what you think of minute-by-minute. I was on a campus where all you saw were waves of nubile, joggling breasts coming at you beneath those sheer peasant blouses (which, you understand, suggests that the women were in on it, too, being every bit as incited by their own frisky hormones).

Personally, I was not altogether on board with the hippie program, though I let my hair grow. A lot about it gave me the creeps — the lurid posters of Hindu gods with elephant heads, the dumb-ass “Hey, man,” lingo, the neurotic sharing of everything from clothing to money, the wooly armpits, the ghastly organic cuisine…. I mostly eschewed drugs, never dropped acid, and smoked pot infrequently due to a chastening episode of frightening paranoia early on. Anyway, after Charlie Manson’s caper, the whole thing lost its luster and by the early 1970s there wasn’t much left but sideburns, and by then many of us were in an office of some kind.

Which is probably where things really went off the rails.

The Boomers should never have been allowed in those offices, especially the ones within ten miles of Wall Street. That’s where the cleverest among us came up with the signal innovations that have now wrecked the world. The corona virus is a very bad thing, for sure, but it’s really nothing compared to the deliberate wickedness that engineered the so-called financialized economy — a supernatural matrix of something-for-nothing swindles and frauds that purported to replace actual work that produced things of value. The great lesson of the age was lost: the virtual is not a substitute for the authentic.

And now the Boomer geniuses of finance are scrambling frantically to hurl imaginary money into the black hole they have opened with their own reckless wizardry. But black holes are nothing like ordinary holes. They are unfillable. They just suck everything into a cosmic vacuum that resembles something like death — which, in its implacable mystery, may just be a door to a new disposition of things, the next life, the next reality.

Of course, not all of us Boomers worked on Wall Street or in its annexes, but we did more or less go along with all that wickedness because we never really made any earnest effort to stop it. The Dodd-Frank bill? Don’t make me laugh. Maybe it’s just impossible to apologize for the mess we left behind after the party we enjoyed. I’m not a Christian in any formal sense, but perhaps only that kind of fathomless, unconditional forgiveness might avail.

I am sincerely sorry.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/03/2020 – 17:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/39G3OOP Tyler Durden

The Federal Government Is Spending $60 Billion To Keep Mostly Empty Commercial Planes Flying Over the U.S.

It’s no secret that the coronavirus pandemic has been particularly devastating for the airline industry, with the number of passengers paying to fly falling by as much as 95 percent compared to this time last year.

Air carriers’ financial pain proved enough of a justification for Congress to include $60 billion in financial assistance to the industry as part of the $2.3 trillion economic relief package it passed last week.

This aid isn’t without strings, however. Airlines are being asked to maintain a minimum level of service to qualify for emergency government funding. The result has been companies running nearly-empty, money-losing flights just so they can avail themselves of taxpayer support.

When Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, it included $50 billion evenly divided into loans and grants for passenger air carriers. The law also empowered the Secretary of Transportation to require airlines to continue flying to locations they were servicing before March 1, 2020.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) issued proposed guidance that specifies the minimum levels of service passenger airlines have to maintain to qualify for CARES Act assistance.

If an airline flew into a city at least five times a week prior to March 1, it will have to continue to offer at least five flights a week to the same city. If an airline flew into a city less than five times a week, it will have to offer only one flight per week.

This guidance allows the biggest air carriers, who flew lots of flights into lots of cities, to substantially reduce their service levels. “You can literally go from that 25 or 30 flights a day to Albuquerque down to one,” one airline industry consultant told NPR.

Low-cost budget carriers who offered fewer flights are required to maintain a higher percentage of their existing service. For that reason, these low-cost carriers have been some of the biggest critics of the new DOT guidance.

Frontier Airlines, in a public comment on the new guidance, noted that it flew a total of five flights a week into four airports prior to March 1. That means the proposed DOT rules will require it to maintain 100 percent of its service at those locations. In another 10 cities, said Frontier, the DOT rules only allow it to reduce service by less than 50 percent, despite demand dropping off by more than 90 percent.

DOT’s “minimum service requirement bears no realistic relationship to current reduced passenger demand,” wrote the airline, adding that the order “amounts to a government edict to operate more flights with the attendant costs and burdens regardless of whether those flights are empty or have load factors in the single digits or teens. That does not make sense.”

The National Air Carrier Association (NACA), a trade association representing budget carriers, argues that the new rules also do not take into account the seasonality of many low-cost airlines’ services.

“By not taking into account the seasonality of air service provided by a large number of air carriers,” wrote NACA, DOT’s proposed minimum service requirements “would require carriers to maintain a schedule developed for the peak winter travel season into the spring travel season and beyond.”

“As a result, a significant number of carriers would be placed at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis U.S. legacy air carriers” whose service is less affected by seasonal peaks and troughs, wrote NACA.

The proposed DOT guidelines would allow airlines to apply for exemptions, but approving those could take time, and there’s no guarantee that every carrier that wants one would receive one.

NACA and the budget carriers they represent are asking that lower minimum service requirements be incorporated into any final rule.

A DOT spokesperson tells Reason that comments on the department’s proposed rules are still being considered, so there’s still a possibility that the budget airlines will get their proposed changes included in the final rule.

At the same time, however, members of Congress, as well as smaller regional airports, are demanding that airlines be required to maintain service at each airport they regularly fly into, not just each city. That request, if adopted by DOT, would have the effect of increasing the minimum number of flights airlines would have to fly.

While DOT hashes out a final rule, NPR reports that the U.S. Treasury Department is encouraging airlines to apply for financial aid by today, otherwise it could get delayed. The confusion over conditions for receiving financial assistance, reported The Air Current on Tuesday, is causing airlines to backtrack planned reductions in service.

The result, as countless news articles have pointed out, is airlines running ghost flights that have more airline staff than paying customers on them.

We are left in the worst possible world of businesses getting a bunch of taxpayer money on the condition that they waste it. This is central planning at its most illogical, and it’s making all of us poorer.

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ICE Detention Facility Sued Over Possible COVID-19 Threat to Immigrant Detainees

Yale Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic, along with Lawyers for Civil Rights, have organized and filed a class-action suit on behalf of 147 plaintiffs against a variety of county and federal officials associated with the Bristol County, Massachusetts, House of Corrections and the C. Carlos Carreiro Detention Center, a federal ICE facility.

The suit is demanding the humanitarian release of immigrant prisoners thought to be threatened by COVID-19. The suit also seeks an injunction against locking up any new detainees in the facilities.

In a filing in the case, the plaintiffs insist that “more than two-thirds of the 147 putative class members have never been convicted of any crime of violence; more than one-third have never been convicted of any crime at all; and approximately one-third have medical conditions that Defendant acknowledges may make them especially vulnerable to COVID-19.”

The suit insists that the detainees are

subject to imminent infection, illness, and death because of their civil immigration detention—literally trapped, with no safe alternative available to them. Facility staff have rebuffed their inquiries about COVID-19 risks and precautions. Their confinement conditions and detention treatment have created a dangerous and hazardous situation that imminently threatens their lives, as well as the well-being of guards and others in the surrounding community.

The defendants are “afraid for their lives” since they have no meaningful opportunity for social distancing while detained in conditions they insist are unhygienic. The filings insist at least two correctional officials were reported by inmates to display flu-like illnesses they could not confirm were or weren’t COVID-19.

The suit points out, for those who fear the alleged chaos of releasing prisoners, that the detainees in question “are not being detained pursuant to a conviction. Rather, they are in civil detention awaiting the completion of immigration proceedings.” ICE, the suit points out, has had “a long-standing practice of releasing for humanitarian reasons even those whose detention has been mandated under particular immigration detention statutes” and “regularly uses alternatives to detention to maintain custody and control over non-citizens in immigration proceedings, such as supervised release, electronic ankle
monitors, home confinement, and telephonic monitoring.”

For 80 of the detainees in question whose personal details the plaintiff organizations were able to confirm, “almost” none of them face a “presently executable removal order” and “nearly all have a residence at which they could self-quarantine and shelter-in-place if ordered released by this Court.”

Further, “those without a personal residence have been offered alternative residential placements by local faith leaders sufficient to ensure that no putative class members ordered released would be without a home or ability to shelter-in-place safely.”

The suit notes that the virus is already known to be spreading in “correctional, immigration detention, and veterans’ facilities across the country.” Other courts in Michigan and California, the plaintiffs showed in a separate filing, have been releasing prisoners because of COVID-19 fears. (C.J. Ciaramella has been reporting for Reason on how federal prisons are dealing, or not dealing, with COVID-19.)

As of this writing, the plaintiffs admit no confirmed cases of COVID-19 have specifically shown up in either facility, but that “at least 38 [detainees] have serious medical issues such as heart conditions; diabetes; liver and kidney disease; and lung and respiratory conditions, including bronchitis and asthma. These individuals are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19.” New detainees, the plaintiffs say, are still being introduced to the confined, unhygienic space without testing or quarantine.

Hearings in the case, formally known as Savino v. Souza, are being held in federal court in Boston today.

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FDA Will Lift Restrictions on Face Mask Imports, Toppling Another Pointless Regulation

After facing criticism for its policies that limited the availability of critically needed face masks, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now says it will allow KN95 masks to be bought by hospitals and used by health care workers.

The KN95 designation is a Chinese government standard that is widely considered to be equivalent to the N95 masks approved by American regulators. Guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says the KN95 masks are “suitable alternatives” to the N95 mask when medical supplies are running short, and research from Minnesota-based 3M Corporation found that KN95 masks are “reasonable to consider….as equivalent” to the N95 variety.

With the supply of N95 masks running low due to a global surge in demand as the COVID-19 outbreak worsens, the FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) on March 24 to allow American health care workers to use masks made to specifications for five other countries (Australia, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico) and Europe. But the Chinese-approved KN95 masks were left off the list.

Despite that, importers were finding ad hoc methods of getting the KN95 masks into the United States. Even though hospitals and other health care providers were forbidden from buying them, the KN95 masks could be sold to the general public or donated to first responders.

On Friday, the FDA issued new guidance that will allow health care workers to use KN95 masks too. The new guidance comes in response to “continued respirator shortages,” the FDA said.

In situations where N95 masks are not available, the FDA said, the agency would not block “the importation and use of respirators without an EUA, including KN95 respirators,” as long as those masks are included on the CDC’s list of respirator alternatives during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Although not required, if a KN95 respirator does not have an EUA, importers may want to take appropriate steps to verify authenticity of these products,” the FDA said.

But while the FDA is saying they will not block imports, it remains unclear whether masks lacking FDA certification will carry liability issues for health care providers.

“Our lawyer warned us we could get in trouble with these KN95s,” Shawn Smith, a Santa Monica, California, entrepreneur who has been attempting to bring masks into the country to sell to hospitals, told Buzzfeed News on Thursday. “He said we could get sued or even face criminal charges.”

Getting full FDA approval can’t happen in a timely manner. As Reason‘s Christian Britschgi reported last week, getting new suppliers approved to produce FDA-compliant gear can take weeks.

William Beaton of Miami Medx, a medical supply firm that imports masks, surgical gear, and other health care equipment, says the FDA is taking a step in the right direction.

“I’m glad to see that the FDA is doing the right thing,” Beaton says. “They should have done this a lot sooner, but at least now we should be able to get more masks to the people and health care professions who need them.”

By not fully authorizing the KN95 respirators, the FDA is putting Chinese manufacturers on an uneven playing field relative to U.S. manufacturers, write Alec Stapp, director of technology policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Caleb Watney, a tech policy fellow with the free market R Street Institute, in a forthcoming paper on the regulatory challenges facing face mask suppliers.

“There is not enough time to demand certification of factories before commencing production, especially considering the FDA has postponed most foreign inspections through April,” they write. “Instead, the government should inspect samples during the customs process and verify they meet a minimum quality standard. Furthermore, hospitals can conduct random quality checks after accepting delivery but before handing out PPE to health care workers or using ventilators on patients.”

That is, they note, the approach that Europe has been taking to maintain a flow of needed imports while blocking defective or counterfeit products.

The FDA’s action to free up more imports of foreign-made masks is a positive sign, but the agency should go further to prevent liability issues from adding to the existing shortage. The alternative is forcing American medical professionals to face the coronavirus with little more than a bandana for personal protection.

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The Federal Government Is Spending $60 Billion To Keep Mostly Empty Commercial Planes Flying Over the U.S.

It’s no secret that the coronavirus pandemic has been particularly devastating for the airline industry, with the number of passengers paying to fly falling by as much as 95 percent compared to this time last year.

Air carriers’ financial pain proved enough of a justification for Congress to include $60 billion in financial assistance to the industry as part of the $2.3 trillion economic relief package it passed last week.

This aid isn’t without strings, however. Airlines are being asked to maintain a minimum level of service to qualify for emergency government funding. The result has been companies running nearly-empty, money-losing flights just so they can avail themselves of taxpayer support.

When Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, it included $50 billion evenly divided into loans and grants for passenger air carriers. The law also empowered the Secretary of Transportation to require airlines to continue flying to locations they were servicing before March 1, 2020.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) issued proposed guidance that specifies the minimum levels of service passenger airlines have to maintain to qualify for CARES Act assistance.

If an airline flew into a city at least five times a week prior to March 1, it will have to continue to offer at least five flights a week to the same city. If an airline flew into a city less than five times a week, it will have to offer only one flight per week.

This guidance allows the biggest air carriers, who flew lots of flights into lots of cities, to substantially reduce their service levels. “You can literally go from that 25 or 30 flights a day to Albuquerque down to one,” one airline industry consultant told NPR.

Low-cost budget carriers who offered fewer flights are required to maintain a higher percentage of their existing service. For that reason, these low-cost carriers have been some of the biggest critics of the new DOT guidance.

Frontier Airlines, in a public comment on the new guidance, noted that it flew a total of five flights a week into four airports prior to March 1. That means the proposed DOT rules will require it to maintain 100 percent of its service at those locations. In another 10 cities, said Frontier, the DOT rules only allow it to reduce service by less than 50 percent, despite demand dropping off by more than 90 percent.

DOT’s “minimum service requirement bears no realistic relationship to current reduced passenger demand,” wrote the airline, adding that the order “amounts to a government edict to operate more flights with the attendant costs and burdens regardless of whether those flights are empty or have load factors in the single digits or teens. That does not make sense.”

The National Air Carrier Association (NACA), a trade association representing budget carriers, argues that the new rules also do not take into account the seasonality of many low-cost airlines’ services.

“By not taking into account the seasonality of air service provided by a large number of air carriers,” wrote NACA, DOT’s proposed minimum service requirements “would require carriers to maintain a schedule developed for the peak winter travel season into the spring travel season and beyond.”

“As a result, a significant number of carriers would be placed at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis U.S. legacy air carriers” whose service is less affected by seasonal peaks and troughs, wrote NACA.

The proposed DOT guidelines would allow airlines to apply for exemptions, but approving those could take time, and there’s no guarantee that every carrier that wants one would receive one.

NACA and the budget carriers they represent are asking that lower minimum service requirements be incorporated into any final rule.

A DOT spokesperson tells Reason that comments on the department’s proposed rules are still being considered, so there’s still a possibility that the budget airlines will get their proposed changes included in the final rule.

At the same time, however, members of Congress, as well as smaller regional airports, are demanding that airlines be required to maintain service at each airport they regularly fly into, not just each city. That request, if adopted by DOT, would have the effect of increasing the minimum number of flights airlines would have to fly.

While DOT hashes out a final rule, NPR reports that the U.S. Treasury Department is encouraging airlines to apply for financial aid by today, otherwise it could get delayed. The confusion over conditions for receiving financial assistance, reported The Air Current on Tuesday, is causing airlines to backtrack planned reductions in service.

The result, as countless news articles have pointed out, is airlines running ghost flights that have more airline staff than paying customers on them.

We are left in the worst possible world of businesses getting a bunch of taxpayer money on the condition that they waste it. This is central planning at its most illogical, and it’s making all of us poorer.

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via IFTTT

ICE Detention Facility Sued Over Possible COVID-19 Threat to Immigrant Detainees

Yale Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic, along with Lawyers for Civil Rights, have organized and filed a class-action suit on behalf of 147 plaintiffs against a variety of county and federal officials associated with the Bristol County, Massachusetts, House of Corrections and the C. Carlos Carreiro Detention Center, a federal ICE facility.

The suit is demanding the humanitarian release of immigrant prisoners thought to be threatened by COVID-19. The suit also seeks an injunction against locking up any new detainees in the facilities.

In a filing in the case, the plaintiffs insist that “more than two-thirds of the 147 putative class members have never been convicted of any crime of violence; more than one-third have never been convicted of any crime at all; and approximately one-third have medical conditions that Defendant acknowledges may make them especially vulnerable to COVID-19.”

The suit insists that the detainees are

subject to imminent infection, illness, and death because of their civil immigration detention—literally trapped, with no safe alternative available to them. Facility staff have rebuffed their inquiries about COVID-19 risks and precautions. Their confinement conditions and detention treatment have created a dangerous and hazardous situation that imminently threatens their lives, as well as the well-being of guards and others in the surrounding community.

The defendants are “afraid for their lives” since they have no meaningful opportunity for social distancing while detained in conditions they insist are unhygienic. The filings insist at least two correctional officials were reported by inmates to display flu-like illnesses they could not confirm were or weren’t COVID-19.

The suit points out, for those who fear the alleged chaos of releasing prisoners, that the detainees in question “are not being detained pursuant to a conviction. Rather, they are in civil detention awaiting the completion of immigration proceedings.” ICE, the suit points out, has had “a long-standing practice of releasing for humanitarian reasons even those whose detention has been mandated under particular immigration detention statutes” and “regularly uses alternatives to detention to maintain custody and control over non-citizens in immigration proceedings, such as supervised release, electronic ankle
monitors, home confinement, and telephonic monitoring.”

For 80 of the detainees in question whose personal details the plaintiff organizations were able to confirm, “almost” none of them face a “presently executable removal order” and “nearly all have a residence at which they could self-quarantine and shelter-in-place if ordered released by this Court.”

Further, “those without a personal residence have been offered alternative residential placements by local faith leaders sufficient to ensure that no putative class members ordered released would be without a home or ability to shelter-in-place safely.”

The suit notes that the virus is already known to be spreading in “correctional, immigration detention, and veterans’ facilities across the country.” Other courts in Michigan and California, the plaintiffs showed in a separate filing, have been releasing prisoners because of COVID-19 fears. (C.J. Ciaramella has been reporting for Reason on how federal prisons are dealing, or not dealing, with COVID-19.)

As of this writing, the plaintiffs admit no confirmed cases of COVID-19 have specifically shown up in either facility, but that “at least 38 [detainees] have serious medical issues such as heart conditions; diabetes; liver and kidney disease; and lung and respiratory conditions, including bronchitis and asthma. These individuals are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19.” New detainees, the plaintiffs say, are still being introduced to the confined, unhygienic space without testing or quarantine.

Hearings in the case, formally known as Savino v. Souza, are being held in federal court in Boston today.

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Supermarket Dunks Shopping Carts Into Giant Vats Of Disinfectants To Protect Customers From Virus

Supermarket Dunks Shopping Carts Into Giant Vats Of Disinfectants To Protect Customers From Virus

A supermarket in Philadelphia has taken sanitizing to a whole new level, dunking shopping carts into three large containers of cleaning solutions to give customers the peace of mind they won’t contract COVID-19.

KYW Newsradio reports that Rittenhouse Market, located on 1733 Spruce St, Philadelphia, has erected a wild contraption outside of the store, that hoists a shopping cart and dunks it into three large vats of cleaning products for sterilization purposes.

“There are 200 gallons per vat,” explained Rittenhouse Market General Manager Phil Cantor. “We have a pulley system, and we can dunk those down into a washing solution, rise them off, and then dip them again into a sanitizing solution before they air dry and we hand them back over to a customer to use.”

Cantor said the contraption outside the store had grabbed attention from residents.

“A lot of people are stopping to look — especially early on, they had no idea what this contraption was we were putting together in front of the store,” he said.

When asked how customers are reacting to the contraption, he responded by saying:

“But it’s been great. They have been very happy — obviously, under the current circumstances — that we are making such efforts to keep our carts clean.”

Cantor said hand baskets are also dunked into the solution to protect customers from the virus. He said these operations to protect customers will continue “until deemed not necessary by the powers that be.” 

Here’s a closer view of the contraption at work: 

Before we know it, other supermarkets will be doing the same across the country. It’s only a matter of time before disinfectants are sprayed on streets and in public areas. What’s happening in China is coming to America.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/03/2020 – 17:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RadfPZ Tyler Durden

When It’s Over, Will We Be The Same America?

When It’s Over, Will We Be The Same America?

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” said Samuel Johnson.

And as it is with men, so it is with nations.

Monday, Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, projected some 100,000 to 200,000 U.S. deaths from the pandemic, “if we do things almost perfectly.” She agreed with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s estimate that, if we do “nothing,” the American dead could reach 2.2 million.

That 2 million figure would be twice as many dead as have perished in all our wars from the American Revolution to the Civil War, World War I and II, and Korea and Vietnam.

This does indeed concentrate the mind wonderfully.

Now add to this slaughter of our countrymen a market plunge steeper than the 1929 Crash and a 1930s-style Depression. Wall Street analysts are talking of a wipeout of 30% of our GDP and unemployment reaching 35%.

What a difference a month can make.

On March 3, Super Tuesday, we were caught up in the 14 primary contests after Joe Biden’s stunning victory in South Carolina, which broke the momentum of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ wins in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.

What March 2020 produced and what it appears to portend is a sea change in U.S. history, an inflection point, an event after which things never return to what they were.

The coronavirus crisis seems to be one of those epochal events that alter the character of the country and the course of the republic.

Consider what has happened in three weeks.

The Republican Party, the party of small government and balanced budgets, approved with but a single dissent a $2 trillion emergency bill. There is talk now of a second $2 trillion bill, this one for infrastructure.

In a single month then, a Republican Senate and president grew the federal budget by 50% and are looking to double that.

For years, Democrats raised alarms about Trump’s poaching of the powers of the other branches. Now Democrats are demanding to know why Trump has not shut down the economy by presidential decree and not used his latent dictatorial powers to order U.S. companies to produce what the nation’s hospitals demand.

Democrats who long accused Trump of xenophobia and racism for seeking to close the borders to migrants entering the country illegally are now silent as Trump closes America to the world.

First Amendment free press champions are calling for Trump’s White House briefings not to be carried on TV because the president is spouting propaganda and lies. The problem: The people are watching and approving of what the media think the people ought not see.

If people in a crisis will jettison lifelong beliefs like this readily, how enduring will their professed belief in democracy itself prove?

The president thinks this will be a V-shaped recession, that once the economy hits bottom and turns up, it will soar, as in 1946 when pent-up demand from World War II was unleashed and America began to churn out cars and consumer good as rapidly as it had weapons of war.

Perhaps. But put me down as a skeptic.

You can’t go home again.

The shattering events of March, followed by what is coming in April and May, will have lasting impacts on the hearts and minds of this generation.

That once-insatiable appetite for Chinese-made goods at the mall — will it really return? Will Americans, after having “socially distanced” for months from family and friends, be reassured of their safety and pack into restaurants in July?

Observing the carrier Theodore Roosevelt in Guam offloading scores of sailors infected with coronavirus, will Americans be up for a clash with a China that is even today asserting its claims to the South China Sea?

Will Americans who survive this crisis care whether Iranian-backed Shiites dominate Iraq or Saudi-backed Sunni prevail in Yemen?

If March shocked this nation as severely as 9/11, what is coming may be even more sobering.

Are millions of unemployed workers without the cash to pay for or to find medicine and groceries likely to stay indoors for weeks or months?

All those criminals being given early release from virus-infested jails and prisons without the means to provide for themselves and their families, how will they react to weeks of mandatory sheltering in place?

Will MS-13 and its thousands of members, and its rival gangs that live off narcotics sales, comply?

Americans have done well in staying home in March. Will they do so through April, May and perhaps June? Or will the system gradually break down just as the second wave of the virus in the fall appears?

In times of crisis in America, there is a tradition of self-sacrifice.

But there have also almost always been not a few whose mindset is that of the Fort Lauderdale spring-breakers.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 04/03/2020 – 16:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2X4YnWS Tyler Durden

FDA Will Lift Restrictions on Face Mask Imports, Toppling Another Pointless Regulation

After facing criticism for its policies that limited the availability of critically needed face masks, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now says it will allow KN95 masks to be bought by hospitals and used by health care workers.

The KN95 designation is a Chinese government standard that is widely considered to be equivalent to the N95 masks approved by American regulators. Guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says the KN95 masks are “suitable alternatives” to the N95 mask when medical supplies are running short, and research from Minnesota-based 3M Corporation found that KN95 masks are “reasonable to consider….as equivalent” to the N95 variety.

With the supply of N95 masks running low due to a global surge in demand as the COVID-19 outbreak worsens, the FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) on March 24 to allow American health care workers to use masks made to specifications for five other countries (Australia, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico) and Europe. But the Chinese-approved KN95 masks were left off the list.

Despite that, importers were finding ad hoc methods of getting the KN95 masks into the United States. Even though hospitals and other health care providers were forbidden from buying them, the KN95 masks could be sold to the general public or donated to first responders.

On Friday, the FDA issued new guidance that will allow health care workers to use KN95 masks too. The new guidance comes in response to “continued respirator shortages,” the FDA said.

In situations where N95 masks are not available, the FDA said, the agency would not block “the importation and use of respirators without an EUA, including KN95 respirators,” as long as those masks are included on the CDC’s list of respirator alternatives during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Although not required, if a KN95 respirator does not have an EUA, importers may want to take appropriate steps to verify authenticity of these products,” the FDA said.

But while the FDA is saying they will not block imports, it remains unclear whether masks lacking FDA certification will carry liability issues for health care providers.

“Our lawyer warned us we could get in trouble with these KN95s,” Shawn Smith, a Santa Monica, California, entrepreneur who has been attempting to bring masks into the country to sell to hospitals, told Buzzfeed News on Thursday. “He said we could get sued or even face criminal charges.”

Getting full FDA approval can’t happen in a timely manner. As Reason‘s Christian Britschgi reported last week, getting new suppliers approved to produce FDA-compliant gear can take weeks.

William Beaton of Miami Medx, a medical supply firm that imports masks, surgical gear, and other health care equipment, says the FDA is taking a step in the right direction.

“I’m glad to see that the FDA is doing the right thing,” Beaton says. “They should have done this a lot sooner, but at least now we should be able to get more masks to the people and health care professions who need them.”

By not fully authorizing the KN95 respirators, the FDA is putting Chinese manufacturers on an uneven playing field relative to U.S. manufacturers, write Alec Stapp, director of technology policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Caleb Watney, a tech policy fellow with the free market R Street Institute, in a forthcoming paper on the regulatory challenges facing face mask suppliers.

“There is not enough time to demand certification of factories before commencing production, especially considering the FDA has postponed most foreign inspections through April,” they write. “Instead, the government should inspect samples during the customs process and verify they meet a minimum quality standard. Furthermore, hospitals can conduct random quality checks after accepting delivery but before handing out PPE to health care workers or using ventilators on patients.”

That is, they note, the approach that Europe has been taking to maintain a flow of needed imports while blocking defective or counterfeit products.

The FDA’s action to free up more imports of foreign-made masks is a positive sign, but the agency should go further to prevent liability issues from adding to the existing shortage. The alternative is forcing American medical professionals to face the coronavirus with little more than a bandana for personal protection.

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