May,2020, Part 4,Political Class Insanity: How The American Political Class, and Specifically New York Politicians, Failed Miserably With the Coronavirus Pandemic

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

Today we will be looking at how poorly the American political class handled the coronavirus pandemic in this country. There is no doubt that the coronavirus is a nasty virus, it kills and incapacitates people. 

But it doesn't kill an overwhelming number of people. It does not incapacitate an overwhelming number of people. In fact, the vast, vast majority of people never get it or get it with no or minimal symptoms. It does not seem to bother children, only the elderly and/or those with respiratory problems. This is not the black plague. This is not smallpox. 

And yet, we have shut down the country and wide areas of the economy, we have incurred trillions and trillions of dollars in additional debt, we have destroyed countless businesses, and made life miserable for just about everyone in the country. And as we will see today, the vast majority of this nastiness was because the American political class, and the government entities it operates, were not prepared, made stupid decisions, overreacted, and generally screwed up everything.

1) How widespread was the virus? Was it as bad as the politicians and the pliant press, anxious for ratings, made it out to be? Consider the numbers as of May 4:

• According to reporting by the Daily Signal, over 50% of the counties in this country have recorded ZERO deaths from the virus.
• 1,639 counties (52%) have had zero coronavirus deaths as of May 4.
• 447 counties (14%) have each reported 1 death.
• 443 counties (14%) have reported 2-5 COVID-19 deaths.
• 183 counties (6%) have reported 6-10 deaths.
• 94 counties (3%) have reported 11-15 deaths.
• 348 counties (11%) have reported more than 16 deaths.
• Thus, 89% of the counties in this country had less than 16 deaths.
• New York and New Jersey have incurred 38% of all cases nationwide and 48% of the deaths nationwide from the virus.
• Only 10% of the states, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and California have accounted for 54% of the cases and 61% of the deaths.
• Yakima county in Washington state had 1,203 virus cases, probably more than entire states have had.

But like every other problem that Americans politicians and government entities address, they went about handling this situation with a club rather than with any ounce of finesse. Rather than focus on the small, limited areas of problems geographically, they assumed the whole country was a problem and in the process killed economic vitality and personal freedom where no problem existed.

2) The New York Times recently ran an article that showed how the virus strain from New York City was the main driver of cases EVERYWHERE throughout the country. We will touch on the incompetence of New York politicians in the face of this virus below but their ineptness resulted in the following nationwide agony according to the Times:

• Travelers out of New York City was the main driver in coronavirus fatalities and sickness across the country.
• Results from a genetic tracking study showed that by early March the primary source of new virus infections around the country was the virus strain that originated in New York City.
• Travelers from New York City spread their version of the disease before the city finally got around to doing what other parts of the country were already doing from a social distancing, enhanced hygiene and other preventive measures perspective.
• As a result, according to the Times, NYC traveling residents “seeded” their version of the virus around the country.
• The study came to these conclusions by examining the small mutations of the virus around the country.
• According to Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health: ”We now have enough data to feel pretty confident that New York was the primary gateway for the rest of the country.”
• For example, out west, 80% of the virus cases in Alaska, 69% in Wyoming, 70% in Texas, and 84% in Utah were of the NYC strain.
• In the midwest, 72% of the virus cases in Minnesota, 78% in Wisconsin, 100% in Iowa, and 88% in Ohio were of the NYC strain.
• In Louisiana, every virus case had the NYC strain.
• In the Northeast, 81% of the Connecticut cases, 93% of the New Jersey cases and 92% of the Maryland cases were from the NYC strain.
• According to the Times: “During crucial weeks in March, New York’s political leaders waited to take aggressive action, even after identifying hundreds of cases, giving the virus a head start. And by mid-March, when President Trump restricted travel from Europe, the restrictions were essentially pointless, the data suggest, as the disease was already spreading widely within the country.”
• Remember, we have previously reported how NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, around March 10 encouraged New Yorkers to go about their business to go out to restaurants and bars, since the virus was not spread by food and drinks, the exact opposite advice that he should have been giving.
• Also, recall that on January 31, the head of the NYC health department assured people that there was not a single case of the virus in the whole city despite reports that police officers were told by their leadership to wear medical masks if they were going into Elmhurst Hospital, a city hospital: “There are NO suspected or confirmed cases in NYC,” Health Department spokesperson Michael Lanza told the Eagle on January 31.
• The article continued to report that on March 1, NYC had one “confirmed case of the virus” while these researchers estimate that over 10,000 city residents were already infected, showing that the head of the health department was truly ignorant of what was going on in his city or 10,000 secretly got sick between his January 31 declaration of not having a single case in the city and what the researchers found.

As a result of New York City and New York State not taking early actions like the Federal government did and other states did, it looks like a lot, a majority of the current virus cases, sickness and deaths, were directly a result of the NYC strain and the ignorance and slow reaction of government officials and politicians in that state.

3) Let’s do a quick review of how inept and out of touch with reality that NYC leaders were:

- On January 31, Michael Lanza of the NYC Health Department declared: “There are NO suspected or confirmed cases in NYC.” But we now know that there were likely hundreds if not thousands of cases already since the study mentioned above estimates that there were over 10,000 cases thirty short days later.

- In that same timeframe, New York governor Andrew Cuomo confidently and incorrectly proclaimed: "New York does not have one single confirmed case of the novel coronavirus, but we are taking every necessary precaution to protect against its spread into our state. We have been here before, and I want to remind New Yorkers that it is much more likely that they will be exposed to the influenza virus than to the coronavirus.”

- On March 10, NYC Bill de Blasio proclaimed: “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life,” and that the virus “does not transmit through food and drink.” In other words, no problem, forget social distancing, go out and have a good time at your favorite restaurant or bar, social distancing is for other folks.

- In March Governor Cuomo insisted that virus patients that survived the virus be sent back to nursing homes which made him the only governor to take such an action, an action which imperiled the staff and residents of the state’s nursing homes. According to AMDA, the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine, declared "admitting patients [into nursing homes] with suspected or documented COVID-19 infection represents a clear and present danger to all of the residents of a nursing home." Since over 5,000 of the state’s virus deaths were in state nursing homes, looks like the AMDA knew what they were talking about, looks like Cuomo did not know what he was talking about.

- Cuomo also looks like a bumbling fool on other aspects of the virus. He whined that he needed 40,000 ventilators and whine some more when Trump said he did not need that many. He actually got fewer than the 40,000 but he eventually ended up giving hundreds of the reduced amount to other states, indicating he had no idea what he was talking about regarding the need for 40,000.

- Cuomo whined that he needed many more ICU beds to handle the virus workload so Trump sent up a Navy medical ship to New York, outdoor ICU tent facilities were set up, the Javits convention center was converted into a massive ICU ward and none of these facilities were used much, if at all. All Of which showed that Cuomo had no idea how bad the virus was initially and then overreacted when he did not know how bad it wasn’t going to be.

- Only recently has Cuomo ordered that NYC subway cars be taken off line from one a.m. to five a.m. every day to be sterilized, an action that should have happened 60 days ago if he had any understanding of how the virus could be spread from public contact sources.

- New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson also gave false assurances when he said on February 13 that fears of the coronavirus “are not based on facts and science. The risk of infection to New Yorkers is low. There is no need to avoid public spaces.”

Massive screw ups on a massive basis.

4) And last but no least. Let’s not forget how the Obama administration blew their part in the coronavirus disaster. Back early in his administration, the country had a flu epidemic with thousands dying from the flu. The Obama administration took months to act and by then the damage was mostly done.

But a study after the fact strongly suggested that the country needed to beef up its stockpile and inventory of medical supplies including medical masks. As the LA Times reported on March 20, 2020: ”After the swine flu epidemic in 2009, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks, which filter out airborne particles, be replenished by the stockpile, which is maintained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That didn’t happen, according to Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Assn.”

Thus, early on during the struggle to cope with the virus, the country faced a severe shortage of high end medical masks to protect the nation's health care workers, a shortage that Obama knew of and did nothing to fix eleven years ago.

You get the idea, from Obama to Trump to Cuomo to de Blasio to just about every other politician and high ranking government official, the response to the virus has been late, feeble, and in many cases lethal. The politicians that run this country and the government officials they oversee have failed again to protect the citizens of this country and have failed at great expense: deaths, sickness, lost wages, bankrupt businesses, and trillions and trillions of unnecessary national debt being created, debt that will accelerate the collapse of the economy and our democracy. 

There is no need to point fingers at who specifically caused this disaster: it was the Chinese government who covered up the true veracity of the virus early on, it was the World Health Organization who covered up for the Chinese government and who told the world that this was bad not nearly as bad as it turned out to be and the American political class who bumbled their way through the past few critical months with either half ass answers, ignorant answers, or authoritarian efforts that represented one of a police state than a democracy, usually where such authoritarian measure were totally unnecessary. Insanity on an epic scale.

One final note: the press journalism outlets in this country also behaved disgracefully and without ethics in this crisis. Rather than report and educate the public on this crisis, they looked for the sensational stories, from DC to local medical facilities, it was all about sensationalism, not reality. 

In fact, we know that CBS has faked at least two news stories and photo ops of the crisis to make it look worse than it was. We know that millions and millions of people either do not get the virus, get it with mild symptoms and survive or get it with severe symptoms and survive. The death rate is very small but you would never know it from the news reporting, it was sensationalism all the time, truth and reality be damned.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w