Free Republic

One of the offshoots of being on the debate team in college, taking graduate level statistics as part of my masters and working as a lawyer, is an awareness of how one can make a case for practically anything, by playing around with evidence, numbers, analysis and language.  Coronavirus is a world-wide pandemic and should be taken seriously.  But the crisis should not be taken advantage of, nor should politicians manipulate definitions, data and diagnoses to achieve political aims.    Getting Down to Cases There is no such thing as a “case" of COVID-19. According to Merriam-Webster a “case”...

Donald Trump's top advisors have expressed doubts about the accuracy of the White House's apocalyptic forecast that 240,000 Americans will die from the coronavirus pandemic, sources have said. As the US death reached 6,056 Thursday and the nation's healthcare system buckles under the crisis, administration officials said the stark forecasts could have been a tactic to warn the president he needs to act now. The White House made the shock prediction Tuesday that there will be between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths in the US if the nation continues on its trajectory and current social distancing guidelines are maintained. Trump said...

We’re gonna need some better “experts.” – For the past three weeks now, President Donald Trump has allowed his team of “experts,” led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, to essentially destroy the nation’s economy based on the projections by a statistical model whose have varied dramatically from week to week, and which do not bear even the slightest resemblance to observed results on the ground. Friday morning, Dr. Fauci told an interviewer that he just can’t understand why the entire nation is not already in a lockdown stay-at-home situation. Meanwhile, in Texas, 101 counties that comprise an are about the size...

Dr. Fauci has recently stated that he doesn't know why all states don't have stay at home orders.If the purpose of stay at home orders is to keep covid-19 from spreading, then this is probably the wrong time to institute them. Right now the weather is warming up. The best thing we can do is get people away from each other and away from the indoor germ breeding ground. It seems to me what we are doing is continuing to incubate the virus in hundreds of thousands of households. If it were winter, I know there would be little choice.

What is the lowest point we can allow our economy to sink before we say, enough and start it back up ourselves? We are at about a 20,000 Dow. Do we wait until it sinks to 15,000? Do we wait until 10,000? In every war we have battled toward a point where we could declare victory. Never did it ever require us to kill every single enemy. Why is it that 13 states can stay open (yes they have less illness; but this is a highly mobile nation regardless of what we are fed by government. We need to be...

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and member of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, said he doesn’t know why some states still do not have stay-at-home orders in place to steam the spread of the coronavirus. "Whether there should be a federally mandated directive for that or not, I guess that’s more of a political question, but just scientifically, doesn’t everybody have to be on the same page with this stuff?” CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked the physician during an interview on live television Thursday evening. "I don't understand why that's not happening,” Fauci responded. “If you look...

PARIS, April 2 (Reuters) - Sanofi SA will be able to provide millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine for patients with the illness caused by the novel coronavirus if the old malaria drug proves successful in clinical trials, its chief executive told Reuters on Thursday. Paul Hudson, who became CEO of the French drugmaker in September, said in an interview that the company is currently manufacturing at over 93% capacity during the pandemic. He said the company had made a choice to "overproduce" its drugs to ensure supplies for hospitals in Europe and the United States facing an unprecedented crush of...