Health

Joe Biden's presidential campaign called another early morning press lid at 9:20 a.m. on Thursday, leaving strategists and reporters wondering what the hell is going on. It was the ninth time this month that Biden had no public events on schedule and thus told the press before lunchtime that they would not be needed for the rest of the day. It's downright bizarre that a campaign would squander nine perfectly good days that could be spent on the trail just two months out from the election. What was Biden doing during this time instead? Sitting at home with his wife in Wilmington and hopping on the occasional Zoom event? Sam Stein, who is a Daily Beast reporter and purportedly not a campaign spokesperson, insisted that Biden must have been prepping for Tuesday's debate against Trump.

Only part of the dramatic racial differences in age-adjusted COVID-19 death rates can be explained by racial differences. The remainder reflects a substantially lower black survival rate because, we are told, of poverty and inadequate access to healthcare. Once taking into account Latino outcomes, however, these factors alone are unlikely to explain the lower black survival rate. Why are the outcomes for Latinos so much better than for black Americans?There is no comprehensive national measure of cases by race and ethnicity. The CDC has estimates for only 57 percent of national cases. Using these partial estimates, together with population data, I estimated that the black case rate is 2.53 times the white rate, and the Latino rate is 11.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is in the hospital — again. The 87-year-old has overcome many health concerns while sitting on the SCOTUS, but an additional liver cancer diagnosis and a recent number of hospital visits leave little room for optimism. The prospect of President Trump replacing an iconic Democratic-appointed justice is a big fear among leftists. But is this fear rooted more in media hysteria than honest judgment? A single SCOTUS seat is limited in power, especially considering the unpredictable voting patterns of recent GOP-appointed justices. The exact legacy of RBG is up for debate, but everyone, regardless of political leanings, can admire her perseverance.

If the coronavirus were as deadly as the bubonic plague, which killed about a third of the population of Europe in the 1340s, there would be no doubt about the need for extreme measures. But this virus spares far more people than it kills, and is sometimes mild to the point of invisibility, even as it proves lethal to others. It’s almost as though nature had calibrated the virus exactly to the point where risk-avoiders saw the lockdown as vital for survival while risk-accepters saw it as so economically destructive as to be worse than the disease itself. America is polarized not just politically but in its attitude to risk.

Do you know what the real ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ is? No, not the fauxtraged shrieks of liberals at everything the president does. It’s the tendency Trump has to turn normally sensible conservative journalists into a sort of Praetorian Guard, drawing their swords to defend his every utterance, and endowing comments that would shame a blithering idiot with non-existent purpose and meaning. The esteemed US editor of The Spectator, Mr Gray, has his gladius out. He argues the president spitballing at a press conference that perhaps one could inject disinfectant to the lungs to kill coronavirus, or irradiate the body with (carcinogenic) UV light, was actually 16-dimensional chess and ‘a Trumpian masterpiece’.

This is a piece about death. Obviously death is a serious topic, perhaps as serious as anything you could possibly write about, but in these truly weird times of a global pandemic and unprecedented threat to what most people would conceive as normality, let’s start with a joke. How do you make ordinary citizens accept an indefinite period of economic shutdown and deprivation of their most basic civil liberties? Two weeks at a time!There seems to be a bit of a trend regarding disclaimers among those who have an opinion in favor of a return to everyday life anytime soon so I’ll start with the usual caveats: I accept that coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 or whatever you prefer to call it, is a serious health threat.

It was just a matter of time before the coronavirus was leveraged as a tool of race politics. With the US presidential campaign in suspension, Democratic broadsides against America’s white supremacy have lost a valuable outlet. Now, however, the media, politicians, and race activists have found a new theme: 'Black Americans Bear The Brunt' of COVID-19 deaths, as the New York Times put it.America’s medical personnel have gone overnight from being heroes to being bigots. Three failed presidential contenders — Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, joined by Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Robin Kelly — have asked the CDC and the FDA to investigate doctors’ 'implicit biases'.

COVID-19 has suddenly made much of the western public health establishment effectively redundant. Unused to dealing with infectious disease, we have a legion of epidemiologists who have never studied an epidemic and a horde of public health professionals who are more comfortable discussing soda taxes than virology.If you’ve spent your career believing that drinking, smoking and obesity are the real epidemics, a potentially fatal virus forcing billions of people into hiding could make you question your priorities. But if the nanny state lobby was disoriented at first, it has quickly learnt to adapt. The public are temporarily willing to sacrifice a bit of liberty for safety and the lifestyle regulators sense fresh opportunities.

No matter where in the apartment I am, if I sit very still, I hear a siren. Over the 18 days I’ve spent in quarantine here, they’ve grown more frequent. I worked late yesterday and finished up at about 1:30 this morning. I pulled my headphones out and listened. There was the briefest moment of calm, before I heard the familiar squall. From what I could make out, it sounded like a convoy of ambulances, careering towards the hospital about a mile from me. Woodhull Medical Center is a block of brutalist concrete planted imposingly at the junction of Broadway and Marcus Garvey Boulevard. A tent outside is my closest COVID-19 testing site.

In all the gloom and doom, and media-driven nihilism, there is actually an array of good news. As many predicted, as testing spreads, and we get a better idea of the actual number and nature of cases, the death rate from coronavirus slowly but also seems to steadily decline. Early estimates from the World Health Organization and the modeling of pessimists of a constant four percent death rate for those infected with the virus are for now proving exaggerated for the United States. More likely, as testing spreads, our fatality rates could descend to near one percent. There is some evidence from Germany and to a lesser extent South Korea, that it may be possible to see the fatality rate dip below one percent.