Month: April 2020

Coronavirus tests delayed by Covid-19 contamination at CDC lab

Boy. Is this the CDC we’ve been hearing about so much these days? Listening carefully to their advice?

Chicago Newspapers

CDC to the rescue? Not quite.

A delay by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in quickly making coronavirus test kits available was the result of “a glaring scientific breakdown” at the CDA central lab, The Washington Post reported.

The Post reported that CDC facilities that assembled the testing kits “violated sound manufacturing practices, resulting in contamination of one of the three test components used in the highly sensitive detection process.”

James Le Duc, a virologist and former CDC officer who now heads the Galveston National Laboratory in Texas, told The Post that the situation was “really a terrible black mark on the CDC, and the impact was devastating to the country.”

Flash: Washington bureaucracy is not always dependable.

View original post

Which Way Now to Fight the Coronavirus — Should We Stay Or Should We Go?

Doctors’ advice very important, but not absolute deciding factor . . .

Chicago Newspapers

One part of this arrangement is for sure, and it’s not the extent of virus threat.

Texas will be the first state to begin re-opening its economy. In the next few days more retail shops will reopen for pickup and online purchases. State parks will reopen. It’s far from normal, but it’s something.

One million Texans have filed for unemployment, overwhelming call centers. 22 million Americans have done likewise. This level of joblessness is simply unsustainable, but it’s still growing.

We cannot look solely to the CDC for solutions. No more than a doctor decides if you live or die. He or she gives options. You the patient, in this case you a whole country, decide.

View original post

End the Shutdowns! Do It For the Children

Otherwise, they die the death.

Hundreds of thousands of children could die this year due to the global economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and tens of millions more could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis, the United Nations warned on Thursday.
***
Compared with adults, children infected with the coronavirus are less likely to have symptoms and more likely to have a mild illness, U.S. and Chinese studies have found.

But the U.N. report warned that “economic hardship experienced by families as a result of the global economic downturn could result in an hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020, reversing the last 2 to 3 years of progress in reducing infant mortality within a single year.

Poverty kills.

via Power Line

Rebecca West’s Unique Take on Communism & Whittaker Chambers

Writers & Writing

Headline above caught my immediate interest, having read Rebecca West and found her (a) very interesting and (b) thorough.

This subhead, however, reminds me of a common irritation:

West understood more clearly than anyone the allure of Communism for educated Westerners

Anyone else. Please. (She being someone, right?)

via National Review

View original post