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The COVID-19 outbreak has made one thing clear: we are a nation that is quickly forgetting how to be free. How many people, in the face of economic panic, have knelt before our elected officials and financial authorities, yearning to be led out of this crisis and made secure in their livelihoods? How many people have taken comfort in the small amount of safety that comes from knowing that millions are not allowed to go to work and support their families, or leave their homes for anything other than what the government deems necessary?

How many have taken comfort in knowing that the police, in complete violation of the fourth amendment, are conducting unwarranted searches for civilians not following quarantine mandates? How many have gained a sense of peace in the idea of forced checkpoints and the governments ability to dictate what companies ought to produce? How many people have taken comfort in their measly share of the $2 trillion stimulus package, which was financed from their own income and savings in the first place? And how many people have marveled at the governments power to indefinitely shut down the economy and bring millions of lives to a halt?

It appears we live in a nation of people who have chosen to dismiss, or are blissfully ignorant of, the wealth of historical evidenceexpertly documented in Robert Higgs's Crisis and Leviathanwhich lays bare the state's tradition of arrogating unwarranted powers during crises and emergencies, powers that never fully recede from its arsenal of economic and political manipulation once the crisis subsides. Higgs described this pattern as the ratchet effect and documented its unfolding throughout critical events of the 20th centurymost notably the Great Depression and both World Wars.

In each crisis, the government assumed incredible powers to manipulate both the economy and the court of public opinion. For example, World War I alone saw the initiation of the War Industries Board, the War Labor Board, the Espionage Act, the Food Administration, the Fuel Administration, the Railroad Administration, and many others. The War Industries Board and War Labor Board, for example, represented one of the most invasive economic planning attempts by our government to date. And the Espionage Act, created to prohibit interference with military operations, military recruitment, and punish enemy support, was also used to silence opponents of the draft and those who exercised their right to speak out against American involvement in the war.

After the war ended, every bureaucratic creation mentioned above was formally scrapped, except for the Espionage Act, which remains on the governments books to this very day. This is but one example of Higgss ratchet effect where not every power assumed by the government during an emergency is fully relinquished after the emergency subsides.

Even today our president has invoked the Defense Production Actestablished during the Korean War in 1950!to force private manufacturers to produce medical equipment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This invocation, along with the slew of social distancing mandates and forced closures of non-essential businesses, constitute part of the ratcheting up of government powers triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Only time will tell how many of these unprecedented powers the government will actually relinquish, but so far it has enjoyed zero pushback on behalf of the public.

Maybe we simply can't conceive of our public servants and their "experts" as being capable of wreaking nationwide political and economic destruction, especially when tasked with the delicate responsibility of keeping 320 million people safe from infection. "This is the United States," we say, "our dear leaders won't let things get that bad!"

But the question of whether or not private citizens are permitted to keep their "non-essential" businesses open, go to work, or attend church isn't even up for debate. We can only hope that the government will continue to permit us to do certain things, and then shrug our shoulders with mumbles of "Well, that's the price we have to pay" as more of our freedoms slowly come under siege. In the meantime, we are to do as our elected officials and their experts have told us, because our unquestioned obedience is necessary to secure our safety.

Many are likely to believe that private citizens are too greedy, irrational, or unpredictable to handle this pandemic on their own; and because of this, we need elected officials and their experts to help us grasp the importance of staying home and socially distancing ourselves to prevent the spread of infection. Others are probably asking the question, "How could any group of private actors possibly devise a more efficient and effective solution for the COVID-19 pandemic than our wise experts in the government?"

Well, in light of the fact that we live in a nation whose private enterprises have solved countless problems to catapult living standards to the highest degree ever attained in all of human history, and have given us just about every modern technological advancement and luxury that we'd go crazy to live without, Id say its possible, wouldnt you?

Sadly, as is the pattern with every national crisis, the fallout of our nation's economic and political decline will be met with cries for more government intervention into an economy whose impending recession only stands to be accelerated by this virus.

No doubt there will also be cries for additional regulation on behalf of the institutions whose laws have hindered the resourcefulness and productivity of the market's response to this crisis.

Perhaps most important will be the neglect of the biggest culprit behind our economy's poor health, the Federal Reserve: the most unaccountable, most influential, and therefore the most dangerous financial institution in the United States. Directed by its presidentially appointed Chairman, the monetary operations of the Federal Reserve stand completely removed from any trace of democratic accountability.

Adding insult to injury, very few people care to understand the deep interconnectedness between the Federal Reserve, the big banks, and the United States Treasury. The Federal Reserve enjoys a totally unbridled monopoly on interest rate manipulation and determination of the money supply.

Fortunately, the Austrian School of economists has correctly focused blame for the Great Depression, the Dot Com crash at the turn of the 21st century, and the housing crisis of 2008 and 2009 on the Federal Reserve and its manipulation of interest rates and generation of abundantly cheap credit.

It was also the Austrian economists who predicted these recessions, giving immense credibility to their teachings on the business cycle, which are more valuable now than ever. Our understanding of the coming recession will be key in determining whether or not more restraints and regulations will creep their way into our everyday lives.

Nevertheless, the Federal Reserve, by continuing to engage in the same type of monetary policy that has weakened our economy leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak, has set the stage for a tremendous recession, a recession that will impoverish far more individuals than have been hurt by our economy's shutdown, and to a much greater extent.

If the pattern holds, we can expect a vast majority of people, when severe recession settles in, to turn to the Federal Reserve and other state officials for economic salvation.

As Larry Reed pointed out, our nation's true test is yet to come. When the crisis is over, we will be able to fully assess, Reed notes, the extent of the measures taken to combat the virus; we will gain a much clearer picture of just how far the government overstepped its supposed bounds.

Until then we should ever be on guard against the governments arrogation of unwarranted powers, especially in light of what history shows the state is capable of doing in times of emergency. Once certain freedoms have been forfeited, that forfeiture will always serve as the precedent for future power grabs.

We have already given up the freedom to work and provide for our families, the right to avoid inspection without the presumption of having committed a crime, the right to go to church, and the right to travel at certain hours and to certain locations without the threat of facing arrest and/or imprisonment. We have allowed the government to determine whose livelihoods are "essential" and whose are "non-essential", and we will sooner look to the government to resolve the fallout of the economic destruction for which it ought to be held responsible.

Excerpt from:
Confronting the Leviathan of the COVID-19 Crisis - Foundation for Economic Education

There are few silver bullets in life, and pandemic control is no exception. But contact tracing may join social distancing, therapeutics, and the eventual vaccine to interdict the coronavirus and mitigate its impacts. There may be privacy-protective ways to do it. The American can-do spirit, our pro-technology outlook, and our fierce belief in rights may make contact tracing part of a balanced and effective pandemic control system. The Apple/Google contact tracing program looks good. Rewarding users of it may make it great.

For a time, the experiences of Singapore and South Korea seemed to make contact tracing the top response to coronavirus. Both were lucky enough early enough to use testing and contact tracing effectively. South Korea had the benefit, such as it is, of a super-spreader who provided something like one-stop shopping for tracing down exposed people. Singapore has seen mixed success over time, as it reported a new record number of cases this week.

The United States had cases pouring in from both Asia and Europe before anyone in a position to do something about them realized the need. And the US was distinctly poor on getting testing underway.

So its probably too late for contact tracing to work in the US as it did in the smaller, faster-acting countries. So said Steve Davies, Head of Education at the Institute for Economic Affairs in a recent Bruno Leoni Institute webinar, which is even more interesting for the broader historical view of pandemics he provides. My AEI colleague Scott Gottlieb was co-author of a paper out last week dismissing app-based contract tracing, saying cell phone-based apps recording proximity events between individuals are unlikely to have adequate discriminating ability or adoption to achieve public health utility, while introducing serious privacy, security, and logistical concerns.

But we do have a can-do, pro-tech attitude around here. Apple and Google have joined together to produce a system that can alert people of exposure to coronavirus in a way that sharply reduces their risk of exposure to general surveillance.

The technical specifications are too inscrutable to translate into English with precision (or for me to calculate privacy consequences down to the last). But the basic idea is that phones would discover each other using Bluetooth and share randomized codes representing the encounter. Such codes would not include information about who held the phone or where the phone was, simply that the two phones met. If the owner of one of the phones received a positive coronavirus diagnosis afterward, he or she could instruct an app on the phone to relay codes from the relevant time period to a server that would in turn share them with all phones in that part of the world. The information would be meaningless to all but the phones that recognized the encoded earlier meeting. Thus, people would be alerted to past contact with someone that was later diagnosed with coronavirus.

On Monday, Axios reported that the system will allowhealth authorities to provide users proof of a diagnosis. Passed along, such proofswouldcontrol whether the broadcast server distributes codes. Thats essential because false alerts could burden the system and bury public confidence.

For a system like this to provide significant benefits, it must see widespread use. A diagnosis confirmationcode could help with that. Let entry of that code and sharing of contact data with the diagnosis server qualify the holder of the phone for a payout (once only) of a few hundred dollars. People would be spurred to use the app by the prospect of a cash bonus at a time when we know they would need it.

Much discussion of contact tracing has turned on whether acute data surveillance for public health purposes squares with the Fourth Amendment. The touchstone, of course, is whether its reasonable to seize and search peoples data to get a certain increment of information about the spread of disease. Thats essentially impossible to know when we know so little about contagiousness, fatality rates, immunity, and so on.

Buying data in the way Ive suggested here would elidethose impossible questions. Or, perhaps it would answer them by gatheringinductively what is a reasonable inducement to share information. In any event,it would provide support for victims of the coronavirus. It turns out there aresilver bullets after all.

Continue reading here:
Fighting the COVID-19 pandemic with Big Tech, apps, and money - American Enterprise Institute

A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that Boston police officers did nothing wrong when they walked through an open door into a boisterous party at East 6th and O streets on St. Patrick's Day in 2013 in response to a noise complaint - and wound up arresting several partygoers after a shoving match broke out.

The decision overturns a lower-court ruling that Boston police officers Harry Jean, Keith Kaplan and Daran Edwards, who initially walked into Christopher Castagna's apartment should not have done so - and means the Castagna and his brother Gavin won't get the settlement ordered by that judge: $1.

At issue was whether three officers - the Castagnas initially sued some 20 officers, but the suits against most were dismissed - should have just walked into Christopher Castagna's apartment without a warrant or his permission after responding to a noise complaint, spotting one seemingly underage lad come outside whirl around and vomit and seeing other apparent pre-21ers through a window. Castagna was not in a position to grant permission since he was, according to the court's summary of the case - in a rear bedroom, drinking and possibly toking up, while his guests grooved to the loud music in the living room, which made it impossible for him to hear the cops shouting "Boston Police!" as they approached and then entered his open apartment door.

In its ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit said that the officers were protected by "qualified immunity" - basically, they were doing their job, and more specifically by a "community caretaking" exception to the Fourth Amendment that lets police take certain actions to safeguard the public even in the absence of the sort of serious crime that is normally required for warrantless searches - in this case, the loud music blaring from the apartment and the apparent presence of several underage drinkers, at least one of them literally sick to his stomach.

According to the court summary of the case, Boston officers arrived at East 6th and O shortly after 7:30 p.m. on March 17, 2013 - roughly 90 minutes after somebody called 911 to complain about a loud party.

By early evening, many of the guests at the Castagnas' party were intoxicated. Different guests estimated that they drank "between [twelve] and [fifteen] beers," eleven to thirteen beers, "ten beers," and "seven or eight beers" that day, respectively. ...

Jean arrived slightly after his fellow officers. He also heard music, saw that the front door was open, and noticed through the window that the people inside were drinking. He, too, believed that some of the guests were underage. As he approached the apartment, Jean "saw a young male come stumbling outside" onto the public sidewalk. Jean testified that the young man "walked around like -- you know, like a circle or half-circle, and then he hurled over, vomiting, and he did that twice. And then he stumbled back into the address that we were looking at."

Kaplan reached the apartment door and yelled "hello" several times and then "Boston Police." No one answered. According to Kaplan, "[w]hen no one answered, we kind of walked in."

At that point, none of the officers were intending to arrest anyone at the party, for underage drinking or any other crime. Kaplan explained that this response was in line with the police department's normal practice for responding to noise complaints: "Typically, we would just knock on the door, try to see who the owners are and tenants and have them turn the music down, shut the doors, keep the windows up and keep everything inside." Indeed, several of the officers did not have their handcuffs on them, which would have been necessary to make an arrest, explaining that they left them behind to lighten their load during a long day walking the parade route.

The officers explained at trial that there were two reasons for entering the home that evening: (1) to respond to the noise complaint by finding the homeowners and having them lower the volume of their music and (2) to make sure that any underage drinkers were safe, including the young-looking man who had vomited outside the home and returned inside.

The guests were in the middle of a dance competition when the police entered through the open door, and they did not immediately respond. Eventually, when they noticed the officers, the guests turned off the music. Kaplan explained that there had been a complaint of underage drinking and asked for the homeowners. There was a lull in which no one answered. Eventually some of the guests told the police that the owner's name was "Chris," but he was not in the room and was "in the back or the bathroom or something to that effect." Jean and another officer went to look for Christopher while the others stayed in the kitchen with most of the guests. ...

The court continued that the officers eventually found the Castagnas in a rear bedroom, that Christopher Castagna opened the door but that when he saw one of the cops eyeing some pot in the room, he tried to slam the door shut, only the officer's foot was right there, preventing him from closing the door all the way.

In the bedroom, Christopher shoved Jean a second time and the conflict between the officers and the party guests escalated. Other officers were called as back-up. Eventually, several of the guests and both brothers were arrested on various charges.

The brothers eventually sued all the cops who responded in federal court, on a variety of charges, including false imprisonment, assault and battery and malicious prosecution - and violation of their Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful entry and their First Amendment rights.

The case came to trial in 2018. The judge declined to tell the jury about the "community caretaking" exception to the Fourth Amendment, but the jury found for the officers under the "exigent circumstances" exception, which is the one normally used for serious criminal activities - that the officers had probable cause to know they had to act immediately to stop something serious.

The Castagnas' attorney filed for a new trial, calling the entry into the apartment and then Christopher Castagna's bedroom "a miscarriage of justice." Instead of a new trial, however, the judge amended the decision to find that the three specific officers were, in fact, guilty of "unlawful entry" because they had neither a warrant nor Christopher Castagna's permission to enter the apartment.

The court awarded the two brothers one dollar in nominal damages from each of the three officers. The court did not disturb any of the other jury verdicts.

The officers then appealed. In its ruling, the appeals court allowed as how there is some ambiguity about community caretaking - in fact, the appeals court did not directly address it until a case after the officers' trial - but not so much that the trial judge, Indira Talwani, shouldn't have told the jury about it:

The officers' entry into the home was in fact constitutional under the community caretaking exception and it was not clearly established at the time of their entry that the community caretaking exception would not give them an immunity defense.

The court continued:

Here, the function being performed by Edwards, Jean, and Kaplan was a community caretaking one. When the officers arrived at the scene, they saw intoxicated guests who appeared to be underage entering and exiting a party freely through an open door. Jean saw a guest that looked underage leave the house, throw up twice outside, and then reenter the apartment. The party was loud enough to be heard from the street. In their efforts to have the music turned down and make sure any underage guests were safe, they were aiding people who were potentially in distress, preventing hazards from materializing, and protecting community safety. ...

The officers acted reasonably. The officers had an implicit invitation to go up on the porch and knock on the apartment's door. See Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. 1, 8 (2013). The officers did not enter the home until announcing themselves and failing to get the guests' attention. They needed to get the attention of the homeowner because he is the person ultimately responsible for the impact of the party on the neighborhood. Because they were responding to a 911 call reporting a noise complaint, the officers knew that people in the neighborhood were disturbed by the party. In addition, underage drinkers pose a safety risk. This is especially true on a holiday known for drinking and one that requires extra police officers to be deployed throughout the city.

Given the open front door, the people coming in and out of that open door at will, the evident lack of supervision by the owner of who entered, and the owner's failure to respond, any expectation of privacy was greatly diminished. It was objectively reasonable for an officer to have on-going concerns about noise complaints and underage drinking and determine that they might be easily resolved by entering through an open door (the same one the guests were coming and going through freely) to bring these complaints to the owner's attention.

Read more here:
Ain't no party like a South Boston St. Patrick's party, cuz it don't stop, no, it don't stop - at least until the cops show up, and sometimes not even...

National Guard Officers work at a checkpoint, amid restrictions on travel due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Westerly, Rhode Island, March 28, 2020. (Oliver Doyle/Reuters)

At a time when everyone in the country needs our leaders thinking the clearest, the governor of Rhode Island has decided to deploy police and the states National Guard for a house-to-house search for transplanted New Yorkers.

With support from the Rhode Island National Guard, local police officers set out on Saturday to identify New York state residents in local neighborhoods and provide face-to-face notification about newly imposed quarantine requirements for visitors from the Empire State.

The operation represented a more residential offshoot of other law enforcement efforts, mostly on the road, that Rhode Island State Police led off on Friday with support from the Guard.

They encountered people in authoritative attire, either police blues or camouflage fatigues, who notified them of a requirement for New Yorkers to immediately go into quarantine for 14 days on arrival in the Ocean State.

In Westerly, no one was arrested or cited. But the historic spectacle of authorities pursuing non-Rhode Islanders, who are now subject to special rules, highlighted the challenges Rhode Islands public health leaders face in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic.

In Westerly,six teams went driveway to driveway as Westerly police Chief Shawn Lacey put it, to identify cars, SUVs and trucks with New York license plates.

Then the duos, one police officer and one National Guard member, approached whoever was living in the house.

For those wondering if this violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, the National Guard can be used to assist state and local law enforcement, if invited by the states governor. Air Force general Joseph Lengyel said earlier this month that was one reason the president should not federalize the National Guard in response to this crisis; once nationalized, the National Guard cannot assume any role in assisting state and local law enforcement.

Im trying to think of a decision that would do more to stir public panic than members of the military going door-to-door with police and checking the legal residency of those inside. Theres plenty of precedent for using the National Guard in emergencies, but even in the worst of circumstances, National Guard leaders understand the importance of not creating the impression that the area is under martial law and all traditional protections under the law have been suspended:

In one now-famous scene during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who was in charge of the Defense Departments response to the catastrophe, shouted at troops to lower their guns.

Put those **** weapons down! he shouted, waving one arm for emphasis. Im not going to tell you again, ******* it! Get those ******* weapons down!

The presence of armed guardsmen can spook locals into thinking that they are under martial law, which means that the military assumes police powers because local courts and authorities arent functioning.

In the face of criticism from the ACLU and New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo chose to implement a new orderrequiring anyone entering the state from anywhere else to quarantine for 14 days, making exceptions only for public-health, public-safety, or health-care workers.

There are a lot of things that the Rhode Island National Guard could do to help in this crisis. Going door-to-door looking for non-state residents is not one of them.

Rhode Island is the smallest state in the union; some of the cars on the highways are no doubt traveling from Connecticut to Massachusetts and vice versa or from other states. The Fourth Amendment would probably prohibit police from stopping any car with out-of-state plates simply for that reason.

Our liberal friends have warned the world about the barely repressed fascist impulses of conservatives and Republicans for a long time. What would they think if a Republican governor were deploying the National Guard door-to-door demanding to know what states people were from?

Read the original:
Rhode Islands Governor Sends the National Guard Out in a Door-to-Door Search for New Yorkers - National Review

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

Spring hills, dark contraries:a glade in a fall valley,its one flower steeped with sun.

From Sixty, by Philip Booth (1925-2007)

Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be like the reality of yesterday an illusion tomorrow.

-- Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), Italian writer, best known for his plays

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

-- Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of life in Paris in the 1920s. Its slightly weird to me, by the way, that it will soon be misleading now to refer to The Twenties, Roaring or otherwise, now that were in the, what? Viral Twenties?

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Vacant Waterplace Park

The current emergency may be making far more people aware of early-spring Nature because far more are walking around outside to battle claustrophobia and to get exercise, partly because most gyms have been closed. But its not a very social experience, as, for example, people tend to keep on the other side of the street from fellow walkers. Still, at least theyre looking at the flowers and trees more than they might have in a normal spring.

Ive been thinking that this would be a good time to head up to New Hampshire and Vermont, get a room at a Motel 6 and check out maple-syrup-making operations for a few days. Yeah, COVID-19 will be circulating up there too but the scenery is therapeutic.

An old friend of ours who lives in Florida part of the year has several dozen acres of field and woods in the Clayville section of Scituate, R.I. She only half-jokingly suggested that shed move full time back to Clayville and live off the land, as people there (mostly) did 250 years ago. It wasnt that long ago, historically speaking, that many of our ancestors lived on farms. My maternal grandfathers family had a couple of farms in Upstate New York, and even some of my New England ancestors in the great-grandparent generation had working farms in Massachusetts. Those who didnt might have had a couple of cows and some chickens.

Newspapers Shrinking to Death

With many newspapers shrinking unto death, all they seem to have room for is COVID-19 stuff; there are many other important things happening around the world that arent being reported. As the late Bill Kreger, a news editor to whom I reported at The Wall Street Journal once observed: Sometimes the most important story starts out at the bottom of Page 37. What might we be missing?

Well, The Boston Guardian reports that property and violent crime is down in its circulation area this year. But maybe thats a virus-related story? As newly unemployed people run out of money will property crimes increase?

Then theres an inspiring little item from the March 24 Wall Street Journal: Voters in Mexican border city of Mexicali have admirably told the U.S. company Constellation Brands not to complete a $1.4 billion brewery there because the facility would take so much water that it could jeopardize the irrigation-dependent agriculture in the region.

In other heartening, if mostly symbolic, news, the U.S. has indicted Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and some sidekicks for drug trafficking and is offering $15 million to those who aid his capture. Dont expect Maduro to appear any time soon in a federal court, but the move is apt to make him nervous.

And theres the important unhappy news that the worlds greatest coral reef, Australias Great Barrier Reef, had just suffered another mass bleaching caused by global warming, whose associated increase in carbon dioxide makes sea water more acidic. For more information, please hit this link:

More virus-free stuff below!

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Gotham Greens

With some medical-supply chains from China and now India broken, the idea of reducing our dependence on some Chinese imports, as Trump and many others have proposed, is quite right. But domestic supply chains can be compromised, too, by pandemics. That includes food. Thus the more food we can grow and ship regionally the better e.g., via the huge Gotham Greens greenhouse in Providence.

xxx

My heroes! A fine bookstore open near our house has remained open, God bless em, with proper space precautions inside. It offers some mental trips into brighter days.

xxx

Much has been made of the dangers of living in cities in times of epidemics because of the density. Quite a few people, mostly rich folks, have, for example, left New York in the past couple of weeks to shelter in place in rural and/or summer resort places angering many of the locals. But too little has been made of cities advantages during such times.

The biggest is having lots of hospitals and other health-care facilities, and thus lots of health-care professionals, of which there are obviously far fewer in exurban and rural areas. Indeed, many rural hospitals have been closed in recent years. (So have some urban hospitals, such as Pawtuckets Memorial Hospital. Can and should Memorial be reopened? Its closure has put intense pressure on nearby Miriam Hospital.) The fragmented, inefficient and astronomically expensive U.S. health-care system is a mess. The failure to have adequate testing systems and equipment in place to address the current crisis is yet another symptom of how disordered it is.

The failure to have enough testing kits, and protective gear for health-care professionals, has resulted in a huge undercount in the number of people with COVID-19. So many of us have it now, but have no, or mild, symptoms. The development of extensive herd immunity through mass exposure, is probably well underway. The surge in reported cases probably mostly just reflects belated testing. Speaking of reported cases, dont believe numbers from China (or Russia).

Ironically, as my friend insurance executive Josh Fitzhugh noted: New York City may be one of the first places that could reopen for business because most residents will have been infected and either recovered or unfortunately passed away.

In any event, with our health-care systems inadequacies, we must focus even more on the most vulnerable populations the immuno-compromised and the elderly and limit our ambitions regarding the wider population. Eventually, herd immunity will bring the pandemic to heel, although there will be, as with flu epidemics, recurrent waves of sickness. But a vaccine, and better treatments, will probably be available within a year or so to stop or at least mitigate such epidemics. Be it by Easter, as per Trump, or later, when social-distancing rules are to be loosened, they should be eased gradually, not all at once, so that the sudden resulting increases in real or suspected cases dont further overwhelm health-care personnel and institutions.

Throughout the crisis, the core emphasis should be on tracking cases by testing so that medical resources can be most effectively geographically deployed and the most at-risk populations isolated. Then whack-a-mole, maybe for years.

Meanwhile, watch this extended interview by an old friend at The Press and the Public Project with Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford University. Dr. Ioannidis cautions that we do not have reliable data to make long-term decisions about COVID-19, and that an extended lockdown could have far graver effects than the disease itself.

Dr. Ioannidis is C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention, Professor of Medicine, of Health and Research Policy, of Biomedical Data Science, and of Statistics, and is the Co-Director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford.

By the way, some major work on researching COVID-19 to develop a vaccine is being done at Boston Universitys National Emerging Infectious Diseases Institute in Bostons South End and elsewhere in Greater Boston. Yes, its supposed to be a very secure location though it unsettles some of the neighbors. To read more, please hit this link:

Recession Was Coming Anyway

After a few more weeks of severe social controls, we must start opening up the economy again to have the resources to address the longer-term public-health, economic and social effects of the virus. When a country has a market economy, it has few alternatives to doing so. That said, COVID-19, even without the social controls now in place, would have accelerated a run into a recession already made inevitable by the business cycle turned toxic by burgeoning corporate and public debt and runaway speculation in the financial markets, fueled by politically driven Federal Reserve Board policy. (And if you thought public debt was bad before.)

People calling in sick with the virus, and an increase in death rates, would be hitting the economy now anyway even without states and localities severe social-distancing orders.

Then there are aging populations, ever-widening economic inequality, trade wars, and, perhaps, the growing economic effects of global warming. How unfair all this is to the young adults hammered by the Great Recession (also caused by runaway speculation fueled by deregulation) of 2008-09, with painful lingering effects for years after! But they plug on.

As to where this pandemic is going public-health-wise, economy-wise or politics-wise: A hearty Who knows! But I do think that New Englanders, with a tendency to follow the facts, to be more skeptical than other Americans and with stronger health-care systems and institutions, will do better than in most of the United States. As our flinty second president, Massachusettss John Adams, famously noted:

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

xxx

Trump has grossly exaggerated his actions in the early days of the virus crisis, which he downplayed for weeks. His only early action against the virus came on Jan. 31, when he blocked most foreigners who had recently visited China from entering the United States. Good! But his order didnt apply to Americans who had been traveling in China.

See Here

Hes also lately bragged again that he patriotically doesnt take the $450,000 presidential salary even as he sends millions in taxpayer dollars to his resorts, clubs and other facilities of the Trump OrganizationAnd so it goes: a nonstop smoke machine.

And the Electoral College may well keep him in office. Demagogues, who prosper by appealing to many citizens fear and wishful thinking, and know how to use their lack of interest in important, if boring, facts, can do very well in crises. Thats especially if they have developed superb skills of mass-media manipulation, and especially of television. (It also helps to have a foreign dictator helping out.) Biden looks like a weak candidate, at this point.

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Governor Gina Raimondo

This goes too far: Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo said Thursday she plans to give State Police the power to stop any car with New York license plates in order to obtain contact information from the driver and passengers as part of her COVID-19 quarantine program.

Sounds brazenly unconstitutional to me! As the ACLU noted:

While the governor may have the power to suspend some state laws and regulations to address this medical emergency, she cannot suspend the {U.S.} Constitution. Under the Fourth Amendment, having a New York state license plate simply does not, and cannot, constitute probable cause to allow police to stop a car and interrogate the driver, no matter how laudable the goal of the stop may be.

I think that Governor Raimondo, except for the excess above, and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker have done fine jobs overseeing their states response to the virus: They are calm, articulate, data-savvy and very well-informed. What a difference from Trumps fantastical campaign-rally-style briefings. More Deep State experts, please, and less noise from our Duke of Deception. (Still, Ill miss the daily spectacles, if they ever end, especially Mike Pences impersonation of a butler -- or is it Stepinfechit? -- and Dr. Anthony Fauci with arms crossed and looking at the floor as the carnival-barker-in-chief unloads yet another whopper for his adoring Red State audience to consume whole.

Hit this link to see how one media outlet is responding to Trumps briefings.

Just Obsess on the Asteroid

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Whitcomb: Cities vs. Countryside in COVID-19 Crisis; Baker, Raimondo Handling It Well - GoLocalProv