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| A quick extra note today asking for your help… we’d like to grow our Hotline list to more key influencers and decision makers who would appreciate our wit and wisdom, and join our mission to get the economy reopen. Can you please take a moment to press the forward button and type in a few names of people who might like to subscribe? We’re including this morning’s Hotline again below so the people you forward to can see it. The subscription link (free of charge!) is: https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/hotline/ Thanks! Steve Moore — Unleash Prosperity Hotline Issue #231) Governors Respond to Our Report Card Within just a few hours of the release of our report card on the governors and the widespread publicity, several governors with poor grades suddenly saw the light. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who received a D, announced retail stores can sell for curbside pickup starting this Friday, non-essential manufacturing can start, and offices can open. Good for him. Is he shooting for a C? Then Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia, who has was one of four governors who got a failing F grade because his policy was to keep the commonwealth locked down until June 10. He announced his lockdown order will now end May 15, almost a full month earlier, when he will allow restaurants, salons, gyms and other “non-essential” businesses to open. Arizona’s Doug Ducey announced yesterday afternoon that retailers and salons will open on Friday and restaurants on Monday – all ahead of schedule. Good for him. Is this all a coincidence – this rash of announcements to accelerate business openings? Who knows, but there is an old saying: “when politicians feel the heat, they see the light.” 2) Some mathematical confirmation that those subways are rolling disease dens Our friend Don Luskin has been looking for a curve that might explain the variations between state death rates for awhile, after finding — consistent with other analyses — that lockdowns had either no correlation at all or actually correlated very slightly with lower deaths. The best fit curve he’s found so far? COVID deaths and mass transit passenger-miles.  You can watch his explainer video here: https://trendmacro.com/videos/more-what-youre-not-hearing-about-bringing-economy-out-lockdown Maybe we should have shut down the New York subways instead of the whole country? 3) So Much for Trusting the Models and the “Science” When the history of the coronavirus is written the failure of models predicting its devastation will loom large. Back in March, a model from London’s Imperial College warned that the coronavirus would kill 500,000 people in the United Kingdom and over 2 million in the United States. It shocked Boris Johnson’s government into ordering a strict lockdown and also influenced the U.S. government to do the same. Johan Giesecke, who until 2014 was Chief Scientist at the European Center For Disease Prevention And Control, says the model was the most influential he’s ever seen and also one of the most deeply flawed. Giesecke has been a proponent of Sweden’s non-lockdown approach. Fraser Nelson, the editor of Britain’s Spectator magazine, reports that the Imperial College model predicted Sweden would pay a heavy price for its different policy, with 40,000 deaths by May 1 and 100,000 by June. As of now, Sweden has suffered only 2,680 deaths and peaked over two weeks ago. Fraser notes: “So Imperial College’s modeling – the same modeling used to inform the United Kingdom’s response – was wrong, by an order of magnitude.” https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-tames-its-r-number-without-lockdown For a great explanation of why the Imperial College model and other similar models were wrong, we recommend this interview with Nobel prize winning biologist Michael Levitt: https://unherd.com/thepost/nobel-prize-winning-scientist-the-covid-19-epidemic-was-never-exponential/ 4) How the Philadelphia Nursing Home Debacle Happened Pennsylvania has 1,646 nursing home COVID deaths, fully two-thirds of its total state death toll of 2,458. Massachusetts has 2,428 (59%) and New Jersey has 4,010 (51%). Older, frailer people are most vulnerable, but you might think that a country committing $2.5 trillion to virus response would have nursing homes on high alert and heavily protected. Tragically the opposite has been occurring. Healthy, low-risk people are being locked up at home while the most vulnerable are being neglected. This horrifying story gives us a clue of how it happened, from Dr. Anish Koka: “As one of the medical caretakers at a nursing home, I thought it was obvious that patients who became infected needed to be rapidly removed from the nursing home… What I found was a local Department Of Health (DOH) that was laser-focused on keeping patients at nursing homes. “Philadelphia hospitals had been emptied waiting for a New York-style surge that never came. But at this point the nursing homes unfortunately had started to see their first infections probably seeded from the nursing home staff. “We looked for help. We asked the DOH to allow us to test everyone at the nursing home in order to effectively cluster everyone with COVID in one unit. They refused because the guidelines didn’t recommend this for those that were asymptomatic. We asked to utilize a large room to cohort patients with COVID. Nursing home administration and the DOH said this wasn’t possible. COVID tests were being sent to the DOH and had a turnaround time of 2-4 days initially. I called the local large health system that had acquired a new rapid, same-day test to see if we could send them tests. No answer. “I spoke to a nice hospitalist at another large health system who was very receptive to the idea of boarding COVID positive patients from the nursing home in the half-empty hospital to avoid the entire nursing home eventually being infected. An email chain followed to get permission from administrative units. Absolutely not was the answer. I was told the more fruitful endeavor was to discuss advance directives with the residents. Did they really want to be resuscitated if they got too sick? And if they didn’t want to be resuscitated did they really want to go to the hospital? “The implicit message: Keep the residents away from the pristine hospital. If they get too sick, hopefully they don’t need to be resuscitated.” https://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2020/05/02/covid-19-physicians-in-shackles/ 5) Too Many Nosy Liberals!A new Scott Rasmussen poll for JustTheNews.com answers the question — who would actually call one of these creepy social distancing snitch lines? Surprise – it’s the liberals! Scott asked 1200 registered voters if they would call the police on a neighbor for having 15 to 20 people in their home. Very conservative respondents said no, 24-to-63. Very liberal respondents said yes 46-28. We say mind your own business.  6) More schools Reopen Los Angeles Unified School District is the second largest in the country, with over 600,000 students. So it’s big news that it has announced plans to reopen on time for the next academic year as evidence mounts that children are rarely sick or infectious – and our sources are confident they mean, normal in-classroom instruction. In addition, an expanded summer school that will help kids catch up will begin online in mid-June. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/lausd-to-start-the-new-school-year-in-mid-august/2356544/ Meanwhile, other nations are opening their schools now. Iceland reopened them on Monday, along with many small businesses. https://www.voanews.com/europe/iceland-prepares-reopen-schools-some-businesses South Korea will start letting seniors return to school on May 13, with other students returning later in the month. https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-05-04/wearing-masks-south-korean-students-to-go-back-to-school And the province of Quebec joins its Francophone peers France and Switzerland with a May 11 school opening (May 18 in Montreal), after the Quebec Association of Pediatricians issued a statement last week saying that “a gradual return to real life for our children is not only welcome, but it is also necessary,” and that “the option of postponing the resumption of school life further is difficult to defend.” https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/gradual-return-to-school-isn-t-just-welcome-it-s-necessary-quebec-pediatricians-association-says-1.4908988 7) Reduce Drug Delivery Time By Reducing Regulation Americans have been shocked to learn how much their country is dependent on China for pharmaceuticals – in the case of some drugs, up to 90%. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy says there is a way to reduce that dependency that even free traders like us can love. Writing in Medium.com, McCarthy says: “[T]he government needs to implement a bold deregulatory agenda that makes it faster and cheaper to build manufacturing plants. Currently, it takes 5 to 7 years to build a plant. … Our national goal should be to bring that to less than 18 months by streamlining permitting and cutting red tape.” https://medium.com/beat-the-virus/breaking-chinas-medical-supply-monopoly-rebuilding-ours-53cd0b9abba1 8) Anti-Hero of the Day Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear infuriated many residents last month when he moved to close down a church’s drive-in religious services. Now a panel of federal judges from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has found that the Maryville Baptist Church is likely to win its legal challenge against the governor and has moved to halt enforcement of his orders. “While the law may take periodic naps during a pandemic, we will not let it sleep through one,” the judges ruled. Although the judges concluded that the governor’s orders were also likely illegal when applied to in-person services, they decided not to enjoin him from enforcing that part of its order. But they warned that his actions “should give pause to anyone who prizes religious freedom.” http://eppc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20-5427-Per-Curiam-Order.pdf 9) Heroes of the Day Maryland Governor Larry Hogan was the worst performing Republican on the Committee To Unleash Prosperity’s new report card. We see that some of his state’s residents not only agree but are taking him to court. A coalition of state legislators, business owners, and religious figures have asked a federal judge to block Hogan’s restrictions on gathering sizes at church services and in certain “nonessential” businesses. The state lawmakers maintain that by keeping churches from meeting, Hogan’s order favors businesses at the expense of churches because stores such as Walmart and Lowe’s “are permitted to have hundreds of cars and people because the Governor chose them to be ‘essential’ businesses.” “However, under the same orders, a church may not have anyone in its buildings with limited exceptions for ‘virtual’ services,” wrote Dels. Daniel Cox, Warren Miller, Neil Parrott, and Robin Grammer Jr. in their filing. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/maryland-legislators-and-church-leaders-sue-gov-larry-hogan-joining-national-trend-of-shutdown-litigation 10) The latest model!  |
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