Our reader and commenter Cogito, a General Practitioner, wrote the following as a comment on our post Boom again? (May 9, 2020).

With his  permission, we feature it here as an article with which we wholly agree.

We don’t know everything about the COVID virus certainly, but we know quite a bit.

We know that the virus can be very dangerous to the elderly and the medically fragile. Indeed the vast majority of deaths are precisely in this group.

We also know that the overwhelming number of people who contract the disease (possibly 99.9%) will survive. We know that most people will have minimal or minor symptoms.

COVID is not and should not be seen as a significant threat to our way of life. It is not the biggest crisis ever faced by Western Civilization. It is not the biggest public health crisis ever faced by Western Civilization.

Yet, it is astonishing that a virus of such low lethality and morbidity could bring the world’s mature market economies to their knees. It makes no sense logically or empirically.

Furthermore, there is no convincing scientific evidence that lock-downs even work. We know this simply by observing and comparing those states such as Sweden and Taiwan, and Japan which did not lock-down or did so only minimally have fared as well or better than those states who locked down tightly.

Another issue about lock-downs that disturbs me is that they run contrary to medical science and history. Quarantines, as far as I can determine, have always been used to isolate the sick. But here, we are isolating healthy symptom-free people. Most unusual.

In addition to these medical observations, I have other concerns social, legal, and political. Lock-downs are proving to be harmful. We are beginning to see (anecdotally for now) more suicides and domestic violence. I witness the growing depression and anxiety in my patients every day.

Then there is the question of civil liberties and overreach by our political masters. Political leaders threatening to follow us on our cell phones, lock-downs which are nothing but a kind of house arrest of citizens who are guilty of nothing, police ticketing people for sitting in parks, “snitch” lines being instituted so neighbors spy on neighbors. Readers of George Orwell would find these measures disturbingly fascistic.

And then, of course, there is the catastrophic economic downturn we are facing now. If Mr. Trump can’t turn this around, we are doomed to a new Dark Age of grinding poverty and misery.

Under (probably gynocratic) communist tyranny.

Pat Condell lays blame for the coronavirus pandemic where it belongs:

The two leaders of the dance of the Democratic Party’s death are Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.

Both are senile, the old woman withering away into her second childhood, the old man already doddering with dementia.

When they open their mouths to make speeches, they stammer and drool.

President Trump has said that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a “sick puppy”. Her sickness is plain to see. She is obsessed by an all-consuming hatred of the President, a fanatical  hatred way beyond the bounds of reason.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness of her “pathological hatred of Donald Trump”.

“Only such an obsession”, he says, can explain her extremely irrational behavior. He cites her highly publicized tour of San Francisco’s crowded Chinatown a month after the President imposed a ban on Chinese citizens entering the country because the coronavirus contagion came from China. To be so reckless as to deliberately set an example of ignoring a pandemic is  “not just politics or hypocrisy—it’s insanity”.

Her insanity cannot excuse her immorality. Not only is she of no help, she obstructs every effort the administration makes to alleviate the actual and potential effects of the disease. Hanson declares: “It is difficult to find one thing Pelosi has said or done that has not made the country worse off since the virus officially hit our shores in late January.”

She is, he says, “puerile”, “unhinged”, “increasingly dangerous”.

Her tearing up of the transcript of the President’s State of the Union speech was a puerile gesture. Presiding over the House of Representatives is an old crone acting like a sulky, defiant kid.

The Democrats’ apparent candidate for the presidency, Joe Biden, is making “botched commentaries” to the nation from his home. “He tried reading from a teleprompter script, and then talking ex tempore, and then both, and found he could do neither.”

May they keep leading the dance right up to the November election!

What became of the first COVID-19 patient, a researcher in a Wuhan laboratory where bats are studied??

An American who has lived in China and reads and writes Chinese, exposes the mystery:

Is the cure for the coronavirus worse than the disease?

This video explores the question intelligently.

Comments?

The admirable Senator John Kennedy discusses on Fox News the House Democrats’ response to the economic crisis brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.

His anger at how the Democrat majority exploited the emergency to serve their own petty interests at the expense of the tax-payer is justified. The Republican minority had to give in to their  absurd demands in order to get the urgently necessary bill enacted into law.

Which is the party of true compassion could not be clearer.

Italians isolated in their apartments because of the coronavirus pandemic find a way to make music together:

Sicily has figured out this whole self-isolation thing.#COVID19 #CoronavirusPandemic pic.twitter.com/93whPVtQcR

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) March 13, 2020

https://twitter.com/i/status/1238523168765218817

https://twitter.com/i/status/1238895639372509184

Writing  about the coronavirus that is killing thousands of people all over the world, Conrad Black says:

China now purports—with what must be acknowledged as majestic (though not simply admirable) aplomb—to be laying out a “silk road” of medical assistance to late-coming sufferer-nations. Of course, these nations are all victims of China’s official lies about the medical dangers it had inadvertently fostered and negligently transmitted. Having inflicted this pestilence on the world, China now claims to be the indispensable world leader in mastering the problem.

But was the virus “inadvertently fostered”? Is it not at least possible that an inhumane power, antagonistic to most of the rest of the world, would foster a biological weapon such as the coronavirus in a laboratory? 

Of course, the Chinese must not be allowed to get away with this colossal rodomontade. The United States must take the lead in repatriating pharmaceutical production from China, demanding the World Health Organization cease to be a shill-and-whitewash operation for the Peoples’ Republic, and render a truthful and objective account of how this virus got started and how it got so completely out of control.

Is it not at least possible that it was deliberately let out of captivity?  Not “negligently transmitted” but malevolently released? 

Sure it killed a lot of the regime’s own subject people, but when was that ever a problem to the regime? To use a popular turn of phrase, it is “not a bug but a feature” of Communism. The Chinese Communist dictatorship has required untold number of infants to be left to die. It kills people in order to harvest their organs for sale. And – Conrad Black points out – it has trampled millions underfoot, “oppressed and traduced” millions, “from the long Civil War (1920s-1949) through the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and the occupation of Tibet”, to its enlarging concentration camps and recent violent suppression of protestors in Hong Kong.

All of which is a matter of “praxis”, the implementation of Communist orthodoxy, which states: it is the collective that matters, not the individual. That is the core, the hub, the nitty-gritty of Communism.

As if the collective can feel pain or fear death! 

The Chinese role must be exposed in effectively assuring the exportation of the coronavirus to the whole world, including through the large concentrations of Chinese workers building the self-important “Belt and Road” with which the Middle Kingdom will assert itself across the Eurasian land-mass, and through its failure to give advisory warnings to international travelers. China deliberately ignored the universally recognized responsibilities of all countries to report outbreaks of communicable diseases promptly and accurately. …

This attempt of the Chinese government, as it blames the United States for this debacle and threatens to be sluggish about the transmission to the United States of medical supplies produced in China by American companies it had induced to invest there, requires a sharp rejoinder.

Where this creates a conundrum for the United States is that although all Chinese comments on the coronavirus have to be somewhat, or even substantially, discounted, China’s partially plausible claim that it has turned the corner and that the virus is now in retreat, is extremely useful in combating the profound panic which is sweeping the United States and the entire Western world. In democratic countries, the media are free to hype any version of events, no matter how terrifying, and the temptation to do so in the United States is aggravated by the possibility presented to the anti-Trump media to hammer the president for incompetence and deception in an election year, and destroy the benefits of his skillful management of the economy.

This is going to require the administration to execute the sophisticated maneuver of exposing China’s duplicity and negligence, while citing the fact that even despite the Beijing regime’s blunders and disinformation, the incidence and impact of the coronavirus are clearly now declining in China.

But is the epidemic declining in China? Should we trust that claim while distrusting others made by the regime – simply because it is useful to us? Or should we pretend to believe it simply because it is useful to us? That seems to be what Conrad Black is advocating:

The remit of the scientists is to end the medical crisis, but the administration has the challenge of imposing total risk-avoidance measures on the susceptible elements of the population (the infirm and elderly), and urging those with minimal chance of serious, much less, mortal illness, to pursue their occupations as best they can …

On the premise of a plausible lie?

These are delicate balances the administration will have to sort out. …

Indeed they are.

I predict that the administration will thread this needle and that the coronavirus crisis will be seen to be receding before the end of May.

That would be good, but it is only wishful thinking. A penchant for substituting words for reality is an oriental characteristic that the global Left has adopted, and is unexpected from a conservative commentator. It is not a useful device. It doesn’t work. Reality goes on accruing its consequences.

We do not know, we cannot know, when this Chinese Communist killer stalking the earth will stop or be stopped.