Remember the song “Send in the Clowns” written by Stephen Sondheim for the 1973 musical A Little Night Music? Numerous artists sang the song e.g., Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, and Judy Collins to name only a few. I personally liked old Blues Eyes’ version.
Anyway, a retired Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant who taught me how to spell recruiting forwarded the following to me from one of his friends. I loved it it so much I thought I’d share it with you.
Outdated due to being “post-election”, but still on-point with accomplishments that are grossly under-appreciated. Never did plan to invite him over for brunch, but always did plan to live in a better USA, which we had the last 4 years. Didn’t vote for the personality, just the sound policies of a successful president.
Hey, anyone starting a pool as to the date Biden steps down, for the pre-planned entrance of Kamala into the white house? A charade I fully expect will take place in the next 4 years as sleepy-Joe isn’t remotely qualified or physically able for the job. I’ll bet he does not last a year before the Ho replaces Joe
Subject:Fwd: The Resume of a Clown
The clown in the White House just brokered four Middle East Peace Accords, something that 71 years of political intervention and endless war failed to produce.
The buffoon in the White House is the first president that has not engaged us in a foreign war since Eisenhower.
The clown in the White House has had the greatest impact on the economy, bringing jobs, and lowering unemployment to the Black and Latino population of ANY other president. Ever.
The buffoon in the White House has exposed the deep, widespread, and long-standing corruption in the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the Republican and Democratic parties.
The buffoon in the White House turned NATO around and had them start paying their dues.
The clown in the White House neutralized the North Koreans, stopped them from developing a further nuclear capability, sending missiles toward Japan, and threatening the West Coast of the US.
The clown in the White House turned our relationship with the Chinese around, brought hundreds of businesses back to the US, and revived the economy. Hello!
The clown in the White House has accomplished the appointing of three Supreme Court Justices and close to 300 Federal Judges.
This same clown in the White House lowered your taxes, increased the standard deduction on your IRS return from $12,500 for Married Filing Joint to $24,400, and caused your stock market to move to record levels over 100 times, positively impacting the retirements of tens of millions of citizens.
The clown in the White House fast-tracked the development of a COVID Vaccine – it will be available within weeks – we still don’t have a vaccine for SARS, Bird Flu, Ebola, or a host of diseases that arose during previous administrations.
The clown in the White House rebuilt our military, which the Obama administration had crippled, and had fired 214 key generals and admirals in his first year of office.
This clown in the White House uncovered widespread pedophilia in the government and in Hollywood, and is exposing world wide sex trafficking of minors and bringing children home to their families.
The clown in the White House works for free, and has lost well over 2 billion dollars of his own money in serving – and done all of this and much more in the face of relentless undermining and opposition from people who are threatened, because they know they are going to be exposed as the criminals that they are if he is re-elected.
I got it, you don’t like him. Many of you utterly hate and despise him. How special of you. He is serving you, and ALL the American people. What are you doing, besides calling him names and laughing about him catching the China virus?
And please educate me again as to what Biden has accomplished for America in his 47 years in office?
I’ll take a “clown” any day, versus a fork tongued, smooth talking hypocritical, corrupt liar. Please let it be known, I am not sure I would want to have a beer with him (if he drank, which he doesn’t), or even be his friend. I don’t care if I even like him. I want a strong leader who isn’t afraid to kick some ass when needed. I don’t need a fatherly figure – I already have one. I don’t need a liar – that’s what Hollywood and CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS and the New York Times are there for.
I don’t need someone to help me, but I also don’t want an obstacle or a demented, senile washed-up Swamp Monster.
God bless Donald Trump – the most unappreciated President in history. And, in the immortal words of Yosemite Sam, “Forget Hell.”
Pass this on if you agree.
Besides President Donald J Trump, who do you think was the last Clown? I’ll vote for Ronald Reagan.
Yes, PLEASE “Send in the Clowns”! The more the merrier.
Please allow me to take this moment to say that I sincerely hope all my blessed followers had a wonderfully merry Christmas regardless what your local dictators may have said. Mine said have a joyous Christmas with your families and friends, but then I consider myself fortunate by choice to have a sensible, for the people, Governor. My bride and I go to church every Sunday and then to a late breakfast at one of our favorite restaurants. Life is good in Florida.
I will wish you a very happy new year if you can. I will not have a happy one as best as I can see into the near future. Our MSM wants you to believe 2020 was the worst ever. Well, don’t chalk it up to record books just yet for 2021 may prove to be a close competitor.
Here another thought provoking article from one of my favorite authors.
By: G. Maresca
American religiosity has been in decline for more than a generation and with the added fear of COVID-19, many Christian leaders have deserted their flocks.
Welcome to Christmas 2020, where the biggest crisis is not a virus but a lack of faith.
Church leaders have conceded to government diktats in this era of COVID-19 in a doleful attempt to brand themselves as benevolent.
The Constitutional right to freely worship, virus or not, was underscored with the recent Supreme Court ruling prohibiting arbitrary limits on church attendance. Despite the court’s 5-4 decision, religious liberty has never been in more need of defense, especially when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo dismissed the ruling as “irrelevant” and “political.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom had imposed a 10 p.m. curfew, which would have made attending Christmas midnight Mass, a criminal offense. Perhaps Newsom would find Mass more acceptable if it were celebrated in the French Laundry restaurant – site of his crowded birthday party? This is another example of directives made by the faithless affecting the faithful in the ongoing leftist agenda to secularize America.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen would be appalled how the church hierarchy has acquiesced to the state. The state prohibits Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, yet liquor stores remain open. Churches should have had the same rights as beer distributors, pot smokers and abortion clinics – all deemed essential.
Mandatory masking, overflowing hand sanitizer, and social distancing are in vogue in houses of worship, but what is missing are the children. Churches will not survive without them. Few in the pews are under age 50. Sign-up sheets, roped off pews, and parking lot services did little to bring anyone back, let alone evangelize.
Limiting, or worse, cutting off sacramental grace from Christ’s mercy has only deepened the divide. The science supporting lockdowns has failed to stop the spread, and may prove deadlier than the virus it was meant to heed.
If anything, COVID-19 underscores daily that no human endeavor can prevent our eventual death from any cause.
Any government that has the authority to restrict your livelihood, family gatherings, and houses of worship is worse than any virus. The alternative is subservience, empty pews, and lost souls.
The COVID-19 generation may never come back. The unrelenting attack on Christianity will never cease until the faithful stop kowtowing to tyrants. Science isn’t going to save you and it is no coincidence Democrats are leading the charge. What do you expect from a political party that has forced religious sisters to provide for contraception? The left knows all too well that faith can be exorcised by breaking one’s spirit and will.
Too many politicos claiming to be Christian believe Jesus Christ came to put a chicken in every pot rather than to feed souls and offer salvation. As long as a portion of a bishop’s budget is generated from government service contracts, towing the party line will be its low-hanging fruit.
Where are the bishops’ supernatural faith?
Where are today’s St. Thomas Mores, and St. Joan of Arc’s, or Fulton Sheens?
Prophetic voices must emanate among the bishops to speak truth to this abuse of government power. As suicides and other mental health issues increase, we need more prayer, not less. The secularist, dictatorial governors and mayors and designated so-called experts seeking to oppress worship reveal their contradictory priorities, daily.
Christmas is not the time to take counsel of your fears, but recall the hope that only a sincere faith provides. Has there been a year in living memory when the Christmas promise is in such demand? The reason for the season is here, and never leaves. Jesus was born during one of the darkest periods in human history as the Roman Empire begot moral depravity on an unparalleled scale. Our Lord did so by entering the world in the humblest of ways to show He will go anywhere when invited.
In a remarkable sign, Jupiter and Saturn crossed paths this past week appearing as one body in the night sky. They were closer than they have been in nearly eight centuries and was labeled the “Christmas Star.”
Many need to heed the message the angels announced that first Christmas: Fear not!
The child whose birth we celebrate is Emmanuel, “God with Us.”
I know, just another M.D. giving an opinion. However, his opinion seems to me to have a little more information that any the other bone crushers I read. Does he make sense to you, or is it just me being fed up with all the BS from the MSM? Everyone is playing games with this pandemic, riots, allegations, name calling, etc. SICK of it ——- PERIOD!
COVID cases are on the rise, or so we are told daily by a hysterical media. Newspaper headlines scream panic as this recent USAToday article proclaimed, “COVID-19 cases rising in 39 states – 9 months into the pandemic: We are overwhelmed.”
It’s the American people that are overwhelmed. Nine months into masks and lockdowns, with a presidential election just weeks away, facing a daily barrage of doom and gloom from the media. Are cases really on the rise or are these simply positive tests?
The above article, one of many warns, “A startling nine states setting ominous, seven-day records for infections.” 39 states reported more cases in the last week than they had in the week before.
What exactly is a “case”? The USAToday article doesn’t say. Neither do other articles or cable news doctors and other “experts.” Is a “case” simply a positive test?
The CDC answers this question with a “case definition.” A case is not just a positive test. Instead what is needed is, “Presumptive laboratory evidence AND either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence.” Notice the AND, meaning not simply a positive test.
Yet what the media trumpets as “surging cases” are only positive tests. There is no discussion of whether or not any of the individuals with positive tests are showing symptoms or are actually sick with the Chinese flu. Or if they are contagious and needing to be quarantined.
As an analogy, suppose we routinely checked peoples’ blood sugar or blood pressure and called any single high reading as diabetes or hypertension. Imagine testing everyone’s blood sugar after lunch, when it naturally rises, and calling anyone with a reading over 140 a diabetic. We would have a surge in diabetes, yet the vast majority of these individuals are not actually diabetic.
The COVID PCR test is quite sensitive, amplifying any viral particles found in the nose, whether dead or alive, repeatedly until the test is positive. Most of these positive “cases” are neither contagious or symptomatic, as even the New York Times acknowledged.
The more people we test, the more positive tests will result. Nancy Pelosi called for “testing, testing, testing” and that is exactly what we now have. The U.S. is currently performing over a million tests per day, with just under 5 percent coming back positive.
The U.S. is performing 2.87 daily tests per thousand people, far more than most countries. For comparison, Canada is a third lower at 2.09 tests per thousand, France 1.9, Germany 1.87, Australia 1.21, and India 0.82.
More tests mean more positive results, but not necessarily cases of COVID. For example, the U.S. performing 2.87 tests per thousand people compared with Mexico performing 0.08 tests per thousand will yield dramatically different results, showing the U.S. “surging” in cases as the media describes.
This then fuels the false narrative that the U.S. has so many cases of COVID due to the orange man’s ineptitude rather than the orange man ramping up testing, as everyone called for, to a level unmatched by any major country.
Hospitalizations, a measure of disease severity, have been steadily declining since March, with a small bump in mid-summer. They’ve gone from a high of over 3,000 hospitalizations per week last spring, to less than 700 per week now, according to the CDC.
Fears of a surge early last spring lead to only the sickest patients being admitted to the hospital at that time. There are no such concerns now and those hospitalized presently are not as sick, receiving hospital care much earlier in their illness. President Trump’s recent hospitalization with only mild symptoms is an example.
Yet these so-called case surges, in actuality only positive tests, are driving societal policy decisions. New York City is shutting down nine neighborhoods based on a positive test rate of over 3 percent for seven straight days. Yet the country as a whole has a higher test positive rate of 4.9 percent currently.
There is no mention of how many New Yorkers are actually sick or hospitalized, simply positive tests as New York is following Nancy Pelosi’s recommendation of “testing, testing, testing.” In fact, back in July, New York had likely achieved herd immunity based on getting hit hard early in the course of the pandemic. Yet for inexplicable reasons New York is closing down again.
In my state of Colorado, Governor Jared Polis extended the mask mandate for another 30 days due to “a rise in hospitalizations” for the Chinese virus. This extension conveniently goes just past the election.
As Coloradans have been wearing masks for months, it begs the question of whether masks are doing anything if hospitalizations are increasing. Unknown is whether patients are being hospitalized earlier in the disease course given excess hospital capacity compared to last spring.
Colorado reports only a third of critical care ventilators in use, hardly a shortage, and unknown how many of those ventilators are for COVID patients versus the myriad of other conditions requiring ventilator support.
Many schools and businesses remain closed based on positive test numbers. The personal and societal costs mount as many states and cities prefer to keep draconian shut down orders in place long after they have served their purpose of “flattening the curve”.
How many cancer screenings, vaccinations, and other preventative care measures has been delayed over lockdowns, with consequences of undetected disease becoming manifest in years ahead?
Death counts were the metric of choice last April, a constant ticker on cable news shows. Now it’s cases, with no context between positive tests and actual cases. Democrats then blame Trump for not having a “national plan” allowing the virus to remain “out of control.”
The only plan is to make Americans miserable ahead of the election, hoping that voters choose a new leader, one whose COVID plan is virtually identical to the existing president’s plan.
What’s shameful is that the media, ignorant or uninterested in the facts, deliberately presents a false equivalence between positive tests and cases, all to push a gloom and doom narrative to influence the upcoming election.
President Trump was right when he said, after returning from Walter Reed to the White House, “Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it.” “We’re going back, we’re going back to work. We’re going to be out front. … Don’t let it dominate your lives. Get out there, be careful.”
Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Parler, and QuodVerum.
My answer to the Doctor’s question is an emphatic YES!!!! Anything to keep this this going until after 3 November, Grrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Folks, I am really tired , fed up, disgusted, ravaged, and fearful of what is going on in our once great Nation. If you are still not a believer of what is about to happen on 3 November, you are wasting your time on my blog. I cannot believe in my own mind what is about to happen. The evidence is their all one must do is research the facts and GET READY. I AM CONVINCED beyond any shadow of doubt that we are in for hell.
Every American, Dem and GOP must understand the current Democratic party is not the party of JFK, LBJ, and Jimmy Carter. I personally believe all three of them would denounce the current party and its goals. So it is wrong to even refer to today’s party as The Democratic Party. They are Marxists . . . . period!
Read , learn, and comment if you agree or disagree with any6thing said herein
Retired CIA officer sends dire warning to America: The Left’s Marxist revolution isn’t concerned about who wins the November election
While most Americans continue to struggle against shutdown Democrats who continue to keep portions of their state’s economies shut down months after telling their citizens they just needed a few weeks to ‘bend the curve’ of the COVID pandemic, they are oblivious to what’s coming in just a few short weeks.
Many of these same Americans have seen the rioting, the looting, the attacks against our police, the continued assaults against Trump supporters, and the endless violence that has torn the soul out of many of our cities.
They don’t like what they’re seeing. But they don’t really understand what they’re seeing: The beginning of a revolution that will proceed regardless of who wins the November election.
Translated, that means if you’re someone who thinks we’ve got to put Democrats and Joe Biden in office in order to ‘get the rioting to stop,’ think again.
Retired CIA officer Sam Faddis, who spent decades undercover working in the Middle East and South Asia — and who has seen such revolutions unfold — writes in a column published by Revolver News that what’s happening across our country is nothing new. It’s a script that’s been used over and over again by Marxists, Leninists and Communists to gain power since the violent creation of the Soviet Union in the ashes of World War I.
And what’s more, many of the anarchist “foot soldiers” — the Antifa and Black Lives Matter types who think they really are fighting ‘fascism’ and believe they’ll wind up with a ‘more fair and equitable world’ if the win — will realize too late they were patsies.
“They discovered far too late that at the heart of the movement in which they were caught up were hard men with very different ideas about the future,” Faddis writes, adding: “We cannot afford to repeat this naivety.” (Related: Nancy Pelosi declares all Republicans to be “domestic enemies of the state.”)
He explains:
We are not experiencing a wave of social unrest generated by injustice or police brutality. We are watching an insurrection in progress, one which uses police violence as a pretext, but which has as its goal the destruction of the existing social, economic and political order in the United States.
Refuse Fascism is one of the primary umbrella organizations supporting Antifa demonstrations nationwide. Refuse Fascism is a creation of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States.If you watch footage of the chaos in our streets, you will quickly see signs linked to both groups.
Faddis notes that the leader of the so-called RevComs is Bob Avakian, a lifelong Commie who, along with other hard-Left groups, formed “Refuse Fascism” in 2016. The CIA vet says Avakian has been open about his objectives.
“Let’s get down to basics. We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is just bulls**t,” he recently said.
Understand, then, that Avakian and those like him who are leading and funding (yes, George Soros is involved, but so, too, are other billionaires like Tom Steyer and former Fox News child James Murdoch) do not want “peaceful protests” to rule the day. They want to overthrow our founding system of capitalism and small ‘r’ republicanism, which means replacing our Constitution with something more akin to Cuba or, at best, China.
“The New Socialist Republic in North America is…a form of dictatorship – the dictatorship of the proletariat,” says the RevCom website.
Get it now?
“The groups sponsoring the 2020 rioters are hostile to the United States of America as it currently exists. They have long since made common cause with some of our most dangerous enemies. Now, what they want is not reform. Phrases like ‘Black Lives Matter’ are a deliberate obfuscation, a time-honored tactic of radical left groups, used to make themselves and their goals seem less threatening,” Faddis warns.
He says if President Trump wins, his victory will be declared illegitimate and the mob will continue its assault on our institutions and our security and freedom. If Joe Biden wins, they will look at him as their puppet and accelerate the revolution; if he refuses to go along, he will be discarded as well.
“This is not about reform. It is about revolution, and revolutions don’t care about elections,” Faddis concludes.
The doctors make a good case for opening America sooner better than later, but are they right? I wonder what the docs on the task force think of of this? If I was waiting for a life saving operation right now, I would be concerned. Would you?
The curve of new infections is declining and we do not need to wait for additional testing or a surveillance apparatus to be in place to reopen America.
In response to warnings that millions of Americans could die and the carnage COVID-19 created in Italy, state and local governments instituted drastic social distancing in America. In the meantime, the epidemiological curve in the US has followed the trend seen in Europe and is well past its peak.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model estimates that the peak of deaths in the U.S. occurred on April 13, 2020. This would seem to indicate the time to loosen social distancing and allow a return-to-work has arrived.
Despite this new information, several public health officials have said that May 1 may be too soon to reopen. They claim that we don’t know enough about the virus, and it won’t be safe to reopen America until we have improved testing and surveillance.
Original Goal: Prevent Healthcare System Saturation
The healthcare system is not overwhelmed, it is underwhelmed and being damaged.
The purpose of “Flatten the Curve” was to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed with patients suffering from COVID-19. The reality is that the healthcare system is now underwhelmed and healthcare workers are being laid off and furloughed in droves as a result of healthcare centers having neglected patient care not related to COVID-19 in fear of a COVID-19 surge that failed to materialize on a nationwide basis. This means tens of millions of patients are failing to receive the medical care they need in a timely manner. Almost every hospital outside of the hot spots is empty.
The dramatic reduction in healthcare utilization and capacity is by no means limited to small, country hospitals. Mayo Clinic is empty: 65% of the hospital beds at Mayo Clinic are empty, as are 75% of the operating rooms. This is the world’s premier medical center. If Mayo Clinic is empty, imagine how dire the situation is at smaller, community-based healthcare centers. Given the complexity of the patients referred to Mayo Clinic, its emptiness alone will have a significant negative impact on healthcare outcomes.
Healthcare under utilization leads not only to patient care being delayed, which will likely result in deaths from delayed cancer diagnoses; it also leads to the loss of countless jobs in the healthcare industry, many of which will never return. Even if the patients that are not being seen at this time are seen several months in the future, many will still suffer negative health outcomes. In Medicine, timing is of the essence and diagnosing and treating a patient today is more beneficial than diagnosing and treating the same patient for the same condition in the future.
If the goal of the shutdown was to flatten the curve and prevent healthcare system utilization, why are we still under a shutdown when the healthcare system is significantly underutilized and tens of thousands of healthcare workers are being terminated or furloughed? Why are we still denying non-COVID-19 patients the care they need when hospitals are sitting idle and laying off staff in droves? The only surge we’ve seen thus far is with respect to initial weekly jobless claims; tragically, there’s a good chance we will see a surge in suicides later this year as well.
Original Goal: Determine the true mortality
The evidence that the true mortality is much lower than early estimates continues to mount.
In order to calculate the true risk of dying of COVID-19, we have to separate case fatality rate (CFR) from infection fatality rate (IFR). Case fatality rate is the chance someone will die after testing positive for a disease. In many studies, the case fatality rate has fallen from 3–4% to around 1%. However, the CFR is not what we think of intuitively as the true mortality of the disease. The true mortality rate, or infection fatality rate (IFR), is the proportion of those who died of the disease among those who were infected, whether or not they were tested.
New data supports the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is much more widespread than previously believed. Researchers have tried an indirect approach to approximate the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 by comparing the incidence of excess influenza-like infections that are correlated to areas of COVID-19 infection. “This corresponds to at least 28 million presumed symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 patients across the U.S. during the three weeks from March 8 to March 28.” They go on to note, “[T]hese results suggest a conceptual model for the COVID-19 epidemic in the U.S. in which rapid spread across the U.S. is combined with a large population of infected patients with presumably mild-to-moderate clinical symptoms.” This is a dramatic change from earlier projections and drops the projected IFR down to around 0.1% — or basically the same as this year’s flu.
Now, I know many people will say, “But look at New York. Look at how the hospitals were full and we almost ran out of ICU beds and ventilators. COVID-19 is nothing like the flu.” To these objections I must point out that COVID-19 kills people through a prolonged process that generally keeps people in an ICU on a ventilator for two weeks before they die. Most people who die of the flu have a much faster disease process.
A new study in The New England Journal of Medicine supports the claim that COVID-19 is much more common and mild than first believed. Researchers from Columbia University in Manhattan tested every woman who presented in labor for COVID-19 from March 22 until April 4. Fifteen percent of the women tested positive for COVID-19, but, of these, eighty eight percent were totally asymptomatic. Also interesting, none of the women who tested positive were even sick enough to seek COVID-19 care; they simply came to the hospital to have a baby.
Eighty-eight percent of positive women were asymptomatic
Given the age of child-bearing women, these results provide further evidence of COVID-19’s generally mild course in young people with limited co-morbidities.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt has been in the news for an outbreak aboard the ship. The US Navy is testing every sailor on board. Of the 4,800 sailors, 600 tested positive and 60 percent of those were entirely asymptomatic. Much like the diamond princess, as time passes the fates of those onboard should give us a much better knowledge of the true risk of hospitalization, intensive care and death from the disease. However, unlike the Diamond Princess, this is a much younger group.
Edit:4/18/20: The first prevalence antibody study from Stanford was released on 4/17/20. After sampling the blood from 3,300 people, researchers found that 48,000 to 81,000 people in Santa Clara county had been previously infected. Only 1000 people tested positive in the county. They estimated the IFR from 0.12 to 0.2.
Many people are actually claiming that the large number of asymptomatic people with the disease requires prolongation of the shutdowns. The large asymptomatic group does quite the opposite. It demonstrates that the number of people who have already had the disease is very high and the actual infection mortality rate is much lower than we previously believed.
Original Goal: Prevent a catastrophic second wave
If there is a second wave, it will most likely be this fall which will give us plenty of time to prepare
The biggest concern voiced by public officials is that opening the economy is unsafe because it could, “Pour gasoline on the fire.” These officials don’t understand that most people who recovered from the infection are now immune and, thus, contribute to the development of “herd immunity”. If the next wave comes, the peak will be lower or, like in South Korea, where social distancing was only voluntary, it may be just a period of a low rate of new cases until herd immunity is build.
If the current level of herd immunity is so low that a second wave builds, it will take at least several months. The CDC estimated that it will likely be at least 150 days before a possible second wave. This would push it back to the fall at the earliest.A study published in The Lancetalso states it would be several months before a possible second wave.
Personal protection equipment (PPE), testing, and surveillance may not be optimized today, but all should be in place by this fall. At that time, politicians and scientists can determine how the elderly and vulnerable can be protected without needing to interrupt the economy.
In addition, the shutdowns are slowing if not preventing the development of herd immunity. This increases the chance and possible severity of a second wave of COVID-19 several months after the shutdowns are lifted.
A recent study from South Korea states that about 100 people who previously had COVID-19 and tested negative have now tested positive again. This has led to rampant media speculation that there may not be lasting immunity from COVID-19.
Dr. Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist from Harvard University, wrote an editorial on this subject in the NY Times. He shows how similar viruses in the past have given long-term immunity. The SARS virus in 2002 gave two years of immunity on average. The MERS virus from 2012 gave approximately three years. He believes that COVID-19 will confer at least a year of immunity.
Regarding the South Korean concern about a lack of immunity. Dr. Lipsitch states that likely “these patients had a false negative test in the middle of an ongoing infection, or that the infection had temporarily subsided and then re-emerged.” One small study should not keep us from opening the economy over a mostly theoretical concern.
The idea of herd immunity is simple: Once enough people in society are immune to a disease, if one person becomes infected, the chance they give it to someone else is less than one. It is estimated that 80% of the population would need to be immune to have true herd immunity. However, if we have even half that, we would slow the increase of the virus dramatically. This would make surveillance easier and decrease the chance that a second wave could overwhelm our health care system this fall.
In summary
Continued shutdowns threaten our economy, our health and even our healthcare system.
The state of our economy is not just a monetary risk, it is a health risk. When people lose their jobs, they typically lose their health insurance. The British Journal of Psychiatry found that there were more than 10,000 “economic suicides” as a result of the 2008 recession. Similarly, a 2016 study from The Lancet found that there were an excess 260,000 cancer deaths as a result of the recession. These statistics also fail to mention the increased domestic violence, increased child abuse and home loss when schools and businesses are closed.
In spite of the changing goalposts: The number of new cases is declining. The mortality is likely much lower than early estimates. Those who have been infected by the disease will most likely be immune for at least a year. Finally, the lives saved by starting the economy sooner vastly outnumber those that could be saved by extended shutdowns.
Jonathan Geach, M.D.
Ankur J. Patel, M.D.
Knut M. Wittkowski, PhD, ScD
Lacy Windham, M.D.
Ashkan Attaran, M.D.
Jason Friday, M.D.
