Don Pesci: The Cuomo catastrophe

A field hospital begins operations in the Javits Center, in Manhattan, on March 30, 2020. That venue would have been a much safer place to send Coronavirus-infected patients than nursing homes.

VERNON, Conn.

The end of life, we know, is very much like its beginning. In the end, all of us rely, as did Blanche DuBois in the Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire on “the kindness of strangers.”

Nothing is stranger than the kindness of politicians, many of whom affect kindness while the television cameras are running, when they know that kindness can advance their political objectives.

Such is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. At the height of the Coronavirus plague, Cuomo shipped hundreds of Coronavirus-infected hospital patients to New York nursing homes, even though other venues were available: a hospital ship sent to New York by then President Trump, a large space in the Jacob Javits Convention Center, and a little used 68-bed tent field hospital set up by Samaritan's Purse in Central Park, all venues packed with kind medical attendants waiting to care for stricken elderly patients.

The strangers in all three venues waited in vain to dispense their services to fatally infected Coronavirus patients. Instead of using the unsung heroes of the Coronavirus pandemic, Cuomo shipped the stricken elderly into what may properly be described as death chambers. Upwards of 60 percent of Coronavirus-related deaths in New York, it had been reported, occurred in nursing homes. Figures in Connecticut were similar. Cuomo only recently was lauded for his communication prowess, and he has been haloed with plaudits by both The New York Times and the Associated Press.    

We learn from New York Post reports, some of which had once been blocked then reinstated by censors such as Twitter and Facebook, that the actual numbers of Coronavirus deaths reported by the Cuomo administration to the relevant federal agency had been previously underreported. New York’s Department of Health undercounted by as much as 50 percent Coronavirus deaths in nursing homes. The precise number of nursing-home patients that ended up in coffins because of Cuomo’s dictums is now being clarified, following the departure from the White House of Trump, who sent the little-used hospital ship to Cuomo.

An accompanying cover-up and media manipulation by the Cuomo administration, underreported by some news outlets in states contiguous to New York, may well cost Cuomo his political future. Even now, grief- stricken relatives of dead nursing-home patients in New York are wondering when impeachment-prone Democrats, such as redoubtable Sen. Chuck Schumer, will begin agitating for the impeachment of Cuomo.

A censure of Trump, rather than impeachment, would have been more politically useful, because, some scholars argue, the only punishment constitutionally assigned for impeachment is removal from office, and Trump had left office a month before the Senate voted on the House indictment. Republicans doubtless would have been much more receptive to censure than impeachment. Given the equal distribution in the Senate of Democrats and Republicans, a possible unconstitutional vote to convict on doubtful House indictments was both impossible and redundant. Then too, any precedent that would in the future allow impeachment for private citizens who have left office would be unnecessarily divisive and redundant.

Under such a precedent, even former President Obama might be impeached long after he left office for having deceived Congress by sending planeloads of cash to Iran, an officially designated terrorist state that in all likelihood used congressionally approved sequestered funds to pay its proxy terrorists in the Middle East to push Israel, the only democracy in the area, into the sea.

The beef on Cuomo, following Post reports and a politically devastating brief by New York Atty. Gen. Leticia James, no friend of Trump, is now broiling on left of center spits such as CNN, no friend of Trump. The New York Times, for years in a seemingly endless anti-Trump fume, and the Associated Press -- perhaps distracted by their fulsome coverage of the most recent (failed) attempt by partisan Democrats in the U.S. Senate to impeach Trump — are considerably behind the times.

The Cuomo cover-up was outed by happenstance. Cuomo’s secretary, Melissa DeRosa, disclosed to Democrats in a virtual meeting that New York officials were concerned with a Department of Justice preliminary inquiry into Coronavirus deaths in state nursing homes; then too, Trump, still president, was tweeting about the death toll. DeRosa’s “apology” to her Democrat cohorts followed a report, according to CNN, “in late January from Attorney General James, noting the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) undercounted Covid-19 deaths among residents of nursing homes by approximately 50%.” After all this, the Cuomo media bubble burst.

Warm on Cuomo and no friend to Trump, CNN reported on the cover-up this way: “But on the private call DeRosa said the administration essentially ‘froze’ because it wasn't sure what information it was going to turn over to the DOJ, and didn't want whatever was told the lawmakers in response to the state joint committee hearing inquiries to be used against it in any way.”

The stink of mass deaths in New York nursing homes now hangs over Cuomo’s head, where once a media halo glittered. Governor-in-waiting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has yet to call for Cuomo’s resignation, and the Democrat impeachment crowd is biting its collective tongues. Here in Connecticut, Friends of Cuomo such as Gov. Ned Lamont and members of the state’s all-Democratic congressional delegation need not worry they will be pestered by media hounds on the hunt for political blood, and relatives of Cuomo’s nursing home victims will be swallowing their grief in silence. 

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Looking out for their patrons' health and safety

— Photo by I, Ruhrfisch

VERNON, Conn.

In my mellowing age, I have become a creature of habits, some warring with others.

For the past few years I have taken breakfast on Mondays at one of three diners in East Hartford, West Hartford and Vernon, Conn., all of which are in compliance with Gov. Ned Lamont's possibly unconstitutional directives. 

This morning, I found the waitress glowing as usual.

Waitress: (As if greeting a cousin she hasn’t seen in months) “How are you?’’

This was said in such an upbeat tone and with such a broad smile and show of pearly teeth, that I understood her to be genuinely glad to see me and turned the question back on her.

Me: “I’m good (a forgivable white lie; it is difficult to sustain a conversation for more than five seconds with a morning grouch) But not as good as you.’’

Waitress: (Doubt shading her smile) “Well, we are all worried.’’

She pointed to a newspaper I had begun to mark up with notes. Ominous headline: “Thousands more deaths predicted; Gov. Lamont: Still no plans to impose more restrictions,” featuring a picture of Coronavirus- masked Gov. Ned Lamont who, according to the story, was dubious about inflicting more crippling regulations on our battered state, restaurants in particular. Was Lamont prepared to follow in the footsteps of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has indicated that he would shut down indoor dining if testing rates did not improve? Not yet, Lamont somewhat reassuringly said.

Me: “Yes, I know. When New York sneezes, Connecticut catches a cold. Lamont regularly has followed in the footsteps of his fishing buddy Cuomo.’’

Waitress: “That’s the worry around here. It’s on, it’s off, it’s up, it’s down. We can’t plan our schedules. We can’t plan our lives, and we don’t want this place to close.’’

Me: “I wonder how many separate decisions you and others associated with the diner make each day.’’

Waitress: (hesitating to venture an answer) “I would guess -- hundreds.’’

Me: “What do you say, are those decisions better made by you and others who work here, or by this guy?’’

I pointed to the picture of Lamont, now being pressed by local “scientists,” experts in academia, newspaper commentators, and other pestiferous busybodies, to shut down restaurants once again before the arrival of what I sardonically call “the Trump vaccine.”

Waitress: “Well, would you rather I take your order and serve you directly, or would you rather be served remotely by him?’’

Me: “You, definitely!’’

The waitress doubted that remote, virtual empathy could be more powerful than direct empathy. The diner’s staff, she pointed out, was perhaps more concerned with the health and safety of its clients than the governor, because all who worked at the diner depended upon repeat business and, if you kill a patron, he or she would not return. 

Lamont is so flighty, I told her, that it would take days before the food was put before me.  And my order was certain to be reviewed countless times before it was fulfilled by members of Lamont’s usual political troupe, such as his communications director, who, I pointed out to the waitress, had been tested positive for Coronavirus.

This produced a glowing smile.

But that is the problem, isn’t it? When we make a decision concerning who decides an issue, we have decided that someone else shall direct what should be done.

Competence here is decisive. Decisions are only as good as the data upon which they are based, and decisions made remotely by those incompetent to make them always point the way to disaster. The number of Coronavirus-related deaths in nursing homes in Connecticut and New York – more than 60 percent of pandemic deaths in both states – is a measure of the deadly incompetence of both governors, though one would never guess as much, given the praise showered upon Lamont and Cuomo by their state’s media.

On Nov. 20, an international academy announced, “Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York will receive this year’s International Emmy® Founders Award, in recognition of his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.”

Better a good breakfast than a misappropriated Emmy. The breakfast was done to perfection, the service cheerful and satisfying, and the diner is still open for business – for now. But my waitress fear that it may not be long before Lamont catches his second wind and is nominated for an Emmy award as well.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Puritan stink bomb explodes in the Northeast

Harry Clarke’s 1919 illustration for "The Masque of the Red Death"

VERNON, Conn.

Secularists have already stripped Christmas of Christ. Now come the politicians, pleading Coronavirus, to strip the seasons of relatives. Scrooge made the celebration of Christmas difficult but not impossible. The Coronavirus governors have raised his bid to destroy joy. And the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are leading the pack.

It is not enough that enlightened, “science-based” politics has driven our relations out of state, many of them in pursuit of fleeing businesses. The Coronavirus Governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, now threatens to prevent their return during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Travel itself has been interdicted at the borders, and those entering Connecticut from foreign parts – Massachusetts has recently been put on the interdiction list –- are beginning to feel what wretches feel.

It is less of a chore in Connecticut to bust the Mexican border and settle in one of our state’s sanctuary cities than it is for a gas-guzzling citizen of the “Land of Steady Habits” to escape the state’s onerous gasoline taxes by sneaking across Connecticut’s border to buy gas that is not taxed twice, once at the port and once at the pump. Bradley International Airport, voted one of the best airports in the country, is beginning to look like a wasteland. Here is Ned throwing ashes in The Hartford Courant on the joy of Thanksgiving and Christmas:

“….Lamont said he’s concerned college students returning home for the holiday might bring COVID-19 with them.

“’I am really worried about thousands of kids coming back from universities all over the country, places like Wisconsin and Nevada and Utah, where they have a 30 percent infection rate,’ Lamont said in Bridgeport.

“The governor said he’d work with governors in other states on ‘really strict guidance,’ perhaps asking students to quarantine for two weeks before returning to Connecticut, then get tested for COVID-19 when they arrive.

“Lamont said the Department of Public Health would soon issue guidelines for returning students.

“’I don’t want people just getting on that plane, going home, potentially putting their family at risk and their friends at risk,’ Lamont said.”

Really, with a daddy and mommy like Lamont, who needs daddies and mommies?

Thanksgiving, now that we are all toxic, will be less thankful. Halloween has flitted by like a ghost; no children were on the streets; the candy dishes are still full. All Saints Day was muted, church attendance having been clipped by Lamont’s emergency orders.

Facing a tsunami of atheist-tinged secularism G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.” On this score, not much has changed over the centuries.

The four cardinal virtues listed by Aristotle are prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, all of them sadly missing in our politics, which gives us more than enough reason to fortify ourselves with them. A prudent, just and temperate policy on Coronavirus would allow and even facilitate the joys of Christmas, Thanksgiving and All Saints Day,

Long since secularized and bastardized as Halloween.

Columbus Day has passed without further Columbus statues having been beheaded by modern vandals, for which, exercising our First Amendment rights – but not in churches – we may thank God. Restaurants, those lucky few that have not yet gone out of business, are less than half full because they are only three quarters open on orders of the governor in preparation for a second wave Coronavirus panic.  Tomorrow, on a gubernatorial whim, the restaurants may be shuttered once again. The arts in Connecticut, all of them, are only virtually alive. Our cities are ghost towns. And though legislators, sequestered far from the state Capitol, have plenty of time on hand, not one of them appears to have had time to read Edgar Allen Poe’s 1842 short story “The Masque  of the Red Death’’. In it, precautions are taken by Lord Prospero to keep at bay the Red Death ravaging the countryside outside the walls of his castle: “With such precautions,” Poe writes, “the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion.”

Ha!!!

A Puritan stink bomb has exploded here in the Northeast and left behind the wreckage of joy. Handshakes are out; hugs are out; kisses are fatal; even our daring president-elect, Joe Biden, has lately refrained from smelling women’s hair and pawing uncomfortable strange children. The Puritan Calvinists of pre-Revolutionary Boston must be clapping in their graves, applauding because John and Cotton Mather would rather sink into Hell than dance in their graves or celebrate a Bob Cratchit Christmas.

Don Pesci a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Representative government crouched in fear

Painting by Peter Paul Rubens of Cronus devouring one of his children

VERNON, Conn.

The Hartford Courant paper points out the brutal irony:

“Connecticut has averaged 366 new cases a day over the past week or about 10.3 per 100,000 residents, just above the threshold at which states are added to the travel advisory. The advisory, which currently includes 38 states and territories, is updated each Tuesday in conjunction with New York and New Jersey. It requires travelers arriving from those states to either produce a negative coronavirus test result or quarantine for 14 days...

(Connecticut Gov. Ned) Lamont said …he’s considering a dramatic overhaul to the advisory, saying “It’d be a little ironic if we were on our own quarantine list.”

Connecticut’s list of quarantined states has grown by leaps and bounds, very likely because the parameters initially were set too low. The gods of irony will not be mocked. Cronus is now eating his own children.

It is nearly impossible to determine definitively who set the parameters, but we do know that Governor Lamont has been borrowing his Coronavirus defense system from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.

In the absence of an advice-and-consent General Assembly whose Democrat leaders, Senate President Martin Looney and House Speaker Joe Arsimowicz, relish pretending that Connecticut’s greatest deliberative body had been sidelined by Coronavirus, Lamont has become the King George of Connecticut, wielding nearly absolute power, and the sharpest weapon in Lamont’s rhetorical arsenal has been – fear of Coronavirus.

The pandemic is not a governor festooned with plenary powers. It is a virus, and viruses cannot suspend the operations of government and businesses across the state. We are where we are because politicians have made the choices they have made.

Gone are the days when President Franklin Roosevelt sought to stiffen American spines, first in the face of the Great Depression and then of the oncoming World War II – by advising his countrymen, “… let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself.”

Americans rose to the occasion. The Great Depression receded, as most depressions and recessions will do in a vibrant free market economy. The United States later officially entered the war on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor -- more than two years after Nazi Germany attacked Poland, in 1939, beginning the war -- and saved Western Europe from the Nazi Hun. Much later during the so-called “Cold War,” beginning in 1946-47, Western Europe and the United States combined to save Western Civilization from the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist beast. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan blew his horn, and the hated Berlin Wall soon came tumbling down, followed in due course by the dissolution of the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

Since the Founders “brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty,” in Lincoln’s often repeated words, the United States has survived colonial mismanagement – see Sam Adams on the point – an anti-colonialist revolution, various crippling recessions, a Civil War – which we thought, before Howard Zinn’s dyspeptic take on American history began to infiltrate public schools, buried slavery along with “the honored dead” at Gettysburg --   two World Wars, the prospect of nuclear annihilation,  and many other disrupting disasters that we had collectively survived.

The government of Connecticut, the “Constitution State”, faced with Coronavirus, has simply shattered. And the merchants of fear among us are still merchandising fear. That irrational fear has all but destroyed scores of small businesses across the state, the prospect of state surpluses, sound state and municipal budgets, public hearings, trials in the remnant of the state’s judicial system, public education as we have known it ever since the General Assembly in 1849 established the first public higher-education institution in the state, now Central Connecticut State University -- and representative government.

There is not a single politician in Connecticut familiar with Aristotelian causality, the living root of most modern science, who would testify under oath that a virus, rather than cowardly politicians, is the efficient cause of all these problems. The Coronavirus fear, like Cronus of Greek legend, is now devouring its own children.

Roosevelt rallied the nation to stop hiding under the bed. But the Coronavirus governors, who through their negligence are responsible for the majority of nursing-home deaths associated with Coronavirus in their own states, want representative government to remain crouched in fear under the bed. They want no public hearings, no votes on gubernatorial dicta by a full General Assembly, no attacks by columnists on their own criminal delinquencies, no suits in a crippled court system, and no contrarian opinions in editorial pages. They will tolerate no effective opposition. And should minority Republicans in Connecticut engage in reasoned opposition, they will be denounced by everyone hiding under a bed of complicity with President Trump who, despite his glaring vices, still is not Hunter Biden’s dad.   

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.

Don Pesci: The coronavirus, King Ned and the Conn. economy

VERNON, Conn.

While Connecticut’s Democratic-dominated General Assembly was napping, Raytheon, formerly United Technologies (UTC), announced it was cutting 15,000 commercial aerospace jobs. The cuts will affect Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes, who moved UTC’s headquarters to the Boson area following UTC’s merger with Raytheon, figures that it will take at least three years for the air travel business to recover.

According to the report, Raytheon had seen “aircraft and pentagon orders surging” before the move. The company said it had “planned to hire 35,000 workers over five years.” And now? Raytheon’s defense sector, Hayes said, is still strong – owing to Trump military procurements. However, as of Sept. 4, commercial air traffic was down about 45 percent globally. To save costs, airlines are “deferring maintenance,” which hurts Pratt & Whitney, based in East Hartford, Congressman John Larson’s bailiwick.

Two questions present themselves: 1) Are the airline restrictions that Gov. Ned Lamont deployed in Connecticut at least partly responsible for the job losses related to a reduction of airline traffic? And 2) Will politicians such as Larson suffer because of these policies?

The answer to 1) is: A policy that discouraged air travel through the imposition of unusual restrictions – passengers coming from restricted states were required to self-quarantine for 14 days if they had not submitted to a Coronavirus test – certainly does not help. And the answer to 2) is: Nothing short of a nuclear winter in gerrymandered districts such as Larson’s 1st District and Rosa DeLauro’s 3rd District may interrupt their political careers, although this year DeLauro, a fashion maven  who has spent nearly 40 years in Congress, has a worthy opponent in Republican Margaret Streicker.

The Lamont directives are not only unusual; they interrupt normal business activity, do not provide uniform continuity of political action, may be unconstitutional, and are whimsical and palliative rather than curative.

The real cure for political action that hurts entrepreneurial activity in Connecticut – how is any restaurant to survive when it is being ordered to reduce its seating by half? – is to put a halter on runaway gubernatorial directives. And this cannot be done in the absence of a General Assembly that has been put in “park” for the last half year. There are some faint indications that, at some point down the road -- possibly after the 2020 elections, during which all the seats in the General Assembly will once again be secure in Democratic hands -- the state may return to some sort of normalcy. The real threat facing Democrats is not that the Coronavirus will mutate into the Red Death, but rather that Democrats, who have refashioned Connecticut into a quasi-socialist wonderland, may lose their majority status in both houses of Connecticut's recumbent General Assembly.

The signs of the times, at least in Connecticut – no longer the pearl in New England’s crown -- suggest a continuation of ruinous business policies. Connecticut’s General Assembly – more properly a fistful of Democratic legislators, a rump legislature – has just extended Lamont’s extraordinary powers by five months. Those powers allow Lamont to open and shut Connecticut’s entrepreneurial valves at will, and businesses, we know, react with horror at uncertainty.

We may well ask for whom is this a problem? Qui bono? Who profits by it -- certainly not representative government? Among Connecticut journalists, only Chris Powell, for many years the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, seems to be troubled by Connecticut’s highly unorthodox political arrangement. Powell suspects that Democratic-run government, rather than democratic government, is the principal beneficiary of the new, now nearly year-long constitutional re-configuration.

The extension of arbitrary gubernatorial directives allow Democrats to claim hero status at both ends of the politically caused pandemic. Through the imposition of fickle gubernatorial powers, the governor saves us from a fate worse than death; and, by calibrating the business closures, he appears to be saving us from the economic pandemic he and his Democrat do-nothing compatriots in the General Assembly have caused. The German critic Karl Krauss once described Freudian psychology as “the disease it purports to cure.” Similarly, the inscrutable and lawless Lamont business shutdown is the disease he and other heroic Democrat legislators are now purporting to cure – by partly opening the businesses they have closed through dubious constitutional means.  

Lamont is not up for re-election in 2020, but all the members of Connecticut’s General Assembly will be on the political chopping block next month.. So Lamont is content to take the political thwacks for the time being; the memories of average Connecticut voters are short-lived, and any autocratic directive issued by Lamont, both in the recent past and for the un-foreseeable future, will not bear the fingerprints of Democrat legislators, many of whom will be left unpunished in the coming elections.

It is doubtful that any directive issued by “King Ned” will benefit anyone but autocratic politicians. All such directives destroy creative solutions by restricting normal business decisions to a governor who cannot be corrected by either the legislative or judicial branches of government. A deliberative legislature may produce far superior solutions than those forcibly imposed by Lamont and his close advisers on the entire state, no corner of which is now represented by members of the General Assembly pretending that they are doing their jobs.

Most recently, the Hartford Symphony has furloughed all of its musicians; restaurants are closing; the workforce at Pratt & Whitney will be reduced; principals and superintendents of public schools lack uniform direction from a government that appears to be operating on the throw of dice; and at some point down the line an exhausted public, frustrated and powerless, will turn against its self-appointed benefactors.

There are two incalculable benefits in hitting bottom: 1) the bottom marks the end of the downward fall, and 2) those who hit bottom know that the way up lies in an opposite direction.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: The pesky ‘science’ and politics of COVID-19

Coronavirus seen with electron microscope

VERNON, Conn.
The New York Times, the old gray lady of Eastern Seaboard journalism, published a blockbuster story on Aug. 30, “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be,” that should be widely reported in other media formats. So far, the substance of the story has remained pretty much on the media shelf.

The Times has discovered that the easily corrected, most often used calibration for Coronavirus testing is not useful for "containing the spread of the virus.” The Coronavirus, of course, causes the disease named COVID-19.

According to The Times, “In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

“On Thursday (8/10/2020), the United States recorded 45,604 new Coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.

The difference between 45,000 and 4,500 is, scientists and reporters may note, not a rounding error.

Leading public-health experts are concerned: “Some of the nation’s leading public-health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over Coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus,” The Times reported.

To put the matter in terms that non-scientists may understand -- current Coronavirus testing is so over calibrated it cannot discover the four leaf clover in a massive field of clover.

“The most widely used diagnostic test for the new Coronavirus, called a PCR test,” the paper notes, “provides a simple yes-no answer to the question of whether a patient is infected.” However, similar PCR tests for other viruses, “do offer some sense of how contagious an infected patient may be: The results may include a rough estimate of the amount of virus in the patient’s body.”

Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is calling for testing that can find the four leaf clover: “We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all. We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision-making.’’

But yes-no isn’t good enough, he says, according to The Times story. “It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the infected patient’s next steps. ‘It’s really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue.’”

The problem is that current PCR tests are imprecisely calibrated. The PCR test, “amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.” The cycle threshold -- the “number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus… is never included in the results sent to doctors and Coronavirus patients [emphasis mine], although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.”

The Times story quotes Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California at Riverside: “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” And Dr. Mina, who would set the cycle threshold limit at 30 or less, agrees. The change would mean, according to The Times’s story, “the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.”

Currently, the cycle threshold limit is set at 40, which means that you are “positive for the Coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus.”

However, “’Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said.”

And the figures deployed by most politicians, in the absence of more useful and predictive figures, are designed to induce in ordinary citizens a posture of compliance to gubernatorial edicts that depend upon medically useless data.   

The Times, not a Trump apologist, quotes another virologist: “It’s just kind of mind-blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from all these tests, that they’re just returning a positive or a negative.”

Not for nothing is Coronavirus called a “novel” virus. There can be no “science” associated with a novel virus. But there are scientists, continuing research, and necessary adjustments in perceptions and medical data. One wonders how many doctors and reporters in Connecticut would be thunderstruck, as were Mina and Morrison, that the “yes and no” figures dangled before them were, to put the best face on it, medically misleading but politically useful.

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.

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Don Pesci: Things should have been opened three months ago with current rules

A waitress at a local eatery, closed for four months by Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s ever changing executive orders, pops the question.

Her eatery is partially opened, but forbidden to serve more than half its regular clientele, many of whom will disappear if the eatery is not permitted to make a sustainable profit to pay the business’s overhead and its dwindling staff.

“If this place can be opened now, why couldn’t it have been opened” under the same severe regimen “three months ago?” the befuddled waitress asks.

Good question, but the common sense answer to the waitress's question will not be forthcoming from Governor Lamont or its waylaid legislative leaders, all Democrats, in the state’s seriously suspended General Assembly. The common sense answer to the question is simple and unambiguous. There is no reason why restaurants in the state should not have remained open during the pandemic four months ago. If social distancing, face masks, frequent disinfections of eating areas, and reducing by 50 percent a restaurant’s usual clientele, work now to prevent the spread of Coronavirus, the same measures would have produced the same result four months earlier.

An elementary school teacher asks this question: Why were elementary schools closed during the politically caused crisis?

Good question. We know – and have always known – that lethality among school children 14 years old and younger infected with Coronavirus has been hovering near zero. Why then were elementary schools in Connecticut shut down? The most frequent answer to this question is highly problematic. Children who are asymptomatic and who very likely had developed herd immunity, the historic prophylactic in viral contagions, can infect older adults. And these older adults are much more likely to die from the infestation than young children. Elementary-school closures are, in fact, a “save the elders” project.

Very good, how has Connecticut gone about saving the elders? In Connecticut and New York about 60 percent of those who died with – not of – Coronavirus were sequestered in nursing homes. We were protecting these elders by forbidding their relatives from eyeballing their care while, at the same time, failing to provide protective gear to the staff, heroes all, of nursing homes. And politicians in Connecticut knew – right from the beginning of the Wuhan infestation – that elders of a certain age, many of whom had medical preconditions that lethalized Coronavirus, were most susceptible to the Coronavirus grim reaper.

Well now, there is a bill before the gubernatorially suspended General Assembly right now that removes partial immunity from police officers across the state, all of whom will be susceptible to asset-swallowing suits filed by “defund the police” political agitators. Will partial immunity be removed from those politicians who are principally responsible for the carnage in Connecticut's nursing homes?

Never mind the oversight, we are told, the problem has now been corrected by Lamont, his political cohorts, and Dr. Close-The-Barn-Door-After-The-Horse-Has-Left. Not to worry; elder habitués of nursing homes who survived the political inattention of preening politicians are now, at long last, safe.

People wonder why the death count in Connecticut and New York are down, a cousin unable to attend the funeral of his uncle remarks – they removed the deadwood and are now taking their bows for having solved problems they themselves had created. They’re like the firefighter-arsonist who sets fires so that he can put them out and read about his courageous exploits in the morning paper.

It is perhaps unpragmatic at this point to hope that businessman Lamont and the Democrat leaders in the General Assembly will realize that Connecticut’s economy, artificially sustained by President Trump’s military- hardware acquisitions and the Wall Street casino, is weak at it core and will be further weakened by unnecessary shutdowns. Businesses lost to the Lamont shutdowns are irrecoverable, and there is yet another ten year recession grinning evilly at the state from the political wings.

Connecticut, now a beggar state, will attempt to squeeze money from the Washington, D.C., larder. Even now, Sen. Richard Blumenthal is hoping to wrest billions of dollars from the impeachable Trump administration, and there is not a journalist in sight who will summon up courage enough to ask him whether he would favor yet another Connecticut tax bump so that Democrats in the General Assembly will be spared the indignity of cutting union-labor costs.

When Connecticut –which has much more in common with dispensable nursing home patients than the state’s sleepy media realizes – finally disappears beneath the waves, who will be permitted to attend its funeral?  

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Conn.'s desperate restaurant owners wonder when...

How long?

VERNON, Conn.

On June 20, Connecticut will once again be open for business – sort of. The road to the grand opening has been a bumpy one full of false turns, sudden cul-de-sacs, and the driver of the bus headed towards a reopening of the state, now nursing a potential budget deficit of close to $1 billion,  appears to be navigating irresolutely.

Will restaurants in Connecticut be fully opened on the date set by Gov. Ned Lamont, June 20, or not? Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, with whom Governor Lamont of has of late been having a Coronavirus shut-down bromance, already has turned the corner. Restaurants in Rhode Island, having got the jump on Connecticut, already are opened for business – sort of.

In a June 3 story, Hearst news noted that Connecticut restaurant owners were clamoring for an earlier opening date for indoor dining: "Some 550 businesses signed a petition by the Restaurant Association calling for a return to indoor dining on June 10. They include companies operating nearly 40 restaurants in New Haven and 30 in Stamford, from chains such as Buffalo Wild Wings, with locations in Stamford, Danbury, Milford and North Haven, to local haunts like Galaxy Diner in Bridgeport and upscale options such as Mediterraneo in Norwalk and Greenwich.”

Executive director of the Connecticut Restaurant Association Scott Dolch wrote to Lamont, “This is not hyperbole. Just this week and only steps from the Capitol, Firebox Restaurant in Hartford closed after 13 years in operation. They simply could not hold out any longer. Right now, every day counts for our industry.”

 Tic Toc.

 And then, as an aside that in some fashion must have penetrated Lamont’s soft shell, “Dolch noted that Rhode Island has already resumed indoor dining service, and that Connecticut’s coronavirus case count is better than that of New York and Massachusetts.”

Well, Lamont drawled, “Everybody wants to get going yesterday — I appreciate that,” Lamont said. “I am going to be a little cautious in terms of what the next round is. ... Maybe we can accelerate that a little bit.”

And then, as an aside that in some fashion must have penetrated Lamont’s soft shell, “Dolch noted that Rhode Island has already resumed indoor dining service, and that Connecticut’s Coronavirus case count is better than that of New York and Massachusetts.”

 "’I've just seen tens of thousands of people protesting in New York City — thousands more in Boston. Neither of them have opened up any of their restaurants - they haven't even opened for outdoor dining that I know of as yet,’ Lamont said. ‘So I want to be very careful before we open our restaurants and invite people from the whole region here.’"

That’s a NO to Dolch and his 550 business petitioners.

Dolch and Connecticut restaurant owners really have nowhere else to turn for succor. In ordinary times, Dolch’s petitioners might have curried support among a dwindling number of legislators in the General Assembly who do not want Connecticut to be eating Rhode Island’s dust, but the General Assembly has put itself in suspended animation until it once again is called into service by the governor, and Lamont’s extraordinary autocratic powers do not lapse until September. Already – someone is keeping count – Lamont ranks fourth in the nation among governors who have issued the most executive orders, and he has three months to go before he runs out of autocratic gas.

Other problems may be looming on Connecticut’s dark horizon.

 On June 4, the Lamont administration sent a notice around to Connecticut’s media that his administration is establishing a program, called the Connecticut Municipal Coronavirus Relief Fund Program, in which the state will reimburse city and town governments for expenses related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a story in The Day of New London.

The program, administered through the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management, is setting aside $75 million to be distributed to municipalities in Connecticut, “part of $1.4 billion in Coronavirus Relief Funds the state has gotten from the federal government.”

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, according to The Day’s story, “said it is appreciative of the announcement but noted that federal guidelines recommend that 45 percent of the total $1.4 billion in Coronavirus Relief Funds, which would be $630 million, be spent on municipalities with populations below 500,000.”

There is, a reader who has successfully passed fourth grade exams in basic math will notice, a considerable difference between the $630 million the Feds expect Connecticut to distribute to its towns in Coronavirus Relief Funds and the planned Lamont distribution of $75 million. Some sharp-eyed accountant in Washington, D.C., is likely to notice the disparity and – maybe – cut Coronavirus funding to the Connecticut proportionally.

The national government now has a debt of some $26 trillion, and every penny helps.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: In the pandemic, separating science and political science

Treating a patient on a ventilator in a hospital’s intensive-care unit

VERNON, Conn.

How scientific is science in the matter of Coronavirus?

There’s science and there’s political science. The one thing we do not want in any confluence of the two is confusion and mass hysteria, which can best be avoided by observing this rule: Politicians should decide political matters and medical scientists should decide medical matters. Occasionally, politicians decide that mass fright can better able convince the general population than rational argument.  

The answer to the above question is simple: In the case of new viruses, science, as defined above, must be silent. There can be no “scientific” view of Coronavirus because it is a new phenomenon, the recent arrival of a stranger on the medical block. Concerning Coronavirus, there are, properly speaking, multiple views of different scientists, many of whom will disagree with each other on important points.

Does Coronavirus remain on surfaces for long periods? A couple of months ago, we were told by politicians, relaying the news from “science”, that hard surfaces were repositories of Coronavirus, and that contamination from hard surfaces was as likely as person-to-person contamination. That notion has withered on the vine now that we know Coronavirus is most often spread person to person.

Do adults spread Coronavirus to children, or are children the Bloody Marys? This is an important datum because if children, who are much less likely than adults to die or be seriously ill from Coronavirus, spread the virus to adults, the wholesale closing of schools might be a protective measure.

But if adults pass the virus to children, the current view of many scientists, remediation efforts would be far different.  We are told that love covers a multitude of sins including, Agatha Christie advises us, murder. The word “science” misapplied covers, we have seen, a multitude of political sins.If we can learn from our past mistakes, we need not carry our mistakes into the future.

If the question is, “Have politicians in the Northeast made a mistake in trusting to some scientists?” the question is wrongly put. It’s not quite as simple as that. It will always be better to take advice from the horse’s mouth rather than from the horse’s posterior. But in the process, politicians must not allow differing scientists to determine the political course of a state.

Politicians, in the face of a pandemic, should not stop being politicians. That is what we have seen in Northeast states, where Coronavirus has dug in its heels. Here legislative activity has been shut down, and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has been festooned with extraordinary – some would say unconstitutional -- powers.

Like his counterpart in New York, Andrew Cuomo, Lamont has resorted to state-wide business shutdowns and sequestration. But inducing a long-lived recession in Connecticut, sequestration and data collection are not curative, however “necessary” they seem to be to some politicians who are masters in the art of spreading fear.

A vaccine may cure Coronavirus. What is called herd-immunity may reduce infestation.  Certain people, in many cases younger people, catch the virus and develop a natural immunity, foreshortening the mass of people fatally exposed to the virus. We know that Coronavirus has spread like a wildfire in nursing homes, because clients in nursing homes are older and subject to other infirmities that in their cases have dramatically increased the fatality rate in Connecticut and New York.

“Science” – real science – warned us of this at the very beginning of the infestation. We knew of a certainty that older people with compromised systems were especially vulnerable. So, knowing this, why did not the governors of Connecticut and New York direct more of their resources to nursing homes? That is a question that must be answered by our “savior politicians.”

Home sequestration, we have been told, helps to flatten the Coronavirus curve. What can this mean if not that sequestration prolongs the time during which the sequestered may in the future be exposed to the virus? Flattening the curve is not curative. Ask any scientist.

The Coronavirus pandemic has been Hell, but it is very important that we should not return from Hell with empty hands.

In Connecticut more than 60 percent of deaths “associated with” Coronavirus occurred in nursing homes; the figure is similar in New York. Cuomo recently acknowledged he was surprised to discover that a sizable majority of people in New York infected with Coronavirus had been sequestered at home. His surprise is surprising.

We are told that business re-opening will occur in Connecticut in three stages, somewhat like a rocket on its way to the moon. But surely business opening should be determined with reference to sections of Connecticut that have been severely or mildly affected by Coronavirus, and the distribution of Coronavirus throughout the state has been mapped by Johns Hopkins University ever since the virus penetrated the United States from its point of origin, Wuhan, China.

These are political decisions that should have been codified in law by a quiescent General Assembly. Political science – yes, there is such a thing – would tell us that we no longer enjoy in Connecticut a republican, small “r”, constitutional government. Instead, Governor Lamont has become our homegrown Xi Jinping, China’s communist tyrant who has now provided Connecticut both with a deadly virus and PPEs, the means of thwarting some of its effects.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

N.E. Council letter to congressional delegation on infrastructure needs

Massachusetts State House

BOSTON

May 5 letter from New England Council President and CEO James T. Brett to the New England congressional delegation:

On behalf of the New England Council, I would like to thank you and your staff for all that you have done in the face of this national emergency to help address the health effects and the economic impacts attributed to the coronavirus outbreak. Our region is fortunate to have such effective leaders advocating on our behalf during this unprecedented time. We are grateful for the relief and economic stimulus measures that have been included in the CARES Act, as well as in the interim supplemental funding measure that was passed just a couple of weeks ago.

This aid will go a long way toward supporting our region’s healthcare providers, as well as the many businesses across an array of industries that have been negatively affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

As Congress continues to work towards mitigating the immediate effects of the coronavirus outbreak, it is necessary to look to ways in which the House and Senate can help lessen the long-term economic implications of this national emergency, while building on your outstanding efforts to date. The New England Council believes that one way to help accomplish this goal is to pursue a job-creating, economy-boosting infrastructure package that addresses a variety of needs for all manner of business, health, education, energy and transportation sectors.

We are heartened that many in Congress share the view that a major infrastructure proposal should be considered, and the New England Council believes the following components should be included in whatever infrastructure package Congress puts together.

Roads & Bridges: The American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) recently reported that in 2019, there were 1,513 structurally deficient bridges in New England out of 18,129 bridges. That’s roughly 8.4 percent of bridges in our region, where the national average of structurally deficient bridges is 7.5 percent. We also have a pressing need to fix our roadways to accommodate the increased traffic we’ve seen over the years, not just for carpools and individual drivers but to put roads in a condition that can incentivize bus-rapid-transit (BRT). A state of good repair keeps vehicle maintenance costs down, improves the flow of traffic, enhances safety, reduces gasoline usage, and helps the region attain air quality requirements.

Public Transit: A significant number of residents in our region count on transit to provide a safe, affordable and reliable means of commuting. For others, transit is their only or primary option to get from place to place. The CARES Act included substantial federal assistance for transit, however that funding will address losses attributed to the sudden disruption of daily transportation. When the nation emerges from this pandemic, Americans will still need to be able to count on transit systems. Besides addressing years of transit maintenance backlogs, an investment by Congress to bolster transit can help ensure greater access for commuters, decrease congestion on our roads and improve air quality.

Airports: The CARES Act provided $10 billion in federal assistance to our nation’s airports to meet current needs related to the coronavirus pandemic and the sudden loss of significant amounts of revenue. Pre-pandemic figures showed that airline travel (and thus, airport usage) was expected to proceed on an upward trajectory, but a potential slow recovery from the coronavirus may limit such growth for the foreseeable future. As such, additional considerations may have to be met in the months ahead should losses continue to mount throughout this sector of our economy.

Also, as growth returns to the industry as previously predicted, there will be a need for facility upgrades and new construction to accommodate millions of passengers each day. Ports: The CARES Act also addressed the status of the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund (HMTF) to help ensure greater utilization of our ports. It is unclear, though, if there will be a requirement for further measures at this point to help increase harbor utilization.

However, as trade with existing partners resumes, and new economic relationships bring heightened activity to our shores, it will be necessary to have enhanced on-shore facility capabilities and channels that can accommodate the vessels that will bring those goods and allow for exports.

Drinking Water and Wastewater Upgrades: Water infrastructure needs across the region constantly demand attention, whether it is for drinking water systems or wastewater treatment facilities. Besides the need to meet new requirements for a growing region, our aging systems – some approaching or surpassing a century old – need replacing as well. Taken together, these needs add up to billions of dollars’ worth of critical expenditures throughout New England. As water quality is enhanced, it ensures health concerns are ameliorated, reduces storm runoff, and keeps our region’s waterways clear of pollution.

Broadband Access: A high priority for any infrastructure bill must include provisions to facilitate and expedite the deployment of broadband. This should include siting proposals that maximize the use of existing infrastructure to accelerate the private sector build-out of wireless 5G networks and funds to install additional infrastructure across the nation, particularly in some of the more remote locations in New England (including western Massachusetts and the northern border regions of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont). Furthermore, telework, telehealth, and remote learning needs will only increase following the example set forth in this coronavirus pandemic further emphasizing the need for robust wireless and wired connectivity. Finally, any effort on broadband expansion should include all Americans.

Energy Systems: Energy reliability is one of the key requirements for our economy and for our overall way of life. Indeed, energy reliability is required “to make sure the lights stay on.” It is also essential to pursue cost beneficial grid modernization investments that will enable the grid to safely and reliably accommodate new clean energy resources that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These distributed generation and distributed energy resources include electric vehicle charging stations that will enable a clean transportation revolution, affordable utility-scale solar power, energy storage facilities and technology, as well as offshore wind development.

Rail: Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor is a key component of interstate transportation between Boston, New York and Washington and locations in between. Maintaining this vital rail link helps to alleviate congestion on our roads and provides another transportation option to the traveling public. The Northeast Corridor received nearly $500 million in the CARES Act, however that will not cover the long-range requirements necessary to expand this crucial transportation link. Congress needs to provide the necessary maintenance to the rail infrastructure in our region as well as those regions that feed into New England. Moreover, Congress should give serious consideration to funding regional rail expansion to help relieve congestion, enhance air quality, and spark economic development beyond traditional hub centers.

Hospitals: If the coronavirus outbreak has demonstrated one thing, it is that hospitals must be considered as a part of our national infrastructure. While many of America’s big city hospitals are being stretched to their limits in this emergency, some communities in our nation have no (or limited) hospital resources at their disposal. A Congressional infrastructure package should give consideration to the inclusion of funds for the construction and renovation of hospitals to ensure we have the ability to adequately manage future potential health catastrophes in our cities and towns alike. Moreover, our nation’s veterans should receive ample consideration as hospital expansion progresses.

Pipeline Safety: The Pipeline Safety Act is past-due for reauthorization and supplemental funds to continue its programs will run out by the end of September. Members of the New England delegation, including those serving on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and other committees, have advocated for the renewal of this law. In addition to establishing safety as paramount, we urge Congress to also consider aging pipeline replacement, security, and capacity concerns.

Education: A Congressional infrastructure package should include federal support for capital needs on public and private higher education campuses as well as for elementary and secondary schools. Such investment will be crucial to keeping our education infrastructure modern and able to accommodate students on updated campuses. Additionally, Congress should consider the inclusion of technology infrastructure, including audio and visual infrastructure in classrooms for remote video and participation, virtual desktop infrastructure, learning management systems, broadband, hardware and software, as well as tools that will assist students with disabilities.

Research: Support for our nation’s research infrastructure is necessary to cement our overall research capabilities and boost our competitiveness for years to come. We urge Congress to include such priorities as high-speed computation, easily accessible and large-scale research data repositories, laboratory and research working environments with greater resiliency to pandemics, and core facility upgrades to modernize shared instrumentation and equipment to increase research capabilities, services, and efficiency. Work at such research facilities would put American researchers at the cutting edge of developing cures and treatments for possible future pandemics.

To maximize federal investments in infrastructure, Congress should include in legislation incentives and programs to foster better adoption of digital technologies in the planning, design, construction management and operations of infrastructure. These technologies can help accelerate project delivery, reduce project costs, enhance construction safety, minimize waste and lead to more innovative and sustainable infrastructure for our nation.

Also, whether it’s new construction or necessary upgrades, climate resiliency must be a requisite consideration for project designers and managers alike. Further, it should be fundamental that any new or upgraded infrastructure component requires elements of cybersecurity protection as a core necessity. Additionally, for some state and local governments hit hard by coronavirus, it may be necessary for Congress to give flexibility when considering the economic abilities of non-federal partners to meet cost-sharing requirements on project awards. These are some of the infrastructure priorities that our members have identified, and in the weeks ahead, others may emerge that our members may wish to have addressed.

The Council may seek to reach out further should it become necessary or beneficial to discuss those with you. Both the House and the Senate have already put forth substantive infrastructure proposals, and we urge the members of both chambers to look towards those proposals as you work towards a compromise infrastructure bill; one that will create jobs, boost the economy, and meet existing and anticipated infrastructure needs. Many have dubbed such an effort as a “Marshall Plan for Infrastructure” and that is clearly what the United States can and should accomplish in the wake of this pandemic. Again, on behalf of our members, thank you for all your efforts to date to help combat this virus and help stabilize our region. .

Don Pesci: Those gubernatorial Caligulas

Decisive executive: A marble bust of Caligula restored to its original colors, identified from particles trapped in the marble

VERNON, Conn.

Gore Vidal – deceased, but not from Coronavirus complications – was once asked whether he thought the Kennedy brood had exercised extraordinary sway over Massachusetts. He did. And what did he think of the seemingly unending reign of “Lion of the Senate” Edward Kennedy, who had spent almost 43 years in office?

Vidal said he didn’t mind, because every state should have in it at least one Caligula.

The half-mad Roman emperor Caligula, who reigned in 37-41 A.D., considered himself a god, and the senators of Rome generally deferred, on pain of displeasure, to His Royal Deity. Caligula certainly acted like a god. The tribunes of the people deferred to his borderless power, which he wielded like a whip. They deferred, and deferred, and deferred… .Over time, their republic slipped through their fingers like water. Scholars think Caligula may have been murdered by a palace guard he had insulted.

Here in the United States, we do not dispose of our godlike saviors in a like manner. At worse, we may promote them to a judgeship, or they may be recruited after public service by deep-pocket lobbyists or legal firms, or they may remain in office until, as in Edward Kennedy’s case, they have shucked off their mortal coil and trouble us no longer

.Coronavirus has produced a slew of Vidal Caligulas, all of them governors. In emergencies, when chief executives are festooned with extraordinary powers, the legislature is expected to defer to the executive, and the judiciary remains quiescent.

This deference to an all-powerful executive department is not uncommon in war, but even in war, the legislative and judiciary departments remain active and viral concerning their oversight constitutional responsibilities.The war on Coronavirus, however, is a war like no other. Here in Connecticut, the General Assembly remains in a state of suspended animation. Every so often, an annoying constitutional Cassandra will pop up to remind us that we are a constitutional republic, but constitutional antibodies in Connecticut are lacking. Our constitutions, federal and state, are still the law of the land, and even our homegrown Caligulas are not “above the law,” because we are “a nation of laws, not of men.”

These expressions are more than antiquated apothegms; they are flags of liberty that, most recently, have been waved under President Trump’s nose. However, in our present Coronavirus circumstances, no one pays much attention to constitutional Cassandras because --- do you want to die? Really, DO YOU WANT TO DIE?Every soldier who has ever entered the service of his country in a war has asked himself the very same question. And we are in a Coronavirus War, are we not? Pray it may not last as long as “The War on Drugs.” Drug dealers won that one, and Connecticut has long since entered into the  gambling racket; the marijuana racket looms in our future.

Then too, in the long run, we are all dead. Even “lions of the Senate” die. The whole point of life is to live honorably. And this rather high-falutin notion of honor means what your mama said it meant: don’t cheat; don’t lie; treat others as you expect them to treat you. Bathe every day and night in modesty, and remember – as astonishing as it may seem -- sometimes your moral enemy may be right. Put on your best manners in company. “The problem with bad manners,” William F. Buckley Jr. once said, “is that they sometimes lead to murder.” Caligula forgot that admonition.

Once Coronavirus has passed, we will be able honestly and forthrightly to examine closely the following propositions, many of which seem to be supported by what little, obscure data we now have at our disposal: that death projections have been wildly exaggerated; that reports of overwhelmed hospitals were exaggerated; that death counts were likely inflated; that the real death rate is magnitudes lower than it appears; that there have been under-serviced at-risk groups affected by Coronavirus; that it  is not entirely clear how well isolation works; that ventilators in some cases could be causing deaths.  These are open questions because insufficient data at our disposal at the moment does not permit a “scientific” answer to the questions that torment all of us.

At some point, a vaccine will be produced that will help to quiet our sometimes irrational fears, but vaccine production lies months ahead. The question before us now is: what is more dangerous, the wolf or the lion? New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and allied governors in his Northeast compact, cannot pinpoint a date to end their destructive business shutdown because of insufficient data. According to some reports, Cuomo has hired China-connected McKinsey & Company to produce “models on testing, infections and other key data points that will underpin decisions on how and when to reopen the region’s economy.”

If the economy in Connecticut collapses because Gov. Ned Lamont accedes to the demands of those in his newly formed consortium of Northeast governors that business destroying restrictions should remain in place for months until a vaccine is widely distributed, the effects of the resulting economic implosion will certainly be more severe than a waning Coronavirus infestation. After Connecticut has reached the apex of the Coronavirus bell curve, it is altogether possible that a continuation of the cure – a severe business shutdown occasioned by policies rooted in insufficient data – will be far worse than the disease it purports to cure.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

David Warsh: The Great Depression and the possible 'Coronavirus Depression'

The course of the Great Depression in the United States, as reflected in per-capita GDP (average income per person.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

People are searching for a way to talk about the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Veteran economic journalist Robert Samuelson wrote last week in The Washington Post, “For the first time in my life, I think a depression is conceivable.”  The Financial Times Saturday led the paper with a four-column headline: “Global Economy set for deepest reversal since Great Depression.”

Robert Gordon, a member for more than 40 years of the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, wrote to say: “Thinking ahead to the ultimate data that the Bureau of Economic Analysis will release on the decline in GDP in 2020:Q2, I should look back at my interpolated quarterly data for the 1930s to see what was the largest quarterly decline of GDP during 1929-32 or 1937-38.  Will this time be larger than that?”

Even without the BEA data, it seems reasonable to suppose that the next several quarters – and whatever financial fragility is exposed therein – will enter historical consciousness around the world as the Coronavirus Depression. Already the experience is very different from the W-shaped recessions of 1981-82, or the deep recession, lasting from December 2007 until June 2009, that accompanied the slow-fused Panic of 2007-08.

Samuelson listed three distinctive characteristics that distinguished the Great Depression from business contractions before and since: the scale of havoc and economic suffering that occurred; the “intellectual vacuum” that accompanied it, insofar as economists lacked a widely accepted theory to explain it; and the absence of a social safety net to cushion the human costs of collapse.

He might have added its length – two contractions, 1929-1933 and 1937-38 —gave it the shape of a 10-year lazy-W – and the fact that it culminated in a long global war.

But of course the Great Depression has not gone into history as altogether unexplained, even though Keynesians and monetarists continue to argue about it. And while the United States had very little in the way of a safety net at the beginning of the 1930s, many of the features that are cushioning the blow today were in place by the end of the decade – bank-deposit protection, unemployment insurance and the Social Security System.

Three years of Depression brought about a change in administration, and, after a false start (the National Recovery Administration), President Franklin Roosevelt and the 73rd Congress produced the lasting reforms of the New Deal – public works, safety nets, labor-market reforms and an array of new regulatory agencies. The onsets of both those later “great recessions,” in 1980 and 2008, also brought changes in the White House and Congress. In their respective ways, those elections, too, produced changes in the country’s long-term direction.

What might be expected to result if Democrat Joe Biden is elected in the fall?  Whatever his imperfections as a candidate, he is just one among many leaders who would come to the fore. I am just guessing, but perhaps health-care reform would top the agenda once again.

President Trump made yet another attempt to damage the Affordable Care Act last week, when he declined to open enrollment to millions of suddenly unemployed and uninsured workers and ordered Medicare to cover coronavirus treatment fr the uninsured instead..  For a Democratic administration, tackling reform of the health-care system in the wake of the Coronavirus Depression would be the logical place to start.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first appeared.

Ready for a pandemic?

Warning signs at DeGaulle Airport, the Paris region’s primary airport

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Back in 2003 I flew to Taiwan (one of my favorite nations) during the epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome— the SARS virus that started, as do so many viruses, in very crowded China. Inconveniently, I was coming out of a bad cold, with bronchitis, and was doing my fair share of coughing on the plane, most of whose passengers were wearing face masks (even without a public-health threat like SARS, many East Asians wear face masks as a matter of course). My coughing clearly distressed my fellow passengers; some moved to vacant seats further away from me.

So I feared that I’d be stopped at the Taipei airport and quarantined for 10 days. Luckily, my guide (who told me “no worries!”) for the series of meetings I had planned for my week on the island, managed to get me through -- or was it around? -- the passport and other controls, and the week went well as my cough subsided. I didn’t have SARS, and the epidemic was eventually stopped after some weeks.

The experience impressed on me how fast epidemics can spread in a time of international jet travel, ever-bigger cities (especially in the Developing World) and, particularly in much of Asia, because of the close proximity of hundreds of millions of people to domesticated and wild animals that can carry dangerous viruses that can rapidly mutate and threaten humans. Still, there’s hope that the decline in the number of rural (and not so rural) Chinese keeping pigs, poultry and other animals in their backyards as the country becomes more urbanized might reduce the spread of dangerous viruses. And of course medicine marches on.

But it seems inevitable that a true worldwide virus pandemic will eventually kill millions.

How ready are we? The World Health Organization, part of the United Nations, needs more resources to plan for and coordinate the battle against epidemics. (By the way, Taiwan is not a member of the WHO; it only has “observer’’ status because China, throwing its weight around in its claim that it owns the island democracy, keeps it out.)

The U.N. hosts assorted hypocrisies, idiocies and corruptions. But real and threatened epidemics is just one huge reason why we need it.

And the Trump administration, which doesn’t particularly like international coordination, has shut down an office charged with responding to global pandemic threats, curtailed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s foreign-disease-outbreak-prevention efforts and ended a surveillance program set up to detect new viral threats. Perhaps it will reconsider in an election year.