Masks off: US judge throws out Biden’s face-covering mandate
Washington: Put it on or leave it off?
That’s the question airline passengers and public transport users across America were left asking after a federal judge in Florida struck down a national mandate that required masks to be worn on planes, trains, and buses to protect people from the pandemic.
Less than a week after the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention extended the mandate, a judge appointed by former president Donald Trump, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, ruled the health agency had overstepped its legal authority by imposing the order that has been in place since February last year.
The move is a blow to the Biden administration, which appeared to be caught off-guard by the ruling and is now “reviewing the decision and assessing potential next steps”.
But it’s also created another grey area in one of the most polarising debates the US has faced over the past few years, and has prompted the question: was the mandate unlawful all along?
America’s COVID-19 rules are confusing at the best of times. In Washington DC, for example, you can attend a packed nightclub or sit next to a stranger at a communal cafe table without wearing a mask; yet, you must put one on the moment you walk into the subway – even if you’re the only person on the platform waiting for the train.
Inconsistencies even when it comes to President Joe Biden himself have not gone unnoticed: sometimes he wears a mask indoors, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes his administration abides by CDC guidelines; other times it doesn’t.
The Florida ruling has resulted in even greater uncertainty, with the transport industry left scrambling as they awaited federal guidance over how quickly airlines and train operators should stop forcing passengers to wear masks.
The Transportation Security Administration said it would no longer enforce the mask requirement, causing airports in Houston and Dallas to almost immediately do away with their mandates.
Some groups, such as New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Chicago Department of Aviation announced they would continue to abide by the previous order as they reviewed the ruling, whereas certain airlines, such as United, said they would drop the requirement in most cases.
“Effective immediately, masks are no longer required at United on domestic flights, select international flights (dependent upon the arrival country’s mask requirements) or at US airports,” it said in a statement.
****************************************************
FDA Authorizes Breath Test to Detect COVID-19
For the first time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized for emergency use a breath test to detect COVID-19.
The InspectIR COVID-19 Breathalyzer is the “size of a piece of carry-on luggage” and can analyze chemical compounds in breath samples to test for COVID-19, the FDA states.
Samples can be collected and analyzed in the same place in less than three minutes, which enables it to be carried out in places such as doctor’s offices, hospitals, and mobile testing sites.
The test uses gas chromatography mass-spectrometry (GC-MS) to isolate different chemical mixtures and quickly detect certain compounds—referred to as Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)—associated with COVID-19 infection in the breath samples.
InspectIR says it is the first company to make a commercially available miniature mass spectrometer to analyze breath samples directly.
If the test detects the presence of five VOCs associated with COVID-19, it will give an unconfirmed positive test result, which would need to be confirmed with a molecular test.
Negative results don’t rule out COVID-19 and “should not be used as the sole basis for treatment or patient management decisions, including infection control decisions,” the FDA noted. Negative results “should be considered in the context of a patient’s recent exposures, history, and the presence of clinical signs and symptoms consistent with COVID-19.”
The breathalyzer was studied on a group of 2,409 people with and without symptoms. Per the study, the device had 91.2 sensitivity—it was able to correctly identify 91.2 percent of positive COVID-19 cases. It also showed 99.3 specificity, meaning it gave false positive results in 0.7 percent of cases.
The test also gave similar sensitivity in a follow-up clinical study focused on the Omicron variant, the FDA noted.
“Today’s authorization is yet another example of the rapid innovation occurring with diagnostic tests for COVID
https://www.theepochtimes.com/fda-authorizes-breath-test-to-detect-covid-19_4405804.html
*******************************************Inequality and the Piketty Accounting Error
The political left’s love affair with steep progressive taxation got an academic boost with the publication of Thomas Piketty’s bestselling 2014 book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Appealing to the New Deal era, Mr. Piketty proposed a simple explanation and remedy for rising economic inequality: The concentration of income among the top 1% could be mitigated by strategically targeting wealth with the tax system.
Mr. Piketty based his theory on a historical argument taken from his own empirical work with fellow economist Emmanuel Saez. When Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt hiked the top marginal income-tax rate to 91% during the New Deal and World War II, they allegedly broke up the concentration of the capital stock at the top of the income ladder. Inequality declined to a midcentury trough, where it remained until the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s. Inequality then rebounded to form a centurylong U-shaped pattern. The solution, then, is to restore tax rates to their FDR levels.
But the Piketty-Saez theory is less a matter of history than an accounting error caused by their misunderstanding of World War II-era tax statistics. That’s the main conclusion of a new analysis of top income concentration in the U.S. between 1917 and 1960, which we recently published in the Economic Journal.
Progressives embraced Messrs. Piketty and Saez’s historical account after it appeared in an influential academic paper in 2003. Their story undergirds the wealth-tax proposals of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, is also a fan. Even the New York Times’s “1619 Project” draws on Messrs. Piketty and Saez to proclaim confidently that “progressive taxation remains among the best ways to limit economic inequality.”
Our findings paint a different picture. It’s true that income inequality declined in the early part of the 20th century, but the cause had more to do with the economic devastation of the Great Depression than the New Deal tax regime.
To see how, we must first turn to Messrs. Piketty and Saez’s inequality statistics. Their data show a rapid decline in top income shares between the 1929 stock-market crash and the end of World War II—a period economists have dubbed the “Great Leveling.” In their version, the sharpest decline took place between 1940 and 1945, just as the 91% top marginal rate schedule became a fixture of midcentury tax policy. Their statistics imply that more than 34% of the decline in the top 1%’s income share occurred in this brief period, as did an astounding 73% of the decline in the top 10% of earners.
Our investigation of the Piketty-Saez data reveals that they failed to account properly for historical changes in how the Internal Revenue Service reported income-tax statistics. As a result, their numbers systematically overstate the levels of top income concentrations by as much as a third, while also distorting the trend line during the “Great Leveling” period. The combination of these errors creates an illusion that FDR’s tax hikes caused inequality to fall.
Messrs. Piketty and Saez’s mistakes arise from how the IRS tabulates income. Between 1943 and 1944 the tax collection agency shifted from tracking “net income” to “adjusted gross income,” or AGI. The latter category, a truer depiction of annual earnings, includes both taxable earnings and deductible income such as charitable giving and state and local tax payments. Yet Messrs. Piketty and Saez didn’t bring pre-1944 IRS records into line with AGI accounting standards. Instead, they applied a fixed and arbitrary adjustment to all years before the AGI accounting change that conveniently scaled upward to the highest income brackets.
At the same time, Messrs. Piketty and Saez mishandled how they estimate the top 1%’s income shares. In addition to IRS records of tax payments, this calculation requires a measure for all personal income earnings. We found that in every year prior to 1960, the IRS’s numerator is mismatched to the total income denominator used by Messrs. Piketty and Saez. They used the wrong accounting definition for personal income and neglected to adjust their data for wartime distortions on tax reporting. When we corrected these problems, something stunning happened. The overall level of top income concentration flattened, and the timing of its leveling shifted away from the World War II-era tax rates that Messrs. Piketty and Saez place at the center of their story.
*********************************************
First infection of new Covid variant detected in Australia
NSW has reported a case of Omicron XE infection brought in by an overseas traveller.
The state was also the first to report a case of another recombinant strain dubbed Deltacron, with that variant spreading two Queensland within 24 hours of being detected.
There are fears a further relaxing rules for international arrivals will see more - and potentially deadlier - variants enter the country.
XE is a combination of the two Omicron variant subtypes BA.1 and BA.2.
The variant is what’s known as recombinant, meaning it is a mixture of the two different strains and has characteristics of both.
More than a thousand cases of XE have been recorded in the UK and cases have also been detected in Thailand, India and Israel.
It’s presence around the world suggests it has been spread by open borders and international travel.
From Monday, international arrivals will no longer need to test negative to Covid-19 before leaving for Australia, meaning more cases of new variants could arrive in the country.
“As the Covid pandemic has progressed, we’ve repeatedly seen the arrival of new viral variants,” University of Leeds virologist Grace Roberts wrote in The Conversation.
While the properties of XE are not yet well known, Dr Roberts said there did not appear to be cause for additional concern.
“We know that Omicron XE has the majority of its genetic information, including the spike protein, from the Omicron sub-variant BA.2, which is the variant predominating in the UK at the moment,” she said.
“ It is likely, therefore, that the characteristics of omicron XE (such as transmissibility, severity of disease and vaccine efficacy) are similar to those of BA.2.”
NSW recorded 17,856 positive cases of Covid on Thursday, with a total 1582 Covid cases admitted to hospital, including 71 people in intensive care, 23 of whom require ventilation.
The state also recorded 21 Covid-linked deaths on Thursday, including one person who was over 100-year-old. Of those that died, three people were not vaccinated
********************************************
Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
**************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment