Coronavirus

New York City’s health commissioner blew off an urgent NYPD request for 500,000 surgical masks as the coronavirus crisis mounted — telling a high-ranking police official that “I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops,” The Post has learned.

Dr. Oxiris Barbot made the heartless remark during a brief phone conversation in late March with NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan, sources familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

Monahan asked Barbot for 500,000 masks but she said she could only provide 50,000, the sources said.

“I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops,” Barbot said, according to sources.

“I need them for others.”

The conversation took place as increasing numbers of cops were calling out sick with symptoms of COVID-19 but before the department suffered its first casualties from the deadly respiratory disease, sources said.

Although surgical masks don’t necessarily prevent wearers from being infected with the coronavirus, they can prevent people from spreading it to others.

The NYPD has recorded 5,490 cases of coronavirus among its 55,000 cops and civilian workers, with 41 deaths, according to figures released Wednesday evening.

Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, called for Barbot to be fired over her “despicable and unforgivable” comments.

“Dr. Barbot should be forced to look in the eye of every police family who lost a hero to this virus. Look them in the eye and tell them they aren’t worth a rat’s ass,” Lynch fumed.

In the wake of Barbot’s crass rebuff of Monahan, NYPD officials learned that the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene had a large stash of masks, ventilators and other equipment stored in a New Jersey warehouse, sources said.

The department appealed to City Hall, which arranged for the NYPD to get 250,000 surgical masks, sources said.

The federal Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency also learned about the situation, leading FEMA to supply the NYPD with Tyvek suits and disinfectant, sources said.

A source who was present during a tabletop exercise at the city Office of Emergency Management headquarters in Brooklyn in March recalled witnessing a “very tense moment” when Monahan complained to Mayor Bill de Blasio in front of Barbot about the NYPD’s need for personal protective equipment, saying, “For weeks, we haven’t gotten an answer.”

De Blasio, who was seated between Monahan and Barbot, asked her, “Oxiris, what is he talking about?” the source said.

When Monahan said the gear was vital to keeping cops safe, de Blasio said, “You definitely need it,” and told Barbot, “Oxiris, you’re going to fix this right now,” the source said.

Last week, Barbot — who’s been a routine participant in de Blasio’s daily coronavirus briefings — was noticeably absent when Blasio announced that the city’s public hospital system would oversee a major testing and tracing program, even though the DOH has previously run similar programs.

Hizzoner also heaped praise on the head of NYC Health + Hospitals, Dr. Mitchell Katz, saying, “When you have an inspired operational leader, you know, ‘Pass the ball to them’ is my attitude.”

De Blasio named Barbot the city’s health commissioner in 2018 following the resignation of Dr. Mary Bassett, who took a job at Harvard University’s School of Public Health amid an investigation into the DOH’s failure to alert federal officials to elevated levels of lead in the blood of children living in city housing projects.

“During the height of COVID, while our hospitals were battling to keep patients alive, there was a heated exchange between the two where things were said out of frustration but no harm was wished on anyone,” Department of Health press secretary Patrick Gallahue said, noting that Barbot “apologized for her contribution to the exchange.”

The NYPD declined to comment.

Comrades, if you live in Derp Blue Washington State you now have to show your papers to eat at a restaurant. Governor Inslee and The Ministry of COVID compliance are requiring all restaurants to keep a list of all diners names and addresses. No papers, no service.

Additionally, the powerful blue Ministry of Los Angeles is extending suspension of the first amendment and economic freedom for an additional three months. Anyone who exits a building is required to wear a mask outside.

All your freedoms are belong to us.

Meanwhile the Michigan Ministry led by Governor Gretchen Whitmer has suspended the occupational license of a non-compliant barber who refused to adhere to the dictates of the state. The rebellious outlaw unlawfully trimmed the hair of fellow rebels.

Fräulein Whitmer was not pleased with the rebellion and dispatched the regulatory arm.

On a positive note, rapid increases of open rebellion against the Blue Team have been identified. The citizen rebellion is starting to align with the freedom and liberty banner of the Red Team. The open totalitarian nature of the Blue Team’s oppressive ideology is creating a backlash which could carry the Red Team to a big victory in November.

As a reminder, the virus has a genetic targeting mechanism able to differentiate between essential cans of vegetables, bottles of liquor, lottery tickets and non-essential products like sneakers or furniture. The virus will also target specific venues. To avoid an increased infection rate it is critical for American citizens to only visit Home Depot, Lowes, Costco, WalMart & other large institutional retail systems with influential lobbying offices near the Covid Mitigation Ministry.

Effective compliance and mitigation requires that everyone must avoid the small business operations where the virus is more prone to hide out and attack consumers. The scientific data-hubs in/around K-Street in Washington DC must lead our careful decision-making.

Remember, the Ministry is working closely with regional governors to outline the greatest threat. Walking on a golf course in Massachusetts is safe-behavior; however, if you carry a particularly shaped stick and swing it at a ball, the virus will immediately target you.

These granular distinctions are very important to understand.

Currently in most regions the virus is allowing dogs and cats to have their fur trimmed. However, if a human attempts to commercially reduce the length of your sideburns it will create a viral hot-spot potentially putting the health of our planet at risk.

The rebel alliance has noted that specifically random viral targeting appears much more prevalent in the regions where people formerly wore genitalia on their heads. There is a possibility this could be propaganda because there is not enough conclusive scientific data assembled to quantify the merit of this claim. Confirmation efforts remain ongoing.

In almost all regions of ministry control, furniture purchasing seems like one of the most potentially dangerous activities. Out of an abundance of caution these consumer hubs of activity have been shut-down; however, the Ministry is evaluating how the virus would respond if cans of vegetables were placed within the building.

According to the most extensive study conducted so far, commercial buildings with cans of vegetables appear to be the safest venue allowing congregation and proximity. It is unknown if moving canned foods and sandwiches into the furniture stores, or other less traveled venues, would transfer the benefits of virus mitigation. The Ministry has a teleconference with scientists and industry experts scheduled later this week to analyze this question.

In the interim, the Ministry would like to remind you the greatest danger is the type of purchasing you make. Large box retailers with dense populations are safe-spaces. Smaller business with less density are hazards; and houses of religious worship are death traps due to their propensity to promote the most critically dangerous activity of all, fellowship.

Because the literal health of our nations’ citizens are at risk, we must remain resolved to keep all hospitals and patient facilities closed and at precipice of financial ruin.

Remember, we are all in this together; and to prove how critical this is to the function of our American society, we must all stay apart. Your compliance is appreciated.

Lindsey Graham opened her Salem salon last week, in defiance of state lockdown orders. In response, Democrat Governor Kate Brown arranged a $14,000 fine through Occupational Safety and Health (Oregon OSHA) and sent Child Protective Services (CPS) to visit her kids at home while Graham was at work.

It’s obvious that Gov. Brown has decided to bully Graham and make an example of her and the contractors that work out of her salon.

Late Thursday, Oregon OSHA notified Graham they have been classifying the contractors working in her salon as employees. This is a frontal assault on independent contract work and has no basis in statute. OSHA further informed her that it will issue a $14,000 fine for workplace violations. If allowed to stand, this action puts at risk every beauty salon in the state of Oregon that operates with contractors. OSHA then bullied Graham with the threat of notifying other state agencies and initiating additional investigations.

Kate Brown has decided to utilize the full weight of the state to target and destroy Lindsey Graham. Brown has even targeted her family and children.

Graham received a visit from CPS at her home just three days after she reopened her salon.

Here is a timeline of the abuses Kate Brown and her state thugs have thrown at Lindsey and her family over the last 10 days.

• On May 2, Lindsay let her clients know that she would open her salon on the 5th of May.

• On May 4, OSHA threatened her with a $70,000 fine.

• On May 5, she reopened her salon in Downtown Salem.

• On May 6, Lindsay received a letter from the city of Salem informing her that she was in violation of the office lease contract. (the city of Salem owns the building her salon occupies)

• On May 7, child protective services showed up at her home while she was at the office to initiate an investigation of her children’s environment.

• On May 14, OSHA told Lindsey they will fine her $14,000 and they will notify other state agencies to initiate additional investigations.

In an interview with PJ Media, Graham said that there is no way OSHA even has jurisdiction over her salon, and her attorney concurs. Salon owners often lease out stations to stylists classified as independent contractors. Lindsey doesn’t actually have any employees, and does not operate a workspace. Therefore, OSHA should not have any involvement at all. They’ve appointed themselves arbiters in this case without any legal authorization.

Graham also told PJ Media the frightening details of the CPS visit, which occurred while she and her husband were both at work. “I’m not going to point the finger at Kate Brown and say she did it,” she said. “My attorney just says, there is nothing in my file or around my life or in my home to warrant a CPS call. What are the chances a state government official shows up at my home three days after I defy her orders on completely bogus grounds?”

“I don’t know how the [CPS worker] didn’t just close the case when he walked in the front door,” she added. “They had a report, and it was full of immaculately bogus material. Just random material as to why our home was unfit for children. My attorney said that the fact that the case is not closed is another interesting detail. It’s still pending.”

“He showed up when I was gone at work, and we had a babysitter watching the baby,” said Graham. “So I had to wait another day to speak with him. He did the whole thing. He sat me down and interviewed me separate from my husband. He interviewed my husband. He questioned my six-year-old child. He made me take him on a tour of my house. He made me lift the toilet seat. He checked my baby’s diaper. Never in my life would I ever have thought I’d experience something like that. That’s harassment at the highest level.”

Much like Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Kate Brown has decided that anyone who defies her orders will be targeted for personal destruction. It’s a wonder these thugs aren’t putting their victims’ heads on actual pikes.

On March 6, Liz Specht, Ph.D., posted a thread on Twitter that immediately went viral. As of this writing, it has received over 100,000 likes and almost 41,000 retweets, and was republished at Stat News. It purported to “talk math” and reflected the views of “highly esteemed epidemiologists.” It insisted it was “not a hypothetical, fear-mongering, worst-case scenario,” and that, while the predictions it contained might be wrong, they would not be “orders of magnitude wrong.” It was also catastrophically incorrect.

The crux of Dr. Specht’s 35-tweet thread was that the rapid doubling of COVID-19 cases would lead to about 1 million cases by May 5, 4 million by May 11, and so forth. Under this scenario, with a 10% hospitalization rate, we would expect approximately 400,000 hospitalizations by mid-May, which would more than overwhelm the estimated 330,000 available hospital beds in the country. This would combine with a lack of protective equipment for health care workers and lead to them “dropping from the workforce for weeks at a time,” to shortages of saline drips and so forth. Half the world would be infected by the summer, and we were implicitly advised to buy dry goods and to prepare not to leave the house.

Interestingly, this thread was wrong not because we managed to bend the curve and stave off the apocalypse; for starters, Dr. Specht described the cancellation of large events and workplace closures as something that would shift things by only days or weeks.

Instead, this thread was wrong because it dramatically overstated our knowledge of the way the virus worked; it fell prey to the problem, common among experts, of failing to address adequately the uncertainty surrounding its point estimates. It did so in two opposing ways. First, it dramatically understated the rate of spread. If serological tests are to be remotely believed, we likely hit the apocalyptic milestone of 2 million cases quite some time ago. Not in the United States, mind you, but in New York City, where 20% of residents showed positive COVID-19 antibodies on April 23. Fourteen percent of state residents showed antibodies, suggesting 2.5 million cases in the Empire State alone; since antibodies take a while to develop, this was likely the state of affairs in mid-April or earlier.

But in addition to being wrong about the rate of spread, the thread was also very wrong about the rate of hospitalization. While New York City found its hospital system stretched, it avoided catastrophic failure, despite having within its borders the entire number of cases predicted for the country as a whole, a month earlier than predicted. Other areas of the United States found themselves with empty hospital beds and unused emergency capacity.

One would think that, given the amount of attention this was given in mainstream sources, there would be some sort of revisiting of the prediction. Of course, nothing of the sort occurred. This thread has been absolutely memory-holed, along with countless other threads and Medium articles from February and March. We might forgive such forays on sites like Twitter and Medium, but feeding frenzies from mainstream sources are also passed over without the media ever revisiting to see how things turned out.

Consider Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis was castigated for failing to close the beaches during spring break, and critics suggested that the state might be the next New York. I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, but Florida’s new cases peaked in early April, at which point it was a middling state in terms of infections per capita. The virus hasn’t gone away, of course, but the five-day rolling average of daily cases in Florida is roughly where it was in late March, notwithstanding the fact that testing has increased substantially. Taking increased testing into account, the positive test rate has gradually declined since late March as well, falling from a peak of 11.8% on April 1 to a low of 3.6% on May 12.

Notwithstanding this, the Washington Post continues to press stories of public health officials begging state officials to close beaches (a more interesting angle at this point might be why these health officials were so wrong), while the New York Times noted a few days ago (misleadingly, and grossly so) that “Florida had a huge spike in cases around Miami after spring break revelry,” without providing the crucial context that the caseload mimicked increases in other states that did not play host to spring break. Again, perhaps the real story is that spring breakers passed COVID-19 among themselves and seeded it when they got home. I am sure some of this occurred, but it seems exceedingly unlikely that they would have spread it widely among themselves and not also spread it widely to bartenders, wait staff, hotel staff, and the like in Florida.

Florida was also one of the first states to experiment with reopening. Duval County (Jacksonville) reopened its beaches on April 19 to much national skepticism. Yet daily cases are lower today than they were they day that it reopened; there was a recent spike in cases associated with increased testing, but it is now receding.