Pelosi issues mask mandate for House, allows Sergeant at arms to remove those who don't comply

Sergeant at arms tasked with removing members who don't wear masks except when speaking

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Wednesday that masks will be required in the House Chamber, and tasked the sergeant at arms with removing members who don’t wear masks except when speaking, saying its a serious breach of decorum. “Members and staff will be required to wear masks at all times in the hall of the House. Except that members may remove their masks, temporarily, when recognized,” she said. The new mandate comes after Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert, a prominent resister of mask-wearing, tested positive for coronavirus during White House screening before a planned trip to Texas with President Trump.

Mr. Gohmert is the seventh House lawmaker to test positive for the virus since the outbreak began. He said Wednesday that he will be quarantining for 10 days. Mr. Gohmert said he wore a mask during the Barr hearing, although a video clip posted by a reporter from The Hill showed neither man wearing a mask while they were in close proximity in a Capitol hallway. A few other members, including fellow Texas Republican Rep. Kay Granger, the top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, and Arizona Democrat Raul Grijalva, House Natural Resources, said they are self-quarantining after being near Mr. Gohmert. The positive test also spurred talk of reconsidering a covid testing mandate for lawmakers on Capitol Hill, which Mrs. Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected in the spring to save resources for the frontlines.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/29/nancy-pelosi-issues-mask-mandate-house/

Declining coronavirus case fatality rate in U.S. renews questions on merits of lockdown

The share of Americans who succumb to COVID-19 is dropping and is lower than many peer nations. The U.S. death toll hit a once-unfathomable 150,000 Wednesday after Northeast nursing homes were battered early, minority populations faced outsized risks and the South and West experienced a midsummer resurgence. Pandemic trackers put the share of U.S. residents who test positive and then die at 3.4%, far better than the 15% in the United Kingdom and roughly 14% in France and Italy, or 7.6% in Canada.

“You look at our mortality rate. You look at our death rate. You look at different statistics. We’re doing very well. But one death is too many,” President Trump said last week. Experts who are tracking the pandemic say case mortality tends to vary widely because of several factors, making nation-to-nation comparisons difficult. The ability to identify more cases through testing lowers the case-to-fatality ratio. Demographics also matter because an older population overall will have more deaths. Plus, health care resources differ widely around the world and not everyone is using the same standards in determining what is a “COVID-19 death.”

There are also different ways of measuring the situation. Case fatality rates give patients a sense of how likely they are to die after infection, while other metrics look at the share of deaths in a population. The U.S. case fatality rate is down from closer to 6% in late April and early May, when states such as New York and New Jersey reported eye-popping numbers. Patients were succumbing from infections they acquired weeks earlier, as states grappled with cases that went undetected. Nursing homes accounted for an inordinate share of early deaths in Washington state and then large percentages of fatalities from coast to coast. As many as 4 in 10 deaths nationwide are linked to nursing homes and long-term-care facilities, leading to state investigations and federal efforts to test workers and shield residents. The 3.4% case fatality rate in the U.S. is based on known cases. But with so many asymptomatic carriers going untested, the real number is probably closer to 0.6%, according to experts who have offered their best estimates.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/29/coronavirus-case-fatality-rate-us-declines-sparkin/