Covid-19 Facts and Statistics for the General Public

The 1889 Institute has published a new webpage on its website explicitly about Covid-19. Its purpose is to provide the best current information for dealing with the pandemic to the general public and policy makers. It also tracks official new daily positive tests and daily deaths, showing trends in the data.

It seems like new information, some of it reported out of proper context or highly speculative, is being reported by authorities and researchers every day. Information provided by the Centers for Disease Control is oriented toward health professionals. We wanted to provide good information that is easily digestible.

This continues the effort that we promised in an earlier blog post. We hope the information is useful and welcome feedback.

Included on the COVID-19 webpage are:

A graphic showing daily positive tests/deaths and 7-day averages,
Who is NOT vulnerable,
Who IS vulnerable,
Information on the relationship between age and COVID-19 vulnerability,
How COVID-19 is transmitted from person to person,
Information on mask efficacy,
The effects of societal lockdowns,
Information about herd immunity and its importance,
Recommendations for the general public and policymakers.

All information is sourced with hyperlinks.

Byron Schlomach is Director of the 1889 Institute. He can be reached at bschlomach@1889institute.org.

Perfusionist (What’s That?) Licensing: Making Heart Surgery More Dangerous

Do you know what a perfusionist is? I didn’t, either, but it’s one of the many occupations that are licensed in the State of Oklahoma. However, we at the 1889 Institute are gradually looking into each licensed occupation to learn if there is justification for forcing people to ask the government’s permission to earn money doing it. So, we got curious about these perfusionists, about which we knew nothing, and why they are licensed ( our report ). It came as no surprise that perfusionists use their skills in medicine. Nearly every occupation involved in medicine, other than custodians, especially in Oklahoma, is licensed. Yet, the majority of states do not license perfusionists . Perfusionists do perform an important service. They monitor and operate the machines that regulate blood and air flow of patients having heart surgery. And perfusionists have accidentally killed people, sometimes due to something as simple as failing to notice a kinked hose. We have previously rev...

School Choice: I Have Erred

I should point out, before the reader gets into this piece, that these are my personal thoughts. Right around last Labor Day, I suddenly had a thought. I quickly made a calculation and realized that, as of the day after Labor Day, I’ve worked full-time in public policy for 25 years – a quarter of a century. While there really is nothing fundamentally more special about a 25 th anniversary than a 24 th or 26 th one, it is a widely-recognized demarcation point. Therefore, it seems worthwhile to take time and write down reflections on my career. My work has touched on several policy areas, but I’ve been thinking a lot about public education lately. That’s the area I practically swam in when I started my career, so here are my thoughts. On the day after Labor Day in 1994 I started work for a member of the Texas House of Representatives. He was the member who always carried a voucher bill, an issue for which I was thrilled to work. By that time, my wife had homeschooled our dau...

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Do you ever find yourself observing a seemingly illogical government program , spending decision, or other strange practice and ask “how is it that no one has fixed that?” If you are like me, you encounter this phenomenon regularly. This often takes the form of a curious headline (Save Federal Funding for the Cowboy Poets!) that most people see and can’t believe is real. I would like to suggest that this phenomenon often results from the problem of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits. To understand this concept, consider a hypothetical law that assessed a $1 tax on everyone in the United States with the proceeds to be given to one individual for unrestricted use as he sees fit. The people harmed by such a law—the individual taxpayers—will not be very motivated to spend the time and effort to convince Congress to change the law. They might resent the dollar taken from them for a silly cause they don’t support, but the lost dollar isn’t worth the trouble of doing something about i...

About Those Roads in Texas

A s Sooner fans head south for the OU-Texas game next week, they will encounter a phenomenon most of us are familiar with: as you cruise across the Red River suddenly the road gets noticeably smoother. The painted lane stripes get a little brighter and the roadside “Welcome to Texas” visitors’ center gleams in the sunlight, a modern and well-maintained reminder of how much more money the Lonestar State spends on public infrastructure than little old Oklahoma. Or does it? Why are the roads so much, well… better in Texas? Turns out, it isn’t the amount of money spent, at least not when compared to the overall size of the state’s economy and personal income of its inhabitants. Research conducted by 1889 Institute’s Byron Schlomach reveals that Oklahoma actually spends significantly more on roads than Texas as a percentage of both state GDP and personal income . And that was data from 2016, before Oklahoma’s tax and spending increases of recent years. The gap is likely gr...

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