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Under the heading of “Who could have imagined…?”
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New Yorkers, Once Again at Ground Zero, in Their Own Words
This week in our living oral history, the city’s residents—from the great to the humble—try to come to grips with a metropolis under assault by a virus.
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A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low
By now, Germany is conducting around 350,000 coronavirus tests a week, far more than any other European country. Early and widespread testing has allowed the authorities to slow the spread of the pandemic by isolating known cases while they are infectious. It has also enabled lifesaving treatment to be administered in a more timely way.
“When I have an early diagnosis and can treat patients early — for example put them on a ventilator before they deteriorate — the chance of survival is much higher,” Professor Kräusslich said.
Do we have US numbers to compare? Per capita?
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I read something else about that not long ago.
In other news:
Whatever happened to the CDC?
Overwhelmed Hospitals Face a New Crisis: Staffing Firms Are Cutting Their Doctors’ Hours and Pay
Multiple private-equity-backed staffing companies have cut hours for thousands of emergency room doctors, physician assistants and nurse practitioners. That means there are fewer medical workers at a time in hospitals and they are receiving less pay.
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Trump recently tweeted about his good friend MBS.
Let’s check in with another Trump pal, Rodrigo Duterte.
“Shoot them dead”: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte orders police and military to kill citizens who defy coronavirus lockdown
Yikes. 
Federal government spent millions to ramp up mask readiness, but that isn’t helping now
It turns out that the Trump regime HAS been using the Defense Production Act… to quietly undermine the states they told to go get supplies on their own.
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Could the GOP please stop “helping” and start HELPING?
Confusion surrounds Georgia’s coronavirus lockdown
Is there an endless supply of these damn cruise ships, and where are they going that people keep getting this? What the heck?
Another cruise ship with virus victims docking in Florida
The purpose of this FEMA page is to help the public distinguish between rumors and facts regarding the response to coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Rumors can easily circulate within communities during a crisis.
430,000 People Have Traveled From China to U.S. Since Coronavirus Surfaced
There were 1,300 direct flights to 17 cities before President Trump’s travel restrictions. Since then, nearly 40,000 Americans and other authorized travelers have made the trip, some this past week and many with spotty screening.
Watch this, and as you do, remember that the coronavirus is called Covid-19 because this strain was discovered in 2019.
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U.S. ‘wasted’ months before preparing for virus pandemic
A review of federal purchasing contracts by The Associated Press shows federal agencies waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.
By that time, hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile. That federal cache of supplies was created more than 20 years ago to help bridge gaps in the medical and pharmaceutical supply chains during a national emergency.
Now, three months into the crisis, that stockpile is nearly drained just as the numbers of patients needing critical care is surging. Some state and local officials report receiving broken ventilators and decade-old dry-rotted masks.
“We basically wasted two months,” Kathleen Sebelius, health and human services secretary during the Obama administration, told AP.
[…]
Trump, who pledged on March 27 that his administration would ensure that 100,000 additional ventilators would be made available “within 100 days,” said on Thursday that he’ll use the Defense Production Act to orderRespironics and other ventilator makers to step up production.
It’s not clear that Trump’s order would translate into the 100,000 new ventilators he promised. In a House Oversight and Reform Committee briefing last week, top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials hedged, saying 100,000 ventilators would be available by late June “at the earliest.”
Press Release: House Oversight Committee hearing with FEMA 
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This is where the hatred leads us.
Stabbing of Asian-American 2-Year-Old and Her Family Was a Virus-Fueled Hate Crime: Feds
https://news.yahoo.com/stabbing-asian-american-2-old-190324496.html?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=tw
I am told that this is a special extra credit, though it is related to taxes. Interesting. So there may be some undue panic.
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Coronavirus death toll: Americans are almost certainly dying of covid-19 but being left out of the official count
Navy Captain Removed From Carrier Tests Positive for Covid-19
Captain Crozier was fired after a leak of a letter he had emailed to Navy leaders detailing the service’s failures in dealing with a coronavirus outbreak on the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt.
The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged
From the Oval Office to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded through the system and opportunities to mitigate the pandemic were lost.
It takes Trump to make W look competent. That’s amazing.
“Bush did not just insist on preparation for a pandemic. He was obsessed with it.”
George W. Bush in 2005: ‘If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare’
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This could really shake things up in the UK:
So this is weird. This is from 2018:
This is 2019:
This is now:
Ignoring Expert Opinion, Trump Again Promotes Use of Hydroxychloroquine
The president’s advocacy of the anti-malarial drug has created tensions in his administration, and fears among doctors that it could unnecessarily expose patients to risks.
Exclusive: Pressed by Trump, U.S. pushed unproven coronavirus treatment guidance
Inside the epic White House fight over hydroxychloroquine
There was a heated disagreement in the Situation Room this weekend over the efficacy of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine – but multiple sources say it was mostly one-sided, as President Donald Trump’s top trade adviser Peter Navarro feuded with other officials over the drug’s unproven effectiveness to treat coronavirus.
He Led a Top Navy Ship. Now He Sits in Quarantine, Fired and Infected.
Colleagues say the downfall of Capt. Brett E. Crozier was charging headlong into the Trump administration’s narrative that it had everything in the coronavirus pandemic under control.
U.S. Military Tells Members to Make Their Own Masks to Fight Coronavirus in New Guidelines Met with Criticism
U.S. Stops Issuing Passports Except For ‘Life-Or-Death’ Emergencies
Appalachian Coal Communities Brace For Coronavirus: It’s Going ‘To Wipe Us Out’
Vulnerable coal miners suffering from black lung disease fear what will happen if COVID-19 is added to the mix.
Good gods, common is an understatement. Metformin is THE drug that most people with Type 2 Diabetes start on! I am on it! I know at least a dozen people in my immediate orbit who are on it!
Researchers Warn Possible Coronavirus Treatment Hydroxychloroquine May Be Toxic When Combined With Diabetes Drug
We’ve already seen mass graves in Iran. Now New York City may face the same.
New York City Councilman Mark Levine says the city is preparing a contingency plan to bury victims in a public park if morgues fill up.
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QUOTE “The different messaging about the drug from the president and his top medical expert sets up a potentially confusing clash of advice on the pandemic…”
Incredible to watch T literally trouncing the reporter’s question about hydroxychloroquine directed to Fauci, suggests more about T wanting to control the messaging, and turning down any questions on the efficacy of such a treatment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/06/coronavirus-fauci-trumpdrugs/
Toward the end, a CNN reporter turned to Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for his opinion on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine with a sharper question: “What is the medical evidence?”
Standing at the microphone, Fauci opened his mouth — but before he could speak, the answer came out of Trump’s instead.
…
Fauci’s smile, for just a moment, was all teeth now. Trump raised his finger sternly, telling the journalist, “You don’t have to ask the question,” and so Fauci didn’t answer it, and the news conference shuffled right along.
The unexpected interruption was an extraordinary moment even in this season of brash behavior exhibited by the president during his daily briefings. While Trump has been at odds with Fauci in the past, repeatedly clouding his administration’s public health messaging, the president has never shut down his top medical expert so abruptly and publicly before, intervening to keep him from answering. In other contexts, the president routinely calls on Fauci for medical questions.
…
“As I’ve said many times … the data are really just at best suggestive,” Fauci said when asked about the drug’s potential to prevent coronavirus during an appearance on “Face the Nation” just hours before Sunday’s briefing. “There have been cases that show there may be an effect and there are others to show there’s no effect, so I think in terms of science, I don’t think we can definitely say it works.”
Separately, the president of the American Medical Association, Patrice Harris, told CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer on Sunday she would not prescribe hydroxychloroquine if she had a coronavirus patient, cautioning against Trump’s “What do we have to lose?” rationale. The drug’s well-known side effects can cause fatal heart problems in patients who are taking other drugs that affect the heart’s rhythm, such as antidepressants, or who have existing heart issues.
“You could lose your life,” Harris said. “It’s unproven. And so certainly there are some limited studies, as Dr. Fauci said. But at this point, we just don’t have the data to suggest that we should be using this medication for covid-19.”
The different messaging about the drug from the president and his top medical expert sets up a potentially confusing clash of advice on the pandemic. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration gave emergency approval to the Trump administration’s plan to distribute millions of doses of antimalarial drugs including hydroxychloroquine to covid-19 patients, despite the fact that no substantial clinical trials have been completed. Using its emergency powers, the agency reasoned that trying the unapproved treatment outweighed the risks.
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As usual, you have to ASSUME that trump is somehow going to make money off whatever he is touting, or someone he owes money to will. 
He is “utterly without redeeming social value…”
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This is not good.
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Almost “poetic justice” after the way he blew off the seriousness of COVID-19 early on. But trump will probably stay healthy…I think viruses respect their own kind. 
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Trade Adviser Warned White House in January of Risks of a Pandemic
The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that had already consumed China’s leaders and would go on to upend life in Europe and the United States.
“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” Mr. Navarro’s memo said. “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
Dated Jan. 29, it came during a period when Mr. Trump was playing down the risks to the United States, and he would later go on to say that no one could have predicted such a devastating outcome.
Mr. Navarro said in the memo that the administration faced a choice about how aggressive to be in containing an outbreak, saying the human and economic costs would be relatively low if it turned out to be a problem along the lines of a seasonal flu.
But he went on to emphasize that the “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked” given the information coming from China.
In one worst-case scenario cited in the memo, more than a half-million Americans could die.
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All of this bait and switch procurement of PPE’s brought to by FEMA and various private sectors is really disgusting.
Swept Up by FEMA’: Complicated Medical Supply System Sows Confusion - The New York Times
For weeks, the Trump administration pushed states to procure their own ventilators and protective gear, like masks, gloves and face shields. But a new effort by the administration to create a hybrid system of distribution — divided between the federal government, local officials and private health care companies — has led to new confusion, bordering on disarray, and charges of confiscation.
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Axios take:
“In late January, President Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro warned his White House colleagues the novel coronavirus could take more than half a million American lives and cost close to $6 trillion, according to memos obtained by Axios.”
Trump was warned in January of Covid-19’s devastating impact, memos reveal
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