So this is happening, the hospitals are asking volunteers to sew masks from home. But you have to leave the house to pick up supply kits. Why wonât they just post the patterns and instructions online? Seems like youâd get more volunteers.
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Pence lied when he promised all passengers on the Grand Princess would be tested. Thereâs a good chance that some of those released without tests will still be infectious.
San Francisco Chronicle
Most Grand Princess passengers in quarantine refused coronavirus tests âoften at federal officialsâ urging
Matthias Gafni March 19, 2020 Updated: March 19, 2020 10:39 a.m.
What possible justification could there be for not testing every single passenger on the Grand Princess as Pence falsely promised would happen? Could it be there are not enough test kits? Could there be an agenda to artificially repress the case numbers to make Trump look better? Probably the latter since Trump himself said he would prefer the passengers to stay on the ship so the case numbers wouldnât rise for something that wasnât his fault.
Hereâs the thing: According to the article, the government does have the authority to compel the passengers to take the test â if they refuse, then the government has the authority to quarantine them for a period that will ensure they will not spread the disease. However, those not taking the test will be released after 14 days â this is simply not a long enough quarantine. That has been shown over and over. For example, a comprehensive study released yesterday establishes that in 1 in 100 cases, the incubation period is longer than 14 days. This means that thereâs a strong chance that at least 5 of the 586 passengers being released without testing will be carrying the coronavirus into their communities.
Despite assurances from Vice President Mike Pence that all Grand Princess cruise ship passengers quarantined at Travis Air Force Base would be tested for COVID-19, The Chronicle has learned that two-thirds of them have declined, often at the encouragement of federal health officials.
As of Wednesday, 568 of the 858 passengers screened while confined turned down the test, a federal official familiar with the Travis quarantine and testing told The Chronicle. The low testing numbers align with what passengers were told by officials during a Tuesday afternoon teleconference, citing a 30% acceptance rate for the novel coronavirus test, several passengers told The Chronicle.
âThese folks know they are in a 14-day quarantine, if they test positive they are further delayed until they test negative,â said the official, who The Chronicle agreed not to name because they were not authorized to speak to the media, in accordance with the paperâs ethics policy. âThey donât want to stay. They want to be released.â
Those who spoke to The Chronicle said federal health officials dissuaded them from taking the test, saying if they had no symptoms during the mandatory 14-day quarantine, a test was unnecessary. The federal official and cruise passengers also said the test compliance would have been higher had tests been available to administer shortly after they were removed from the ship and sent to the base.
The low test numbers fly in the face of what government officials had promised after the passengers, many California residents, were removed from the stricken Grand Princess cruise line beginning March 9 and sent to military facilities across the country. Twenty-one people aboard the cruise ship tested positive while it was quarantined off the coast of California before docking at the Port of Oakland.
âWe will be testing everyone on that ship,â Pence said March 6 in a White House briefing. Two days later, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is overseeing the Travis operation, also said passengers would be tested.
But it appears that most will return to their homes with no COVID-19 test results.
In response to a series of questions, a White House official told The Chronicle: âNo one can be forced to be tested. All passengers were screened and all were offered testing.â
However, past court rulings indicate the government would be allowed to order testing for the coronavirus during a health emergency, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at UC Hastings in San Francisco.
Stanford law professor Michelle Mello agreed, saying the government could force a test if there was an order that explained âwhy testing is reasonable and necessary.â
âStrictly speaking, people do not have to comply with such orders, in the sense that we donât strap people to a hospital gurney and extract biospecimens from them,â Mello said in an email. âBut if they refuse, public health authorities can order them into isolation until such time as the period of dangerousness (contagiousness) has passed. They can also criminally prosecute them and seek imprisonment or fines.â
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âYou donât want to have 800 or so people re-seeding their communities when they are released,â said George Rutherford, a UCSF professor of epidemiology. âThere arenât absolutes ⌠a person could be mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic and still infectious.â
P.S. The SF Chronicle normally requires a subscription, but I think they may be waving that since I had no issues accessing the article.
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Image of Dr. Anthony Fauci mentally disappear during the Presser.
video
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Trump, promoting unproven drug treatments, insults NBC reporter at coronavirus briefing
NBC Newsâ Peter Alexander asked Trump to respond to Americans who are scared by the pandemic, which triggered the president to reply with an insult.
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I am sick as anything today and my head is starting to spin as I see double, so just posting these quickly to show how the GOP proposal fails to help the poor and is GOP Tax Scam Part 2.
Senate Republicans release massive economic stimulus bill for coronavirus response
But numerous lawmakers complain about key provisions, showing how much remains in flux
https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1241099004177457153
Senate GOP Response to Pandemic, Recession Is Seriously Inadequate
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A reasonable summary of what is coming:
Bottom Line: we have to manage this for more than 18 months.
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Feel betterâŚthis is not an easy time to start feeling sick. 
Take good care.
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Why is this person smiling?
Could it be that she tapped insider trading info to dodge losing a fortune?
On March 6, during Trumpâs cringeworthy CDC coronavirus presser (see his most egregious lies here), I couldnât help noticing a woman standing behind the President. She really stood out because she was grinning throughout like a cat who ate the canary. I wondered, âWho is this person and what does she find so amusing about this serious topic?â Even when everyone else was wearing somber expressions, she was beaming as if she just popped a fistful of Xanax.
Her manic smirk really stuck in my mind, but I didnât follow through and check out who she was. Well, just yesterday, a post from @Windthin gave me a feeling of dĂŠjĂ vu. It was about Kelly Loeffler, the Republican Senator from Georgia whoâs been caught using insider trading info from a confidential Senate briefing to dump stocks before the market plunged (for convenience, Iâve posted the link again below). I thought, âThat person looks really familiar. Wait! Sheâs the one who was blissfully smiling throughout the CDC presser!â But, of course! Sheâs probably humming to herself, âHey, chumps, I dumped my stocks weeks ago right after that private briefing. Suck it!â (Check it out â sheâs cued up here â just click around anywhere in the second half of the presser and note her Cheshire cat smile.)
Sen. Kelly Loeffler Dumped Millions in Stock After Coronavirus Briefing
The Senateâs newest member sold off seven figuresâ worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private, all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S. equities.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) reported the first sale of stock jointly owned by her and her husband on Jan. 24, the very day that her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private, all-senators briefing from administration officials, including the CDC director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on the coronavirus.
âAppreciate todayâs briefing from the Presidentâs top health officials on the novel coronavirus outbreak,â she tweeted about the briefing at the time.
That first transaction was a sale of stock in the company Resideo Technologies valued at between $50,001 and $100,000. The companyâs stock price has fallen by more than half since then, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average overall has shed approximately 10,000 points, dropping about a third of its value.
It was the first of 29 stock transactions that Loeffler and her husband made through mid-February, all but two of which were sales. One of Loefflerâs two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.
Loefflerâs office did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast on the transactions and whether they were prompted or informed by information shared at that late January briefing. Itâs illegal for members of Congress to trade on non-public information gleaned through their official duties.
Late Thursday night, she did offer a statement, tweeting: âThis is a ridiculous and baseless attack. I do not make investment decisions for my portfolio. Investment decisions are made by multiple third-party advisors without my or my husbandâs knowledge or involvement.
âAs confirmed in the periodic transaction report to Senate Ethics, I was informed of these purchases and sales on February 16, 2020âthree weeks after they were made.â
Note: Loefflerâs statement is an outright lie. The periodic transaction report does indeed confirm that the trading occurred on the same day she received the briefing, but it in no way reveals what she did and did not know about it at the time.
In the weeks after her spate of stock trades, Loeffler sought to downplay the public-health and financial threats posed by the coronavirus.
âDemocrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on #Coronavirus readiness,â she tweeted on Feb. 28. âHereâs the truth: @realDonaldTrump & his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy & safe.â
âConcerned about #coronavirus?â she tweeted on March 10. âRemember this: The consumer is strong, the economy is strong, & jobs are growing, which puts us in the best economic position to tackle #COVID19 & keep Americans safe.â
Loeffler is the second known senator to sell off large stock holdings between that Jan. 24 briefing and the dramatic drop in stock-market indices over the last week. The Center for Responsive Politics reported on Thursday that Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, sold between $500,000 and $1.5 million in stock in February, shortly before markets tankedâand before Burr privately warned of the havoc that coronavirus was poised to wreak.
Burr lashed out at National Public Radio on Thursday over its report revealing those private comments in a series of tweets that did not mention his stock trades. Burr was one of just one of three senators who voted against legislation in 2012 banning so-called congressional insider trading.
As it happens, Burr and Loeffler sat next to each other on the Senate floor during the chamberâs impeachment trial in January.
Loeffler assumed office on Jan. 6 after having been appointed to the seat vacated by retiring Sen. Johnny Isakson. Between then and Jan. 23, she did not report a single stock transaction from accounts owned by her individually or by her and her husband jointly.
Between Jan. 24 and Feb. 14, by contrast, Loeffler reported selling stock jointly owned with her husband worth between $1,275,000 and $3,100,000, according to transaction reports filed with Senate ethics officials. On Feb. 14, she also purchased the Citrix stock and another $100,000 to $250,000 in technology company Oracle, which has seen its share price decline by more than 18 percent since then.
The 15 stocks that Loeffler reported selling have lost more than a third of their value, on average, since she reported offloading them. She initially reported many of the transactions as sales of stock owned by her husband. Last week she amended the filing to note that most of them were jointly owned.
The full scope of Loefflerâs portfolio and its particular holdings is not yet known. Senators are required to regularly disclose that information, but in January she requested an extension from Senate ethics officials. A full accounting of her finances will not be public until May.
When Loeffler assumed office, she immediately became the wealthiest member of Congress. The Atlanta businesswoman, whose husband is the chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, has a fortune estimated at $500 million.
From the beginning of her tenure, she has faced scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest. Her position on a Senate subcommittee that oversees futures markets âgives Kelly Loeffler a direct position in overseeing her and her husbandâs financial enterprises,â Craig Holman, lobbyist for the ethics group Public Citizen, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in February. âI find it utterly irresponsible the Senate would choose to put Loeffler on that committee, given her conflicts of interest.â
Unlike other senators, Loefflerâs finances are directly tied to her electoral fate. She has pledged to spend $20 million on her bid to hold on to her seat when she faces voters for the first time this November.
Itâs crucial to know what time the coronavirus briefing occurred on January 24, the day that Loeffler dumped stocks. If the briefing was after the markets closed, that would tend to favor Loefflerâs defense that she didnât commit insider trading. The article doesnât give the time so I went on a hunt to find it. Finally, I was able to determine that the briefing was held very early in the morning and concluded even before the markets opened. So coming out of that meeting, Loeffler had plenty of time to sell stocks â pretty damning, considering that she had sold no stocks since assuming office on Jan 6, but starting dumping stocks on the very day she exited that briefing.
The reason the briefing was held at such an early hour was that the Senate Impeachment trial was going on at the time so the Senators needed to make their way from the briefing to the trial. As the article points out, during the trial, Loeffler sat next to another Republican Senator, Richard Burr, who also attended the briefing and is also accused of insider trading based on info learned at the briefing. Iâm wondering if they plunked down next to each other at the trial and started exchanging tips on what stocks to dump. Loeffler began offloading stocks on that very Friday. Burr waited until Feb. 13 while the market was at its peak.
For confirmation that the briefing ended at 8:11 AM ET well before trading begins (at 9:30 AM), hereâs a tweet thread from a C-Span reporter â he notes when the Senators are leaving the briefing. (Click on âShow This Thread,â then, in the fourth tweet, hover over âJan. 24â to see the time.)
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Wow. I am sharing that around now. That is an AMAZING catch. It puts a lot together suddenly.
Also:
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FalloutâŚeveryone gets a bit of a hit, including T 'n Co.
President Trumpâs company â significantly reliant on tourism, conventions and restaurant income â has been sharply impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, with at least two properties closing and three hotels laying off staff, according to people familiar with the company.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis ÂŽ ordered all restaurants and bars in the state to close Friday and imposed special restrictions in a few places including Palm Beach County â home of Trumpâs Mar-a-Lago Club.
Previously, Mar-a-Lago had been partially open, offering limited sit-down service at its beachfront bistro, according to a letter sent to members.
Before that, Trumpâs hotel in Las Vegas was shuttered in response to a statewide order from Nevadaâs governor. It will not reopen until April 17, the hotel told customers. Some employees at the hotel have already been laid off, according to a letter one employee received.
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Whoa.
https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1241112719173902336
https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1241112720075714561
https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1241112720927158272
Strange happenings in Japan.
Japan was expecting a coronavirus explosion. Where is it? | The Japan Times
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USA Today
Pence staffer tests positive for coronavirus, first among administration aides - live updates
Nicholas WuChristal HayesJohn FritzeMichael Collins
March 20, 2020
A member of Vice President Mike Penceâs staff has tested positive for coronavirus, the White House said Friday, marking the first such infection within the top rungs of the administration.
Katie Miller, a spokeswoman for Pence, did not identified the staffer, nor did she say specifically where the individual worked. Pence is leading the administrationâs coronavirus task force and has been a regular presence at the presidentâs side in recent weeks.
âThis evening we were notified that a member of the Office of the Vice President tested positive for the Coronavirus,â Miller said in statement. âNeither President Trump nor Vice President Pence had close contact with the individual.â
P.S. Sorry for the âplain posts,â but the pretty âauto-graphicsâ when we post a news link are not coming up for me. Iâm going to try a few things to see if itâs my computer thatâs causing the issue.
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U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic
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Interesting Skype interview by Wolf Blitzer with one of the Congressmen who recently tested positive. It looks like heâll be OK, but coronavirus has hit him hard â and heâs just 45 years old. (I say âjustâ because I wish I was 45 again 
). Those cocky springbreakers should watch this and maybe theyâd think twice about blowing off the guidance for social distancing.
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Who else can sew? This pattern is easy, letâs do it! 
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âChillingâ Plans: Who Gets Care as Washington State Hospitals Fill Up?
âThey look at the criteria â in this case it would likely be age and underlying disease conditions â and then determine that this person, though this person has a chance of survival with a ventilator, does not get one,â Ms. Sauer said.
âThis is a shift to caring for the population, where you look at the whole population of people who need care and make a determination about who is most likely to survive, and you provide care to them,â she said. âThose that have a less good chance of survival â but still have a chance â you do not provide care to them, which guarantees their death.â
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These maps show just how bad things can get if we donât dig down deep and take real serious measures.
Coronavirus Could Overwhelm U.S. Without Urgent Action, Estimates Say
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This Is How We Can Beat the Coronavirus
While many watched the coronavirus spread across the globe with disinterest for months, in the last week, most of us have finally realized it will disrupt our way of life. A recent analysis from Imperial College is now making some Americans, including many experts, panic. The report projects that 2.2 million people could die in the United States. But the analysis also provides reason for hopeâsuggesting a path forward to avoid the worst outcomes.
We can make things better; itâs not too late. But we have to be willing to act.
Letâs start with the bad news. The Imperial College response teamâs report looked at the impact of measures we might take to flatten the curve, or reduce the rate at which people are becoming sick with COVID-19. If we do nothing and just let the virus run its course, the team predicts, we could see three times as many deaths as we see from cardiovascular disease each year. Further, it estimated that infections would peak in mid-June. We could expect to see about 55,000 deaths, in just one day.
Of course, we are doing something, so this outcome is unlikely to occur. Weâre closing schools and businesses and committing to social (really, physical) distancing. But as the sobering charts from the analysis show, this isnât enough. Even after we do these things, the report predicts that a significant number of infections will occur, that more people will need care than we can possibly provide in our hospitals, and that more than 1 million could die.
Why does the Imperial College team predict this for the West when things seem to be improving in Asia? Because we are taking different approaches. Asian countries have engaged in suppression; we are only engaging in mitigation.
Suppression refers to a campaign to reduce the infectivity of a pandemic, what experts call R0 (R-naught), to less than one. Unchecked, the R0 of COVID-19 is between 2 and 3, meaning that every infected person infects, on average, two to three others. An R0 less than 1 indicates that each infected person results in fewer than one new infection. When this happens, the outbreak will slowly grind to a halt.
To achieve this, we need to test many, many people, even those without symptoms. Testing will allow us to isolate the infected so they canât infect others. We need to be vigilant, and willing to quarantine people with absolute diligence.
Because we failed to set up a testing infrastructure, we canât check that many people. At the moment, we canât even test everyone who is sick. Therefore, weâre attempting mitigationâaccepting that the epidemic will advance but trying to reduce R0 as much as possible.
Our primary approach is social distancingâasking people to stay away from one another. This has meant closing schools, restaurants, and bars. Itâs meant asking people to work from home and not meet in groups of 10 or more. Our efforts are good, temporizing measures. Impeding the growth of the infection improves the chance our health-care system will be able to keep up.
But these efforts wonât help those who are already infected. It will take up to two weeks for those infected today to show any symptoms, and some people wonât show symptoms at all. Social distancing cannot prevent these infections, as theyâve already happened. Therefore, things will appear to get worse for some time, even if what weâre doing is making things better in the long run. The outbreak will continue to progress.
But buried in the Imperial College report is reason for optimism. The analysis finds that in the do-nothing scenario, many people die and die quickly. With serious mitigation, though, many of the measures weâre taking now slow things down. By the summer, the report calculates, the number of people who become sick will eventually reduce to a trickle.
On this path, though, the real horror show will begin in the fall and crush us next winter, when COVID-19 comes back with a vengeance.
This is what happened with the flu in 1918. The spring was bad. Over the summer, the numbers of sick dwindled and created a false sense of security. Then, all hell broke loose. In late 1918, tens of millions of people died.
If a similar pattern holds for COVID-19, then while things are bad now, it may be nothing compared to what we face at the end of the year.
Because of this, some are now declaring that we might be on lockdown for the next 18 months. They see no alternative. If we go back to normal, they argue, the virus will run unchecked and tear through Americans in the fall and winter, infecting 40 to 70 percent of us, killing millions and sending tens of millions to the hospital. To prevent that, they suggest we keep the world shut down, which would destroy the economy and the fabric of society.
But all of that assumes that we canât change, that the only two choices are millions of deaths or a wrecked society.
Thatâs not true. We can create a third path. We can decide to meet this challenge head-on. It is absolutely within our capacity to do so. We could develop tests that are fast, reliable, and ubiquitous. If we screen everyone, and do so regularly, we can let most people return to a more normal life. We can reopen schools and places where people gather. If we can be assured that the people who congregate arenât infectious, they can socialize.
We can build health-care facilities that do rapid screening and care for people who are infected, apart from those who are not. This will prevent transmission from one sick person to another in hospitals and other health-care facilities. We can even commit to housing infected people apart from their healthy family members, to prevent transmission in households.
These steps alone still wonât be enough.
We will need to massively strengthen our medical infrastructure. We will need to build ventilators and add hospital beds. We will need to train and redistribute physicians, nurses, and respiratory therapists to where they are most needed. We will need to focus our factories on turning out the protective equipmentâmasks, gloves, gowns, and so forthâto ensure we keep our health-care workforce safe. And, most importantly, we need to pour vast sums of intellectual and financial resources into developing a vaccine that would finally bring this nightmare to a close. An effective vaccine would end the pandemic and protect billions of people around the world.
All of the difficult actions we are taking now to flatten the curve arenât just intended to slow the rate of infection to levels the health-care system can manage. Theyâre also meant to buy us time. They give us the space to create what we need to make a real difference.
Of course, it all depends on what we do with that time. The mood of the country has shifted in the last few weeks, from dismissal to one of fear and concern. Thatâs appropriate. This is a serious pandemic, and itâs still very likely that the rate of infection will overwhelm the surge capacity in some areas of the United States. There will likely be more seriously ill people than we have resources to care for, meaning that providers will have to make decisions about whom to treat, and whom not to.
They may, explicitly or implicitly, have to decide who lives and who dies.
If we commit to social distancing, however, at some point in the next few months the rate of spread will slow. Weâll be able to catch our breath. Weâll be able to ease restrictions, as some early hit countries are doing. We can move toward some semblance of normalcy.
The temptation then will be to think we have made it past the worst. We cannot give in to that temptation. That will be the time to redouble our efforts. We will need to prepare for the coming storm. Weâll need to build up our stockpiles, create strategies, and get ready.
If we choose the third course, when fall arrives, we will be ahead of a resurgence of the infection. We can keep the number of those who are exposed to a minimum, focusing our attention on those who are infected, and enacting more stringent physical distancing only when, and in locations where, that fails. We can keep schools and businesses open as much as possible, closing them quickly when suppression fails, then opening them back up again once the infected are identified and isolated. Instead of playing defense, we could play more offense.
We need to keep time on the clock, time to find a treatment or a vaccine.
The last time we faced a pandemic with this level of infectivity, that was this dangerous, for which we had no therapy or vaccine, was a 100 years ago, and it led to 50 million deaths. The coronavirus pandemic isnât unprecedented, but itâs not anything almost anyone alive has experienced before. We, are, however, much more knowledgeable, much more coordinated, and much more capable today.
Some Americans are in denial, and others are feeling despair. Both sentiments are understandable. We all have a choice to make. We can look at the coming fire and let it burn. We can hunker down, and hope to wait it outâor we can work together to get through it with as little damage as possible. This country has faced massive threats before and risen to the challenge; we can do it again. We just need to decide to make it happen.
Best defense is a good offense. We need to establish massive testing infrastructure, ASAP! We need to start testing everyone.
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Trump, or his media team, seems to be taking this seriously finally.
It would be nice if this thread he linked this morning had come from a doctor, not a CEO, but that he posted it at all is a minor miracle.
Still doesnât make him competent.
Trumpâs latest attack on the media is more heinous than usual
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/19/trumps-latest-attack-media-is-uglier-than-usual/
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