WTF Community

šŸ¤® Coronavirus (Community Thread)

The ā€˜messagingā€™ aspect to what T should do in relation to this EPIC Coronavirus situation. Tā€™s closest handlers - Meadows, Kushner, Hicks all want T to lay low and only speak about the economy. Others like VP Pence wants T to take up the CV issue.

Seems like the handlers just need T propped upā€¦doing his economy-campaign speak. Thatā€™s a sure fire way to keep T out of more trouble.

The Trump White House has a new internal battle: how much to talk publicly about a pandemic thatā€™s crippling huge swaths of America.

President Donald Trumpā€™s top aides are divided over the merits of resuming national press briefings to keep the public informed about the latest coronavirus statistics as infection rates spike in large states including California, Texas, Florida, Arizona and Georgia.

Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and counselor to the president Hope Hicks are among the aides arguing against these regular sessions because they want to keep the White House focused on the path forward and the nascent economic recovery ā€” without scaring too much of the country about a virus resurgence when infections are rising at different paces in different regions.

Other senior aides, as well as Vice President Mike Pence and his team, believe keeping Americans up-to-date about the nature of the outbreak is critical as the death toll rises. More than 126,000 people have perished in the U.S. due to the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the governmentā€™s own experts are warning of serious trouble ahead.

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NYTimes:
Senate Approves Extending Paycheck Protection Program

WASHINGTON ā€” The Senate on Tuesday evening approved extending the application period for a relief program for small businesses, granting five additional weeks for the remaining money left in the program to be spent.

Less than four hours before the Paycheck Protection Program was scheduled to close with $130 billion still available for loans to small businesses seeking to maintain their payrolls, the Senate approved extending the application period and allowing small businesses to receive aid until Aug. 8.

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Oklahoma Is Seeing 100% Positive Test Rate For COVID-19 Following Trumpā€™s Tulsa Rally

Even though Donald Trumpā€™s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma quickly became a laughingstock after only about 6,000 people showed up, it may be having an impact on the spread of coronavirus in the state.

As MSNBCā€™s Chris Hayes pointed out on Monday, 100 percent of coronavirus tests in Oklahoma came back positive over the past two days.

ā€œYesterday in Oklahoma, they tested 352 people for the coronavirus, and every single test came back positive,ā€ the MSNBC host said. ā€œToday they tested another 178 people, and all those tests came back positive, too.ā€

ā€œIf you canā€™t do the math in your head, thatā€™s 100% positive rate,ā€ he added.

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Hayes said:

And it comes less than ten days after that infamous Tulsa, Oklahoma rally where even with the arena far from full, you still had thousands of people gathered in an indoor space cheering and screaming in a city that had just seen a spike in cases and in violation of every single recommendation for safety, again, from the Trump administrationā€™s own CDC. And while we never know cause and effect exactly, particularly in the moment, itā€™s hard to figure out what the exact impact of that rally looks like. Look at this: yesterday in Oklahoma, they tested 352 people for the coronavirus, and every single test came back positive. Today they tested another 178 people, and all those tests came back positive, too. If you canā€™t do the math in your head, thatā€™s 100% positive rate. Thatā€™s extremely bad.

Trumpā€™s actions are only helping the virus spread

As Chris Hayes noted on Monday, itā€™s hard to pinpoint the exact cause and effect of mass gatherings like Trumpā€™s rally in Oklahoma on the spread of the coronavirus ā€“ especially in the short term.

What we do know, however, is that the presidentā€™s actions ā€“ both direct and indirect ā€“ are helping the virus spread.

Whether itā€™s bringing people together at events that violate every single one of his own CDCā€™s recommendations or refusing to be an example for the country by wearing a mask, Trump himself is an obstacle to stopping the spread of this deadly virus.

The best thing for the health and wellbeing of the United States is for Donald Trump to be voted out of office.

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WTAF. President Supervillain is at it again.

US buys up world stock of key Covid-19 drug remdesivir

No other country will be able to buy remdesivir, which can help recovery from Covid-19, for next three months at least


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If Anyone Doubts Whether Masks Work, Just Look At These Photos

He tested sneezing, talking, singing, and coughing with a mask and without one.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkB0k81oNiI

Least effective
Bandanas

Most effective (aside from N95)
Double layer home made ones - with full coverage and dense material

Researchers at Florida Atlantic Universityā€™s College of Engineering and Computer Science made visualizations to show exactly how face masks stop COVID-19 transmission. Without a mask, droplets produced during coughing can travel up to 12 feet. With a mask, this distance is reduced to just a few inches. But some cloth masks appear to work better than others at stopping the spread of potentially infectious droplets. Read the full #facemask article here: https://www.livescience.com/face-maskā€¦

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T keeps hammering home his magical thinking that he presents to his friends on Fox Network

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The next Sarah Cooper bit ā€œā€¦And I think we are going to be very good with the Coronavirus ā€¦I think that at some pointā€¦itā€™s just going to disappear, I hopeā€ :fearful:

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From Harvard Global Health Institute
Pandemics Explained and where testing targets should go

Great resource/graph of USA

Misinformation is a problem

Uncertainty is at the heart of disease outbreaks. There is so much we donā€™t know. Which pathogen is the culprit, how deadly is it, how many people are infected? New information comes in small pieces, and needs to be verified. But how? In early February, news spread on Twitter that a doctor ā€” one of the eight who had been reprimanded weeks earlier by Chinese authorities for sounding the alarm about a new disease ā€” had died. But was it true?

Sadly, it was. Fact checkers were wary at first, because the initial source was unclear, and because there had already been so much misinformation: The wave of false claims about infection rates as high as 2.8 million people, for example. Or the persistently shared falsehoods that the virus was a) a biological weapon that had leaked from a bio security laboratory in Wuhan or b) smuggled out of Canada by Chinese scientists. (See this Buzzfeed story for more on the early hoax mayhem.)

Outbreaks always attract fear-mongering, rumors and conspiracy theories. Political realities, such as Chinaā€™s all-encompassing grip on information sharing and thorough censorship, always play a role. (MITā€™s Technology Review has an important story about how Chinese crowdsourcers are fighting coronavirus censorship to chronicle the outbreak.)

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The key stat is community transmissions. This is the number that is meaningful to most residents. The big three stats are institutional transmissions (prisons, hospitals, and nursing homes), border transmissions (people with covid coming into the state), and community transmissions (people in the state infecting each other because of poor social distancing). Each requires a different intervention and each is of interest to different intervention specialists). Have to get pragmatic.

ā€œWe still have to do more tests,ā€ Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday, noting the state is meeting its stated goal of conducting 60,000 to 80,000 tests a day.

A spokeswoman for the California Department of Public Health said the stateā€™s testing capacity will continue increasing but did not specifically address the Harvard figures.

Dr. Thomas Tsai, a surgeon and health policy expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, cautioned that the new goals are more like goal posts that can shift as case rates change. If measures like wearing masks and social distancing are able to bring case rates down, for instance, less testing will be needed.

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Trump has ā€˜gone awolā€™ as president amid coronavirus pandemic, says ex-CIA director

Leon Panetta becomes latest prominent public figure to accuse Trump of effectively surrendering to the virus and abandoning Americans to their fate

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It is a horrid virus and it is getting closer to all those in the presidentā€™s inner circle.

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:fearful:

The Washington Post: Top Stories | Trump says U.S. has ā€˜made a lot of progressā€™ controlling pandemic as country sets record for 26th day

Here are some significant developments:

Florida logged another daily high number of new cases. Hospitalizations in Arizona set a record. Intensive care unit capacity at the worldā€™s largest medical center, in Houston, was exceeded at one point in the day.

Several California municipalities dismissed requests from higher governments to forgo fireworks shows or close beach parking lots to promote social distancing, local news outlets in the state reported.

In tweets earlier in the day, Trump correctly said the number of virus deaths and the rate of those deaths are declining. He also said that ā€œIf we didnā€™t test so much and so successfully, we would have very few casesā€ ā€” a false statement that misleads because the rate of positive cases continues to rise in states showing a marked increase in infections.

Trump asserted in his speech at the White House that the country had ā€œput out the flameā€ of the virus. He added that progress was being made on development of a vaccine, which experts say is unlikely to be widely available until late this year or early next year at the earliest.

Public health experts warned that the virus showed little sign of slowing, partly because of people going to bars and restaurants. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said young adults make up a significant share of new infections but added that the virus will spread to others.

ā€œItā€™s worse, will continue to get worse, and will take months to improve substantially,ā€ he said on Twitter. ā€œWe are going in the wrong direction, fast.ā€

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WTF ā€¦ Smarten up Americaā€¦

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Wtfā€¦

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/07/04/us/ap-us-virus-outbreak-kansas-holocaust-cartoon.html

Kansas Newspaperā€™s Post Equates Mask Mandate With Holocaust - The New York Times

A weekly Kansas newspaper whose publisher is a county Republican Party chairman posted a cartoon on its Facebook page likening the Democratic governorā€™s order requiring people to wear masks in public to the roundup and murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.

The cartoon on the Anderson County Reviewā€™s Facebook page depicts Gov. Laura Kelly wearing a mask with a Jewish Star of David on it, next to a drawing of people being loaded onto train cars. Its caption is, ā€œLockdown Laura says: Put on your mask ā€¦ and step onto the cattle car.ā€

The newspaper posted the cartoon on Friday, the day that Kellyā€™s mask order aimed at stemming the spread of the coronavirus took effect. Itā€™s drawn several hundred comments, many of them strongly critical. Dane Hicks, the paperā€™s owner and publisher, said in an email to The Associated Press that he plans to publish the cartoon in the newspaperā€™s next edition Thursday.

@Pet_Proletariat @MissJava. Might you post this shocker in Coronavirus plz? Thx!

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Despite Rising Coronavirus Cases, Trumpā€™s Focus Appears To Be Elsewhere

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^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ā€¦Now if ONLY his body would followā€¦:smirk:

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Mayor of Atlanta - asymptomatic, and has Covid-19 :persevere:

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:eyes:

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Meanwhile,

Coronavirus in Florida: 10,059 new cases recorded on July 4

Sundayā€™s report from the Florida Department of Health showed the state received another 10,059 positive COVID-19 test results back from labs on July 4, pushing its overall total number of confirmed cases above 200,000.

The state has now had more confirmed cases than Germany, which has 83.02 million residents ā€“ more than 3.86 times Floridaā€™s population.

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OMFG, he actually pulled the US out of the World Health Organization (WHO)

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