Wuhan Chinese Pandemic: Be smart. Pay attention to the advice health care professionals are giving. Be diligent about your habits. Do your part to help. This is serious and should be taken seriously.
It isn’t and shouldn’t be political.
It’s a pandemic. The world was NOT ready for this. We need to ALL do our part. Follow the advice, keep your distance, touch less, clean everything and say a little prayer, it can’t hurt!
P.S. Remember the Spanish Flu, West Nile Virus, German Measles, Ebola, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme Disease, MERS and other geographically named diseases?!?
Stimulus Idea – 0% Interest: The Fed (our tax dollars) are lending big banks funds at 0% interest. Banks and primarily big businesses will get to take advantage of that.
To help the average middle class and working class American here are two simple and affordable ideas:
0% interest on all credit card debt for 12 months with minimal payments made monthly.
0% interest on all home mortgages with balances under $1mil for 12 month with minimal payments made monthly.
OK, the banks won’t make any money on the spread for a year, but something like this will avoid forcing huge numbers of Americans into bankruptcy, foreclosure or default while giving them a chance to recover from the economic catastrophe.
Democratic Debate: The millionaire on the left was a 77 year old whom many are questioning whether or not he may have early stages of dementia. The Marxist communist millionaire on the right was a 78 year old with cardiovascular disease. Both have never worked a day outside of politics. Both made their millions from politics, never from ideas or productivity. These are the best of what today’s Democratic party has to offer?!
“It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.” -Thomas Sowell
-Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
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Weekly News Video Summary:
To keep seniors safe at home, Medicare expands telemedicine
The new option will allow millions of older people to take care of ongoing medical problems as well as new concerns, while heeding public health advice to stay home during the outbreak.
‘Wake-up call’: Chinese control of U.S. pharmaceutical supplies sparks growing concern
As the war of words between China and the U.S. over COVID-19 heats up, Chinese state media have raised the specter of using Beijing’s pharmaceutical leverage to block critical components and supplies for dependent U.S. drug companies and send America into a catastrophic coronavirus epidemic.
5 takeaways from the Democratic debate Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) debated each other in a studio with no audience in Washington, D.C., on Sunday night amid a global panic over the spread of the coronavirus.
Watch our Weekly News Summary Video Here
Coronavirus: South Korea’s infection rate falls without citywide lockdowns like China, Italy
South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Monday noted his country’s “slowing trend” of new infections but warned: “We should not be complacent at all.”
His point was underscored by the KCDC, which said that among the new patients were more than 60 people who were infected while working in close proximity to each other at an insurance company call centre.
“The total number of new confirmed cases is on a downturn but there are concerns over such mass infection cases”, said KCDC Deputy Director Kwon Jun-wook.
The steady decrease in cases has been attributed to a variety of factors, including mass testing, improved public communications and the use of technology. Extensive testing of members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, which was linked to more than 60 per cent of the country’s cases, has been completed.
Chinese Covid-19 should be forever linked to the regime that facilitated its spread
Want to know why the U.S. economy is in free fall? Why restaurants and bars are closing, putting millions out of work, and why the airline industry is facing possible bankruptcy? Why schools across the nation are shutting down, leaving students to fall behind and parents without safe places to send their children everyday? Why the stock market is plummeting, wiping out the retirement and college savings of millions of Americans? Why the elderly are isolated in nursing homes and tens of millions who don’t have the option of teleworking have no idea how they will pay their bills?
Answer: Because China is a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.
Timeline: The early days of China’s coronavirus outbreak and cover-up
Axios has compiled a timeline of the earliest weeks of the coronavirus outbreak in China, highlighting when the cover-up started and ended — and showing how, during that time, the virus already started spreading around the world, including to the United States.
Why it matters: A study published in March indicated that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did, the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95% and its geographic spread limited.
This timeline, compiled from information reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the South China Morning Post and other sources, shows that China’s cover-up and the delay in serious measures to contain the virus lasted about three weeks.
Dec. 10: Wei Guixian, one of the earliest known coronavirus patients, starts feeling ill.
Dec. 16: Patient admitted to Wuhan Central Hospital with infection in both lungs but resistant to anti-flu drugs. Staff later learned he worked at a wildlife market connected to the outbreak.
Dec. 27: Wuhan health officials are told that a new coronavirus is causing the illness.
False Claim About CDC’s Global Anti-Pandemic Work
As the COVID-19 disease caused by the new coronavirus has spread around the world, a number of politicians, news organizations and public figures have made the false claim that the Trump administration cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s anti-pandemic work in over 40 countries to just 10. The CDC told us that’s not true.
The claim appears to have been based solely on outdated news reports from early 2018 that said the CDC was preparing to dramatically reduce its work helping to prevent infectious-disease epidemics. Those reports said much of that work on the Global Health Security Agenda, a pact between over 60 nations that began in 2014, had been funded by a five-year, nearly $600 million supplemental package that was dwindling. That one-time funding, which Congress originally appropriated in response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014, ran out at the end of September 2019.
The director of the CDC’s Center for Global Health did say at the time that, without additional funding, its Division of Global Health Protection “will have to scale its global health security portfolio to focus efforts based on existing resources,” as the Wall Street Journal first reported in January 2018. If that happened, the official said the CDC would shift its focus to just 10 “priority countries” and “plan for the completion of its country-based programs” in 39 other nations, the Journal’s story said.
Those hypothetical cuts were avoided, however, because Congress later provided more funding for the CDC’s global health programs, the CDC told us in a statement.
Beijing Fears COVID-19 Is Turning Point for China, Globalization
While the world fights the coronavirus pandemic, China is fighting a propaganda war. Beijing’s war aim is simple: shift away from China all blame for the outbreak, the botched initial response, and its early spread into the broader world. At stake is China’s global reputation, as well as the potential of a fundamental shift away from China for trade and manufacturing. Also at risk is the personal legacy of General Secretary Xi Jinping, who has staked his legitimacy on his technocratic competence. After dealing with the first great global crisis of the 21st century, the world must fundamentally rethink its dependence on China.
Beijing’s Propaganda War
After months of staying holed up in the Forbidden City, Mr. Xi finally ventured to Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus, to declare victory over the virus as all the makeshift hospitals have been closed. Yet no one knows if Beijing’s claims that new indigenous cases are slowing down are true or not, given long-standing doubt about the veracity of any official Chinese statistics, and the party’s failure to act in the early days of the coronavirus.
The communist government instead is claiming that it has largely controlled the epidemic, even as it suspiciously now blames “foreign arrivals” for new cases of virus. Leaked video from China shows huge lines at a hospital in Chongqing, for example, raising questions about just what is happening around the country.
Why no one should believe communist China’s claim that coronavirus is under control
The Chinese Coronavirus has now spread to a reported 150 countries. But the rulers of the country where the pandemic started have good news: They have, they declared, won a complete and total victory over the dangerous pathogen.
On Thursday, Chinese propaganda outlets reported that there had been “no new infections of the novel coronavirus” in Wuhan, which is ground zero in the global pandemic. As for China as a whole, they cited the National Health Commission is saying that “domestic transmissions are zero.”
The Chinese Communist Party is now touting its “success” in stopping the virus in its tracks is a model for other countries to follow. “Learn from China,” is the latest Party line.
Were all of this true, it would be the fastest end to a pandemic in human history. It would also be a stirring tribute to the sheer efficiency of Chinese-style socialism and a redemption of sorts for the country that caused the problem in the first place.
But of course it isn’t true at all. It is sheer fabrication, no sturdier than the shoddy warehouses that were put up in a week to house the victims of the Wuhan virus. It is just one more piece of Chinese propaganda to add to the ever-growing pile of lies that Beijing has been telling these past three months.
Ask yourselves what is the likelihood that China has actually reduced the number of new cases to zero, as it claims? That in the entire 1.3 billion people of China there is not a single new case? I would say that the likelihood of this happening is about the same as the CCP discovering a cure for cancer, establishing a base on Mars, and inventing faster-than-light interstellar travel—all on the same day.
The Countries With The Most Critical Care Beds Per Capita [Infographic]
As Italy struggles to contain a major COVID-19 outbreak, its hospital capacity has come under unprecedented pressure. Last Friday, 4,636 cases of the virus were reported across the country and that has now increased to just under 12,500. By Tuesday, there were 5,791 cases of COVID-19 in Lombardy with 446 people in intensive care units. Medical staff have reported that Northern Italy’s health system, one of Europe’s best resourced, is approaching breaking point.
In mid-February, a Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention paper found that while just over 80 percent of all COVID-19 cases had been mild, another 13.8 percent and 4.7 percent were classified as severe and critical respectively. That has led to serious questions being raised about critical care bed capacity not just in Italy but in other countries braced for major outbreaks. If the case count continues to climb at its current pace, intensive care units will come under huge pressure.
Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19
After watching the outbreak of COVID-19 for the past two months, I’ve followed the pace of the infection, its severity, and how our world is tackling the virus. While we should be concerned and diligent, the situation has dramatically elevated to a mob-like fear spreading faster than COVID-19 itself. When 13% of Americans believe they are currently infected with COVID-19 (mathematically impossible), full-on panic is blocking our ability to think clearly and determine how to deploy our resources to stop this virus. Over three-fourths of Americans are scared of what we are doing to our society through law and hysteria, not of infection or spreading COVID-19 to those most vulnerable.
The following article is a systematic overview of COVID-19 driven by data from medical professionals and academic articles that will help you understand what is going on (sources include CDC, WHO, NIH, NHS, University of Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, NEJM, JAMA, and several others). I’m quite experienced at understanding virality, how things grow, and data. In my vocation, I’m most known for popularizing the “growth hacking movement” in Silicon Valley that specializes in driving rapid and viral adoption of technology products. Data is data. Our focus here isn’t treatments but numbers. You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say. Numbers are universal.
EU warns of pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign on coronavirus
Russian pro-Kremlin media have mounted a “significant disinformation campaign” to aggravate the coronavirus pandemic crisis in western countries by destroying confidence in the emergency response, according to an internal EU report. The effort aims to stoke “confusion, panic and fear” and stop people obtaining good information about the contagion, as part of a broader strategy to “subvert European societies from within”, the European diplomatic service analysis says.
The nine-page report — dated March 16 and seen by the Financial Times — outlines a wide range of attempts internationally to exploit the Covid-19 pandemic by spreading implausible narratives. It says the effectiveness of vetting put in place by social media companies for coronavirus content is still unclear.
“A significant disinformation campaign by Russian state media and pro-Kremlin outlets regarding Covid-19 is ongoing,” says the analysis from the European External Action Service’s strategic communications division. “The overarching aim of Kremlin disinformation is to aggravate the public health crisis in western countries, specifically by undermining public trust in national healthcare systems — thus preventing an effective response to the outbreak.”
A fiasco in the making?
As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data
century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.
At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact.
Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the pandemic dissipates — either on its own or because of these measures — short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable. How long, though, should measures like these be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?
Are black Republicans running for office the death knell of the Democratic Party?
There are more black Americans running as Republicans for public office than ever before. These candidates include U.S. Senate candidates John James in Michigan, Omari Faulkner in Virginia and Peggy Hubbard in Illinois, congressional candidates Angela Stanton-King in Georgia, Jeff Dove in Virginia, Kathy Barnette in Pennsylvania, Bryon Donalds in Florida and Brad Mole in South Carolina.
In addition, there are other black candidates for office like Mark Robinson, who is the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in North Carolina, as well as scores of candidates for the state legislature, county councils and city councils across the land. These courageous African-American candidates are difficult to track down and count, but they are out there carrying the banner of conservatism and of Donald Trump.
If Bloomberg Couldn’t Buy 2020, How Did Russia Buy 2016?
Editor Mollie Hemingway joined Fox News’ “Special Report” to discuss New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s historic level of campaign spending, and what it reveals about the power of media and establishment consensus.
Hemingway pointed out how Bloomberg’s failed campaign, despite unlimited resources, pokes holes in the popular narrative that Russia helped Donald Trump “steal” the 2016 election.
“We had years where people were saying a couple hundred thousand dollars in barely literate Facebook ads from Russians caused Donald Trump to win. Here you had a guy spend nearly $1 billion and he went nowhere. It’s a humiliating defeat for Michael Bloomberg,” she said.
Host Bret Baier drilled the point home: “So Russians influenced the election with $200,000, or $300,000 in Facebook ads? And Mike Bloomberg couldn’t get more than 50 delegates with $600 million dollars?”
“And this hurts Bernie Sanders’s message, too, because he likes to say the billionaires control everything,” Hemingway said. “Clearly Bloomberg having all this money didn’t do as much for him as Biden having the media and the establishment behind him. I would pick media and establishment over millions all day.”
