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lunar-magnolia · 5 years ago

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World Health Organization (WHO) declares Pandemic.

Only a couple of hours ago the World Health Organization declared the state of pandemic regarding the COVID-19 outbreak.

In this article I aim to spread as much information I can. It’s not being talked about enough and so, so little people have access to real information about how to contain it, what it is and how it’s spreading.

I am from Italy. All territory has been declared “protected zone” yesterday and today (11th March 2020) the president of ministry reinforced the safety measures taken.

Disclaimer: this article was written from an Italian point of view. All I write here is all I know about the emergency the world is in and what the official sources said to us through official medias.

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First and foremost, let’s answer: What is a Coronavirus?

Coronaviruses are a large family of virus known to cause illnesses ranging from the common flu to other serious diseases like SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome).

They are RNA viruses that resemble a crown when under a microscope.

Coronaviruses were identified in the 60s and are known to infect humans and some animals. They aim to epithelial cells, as well as respiratory tract cells and gastrointestinal cells.

The source of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) is still unknown. The Superior Health Institute thinks it could have been a result of a spill over, meaning it came from animals and evolved to infect humans. It is still not certain.

(source: http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/nuovocoronavirus/dettaglioFaqNuovoCoronavirus.jsp?lingua=italiano&id=228 It’s in Italian, I’m sorry. I can translate it for you, should you need a whole translation)

With the what settled, let’s focus on why the WHO declared the pandemic state.

The WHO defines “pandemic” a situation that affects all continents. At first COVID-19 wasn’t considered a threat because of its lethality and the number of cases outside China.

Now it has been spread to all continents and the WHO declared the pandemic emergency.

To better understand what it entails, it’s worth mentioning that the word “pandemic” comes from the ancient Greek “pan” “demos”, meaning “all” “population”.

Ilaria Capua, director of the department of the Emergency Pathogen Institute in the University of Florida, states that the virus started spreading around mid-December/January, well before it was even disclosed that this virus existed outside Wuhan. This means it was in Europe (and every other nation) since then.

Since Italy declared its first case, the European nations have been kicking out Italians and blocking import of Italian goods. This was useless, as they got infected nonetheless and not by an Italian or a Chinese person.

Make an example of this and do not discriminate. It’s damaging and ultimately useless. It does not prevent contagion.

An important data is Italy having the highest number of cases in Europe, and possibly in the world after China. That is because almost everyone has been tested, starting from people who showed signs (and were confirmed infected) and then testing everyone they came in contact with in the last two weeks.

Be careful: the virus can be asymptomatic, so there are people who don’t experience symptoms but are vessels and can infect others. Although it’s rare without symptoms first.

Cases can be counted only if people get tested. So, if you’re from a country like the USA where the test isn’t free and costs a lot of money, please do not underestimate the number of infected people. It might be way more than you think.

After a mass movement of people coming from the red zones in the north of Italy (zones with a high risk of infection) to the south, and the carelessness of people who went against the decrees by gathering to party and protest, all of Italy has been put under quarantine till 3rd April 2020.

The government, working alongside medics and scientists, issued several emergency laws and sanctions to ensure public safety, plus a couple of hashtags trying to make people understand the severity of the situation.

President of the ministry Giuseppe Conte summarized all the new decrees with the trending hashtag “#iorestoacasa”, meaning “I stay at home”. That is, in fact, the first and foremost rule to apply when under quarantine and fighting a highly infective virus like this: stay at home and don’t interact with people.

As bad as it sounds, it is the necessary precaution. The virus can take up to two weeks to show symptoms, and even then, it’s not always detected immediately. Two weeks is a long time. One single person can infect dozens. And each in a dozen can infect other dozens and so on.

The decrees forced all unnecessary shops and stores, cinemas, theaters, bars and every other place where people gather to close. Only grocery stores, pharmacies and clinics are open to the public, but they must ensure safety distance between each client and regulate how many people at a time can enter.

Other commercial businesses, like restaurants, can only home delivery their products if they choose to operate.

Businesses with employees that usually work in offices are required to provide the necessary means to ensure everyone can work from home.

Ceremonies, events and shows are all cancelled.

Any movement inside and outside your city must be motivated by either work or health. People need to fill out a form stating why they are outside.

Lying and going around without taking the due precautions can result in fines and even jail time.

Medics launched their own hashtags too: #iorestoincorsia #turestiacasa. “I stay in the hospital ward” “You stay at home”.

This was a necessary step to take, to make sure people truly understand how paramount is to avoid needless contacts with others and contagion. Medics are working hard and to the bone, people are getting infected with such speed that the wards can’t keep up with demands, especially intensive care wards.

The decrees also include a set of rules taken from the WHO and adapted to the current situation that everyone should follow to ensure safety.

1. Wash your hands often

2. Avoid close contacts and maintain a safety distance of at least one meter with everyone

3. Avoid crowded places

4. Preferably stay at home, especially if immunocompromised

5. Avoid touching your mouth, nose and eyes with your hands

6. Use a one-time napkin for your mouth and nose if you sneeze or cough. Alternatively use your inner elbow

7. Open the windows as much as you can if you are with other people

8. Avoid handshakes and hugs, and sharing glasses and bottles

9. Clean surfaces with alcohol (75%) or chlorine (1%) based disinfectants

10. Do not take antiviral drugs or antibiotics, unless your physician told you to

11. In doubt do NOT go to the ER: call your physician and, if you think you got infected, call the emergency service (112)

12. Stay informed and follow advice given by your healthcare provider

(Source: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public )

Most importantly every authority recommends to use your own common sense, your sense of responsibility, and self-quarantine.

It’s not only about you as a person, it’s about public health and safety.

The word “responsibility” comes from Latin verb “respondio”, to answer. We have to respond to ourselves first, to our conscience. Then the government.

In Italy’s case the government is helping us, pointing us in the right direction and uniting the people to fight a common enemy. It’s not about the single person, nor about political factions, it’s about all of us. Helping each other by staying healthy and avoiding endangering others needlessly.

This is above the law. This should go without saying.

This pandemic is a level. There is no discrimination. The virus doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, healthy or not, a baby or an elder, a teacher or a business person. We are all the same.

This is the right time to understand this. This is the time to understand what it means to care for others and ourselves as a community. Love thy neighbor as thyself.

And this is why self-quarantine is important.

I understand this is difficult. We are social animals and we need that social contact. These times are challenging for sure, impacting our habits and forcing us to change them, but it’s not forever.

Give up physical contact now, to feel its warmth later. It will be enhanced and most rewarding.

If your government still hasn’t given the orders, made exceptional laws, you must do what it’s necessary to ensure your own safety and the safety of others.

Keep a calm fear. Stay at home, but don’t panic. There is no need if you take the right precautions.

Respect the prevention rules. Respect the elders. Respect yourselves.

We can do it. All together.

I’ll leave some useful links in case you want to learn more. All of these are official sources. I highly recommend spending some time on the World Health Organization website.

https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public

http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/nuovocoronavirus/dettaglioNotizieNuovoCoronavirus.jsp?lingua=italiano&menu=notizie&p=dalministero&id=4191 (This one is in Italian, let me know if you want a translation)

#coronavirus #information #signal boost #covid-19 #italy #quarantine #outbreak #world health organization #pandemic #no panic #stay at home #discourse

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dgfystenson · 5 years ago

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‘Getting there’ and COVID-19

I think I made a mistake in judgement. And think I should take a moment and apologize for this mistake in judgment and explain how I feel it came about and how I came to recognize it. Maybe this helps someone else who might be having similar struggles get, emotionally and intellectually, ‚there‘ as well.

As the seriousness of COVID-19 began to clearly crystalize over the past three weeks I, as most, started to adjust my social behavior. For the first week I made sure to maintain and heighten my already stringent hygienic practices. Since I have been a Chef for the past ten years and always prided myself on my cleanliness and sanitation practices this was no difficult adjustment. Next, I started to take more seriously the idea of keeping physical distance and avoiding common social greeting practices like hugging, high-fives and hand shakes. Since as many friends know I’m not always the most outwardly physically intimate person, this too (other than the high-fives), was no great adjustment. For the most part during the early and mid part of March I also tried to keep a bit more space between me and others, especially those that showed signs of illness (this was before it was made clear that COVID-19 also spread rapidly before symptoms even appear). However for the past week I feel like I have made the wrong social decisions. I did not make the wrong decisions out of a lack of seriousness concerning the virus, a lack of empathetic and ethical societal considerations, or by not practicing concrete suggestions of social distancing of one to two meters when in public. No, the way that I failed was due to letting my dissatisfaction of the governments response and preparedness cloud my rational mind and not quarantine myself as soon as or as much as I should have. And it is for this that I apologize.

I would like to briefly explain how I think this came to be.

I like to believe and trust that most developed democratic governments that have extensive financial and technological resources at their disposal and a deep pool of highly proficient and trained experts in various fields and areas: epidemiology, virology, crisis management and preparation, supply chain management, etc, would take said resources and experts to create plans of attack, procedures and alternate scenarios for a crisis such as this. Not only within their own boarders but with their immediate neighbors and the relevant international business that span the globe and reside in their boarders. Most importantly, I would like to think that with the multitude of global viral threats that we have had over the past 20 years: SARs, MERs, H1N1 (swine flu), Ebola, Zika, etc, that governments would have been better prepared than they have proven to be. And I realized this morning, as I woke up after an evening discussing responsible social behavior with various friends, this was the mental block that had kept me from completely committing to self quarantine and strict social distancing. I took me a second to get over the fact that those in positions responsible for the preparedness of the government and the safety of its citizens had failed to do so and more or less passed responsibility on to individuals for their own and societies health and safety.

Now there is no doubt that each individual carries responsibility to behave in a socially responsible way during a time of crisis and in everyday life, but the alarm bells, in my opinion, weren’t sounded loud enough until a few days ago when, here in Germany, Chancellor Merkel gave, for the first time in her tenure, a televised address to the nation. Furthermore, certainly no clear, concise and concrete short, medium, and long term plan of action by the government was given until very recently. And most importantly the reason why this is so dangerous, is that the system in place is not in the slightest equipped or prepared to handle a spike in critical cases, even when experts have warned governments for decades that this type of thing is a real threat. I am not trying to pass blame for my failure for the past 5 days of truly recognizing the severity of situation and not immediately quarantining myself, but I am saying that I look to experts directly and those that are in contact with, informed and counseled by experts (government officials) to make my informed decision concerning my actions in a crisis like this. And when I see an unclear and rather lackadaisical response by the government for the first weeks, I am inclined to think it can’t be that serious and what government officials are trying to protect are things other (take your pick of political and philosophical perspectives here) than the true well-being, in every facet, of the its citizens. The lack of what to me was clear information and a response by the government that was not in the least concerned with economic survival and fallout, and the next steps for its citizens, but more concerned with the survival of the economic and political system as it exists now, I think, clouded my own rational decision making. I realized, this morning, that out of my displeasure and deep disapproval for the course of action by the State, I too have not been acting as responsible as I should have been for the past week that a strict self-quarantine has been heavily suggested by health experts. It doesn’t matter right now in this second why things have gotten as bad as they have. What matters in this second is that everyone does whatever is necessary to save as many lives as possible, and to get help get the spread of the virus under control, to flatten the curve as health officials and experts have made very clear. In this moment it really is about the survival and protection of everyone, but especially those who need it the most.

As I came to this realization this morning, it almost seems moot as the German State of Bavaria, where I currently reside, decided to impose a public lockdown this afternoon. This is the sort of thing I more or less I would have expected to happen several weeks ago, along with massive immediate testing, but it didn’t. All I can do now is make sure I follow the correct rational and socially ethical things to the fullest and try not to let my dissatisfaction and resentment of how it has been handled by the government cloud my future decisions. I only hope that we won’t forget that all governments were woefully underprepared in almost every way from medical equipment to appropriate and clear crisis management. I hope that when this is all said and done that we will still demand that governments prepare for this type of and similar crises better in the future and that we have a real honest and open public discussion about why we weren’t prepared in the first place and take the steps to change those fundamental reasons. But to end I want to return to why I wrote this, I would just like to apologize for not focusing on the important immediate aspects of this crisis and not adjusting my behavior sooner. All I can do is make sure I learn from this and hope that this helps others emotionally and intellectually ‚get there‘ as well.

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againstcorona-blog · 5 years ago

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What Is the Coronavirus?

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What is the coronavirus?

Coronaviruses are a family of hundreds of viruses that can cause fever, respiratory problems, and sometimes gastrointestinal symptoms too. The 2019 novel coronavirus is one of seven members of this family known to infect humans, and the third in the past three decades to jump from animals to humans. Since emerging in China in December, this new coronavirus has caused a global health emergency, sickening almost 100,000 people worldwide, and so far killing more than 3,000. As of March 3, about 100 cases had been reported in the US, and six people have died.

How does it spread?

Researchers are still trying to understand how SARS-CoV-2 spreads between humans. (SARS-CoV-2 is the official name of the germ; the official name of the disease you get from the germ is Covid-19—more on that below.) It’s likely to be transmitted in droplets from coughing or sneezes, and the virus has a two- to 14-day incubation period. That means people could be infectious for quite a while before symptoms like fever, cough, or shortness of breath emerge.

Right now, CDC officials say Americans should prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Based on the number of new cases, the overall risk of getting Covid-19 is still pretty low in most parts of this country. But flaws in testing kits and strict testing requirements have severely limited how many people have so far been tested, which means nobody knows who might actually be infected, or how serious (or mild) their illnesses might be. Growing numbers of cases of community spread in California and Washington suggest that the virus may be circulating more widely than case numbers might indicate.

What are the particular symptoms of Covid-19?

In the confirmed cases so far, most people get a fever with a dry cough; smaller numbers of folks might experience shortness of breath, a sore throat, or a headache.

How can I avoid catching the coronavirus?

Wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands wash your hands. You get the point.

Clean all of your tech equipment. Just like your hands, your smartphone and keyboard and headphones and anything else gets germs on it.

Are you a health care worker? If not, don't buy a face mask—that depletes supplies for the health professionals who need them. Same goes for gloves (see: "wash your hands," above).

If you're in a high-risk group (over 60, have preexisting lung disease, heart disease, diabetes, or a weakened immune system) you should seek treatment if you get sick, since it can quickly go from cough to full-blown pneumonia. Call your doctor or clinic first with your suspicions so they can direct you appropriately. If you're not in a high-risk group, better to self-isolate at home with plenty of fluids and anti-fever meds. Odds are you'll recover, and this way you won't expose anyone. Still call your doctor, so they know what's going on—they may be able to direct you to people at the health department who can conduct testing. Don't go to the ER unless you're really experiencing life-threatening symptoms.

Is Covid-19 more deadly than the flu?

That remains to be seen. According to preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the 2019–2020 flu caused 19 million to 25 million illnesses and up to 25,000 deaths. The Covid-19 numbers are harder to calculate because it’s not yet clear how many people are infected. The CDC calculates the death rate at about 2 percent, which is higher than the flu—but the real number might be a lot lower, because less-severe cases may not have been reported. People with more mild cases might not even go to the hospital, and health care workers might have mistaken cases for the flu or for pneumonia. If epidemiologists count only the most severe cases, the death rate will look higher because a higher proportion of those patients die—so that might not offer an accurate reflection of reality.

The biggest difference between the two types of infection is that the health system is better prepared to fight the flu. It comes every year and, while some strains are more severe than others, doctors know how to treat and prevent it. Covid-19 is uncharted territory, because scientists have so many questions about how it spreads, and there isn’t a vaccine for it. That’s why governments around the world are responding so quickly by discouraging travel to China and quarantining people who may have been exposed. The World Health Organization hasn't officially called Covid-19 a pandemic—it's probably waiting to see if sustained person-to-person transmission happens outside of China. It's looking at Iran, Italy, and South Korea for that.

How did it get its official name?

The international committee tasked with classifying viruses has named the new one SARS-CoV-2, because of its close genetic ties to another coronavirus, the one that causes SARS. However, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2—remember, that's the disease characterized by coughing, fever, and respiratory distress—is called Covid-19. It's the name officially bestowed upon the ailment by the World Health Organization. WHO's task was to find a name that didn't demonize a particular place, animal, individual, or group of people and which was also pronounceable. It's pronounced just like it sounds: Co-Vid-Nine-teen.

Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from, anyway?

The first cases were identified at the tail end of 2019 in Wuhan, the capital city of China’s Hubei province, when hospitals started seeing patients with severe pneumonia. Like the viruses that cause MERS and SARS, the new coronavirus appears to have originated in bats, but it’s not clear how the virus jumped from bats to humans or where the first infections occurred. Often, pathogens journey through an intermediary “animal reservoir”—bats infect the animals, and humans come into contact with some product from that animal. That could be milk or undercooked meat, or even mucus, urine, or feces. For example, MERS moved to humans through camels, and SARS came through civet cats sold at a live animal market in Guangzhou, China.

Scientists don’t know why some coronaviruses have made that jump while others haven’t. It may be that the viruses haven’t made it to animals that humans interact with, or that the viruses don’t have the right spike proteins, so they can’t attach to our cells. It’s also possible that these jumps happen more often than anyone realizes, but they go unnoticed because they don’t cause serious reactions.

How do coronaviruses even work?

Coronaviruses are divided into four groups called genera: alpha, beta, gamma, and delta. These little invaders are zoonotic, meaning they can spread between animals and humans; gamma and delta coronaviruses mostly infect birds, while alpha and beta mostly reside in mammals.

Researchers first isolated human coronaviruses in the 1960s, and for a long time they were considered pretty mild. Mostly, if you got a coronavirus, you’d end up with a cold. But the most famous coronaviruses are the ones that jumped from animals to humans.

Coronaviruses are made up of one strip of RNA, and that genetic material is surrounded by a membrane studded with little spike proteins. (Under a microscope, those proteins stick up in a ring around the top of the virus, giving it its name—“corona” is Latin for “crown.”) When the virus gets into the body, those spike proteins attach to host cells, and the virus injects that RNA into the cell’s nucleus, hijacking the replication machinery there to make more virus. Infection ensues.

The severity of that infection depends on a couple of factors. One is what part of the body the virus tends to latch onto. Less serious types of coronavirus, like the ones that cause the common cold, tend to attach to cells higher up in the respiratory tract—places like your nose or throat. But their more gnarly relatives attach in the lungs and bronchial tubes, causing more serious infections. The MERS virus, for example, binds to a protein found in the lower respiratory tract and the gastrointestinal tract, so that, in addition to causing respiratory problems, the virus often causes kidney failure.

The other thing that contributes to the severity of the infection is the proteins the virus produces. Different genes mean different proteins; more virulent coronaviruses may have spike proteins that are better at latching onto human cells. Some coronaviruses produce proteins that can fend off the immune system, and when patients have to mount even larger immune responses, they get sicker.

Can people be immune to the new coronavirus?

Viruses that spread quickly usually come with lower mortality rates and vice versa.

As the virus is an entirely new strain, it is believed that there is no existing immunity in anyone it will encounter.

Some level of immunity will naturally develop over time, but this means that those with compromised immune systems, such as the elderly or sick, are most at risk of becoming severely ill or dying from the coronavirus.

Although the total number of deaths has now exceeded those recorded during the 2002-2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the current mortality rate is much lower than that of SARS.

The coronavirus mortality rate stands at 2.4 percent, while SARS killed 9.6 percent of those infected.

How can people protect themselves? Are face masks useful?

In terms of self-protection and containing the virus, experts agree that is important to wash your hands frequently and thoroughly with soap; cover your face with a tissue or your elbow when coughing or sneezing; visit a doctor if you have symptoms; and avoid direct contact with live animals in affected areas.

While face masks are popular, scientists doubt their effectiveness against airborne viruses.

Masks may provide some protection to you and others, but because they are loose and made of permeable material, droplets can still pass through.

Many countries have advised people travelling back from China to self-quarantine for at least two weeks.

How to Protect Yourself Against the Coronavirus

Wash your hands.

Washing your hands regularly is the best way to protect yourself from the coronavirus — assuming you’re doing it correctly. The CDC recommends getting your hands wet with warm or cold water; lathering your entire hands, including under the nails, with soap; scrubbing your hands for 20 seconds; rinsing with clean water; and finally, either letting your hands air-dry or using a clean towel.

“Wash them especially well if you’re about to eat,” Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, wrote in the New York Times. “Wash them after you’ve blown your nose, coughed or sneezed. Make it routine that all members of the household wash their hands when they get home.”

It’s also not a bad idea to carry around a hand sanitizer for times when you’re not near a sink, though you should make sure it contains at least 60 percent alcohol. However, experts stress that washing your hands thoroughly — and frequently — is the best preventative measure.

Stop touching your face!

In addition to washing your hands frequently, the CDC also recommends that you avoid touching your face — specifically, your eyes, nose, and mouth, which are entry portals for coronavirus and other germs. If an infected person coughs or sneezes on a surface, and you touch that contaminated surface and then touch your facial mucous membranes — the eyes, nose, and mouth — you could become infected.

Stock up on prescriptions and household supplies.

According to the New York Times, experts are recommending stocking up on at least a month’s worth of prescription or over-the-counter medicine, in the event that you have to self-quarantine. Experts are also advising buying extra shelf-stable food, cleaning supplies, and other necessary household items.

Practice social distancing.

If there’s an outbreak in your area, experts say it’s wise to practice “social distancing” measures to mitigate the spread of viruses. These measures typically entail keeping your distance from other people — the CDC recommends standing at least six feet away, if possible — and avoiding crowded spaces. (Some countries like France have already implemented such measures, like banning gatherings of more than 1,000 people.)

If you’re sick …

Be cautious: If you experience any cold or flulike symptoms, you should stay home (if you can afford to.) And even if you aren’t sick, it’s a good idea to work from home if you can. As Katie Heaney noted on the Cut, every time we leave our home, we increase our risk of exposure and transmission, potentially unknowingly.

According to the Times, if you think you have the coronavirus, you should reach out to your doctor or local health department, or follow the instructions on the CDC’s website.

If you’re pregnant …

As of now, the CDC does not recommend specific precautions for pregnant women, as there’s a lack of “information from published scientific reports about susceptibility of pregnant women to COVID-19.” However, the CDC notes that because pregnant women’s immune systems are in flux, it’s possible they could be more susceptible. “It makes sense that a pregnant woman would be at higher risk of complications from this virus than a nonpregnant one,” Dr. Steven Gordon, M.D., an infectious-disease specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, told the New York Times last week.

If you have a chronic illness, are elderly, or have a compromised immune system …

While COVID-19 will cause mild symptoms in the majority of infected people, Jan Carette, an associate professor at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, says that the elderly — especially those with chronic conditions, like hypertension or diabetes — are at greater risk for more severe disease. In this case, he recommends that those who are especially susceptible practice the above precautions as well as avoid people who display flulike symptoms.

If you’re traveling …

If you have upcoming travel plans, it’s a good idea to stay up-to-date on the CDC’s travel warnings for specific countries. In general, it’s safest to avoid nonessential travel to countries with a sustained COVID-19 presence; right now, this includes Iran, China, South Korea, and Italy. For individuals who are especially susceptible to viral infections, including the elderly and those with existing medical conditions, the CDC advises avoiding travel to Japan as well.

Currently, the CDC doesn’t have any additional recommendations for domestic travel, though this could change as the virus spreads further in the United States. But according to the CDC’s website, the risk of infection on an airplane is low. “Because of how air circulates and is filtered on airplanes, most viruses and other germs do not spread easily,” they write. However, they recommend that travelers wash their hands frequently and avoid contact with sick passengers.

10 Tips For Preparing To Stay At Home Due To The Coronavirus

1. You can eat normal, tasty, healthy foods.

Just because you’re stocking up doesn’t mean you have to live on nonperishable foods and canned vegetables. That’s going to get tiresome real quick, and there are plenty of ways to eat the things you normally would.Fill your freezer with fresh, flavorful soups. Keep pasta in your pantry and tomato sauce in your freezer. Think about the foods you would want to eat on a typical day; usually there’s a way to keep those around. Personally, I froze a big batch of taco soup and a bunch of marinated salmon, and made a crunchy quinoa salad that lasts well in the fridge for the week. I also bought eggs, sweet potatoes, peanut butter, hummus, carrots, and a bunch of other things — normal staples for my diet that will keep for a decent length of time.

2. And remember that food isn’t just about staying alive.

You don’t just need well-balanced meals! You need Cheez-Its, peanut butter cups, popcorn, gummy bears...really whatever snacks you’ll be craving if you’re stuck inside for a while. There has never been a better time to have ingredients around to bake cookies. And if you’re out here thinking meal prep time would be a good time to get super healthy and only eat lentils, get real. These are trying times. Buy the damn candy.

3. Avoid being too isolated.

Being forced to stay inside might sound like an introvert’s dream come true, but when it’s in the midst of a worldwide epidemic and everyone is panicking, it’s not such a fun and chill time. It took me one day stuck at home to get lonely and stir-crazy.Check in with your people. Get on the phone or FaceTime and call your family and friends with some regularity — you’ll probably need it, and so will they.

And if someone you know actually gets quarantined, or gets infected with the virus, be there for them as much as you (safely) can. Call them, or just send a playlist, some memes, or links. And even if you can’t go hang out with them IRL, consider cooking them a meal and leaving it outside their door, which is safe to do.“People [need to] know who to call if they do start getting symptoms, [and] know there is somebody who is going to check in on them, that they’re not just going to be isolated and forgotten about,” said Hawryluck. “If you’re afraid you’re going to get sick, what you really need and want is to know that somebody is going to care for you.”

4. Get a little fitness in.

There are plenty of workouts you can do from the comfort of your own home, and doing so can seriously help your mental health.Here are a bunch of exercises you can do without any equipment, and YouTube has tons of channels that offer instruction in everything from yoga to Pilates to strength training.And if you can still go outside, nothing beats a walk. Just avoid big groups of people.

5. Clean your home.

Not only does it protect against the spread of illness, it also makes being cooped up in your home a lot more pleasant. Here’s a big list of spring cleaning chores you may have been putting off.

6. Go online, but beware.When the SARS epidemic broke out in 2002, Facebook, Twitter, and even Myspace did not yet exist. Now, people are far more digitally connected, and the ability to keep in touch over social media and video chat can have major benefits on mental health during isolation. “It shortens distances between people,” Hawryluck said.But the internet also creates issues that didn’t exist during SARS — namely, the spread of misinformation.“People are afraid, and that’s okay — we are human, there are things in our lives that are going to scare us, and this is one of them,” said Hawryluck. “But how we handle that fear, I think fear can be lessened if we have accurate information.”Here’s a running list of misinformation about the coronavirus to keep on hand as you peruse social media. Also, be wary of those hawking fake cures online or trying to infect your computer with malware by sending you suspicious coronavirus-themed emails.

7. Plan out your entertainment.

Watch the news, for sure, but don’t just stay glued to cable news. “The worst thing people can do is sit around and watch TV or watch their screens and look for the hourly update of numbers,” Hawryluck said. “I think that just exaggerates the symptoms of fear and its effects.”

You know all those shows and movies you’ve been meaning to watch but never get around to? Make a list — yes, an actual list — of the titles, and you’ll never run out of things to watch.But if spending too much time looking at screens is driving you nuts, shut it down.Get out a bunch of books from your library. Pull out the board games and puzzles. Have some craft supplies on hand, if that’s your thing.

8. Seek professional help if you’re really struggling.Whether you’ve been to a therapist before or are just realizing you might need to see one, seeking help with your mental health doesn’t need to wait till you can go outside again. Lots of therapists offer sessions over the phone or video chat. Here are a bunch of tips for how to find a therapist. There are also apps to help you with your mental health.

9. If you’re working from home, do it right. Working from home sounds like the dream — pajamas all day, slacking off, working from the couch! — but it can get bleak and unproductive pretty quickly if it’s not approached the right way.

10. Remember to stay healthy and practice good hygiene.

Information is power, and having the right info can be helpful in stopping yourself from freaking out. You don’t need to go overboard on research, but it’s a good idea to be aware of what you should do if you do think you’ve contracted the coronavirus.

And perhaps the easiest way to stay healthy is to maintain proper hygiene. You don’t need a face mask (unless you’re sick), but you should be washing your hands regularly (and remember, soap and water is just as effective as hand sanitizer).Once that’s done, just try to take it easy (and maybe order some dumplings to support your favorite Chinese restaurant). These are tough, uncertain times, and the best thing we all can do is be kind to ourselves and our neighbors as we all go through it.

#corona #coronavirus

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techcrunchappcom · 4 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/the-entire-presidency-is-a-superspreading-event-new-yorkmagazine/

The Entire Presidency Is a Superspreading Event - New York Magazine

Donald Trump was on the phone, and he was talking about dying. It was Saturday, October 3, and while his doctor had told the outside world that the president’s symptoms were nothing to worry about, Trump, cocooned in his suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, was telling those close to him something very different.

“I could be one of the diers,” he said.

The person on the other end of the line couldn’t forget that unusual word the president used: dier. A seldom-said dictionary standard, it was a classic Trumpism, at once sinister and childlike. If being a loser was bad, being a dier was a lot worse. Losers can become winners again. Diers are losers forever. But aren’t we all diers in the end? Donald Trump, the least self-reflective man in America, was contemplating his own mortality.

He said it again: “I could be one of the diers.”

The previous day, at 12:54 a.m., he had announced that he and the First Lady, Melania, had tested positive for COVID-19 in an outbreak that would sideline dozens across the West Wing, the East Wing, the highest levels of the federal government, the military ranks, Trump’s 2020 campaign team, and prominent supporters in the religious community. The virus had barreled into the very White House that allowed its spread throughout the United States, where 213,000 were dead and 7.6 million more were infected amid the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression.

As infections swelled nationwide, the virus made its way inside the president himself — an epic security failure with no modern analog. It was over a century ago, amid a pandemic in 1919, that Woodrow Wilson got sick in Paris. His White House blamed what it called a cold and a fever on the dreary weather. But, in fact, Wilson was sick with the virus now known as the Spanish flu, which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans as his administration looked away. One hundred and one years later, the story of Trump’s “mild symptoms” became less and less true as the hours ticked by. His fever crept up. His cough and congestion grew worse. Doctors gave him oxygen and administered a high dose of an experimental antibody treatment unavailable to the ailing masses and made using fetal tissue, a practice his administration opposes, from the drugmaker Regeneron. Still, he resisted going to Walter Reed. “I don’t need to go,” he said, according to a person who spoke to him. “I’m fine. I’m fine. We have everything we need here.”

Persuading him to leave the White House required an intervention from his doctors, members of the White House operations staff, the Secret Service, and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. They had failed to stop the mass deaths of high-risk Americans, but they were going to save Trump, the most important high-risk American of them all. They told him, “This isn’t just your choice. This really isn’t about you. It’s about the presidency. Our job is to protect the presidency, and you occupy it.” They asked him to think about the military and everyone else whose life would be upended if the state of the country’s leadership was in doubt.

Fine. He agreed to walk across the South Lawn and board Marine One. The White House said the move was made “out of an abundance of caution.” In a video posted on social media, the president hinted that things weren’t so great. He put it this way: “I’m going to Walter Reed hospital. I think I’m doing very well, but we’re going to make sure that things work out.”

In the hospital, Trump’s world shrank overnight in a way it hadn’t since he arrived in Washington from New York to be sworn into office nearly four years ago. Contagious and isolated from his family and closest aides, he was accompanied by Dan Scavino, the social-media director who had first been his caddie and had survived at his side longer than anyone who wasn’t blood, and Mark Meadows, his highly emotional chief of staff, who slept in a room nearby, and was attended to by a team of camera-conscious doctors. In this sterilized confinement, he tried to distract himself from his illness. He plotted his escape, planned public-relations stunts, watched TV, and took calls from friends, members of his staff, and Republican lawmakers. But he remained consumed by what the doctors told him about his chances of survival. It wasn’t a sure thing.

Nine months into the pandemic and one month away from Election Day, the president considered for the first time that the disease killing him in the polls, threatening his political future, might just kill him, too. On the phone he remarked sarcastically, “This change of scenery has been great.”

He asked for an update on who else in his circle had contracted the virus, though he expressed no regret, no indication that he understood his own decisions could have led to the infections. Unable to process the irony of his own misfortune, he tried his best to find the Trumpiest spin. Looked at one way, he was having the greatest and most important illness of all time. He had the best care in the world, and he raved about the virtues of the drugs the doctors had him on, including dexamethasone, a steroid pumping up his lungs that can induce euphoria. He was awed by the wonders of modern medicine. He said he was feeling really good, and it didn’t sound like he was lying. Then he admitted something scary. That how he felt might not mean much in the end.

“This thing could go either way. It’s tricky. They told me it’s tricky,” the president said. “You can tell it can go either way.”

Trump held a press conference on September 26 in the Rose Garden to announce Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Photo: Carlos Barria/REUTERS

Statistically, the coronavirus is more likely to cost Donald Trump the White House than his life, though the threat to the latter isn’t helping the former. A little more than three weeks before the election, potentially contagious and freaking everybody out, Trump faces what looks like the end of his presidency. “He’s mishandled the coronavirus, he’s never been popular, and he’s gonna lose badly. I think it’s pretty simple,” a senior Republican official said. “Of course he was going to say, ‘Oh look, I feel great! Look how badly I beat this puny little virus!’ Meanwhile, it touches every American’s life every day in multiple different ways, and he’s handled it badly and people don’t forget that.” Or, as ex–Trump adviser Sam Nunberg put it, “Everything has just completely gone to shit.”

The polls suggest not just that the president will lose to Joe Biden but that he might lose bigly, in a landslide.

When the coronavirus came to America, the president was preoccupied with more obvious threats. The first positive case was confirmed in Washington State on January 21, and that same day, as he landed in Davos, the Senate was debating an organizing resolution for the president’s impeachment trial. In the Alps, he dismissed the news about the virus at home. “We have it totally under control,” he said. In fact, the president soon thought that things could hardly be going better.

After three years of crisis, the election year had begun with his acquittal on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice brought by the House under Articles of Impeachment. At the same time, the economy was booming. In the Democratic primary, which would select his opponent for the general election, the candidate he most feared, Joe Biden, seemed to be choking. And Michael Bloomberg was threatening to blow the whole thing up anyway. Trump thought about the last campaign and, ever superstitious, how to replicate its magic. He was relieved when Hope Hicks, his closest aide, returned to the White House after two years in exile in Los Angeles. Around the same time, he welcomed back Johnny McEntee, a former aide he believed to be a MAGA whisperer, capable of knowing exactly what would appeal to his base. He didn’t think about the coronavirus much. And then the deaths began.

“If the president had his way, he’d be back in February,” Newt Gingrich told me. The former Speaker of the House is an opportunist, and in the era of Donald Trump, that means he must be an optimist. In 2016, Gingrich supported Trump’s campaign in the hope that he’d be asked to be the vice-president. Instead, Trump repaid his loyalty not with power or higher status in history but with the cushiest gig in Europe: He made Gingrich the husband of the United States ambassador to the Vatican, based in Rome. Before the pandemic, whenever you’d call the guy, he was in a loud restaurant — “Hi! Yeah?! This is Newt!” — having the time of his life. So one might understand why he’s invested in keeping this whole thing going.

This is what it looks like when the president knows he’s losing, but it’s also close to what it looked like when he won.

Gingrich grasps better than most how to stick to a message, and he keeps a straight face on Trump’s behalf even as he argues things he knows cannot be true. That voter surveys are skewed by the left-wing media. “I think the election is not quite like the public-opinion polls,” he says. That the president’s illness is a political asset. “It gives him a better understanding of what people are going through,” he says. Or that the president doesn’t mean to imply those killed by the virus were weak when he says he’ll beat it because he’s strong. “I think he’s talking about a national attitude. Should it be ‘Hunker down in the basement’ or ‘Reopen the schools’?” he says. Still, he cannot help but break character to admit the obvious: “If the president had his way, there’d be no virus. There’d be historically high employment among Blacks and Latinos. But you don’t get to pick the circumstances in which you run.”

And the circumstances have grown less pickable each day. “I think some of this is sad to watch,” Nunberg said. “It’s getting to the point where he’s almost turning into a laughingstock. What I’m worried about is whether he wants to completely self-destruct and take everything down with him vis-à-vis the election and the Republican Party.” He added, “This is a guy who’s not gonna lose joyfully.”

It does appear at times as though self-destruction may be the point. How else could you explain the Plague Parade circling Walter Reed, in which a very sick Trump boarded a tightly sealed SUV with his Secret Service agents so he could wave at the supporters who had come to fly their flags on the street? Or the Evita-inspired return to the White House, in which a still very sick Trump ascended the staircase to the balcony, ripped off his face mask, and saluted to no one as his photographer snapped away? Or calling in to the Fox Business Channel to suggest his infection may be the fault of the Gold Star military families, since they were always asking to hug him? This is what it looks like when the president knows he’s losing, but it’s also close to what it looked like when he won — after all, he thought he was losing in 2016, too. We all did. “You’re never as smart as you look when you win, and never as dumb as you look when you lose,” according to David Axelrod. In Trump’s case, it may be more like this: What seems like genius when he manages to survive is the very madness that threatens his survival in the first place.

A senior White House official told me there has been an ongoing effort to persuade the president not to do any of this, as there always is during his episodes of advanced mania. Asked what the effort looked like this time, with Trump physically removed from most of the people who might try to calm him down, the official said, “Well, for starters, it’s unsuccessful.”

One former White House official said that stopping Trump from doing something stupid that he really wants to do is possible only if you’re “actually sitting in front of him.” Sick themselves or trying to avoid a sick president, “the people he trusts and respects who would be barriers to that behavior don’t seem to be around,” this person said. “It just looks so chaotic. Duh.”

On October 5, the night Trump returned, a member of the White House cleaning staff sprayed the press briefing room. Photo: Erin Scott/Reuters/REUTERS

A second former White House official said the problem is “now people are so broken down, to the point where everyone’s been in ‘Jesus, take the wheel’ mode for the last couple years, and fighting against him is only gonna get them burned. Why even try?” The president’s staff, this person said, have no ability to think strategically because the president’s behavior poses new threats to survival every five minutes. “I don’t think they’re even considering what happens if he’s back in the White House and he needs oxygen or a ventilator. Their view is ‘If it happens, well, we’ll fucking figure it out when it happens!’ ”

Like Gingrich, they have to stay optimistic. “They aren’t even considering what happens when he’s feeling worse than he’s feeling now, when he’s hopped up full of steroids and other performance enhancers. He’s on the sort of drugs you’d see with a Tour de France rider in the mid-’90s!” Another way to say this, the former White House official said, was that the president is “hopped up on more drugs than a Belgian racing pigeon.” In keeping with the bird theme, this person said the president’s illness was proof that “the chickens are coming home to roost.”

“Going back to 2016,” this person added, “you always had these warnings from the Clinton camp and Democrats and the Never-Trump Republicans that, if he takes office and if a crisis hits, it’s gonna be a mess. But people don’t really vote on that when there’s not a crisis. People think, A crisis isn’t gonna happen! May as well vote for the guy with a good tax policy. Suddenly, this happens, and you always assume it won’t happen to you, but when you act like that, bad things happen!”

One theory of Trump’s self-immolation campaign is that it’s about gaining a sense of control. “I don’t think he wants to lose. I think he wants to have excuses for why he did lose,” a third former White House official said. “If it’s the ballot, the China virus, if it’s Nancy Pelosi. I just think he wants an excuse.”

As he considers the end, he fakes his way through a performance of political possibility. One person who publicly supports Trump and considers him a friend said that, in conversations with White House and campaign officials following the president’s release from the hospital, it became clear that no one who was supposed to know seemed sure when he would be okay. “They’re putting out a big ‘Oh, everything’s fine!’ face. But I don’t think they know how much stamina he’s gonna have,” this person said. “I didn’t like the way he looked on that balcony. Last week, I would’ve said that he was definitely going to win. Now, I don’t know.”

Trump spoke from outside the Oval Office on October 7 about having COVID and the vaccine. Photo: @realdonaldtrump/Twitter

Donald Trump does not often get sick. The philosophy of Fred Trump decreed that “sickness was weakness,” Mary Trump told me, “which obviously Donald has adhered to, which is a big part of the reason we’re in this horrible mess we’re in.”

Mary Trump is the president’s niece as well as a psychologist, whose best seller, Too Much and Never Enough, analyzes her uncle through the dysfunctional family he came from. In her view, the president is best understood as a self-unaware Tin Man, abandoned as a small child by his sick mother and rejected by his sociopath father until he became useful to him, whose endless search for love and approval plays out as mental warfare on the Free World he improbably represents. “In order to deal with the terror and the loneliness he experienced, he developed these defense mechanisms that essentially made him unlovable,” Mary said. “Over time, they hardened into character traits that my grandfather came to value. When you’re somebody who craves love but doesn’t understand what it means — he just knows he misses it and needs it, but he’ll never have it because he’s somebody nobody loves — that’s fucking tragic. He still needs to go to prison for the rest of his life. It’s not a defense. But it’s sad.”

For two weeks before he died, Fred Trump was hospitalized at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in what Mary remembers as “a very beautiful corner room with lots of sunlight.” With her uncle at his father’s bedside, she said, “everyone just stood around chitchatting, making small talk — they just don’t understand how to be human.” When his mother was in the hospital, often for osteoporosis and once after a brutal mugging, Trump visited with an attitude of “Why the fuck do I have to be here?” she said. “It was of no use to him whatsoever.” When Mary’s father, Fred Jr., died in 1981, his brother didn’t even show up to the funeral.

In his 2007 book Think Big, the future president recalled how, a decade before, he “unexpectedly came down with a wicked case of the flu” in the middle of his negotiations to buy a newspaper (he didn’t say which one). “I felt terrible. It was so bad that I called the sellers and told them we would have to postpone the closing until I was better,” he said, which was “very unusual” because “I never get the flu. It’s been ten years and I haven’t been sick a day since then.” Trump didn’t share the story of this freak illness to reveal his humanity but to add to his myth. He lost out to another buyer in the end, he said, and he was happy he did because, he claimed, the unnamed paper turned out to be a bad investment that was some other sucker’s problem. “Catching the flu was a lucky break that saved me from ruin,” he said. “Sometimes luck makes better deals than talent.” In other words, the idea that sickness is weakness, except for when it happens to him, took root a quarter-century before he made it his case for reelection.

Trump is aware that he isn’t healthy. His wife, an Eastern European former model who eats salmon and greens, lengthens her muscles on a Pilates reformer, and glows as if cast in bronze, is “healthy.” As a 74-year-old who takes the unscientific position that human beings have a finite amount of energy that exercise needlessly drains, and who thus never engages in any physical activity more strenuous than golf or tweeting, and whose vices include red meat, French fries, ice cream, Oreos, and Diet Coke, he knows he is very much not that.

And he understood that with age and weight comes heightened risk in the coronavirus pandemic. But he couldn’t accept that he wouldn’t be fine, that he was part of the “at-risk seniors” his advisers kept telling him he should think about since they were an important voting demographic and they were literally dying by the thousands. What he could accept even less than not being fine was not seeming fine. His supporters like to imagine him as a cartoonish representation of his vigorous, manly spirit, a joke directed at anyone who doesn’t find it funny. In memes, he body-slams his enemies. A video from the Trump campaign, released the week of his COVID-19 diagnosis, shows him body-slamming the virus. When I stopped by the home of Willard and Dolly Smith in New Hampshire last month, the flag on the couple’s front lawn showed Trump’s fleshy face on Rambo’s ripped body. “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m very young,” the president joked on Fox Business on Thursday. But the stabs at self-deprecation, more necessary at this moment than ever before, do little to mask deep insecurity. Since his illness, the makeup the president applies himself has gotten so heavy and so dark that rather than obscure his pale coloring, it emphasizes the contrast between his unnatural face and the bare skin of his ears and hands. (All those years spent judging beauty pageants, and he never learned from the contestants the value of body makeup.)

Personality is policy in the Trump administration, and the president’s insecurity has made the uncertainty about the country’s leadership — unavoidable when any chief executive falls ill — even worse. His unwillingness to admit human frailty has led the White House and its doctors to keep information about his illness not only from the public and the press (three members of which have, so far, been infected at the White House too) but from his own staff. After Hope Hicks began experiencing symptoms at the Minnesota MAGA rally on Wednesday, forcing her to isolate in the back of the plane on the trip home, officials with whom she’d had contact remained in the dark. After she tested positive on Thursday afternoon, the White House failed to notify others who would soon test positive themselves. They learned about it when the world did, not with an official disclosure but with a leak to the media. “The president could’ve given it to her,” one of those people told me, in fairness, but “I would’ve done things different that day, had I known.”

Trump did know, but he didn’t change his plans. At 1 p.m. on Thursday, he flew to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, for a fund-raiser with hundreds of his supporters, some of whom he spoke with indoors. Later that night, he tweeted about Hicks being sick. “Terrible!” he said. “The First Lady and I are waiting for our test results. In the meantime, we will begin our quarantining process.”

Reading the message, the person said, “I assumed he must’ve had a preliminary positive one.” The lack of transparency, this person added, is “symptomatic about how people I work with always keep the wrong things secret.” Suicidal in all senses, this is the Trumpian madness that threatens the president’s political and earthly future as it puts at risk everyone around him.

As one White House official put it: “Everybody at the top should be fired.”

*This article appears in the October 12, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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paulbenedictblog · 4 years ago

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Bbc news Coronavirus: el costo humano de la desinformación del virus

Bbc news

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Image copyright Getty Shots

Image caption A protester's signal casts doubt on the existence of coronavirus during an illustration in California in early Could doubtless well perhaps

A BBC crew tracking coronavirus misinformation has found hyperlinks to assaults, arsons and deaths. And experts assert the opportunity of indirect damage precipitated by rumours, conspiracy theories and unsuitable health data will likely be grand bigger.

"We thought the federal government was utilizing it to distract us," says Brian Lee Hitchens, "or it was to invent with 5G. So we didn't be aware the foundations or seek lend a hand sooner."

Brian, 46, is talking by phone from his health facility mattress in Florida. His wife is severely ill - sedated, on a ventilator in an adjacent ward.

"The wrestle that they've been having is alongside side her lungs," he says, divulge wobbling. "They're infected. Her body honest will not be responding."

After studying on-line conspiracy theories, they thought the illness was a hoax - or, a minimal of, no worse than flu. But then in early Could doubtless well perhaps, the couple caught Covid-19.

"And now I realise that coronavirus is surely not fraudulent," he says, working out of breath. "Or not it is available and or not it is spreading."

Image copyright Brian Lee hitchens

Image caption Brian Lee Hitchens thought the virus was a hoax - until he and his wife caught it

Bbc news Harmful misinformation

A BBC crew has been tracking the human toll of coronavirus misinformation. We have investigated dozens of circumstances - some beforehand unreported - talking to the folks affected and clinical authorities in an are trying to take a look at the experiences.

The outcomes hold spread through the enviornment.

On-line rumours led to mob assaults in India and mass poisonings in Iran. Telecommunications engineers had been threatened and attacked and make contact with masts had been place alight within the UK and diversified worldwide locations - all due to conspiracy theories.

And in Arizona, a pair mistakenly thought a bottle of fish tank cleaner contained a preventative treatment.

Bbc news Poisoned by cleansing products

It was gradual March when Wanda and Gary Lenius started to listen to about hydroxychloroquine.

The couple noticed a the same-sounding ingredient on the designate of an frail bottle that was lying around their house in Phoenix.

Hydroxychloroquine would possibly well well hold doubtless to wrestle the virus - nonetheless as research continues, it remains unproven. On Monday, the World Health Organisationhalted its employ in trialsafter a contemporary examine advised it would possibly well if truth be told elevate the likelihood of patients loss of life from Covid-19.

Hypothesis about its effectiveness started circulating on-line in China in gradual January. Media organisations, alongside side Chinese language divulge retailers, tweeted out frail research where it was tested as an anti-viral treatment.

Image copyright Getty Shots

Image caption President Trump says he has been taking hydroxychloroquine

Then a French physician claimed encouraging outcomes. Even supposing doubt was later solid on that examine, interest in hydroxychloroquine surged. It was talked about, with a quantity of degrees of scepticism, by a diversity of media retailers and influential folks alongside side Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

It also found its plan into White Home press briefings - and President Trump's Twitter feed.

"What invent you hold to lose?" he acknowledged on 3 April. "Snatch it." In mid-Could doubtless well perhaps, he went additional - saying that he'd beenfollowing his hold recommendation. Each comment resulted in nice spikes in social media chatter in regards to the drug, primarily based on data from on-line monitoring software program CrowdTangle.

Overdoses of the drug are rare, nonetheless the distress produced by the pandemic has pushed folks to coarse measures.

In Nigeria, health facility admissions from hydroxychloroquine poisoning provoked Lagos divulge health officers to warn folks against utilizing the drug.

And in early March, a 43-one year-frail Vietnamese man was admitted to a poison control health center in Hanoi after taking a nice dose of chloroquine. He was crimson, trembling and unable to view straight. The health center's director, Dr Nguyen Trung Nguyen, acknowledged the person was lucky he purchased treatment mercurial - or else he would possibly well well hold died.

Gary Lenius was not so fortunate. The cleaner he and Wanda gulped down contained a traipse chemical, and was poisonous.

Internal minutes, each and each started feeling dizzy and sizzling. They vomited and struggled to breathe. Gary died, and Wanda was hospitalised.

Wanda later defined why the couple drank the concoction.

"Trump saved saying it was slightly grand a treatment," she acknowledged.

Image copyright Getty Shots

Image caption President Donald Trump speaks at a on a typical basis press briefing in regards to the pandemic

Bbc news Alcohol poisoning

In Iran, authorities assert hundreds hold died from alcohol poisoning after viral rumours about its healing outcomes.

The total was build apart at 796 by the discontinue of April by Kambiz Soltaninejad, an legit from Iran's Correct Remedy Organisation, who acknowledged it was the of "fraudulent news on social media."

The truth leisurely the volume is gloomy in a nation where alcohol is banned in Iran and bootleg moonshine is routinely wicked.

On the other hand on this case, BBC journalists did stumble on rumours of the supposed "treatment" spreading on the messaging app Telegram earlier than the legit announcement.

Shayan Sardarizadeh of BBC Monitoring's disinformation crew notes that the announcement was doubtless embarrassing to the Iranian authorities and, if something, the volume will likely be an underestimate.

In one case we verified, a 5-one year-frail boy went blind after his folks plied him with unlawful booze in an are trying to wrestle the illness.

"We know that unsuitable data can ruin lives," says Clare Milne, deputy editor of UK truth-checking organisation Full Reality. "There would possibly be such nice doubtless for damage."

Image copyright Getty Shots

Image caption Iranian officers, alongside side President Hassan Rouhani, meet to chat in regards to the coronavirus pandemic

Bbc news 'My buddy ate soap'

President Trump has speculated on slightly a few diversified remedies beside hydroxychloroquine. In gradual April, he opined thatultraviolet rays would possibly well neutralise the virus.

"And then I stumble on the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a blueprint we are in a position to invent something like that, by injection within or nearly a cleansing?"

Trump later acknowledged his feedback had been sarcastic. But some American citizens didn't stumble on it that plan, and poison control hotlines purchased calls asking in regards to the recommendation. Officers at one in Kansas acknowledged they heard from somebody who acknowledged his buddy swallowed disinfectant soap after the president's briefing.

Image copyright Getty Shots

Dr Duncan Maru, a doctor at Elmhurst Sanatorium in Original York, says his colleagues hold handled patients who hold become acutely ill after ingesting disinfectant.

"These ingestions would possibly well hold long-time interval consequences, like cancers and gastrointestinal bleeding," he says.

Image caption Dr Duncan Maru heads for a health facility shift treating coronavirus patients

Bbc news Arsons, assaults and conspiracies

Social networks hold also been fertile ground for conspiracy theories. One particular coronavirus-associated one - there are hundreds circulating on-line - has resulted in arsons and assaults.

Across the UK, more than 70 phone masts had been vandalised due to unsuitable rumours that 5G mobile phone technology is somehow to blame for the virus.

Image copyright Getty Shots

Image caption A mobile phone mast was place on fire in Huddersfield in April

In April, Dylan Farrell, an engineer for Openreach, was riding his van in Thurmaston come Leicester. It had been a protracted day and he was occupied with what he would possibly well well hold for tea as he pulled up to a roundabout. That's when he started to listen to shouting.

First and well-known, he thought it was directed at somebody else. But when he heard "5G!" being screamed by his passenger side window, he realised the shouting was supposed for him.

"You can hold received no morals!" a person shouted. "5G is killing us all!"

Image copyright Dylan Farrell

Image caption Dylan Farrell was abused by a person shouting about 5G conspiracy theories

"I assemble not hold any doubt he would hold tried to earn within and bodily attack me had I not locked the doorways straight," Dylan says. "It was so shocking."

He drove away mercurial. There had been no arrests in connection with the incident.

"We hold considered slightly a few conspiracies which had been on-line for a truly very long time now about 5G," says Claire Milne of Full Reality. "Those hold developed to be linked to the quiet coronavirus."

Image caption A person carrying a "Voice No to 5G T-shirt" who attended an anti-lockdown divulge in central London in Could doubtless well perhaps. He was not interested by the violent assaults against telecoms workers

Bbc news Racial tensions and violent assaults

In March, WHO Director Overall Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the pandemic would lead to a flare up of a "unpleasant enemy".

He was relating to racism against folks from Asia and China, nonetheless the virus has exacerbated tensions in quite quite a bit of worldwide locations.

In April, three Muslim males had been violently attacked in separate incidents in Delhi. They had been overwhelmed up after rumours circulated that Muslims had been spreading the virus.

In Sisai, a little village in japanese India, rival gangs clashed. It came after an attack on a Muslim boy, yet again linked to unsuitable rumours suggesting Muslims had been spreading illness. One younger man lost his life and each other was seriously injured.

Image copyright Getty Shots

Image caption Muslim males pray in entrance of closed retailers in Original Delhi during Ramadan. Many Muslims in India fright they've been unfairly discriminated against through the pandemic

Fraudulent experiences hold circulated within ethnic communities as smartly. In Bradford, England, rumours circulated thatnon-white patients had been being left to die.

And in Indore, a metropolis in west-central India, doctors on a mission to trace down somebody who would possibly well well had been exposed to the virus had been attacked with stones. Deceptive WhatsApp movies claimed that healthy Muslims had been being taken away by health care workers and injected with the virus.

Two doctors had been left with severe injuries after the incident in early April.

Bbc news Seriously ill from conspiracies

On-line disinformation can hold verbalize consequences, and social media platforms equivalent to Fb acknowledged they'll grab away coronavirus posts that pose an instantaneous threat.

But it undoubtedly can even hold indirect or delayed outcomes.

"I'm hoping she pulls by," says Brian Lee Hitchens, the affected person in Florida who received sucked in by coronavirus conspiracy theories. "But if I invent lose her, she'll be in an even bigger self-discipline."

Image copyright Brian Lee Hitchens

Image caption Brian outdated to take into consideration conspiracy theories about coronavirus

Brian and his wife didn't hold one firm belief in regards to the illness - as a replace they oscillated between thinking that the virus was a hoax, linked to 5G, or a gentle nonetheless delicate ailment.

So they carried on as in type in spite of legit warnings. Brian went to work as a taxi driver in his self-discipline of beginning of Jupiter. He went purchasing and picked up his wife's medications. Despite his wife's sleep apnoea and asthma, he didn't bother with social distancing or carrying a canopy.

Image copyright Fb

Image caption Brian and his wife at a birthday party earlier than the pandemic

Catching the virus introduced Brian support to actuality. He grew to become to social media, this time to warn folks off of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Consultants assert posts like Brian's will likely be more helpful in combating conspiracies than news articles and truth checks.

"Indubitably one of many absolute best techniques of making an are trying to factual the story," says Full Reality's Claire Milne, "is by getting the person that made the usual claim to invent it themselves."

Bbc news 'We lose so many lives due to misinformation'

Brian's will likely be an coarse case, nonetheless with the sheer quantity of data circulating -the WHO has known as it an "infodemic"- many replace folks had been misled by what they read on-line.

They are usually not killing themselves by taking fraudulent remedies. Instead, they're reducing their possibilities of survival by not thinking coronavirus is steady or severe.

On an surprisingly frigid Friday in Could doubtless well perhaps, two males of their forties arrived at an emergency health facility within the Original York borough of Queens. They had been roommates, working long shifts and sharing a single mattress, and each and each had been seriously ill.

Internal hours, Dr Rajeev Fernando saw one die in entrance of his eyes. The diversified was placed on a ventilator.

Image copyright Dr Rajeev Fernando

Image caption Dr Rajeev Fernando working at an emergency health facility place up in Original York

Dr Fernando asked the males why they hadn't reach to health facility sooner. They defined to him that they read someplace on-line that the virus wasn't very severe.

"They are trying replace therapies," Dr Fernando says. "They contemplate right here's honest just like the flu."

The males had been in at-possibility groups - nonetheless Dr Fernando believes they would possibly hold fared better within the occasion that they'd not current the deceptive recommendation and sought lend a hand sooner.

Media playback is unsupported to your instrument

Media caption"Fallacious news" can spread like a scourge

Professor Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal Faculty of Overall Practitioners, says he and his colleagues within the UK hold considered patients taking pointers from posts they stumble on on-line - alongside side keeping their breath in an are trying to "diagnose" themselves or thinking that drinking sizzling drinks will wrestle off the virus. Some hold cited President Trump's statements about disinfectant.

Dr Maru, the physician at Original York's Elmhurst Sanatorium, calls the numbers who hold doubtless delayed treatment "staggering."

He knows of neighbours who hold caught the illness and died because they believed that social distancing is ineffective or that coronavirus is a hoax. And he says that he and his colleagues use precious time making an are trying to debunk misinformation after they'll be treating patients.

Image caption Anti-5G graffiti in Original York Metropolis

But as he spoke on the phone, exhausted and making ready to reach support to Elmhurst for every other shift, Dr Maru was also like a flash to shift the blame some distance from the patients themselves.

"Misinformation is a structural train," he says. "Blaming somebody for ingesting bleach or for staying at house and loss of life is equivalent to blaming somebody who's strolling down the road and will get hit by a below the impact of alcohol driver."

In response to the wave of misinformation, social media companies hold drawn up quiet guidelines. In an announcement, Fb acknowledged: "We assemble not allow inaccurate misinformation and hold removed hundreds of hundreds of posts alongside side unsuitable remedies, claims that coronavirus doesn't exist, that or not it is precipitated by 5G or that social distancing is ineffective." The firm also says it has build apart warning labels on 90 million objects of enlighten material.

YouTube says it would not allow enlighten material promoting unpleasant so-known as remedies and has quite a bit of policies against Covid-19 misinformation, alongside side disputing the existence of the illness or suggesting that it is precipitated by 5G.

Bbc news What lies ahead

But as research continues correct into a coronavirus vaccine, many anti-vaccination and conspiracy-minded groups and accounts hold considered their numbers swell. They pose a doubtless health threat - albeit not an instantaneous possibility.

What some doctors we spoke to fright basically the most is that the advance of a coronavirus vaccine - something that is susceptible to be a human achievement for the ages - will likely be completely undermined by misinformation.

Image caption Protesters promoting conspiracies about vaccines and 5G aid a divulge in St James's Park, London in Could doubtless well perhaps.

The future is upsetting, clinical examiners assert, due to what they're seeing factual now.

"We lose so many lives. They reach in very gradual," says Dr Fernando in Original York. He's honest performed a night shift, and today on Skype, a maintaining hide dangles from his ears. "And we honest peek them die in entrance of our eyes."

Brian, the coronavirus affected person in Florida, has a message for the those that quiet take into consideration within the conspiracy theories he counseled honest a few days within the past.

"Make not be foolish like I was," he says, "and the same factor would possibly well not happen to you love it came about to me and my wife."

With reporting by Khue Luu Binh, Flora Carmichael, Alistair Coleman, Shruti Menon, Olga Robinson, Shayan Sardarizadeh, and a BBC Persian journalist.

Is there a fable we wants to be investigating?Electronic mail Marianna

Advise us on Twitter@BBCtrendingor onFb.

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anarchistettin · 5 years ago

Link

[c&vd from behind the paywall]: The lockdown has produced a disparity between the old script of grievance and a sickness that can wreak destruction on anyone.

MATTHEW SITMAN

May 21, 2020

Last week, First Things editor R.R. Reno, a prominent Catholic intellectual who backed Donald Trump for president, let the world know he’d had enough of the effete conformists following public-health guidelines in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Sharing a photo on Twitter of Trump saluting World War II veterans, none of them wearing masks, he declared, “They’re men, not cowards. Masks=enforced cowardice.”

The reaction from critics was swift and punishing, as they noted the emerging wisdom that masks may be one of the most effective measures in preventing the spread of Covid-19. But Reno decided to tweet through it in a typo-laden tirade. “The mask culture if fear driven. Masks+cowardice,” he wrote. “It’s a regime dominate by fear of infection and fear of causing of infection. Both are species of cowardice.” Other, similarly garbled tweets followed, but one of them serves as an especially telling summary of his position: “Now we know who want to cower in place. By all means rage against those who want to live.”

The outburst was no aberration. Since March, he’s produced a string of commentary doubting the severity of the pandemic and lamenting the measures taken to combat it—particularly the temporary closures of churches. It’s not as deadly as we feared, he’s said, and for those under 35, perhaps little more worrisome than the flu—a statement that blithely ignores all that we still don’t know about Covid-19, from the long-term effects it might cause in even healthy young adults to the sudden spike in a Kawasaki-like disease in children. No matter. Reno renders his verdict: “The science increasingly shows that the measures we have taken in the last few weeks have been both harmful—with freedoms lost, money spent, livelihoods destroyed—and pointless,” he wrote.

It’s not just that Reno can sound at times like a coronavirus truther. He is also convinced that our pandemic response stems from a deeper civilizational malaise, one that prioritizes the fleeting material world over the everlasting life that awaits our souls after death. In a missive published in March, Reno declared, “There are many things more precious than life,” and castigated political leaders, especially New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for leading “an ill-conceived crusade against human finitude and the dolorous reality of death.”

Reno is not alone on the Christian intellectual right in framing the shutdown as part of a grand narrative of spiritual decay. His colleague Matthew Schmitz wrote that, in valuing “health above all, we subordinate the spiritual to the temporal,” adding, “Unless religious leaders reopen the churches, they will appear to value earthly above eternal life.” National Review writer Alexandra DeSanctis caught flak on Twitter for writing, “It’s fascinating to see how the cultural loss of belief in God and eternity so often manifests in an outsized fear of death as the ultimate evil. Human life is beautiful and precious and good, but life on earth isn’t our ultimate end.”

The latter prompted a lot of jokes about the literal death cults forming on the right, but there is something more at work here. Writing in Providence magazine, Jason E. Vickers described this death-embracing cohort as possessing a “bitter remnant mindset,” and acting “as though they are the last Christians in America.” It’s a worldview shot through with grievances against the corrupt, decadent societies of the West, and it’s shared by otherwise very different factions on the right. Followers of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option might seek to build intentional communities and withdraw from modern society, while Christian nationalists long for the political power to defeat it—but they have the same enemies.

For all Reno’s paeans to courage, the pandemic has shown us, in starker terms than before, the extent to which modern conservatism is driven by resentment of a seemingly hostile, terrifying world. Not all conservatives have succumbed to this impulse during the pandemic, of course. But those who have reveal the ways in which the pandemic is being shoehorned into a familiar culture war.

Let’s return to the example of Reno, since he manages to encompass both the raging id of the anti-lockdown protesters and the philosophical justifications of their actions that have appeared in the conservative press. One of his “Coronavirus Diary” entries begins with him visiting an emergency room in an outer-borough hospital. He can’t say more, though, because “the present conditions of public health hysteria” mean his host “might lose his job if higher-ups found out I penetrated the ‘no visitors’ cordon sanitaire.” Reno notes that, after cases of COVID-19 flooded the hospital in late March and early April, the doctor says they had since plummeted—a development Reno passes over as a happy mystery, never connecting it to the stay-at-home orders and economic shutdown that he has called “pointless” and “cowering.”

Reno also mentions that he’s been worshipping at an “underground” church, borrowing the language Christians have used for those persecuted by Communist regimes in China or, during the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain. A sense of persecution hangs heavy over the article, as does the characterization of himself as a righteous dissenter.

Then the diary entry becomes surreal. Reno describes a long bike ride on a recent weekend, during which a Dunkin Donuts worker refuses to serve him because he isn’t wearing a mask. He ends up on Staten Island, and needs to take the ferry back—which also requires a mask. “Providentially,” he writes, “I found a mask in a gutter just before reaching the Staten Island Ferry, allowing me to board and steam back to Manhattan.”

What comes next comes as no surprise: Reno takes an antibody test, and the results show he had contracted the virus. Like the ending of certain novels, it transforms all that came before it. Was he wearing a mask in the hospital, or at his “underground” church? He doesn’t say. Reno doesn’t seem troubled that, even if he never had significant symptoms, he could have been spreading the virus to others. He doesn’t realize that wearing a mask is not a commentary on his own courage or virility, but a simple way to show concern and care for others who might be especially vulnerable to the ravages of Covid-19.

There’s little point in looking for sense or reason in Reno’s ramblings. The language of courage and cowardice can’t really be debated—it is pure emotion. The point is not to grapple with the reality of a complex, overwhelming situation that changes every day, about which there can be genuine debates, but to reinscribe it in affective terms. What becomes decisive is not the cogency or persuasiveness of a policy response to a public-health crisis, but whether or not you’re cowering in fear or bravely resisting the conformity imposed by dreaded, elite experts. Wearing a mask, or not, floats up to the realm of the purely symbolic. It is a way of brushing aside difficult questions for dramatic rhetoric about civilizational decline.

If Reno and others make this sort of argument in a religious key, others on the right render it in supposedly class terms. Patrick Deneen took to Twitter last month to say that the divide over the shutdown did not simply reflect your position on Trump, but might reveal “more fundamental differences between elites and masses,” sharing Christopher Lasch’s observation in Revolt of the Elites that “young professionals” are health-obsessed exercisers and dieters attempting to attain eternal beauty and live forever, while “ordinary people” just “accept the body’s decay.”

More recently, The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, citing no evidence, regretted the “class divide between those who are hard-line on lockdowns and those who are pushing back.” The former consist of the professionals who make up the “overclass,” with the latter are “normal people” who are fatalistic about life, and therefore itching to open up the economy—a “generalization” she offers “based on a lifetime of experience and observation.”

Once again, all this only serves to twist debates over when and how to reopen the economy into a battle between supposed elites and ordinary folks who have not only been ignored and left behind, but also ridiculed. This just hasn’t been the case so far, and Reno, Deneen, and Noonan are making it up as they go along. The latest polling continues to find, as described in a recent Washington Post article, “that there just aren’t meaningful divisions along class or education lines on these questions.” There certainly isn’t a rugged, death-defying, God-fearing working class straining against the complacency of prissy white-collar overlords. Imagining that’s the case, however, is less challenging than talking about what actually will help workers: hazard pay, paycheck protections, paid medical leave, proper safety equipment, and robust testing. It’s grievance-mongering all the way down.

The writer Sam Adler-Bell has described the “mutable dynamism” of conservative politics, a term that captures the way the search for fresh enemies can stoke these passions. It explains why conservatives respond to novel situations with a tried-and-true mash-up of elite bashing and performative victimhood. But Americans’ reserve of patience and good will so far shows the glaring mismatch between the old script of grievance and a sickness that can wreak destruction on anyone.

Reno’s embarrassing pandemic punditry is finally the predictable consequence of the way he compromised himself by endorsing Trump, then taking up the mantle of “national conservatism.” G.K. Chesterton, a writer well-known to First Things editors, once wrote, “When a man concludes that any stick is good enough to beat his foe with—that is when he picks up a boomerang.” To view Trump as a useful wrecking ball, or a flawed vessel for an otherwise sound nationalism, with his critics being the real problem, is to be set adrift morally and intellectually. You take your bearings less from what you believe than what you oppose; if it provokes cosmopolitan elites, then there must be some value to it.

On Monday, after having deleted both his tweets about masks and his Twitter account, Reno published an apology at First Things. “I used over-heated rhetoric and false analogies,” he wrote. “It was wrong for me to impugn the intentions and motives of others, for which I apologize.” He should be taken at his word—but what the episode reveals about the intellectual right isn’t limited to a few late-night tweets.

Matthew Sitman is an editor at Commonweal.

@MatthewSitman

#r.r. reno #coronavirus #pseudoconservative #neoliberal

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bangkokjacknews · 5 years ago

Text

Why the COVID-19 HYSTERIA is making us SUSPICIOUS

The government of #Thailand has effectively closed down the kingdom for fear of a virus that may or may not be killing some people.

By that I mean in Italy doctors have admitted to including the words 'Covid-19 Related' onto the death certificates of those who have died of pre-existing illness. They claim they have been instructed to 'get their numbers up' and it is a funding issue. If this sounds far-fetched, unlikely or even fake news, then consider this. An American State Senator, Scott Jensen (R-Chaska), who is also a practicing physician, has revealed this week new CDC guidelines (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) that give doctors the authority to include 'suspected or likely' cases of COVID-19 on death certificates. That effectively means doctors can include a diagnosis of COVID-19 on death certificates even where there are NO lab results confirming any diagnosis at all. 'As a physician,' he says, 'I received an email last week from the Department of Health coaching me on how to fill out death certificates and I’ve never really received coaching from the vital statistics agency in terms of how to do a death certificate. Basically, I felt like they were saying, ‘You know, you don’t have to have a confirmed laboratory test for COVID-19 in order to make the death certificate be COVID-19,’ he said. Jensen claims the guideline implies that it 'would be appropriate to diagnosis on the death certificate COVID-19' if a deceased patient had contact with someone who had the virus but never actually tested positive themselves. 'Now we’ve never done that before. If someone has pneumonia and it’s in the middle of the flu epidemic, and I don’t have a test on influenza, I don’t diagnose influenza on the death certificate,” said Jensen. He called the guidance 'concerning' and said doctors should never place 'probabilities' or 'presumptions' on death certificates, but 'just the facts.' There is no evidence of that in Thailand - yet. In Thailand, as of April 10, the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country stands at 2,473. 1,427 are being treated, 1013 have recovered and been discharged, and there have been 33 deaths. This is, thankfully, still a small number. No doubt the government will credit their lock-down and other preventative measures. Such as closing convenience stores at 10pm and taping off cycling paths. Banning alcohol throughout the kingdom is another great way to prevent the spread of an invisible menace too, apparently. Look again at those COVID-19 figures (above) and then consider this; Last year (2019) in Thailand alone there were 98,741 cases of Dengue Fever. 106 of those people died. Across the world there were 4,700,522 Dengue Fever infections. This year, in only three Thai provinces, an outbreak has infected 8,147 between January 1 and April 7, according to Dr Asadang Ruayajin, deputy director general of the Department of Disease Control (DDC) This is not uncommon in Thailand, but the airport has never been closed before. Nor have all the bars, restaurants and beaches. We have never seen road-blocks and check-points all over the country testing people for Dengue Fever, Influenza, Malaria, Chicken Pox or anything else in the past. And meanwhile doctors in America and Italy are pumping up the numbers. Why? Well, fear is a great way to control people. Cranking the fear up to the maximum level limits a person's ability to think for themselves. And there is clearly a lot of limited thinking going on around the world at the moment. In Great Britain, it is reported, uniformed police officers are patrolling supermarket aisles to check that old ladies are not making 'non-essential' purchases. Can you believe this? 'Excuse me madam, do you really need that blue hair rinse today, or the bunion cream?' Or, 'not so fast young lady, just how essential is this KY Jelly...?' In the Czech Republic police raided a NUDIST COLONY and people were told to put on their face-masks. The Thai provincial governors certainly appear to have lost their ability to think clearly, if decisions like closing down the motorway into Pattaya, to check people's temperature, is anything to go by. Most of the drivers, it turned out, weren't even going to Pattaya City, but somewhere else entirely. https://albertjack.com/2020/04/12/life-has-changed/ This madness, it seems, has now gone on long enough. Given the evidence we have, which includes the knowledge that doctors in America and Italy, to name only the two who have been caught out so far, are manipulating the death rates, questions need to start being asked by opposition groups. Governments around the world restricting the movements of free people need better evidence, to support this behaviour, than salivating, media hysteria. And remember this. Those making the claims need to provide the evidence. The bigger the claims the bigger the evidence required. And it don't get bigger than losing your liberties - your freedom, your movement between one place and another. Or your choice to go and have a couple of beers with your friends and kiss the kids goodnight. What evidence have you seen for yourself? Is it all silly Facebook nonsense or do you actually know somebody who is suffering Coronavirus? What is it we don't know? What aren't they telling us? Is it anything at all or does this all fade away in a few months and our glorious leaders remind us all how lucky we are to have them looking after us. That's communism. That's fascism. This is the Liberal Ideal. They will have us all in matching pajamas soon, for health and safety reasons. What they are telling us in Thailand is to beware of Dengue Fever, after rains in several regions have led to an over-supply of mosquitoes. Now that is real. Dengue Fever can be a nasty, nasty little bitch. So in order to avoid an increase in infections, Dr Asadang has urged people to get rid of breeding grounds for mosquito larvae. And so is asking everybody never to flush their toilets again. Ok, no he isn't. I made that part up. That would be just as stupid as wearing face-masks when riding bicycles. Oh, wait...... But he did remind people they can call the 1422 DDC hotline for advice, about the Dengue Fever. - Albert Jack (If you agree then please share this article as widely as you can because it is already being suppressed by Google and all the other usual suspects) https://bangkokjack.com/2020/04/11/avoid-dengue-fever-asia/ – Stay up to date with BangkokJack on Twitter, Instagram, & Reddit. Or join the free mailing list (top right) Please help us continue to bring the REAL NEWS - PayPal Read the full article

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techcrunchappcom · 4 years ago

Photo

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/panic-and-confusion-permeate-white-house-following-trumpscovid-diagnosis-the-guardian/

Panic and confusion permeate White House following Trump's Covid diagnosis - The Guardian

Golden autumn sunshine shone down on Washington on Saturday to illuminate a US capital upended as Donald Trump began his first full day in hospital battling coronavirus amid a presidential election thrown into chaos.

Just hours earlier, on Friday evening after an excruciating wait for news, the president had emerged from the White House with a lacklustre wave and thumbs up, but ignoring reporters’ shouted questions about the state of his health.

Trump stalked slowly across the south lawn and boarded the US presidential helicopter. The only visual clue that something profound had changed was Trump’s face: he was wearing a mask.

As Marine One lifted into the sky just before sunset, the president left behind a White House staff suddenly rudderless, fearful and unsure how the story will end. The reality TV star turned president has delivered his greatest moment of suspense and the presidential election with its first “October surprise” but maybe not its last.

Trump, 74, is spending the weekend at a military hospital near Washington after discovering that not even the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful country is immune to the coronavirus. Said to be feverish and fatigued, there is huge uncertainty over his condition, its potential to deteriorate and whether he might become incapacitated.

Trump films message before leaving for Covid treatment in hospital – video

In his absence, the mood in the White House was said to be one of panic, with growing concern over the extent of the spread of the virus within the building and whether it could disrupt the functioning of government.

Staff have taken their lead from Trump’s bubble of denial for months, eschewing face masks and congregating in the west wing’s cramped spaces and narrow hallways. The president’s positive test was chilling proof of what the rest of the country has long known: no one is safe.

“People are losing their minds,” one source told the Washington Post newspaper.

As Friday wore on and Trump’s conditioned worsened, staff were also forced to confront the possibility that his health could be at serious risk. An information vacuum filled with rumour and speculation and did little to calm nerves, with media outlets forced to depend on leaks from anonymous officials or presidential tweets such as: “Going welI, I think! Thank you to all. LOVE!!!”

embed

The heavily guarded White House is one of the world’s most secure properties with a new 13ft tall fence to keep out intruders, protesters and terrorists. Yet it too was breached by the invisible pathogen that has killed more than 205,000 Americans. Commentators said there could be no greater proof of the administration’s failure to combat the pandemic.

How, when or from whom Trump became infected remains a mystery. But the myth of invulnerability may have been finally shattered by an event in the White House Rose Garden last Saturday in which he nominated judge Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court. More than 150 guests sat close together without face masks, apparently lulled into thinking it was safe to do so in the open air.

But eight attendees – Trump, the first lady Melania Trump, senior aide Hope Hicks, former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, Senators Mike Lee and Thom Tillis, University of Notre Dame president John Jenkins and junior staffer – have all since tested positive for the virus.

On Saturday morning it emerged that the Trump re-election campaign manager Bill Stepien had also tested positive, fueling more chaos into the election. Deputy campaign manager Justin Clark is set to run the Trump campaign headquarters in Stepien’s absence.

After last Saturday’s Rose Garden celebration, an event which continued with receptions indoors at the White House, Trump spent a whirlwind week campaigning for the 3 November presidential election.

On Tuesday there was a chaotic and dismal debate with rival Joe Biden in Cleveland, Ohio, where many of his entourage sat unmasked in contrast to the Democrat’s team, who strictly followed the protocols.

On Thursday, Trump attended a political fundraiser at his golf club in Bedminister, New Jersey, even though he was aware he had been exposed to the infected Hicks. That night, sounding unconcerned, he gave an interview to Sean Hannity of Fox News, apparently blaming the military or law enforcement for violating physical distancing: “They want to hug you and kiss you because we really have done a good job for them. You get close, and things happen.”

Trump’s revelation that he was positive came in perhaps the most momentous tweet of his entire presidency just before 1am on Friday. At last, critics said, a man notorious for dealing in disinformation and fantasies had to face a cold scientific truth he could not wish, insult or tweet away.

He also referred to it in the tweet correctly as Covid-19, having previously referred to the disease in public remarks variously as “the China virus”, the plague and “kung flu”.

Later that morning, the White House tried to project an air of business-as-usual. Officials Mark Meadows, Larry Kudlow and Kayleigh McEnany all sought to assure reporters that Trump was in good spirits and had only mild symptoms.

Yet by the afternoon, there was evidence of growing gap between spin and reality. It was announced that Trump had been injected with an experimental drug combination and, “out of an abundance of caution”, would be flown to hospital. The otherwise routine Marine One journey gave many in Washington a sense of witnessing history unfold before their eyes.

Howard Fineman, a journalist, tweeted: “I’ve seen and heard many indelible moments here in DC over the years, but nothing like Marine One flying over our neighborhood bound for Walter Reed, bearing a president struck, like millions of others, by global pandemic. Unsettling, scary. Politics is stilled for just a moment.”

Officials said Trump’s stay of a few days at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center is precautionary and that he will continue to work from the hospital’s presidential suite, which is equipped to allow him to keep up his official duties.

But the hospitalisation represents the gravest threat to an incumbent US president’s health since 1981 when Ronald Reagan survived a would-be assassin’s bullet outside a Washington hotel and received emergency medical attention.

Trump’s age, sex, obesity and elevated cholesterol put him at greater risk of becoming seriously ill from a virus that has infected more than 7 million people nationwide. If he declines sharply and is unable to carry out his responsibilities, he could transfer power to the vice-president, Mike Pence, under the 25th amendment to the constitution. Pence tested negative for the virus on Friday.

Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution think tank at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “The dominoes are multiple. There’s the question of his ability to campaign in person moving ahead. There’s the question of his ability to have the office right now: the 25th amendment. I’ve talked to some of my conservative friends who think he should be invoking this right now.

“I hate to speculate like this, but what if his health did deteriorate rather fast to the point where either he was unconscious or just delirious? Then the vice-president, the cabinet, would have to step in and do this, so there’s actually a school of thought that he should invoke it proactively.”

The US government has a long history of opacity when it comes to presidents’ health and the Trump White House, in particular, suffers from a trust deficit.

Doctors outside Walter Reed medical center on Saturday. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

Kurt Bardella, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, said: “What we’re seeing is a very healthy scepticism about anything that comes from the White House. These are the same people who have been lying about everybody else’s health terms of the impact of Covid-19, so why would we expect any differently when they’re talking about themselves?”

Dan Rather, a veteran journalist who reported on Richard Nixon’s downfall in 1974, added on Twitter: “What we don’t know is a lot more than what we do know. And we have an administration that long ago squandered its credibility. All coverage of this crisis should keep these truths in mind for context.”

His next debate with Biden, scheduled for 15 October, is in doubt. As well as Stepien testing positive for Covid-19, so has key ally Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who helped coach Trump for the first debate with Biden. Despite Trump’s attempts to change the conversation, for example with Barrett’s court nomination, the pandemic remains the defining issue at the ballot box.

Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster, told the Associated Press: “It’s challenging. It would be better if the discussion was about jobs and the economy, or even Joe Biden is going to ‘be held captive to the left’. But the election is going to be about coronavirus, and that’s not favourable terrain for Republicans.”

#confusion #following #house #panic #permeate #trump #white #Politics

0 notes

bangkokjacknews · 5 years ago

Text

Why the COVID-19 HYSTERIA is making us SUSPICIOUS

The government of #Thailand has effectively closed down the kingdom for fear of a virus that may or may not be killing some people.

0 notes

bangkokjacknews · 5 years ago

Text

Why the COVID-19 HYSTERIA is making us SUSPICIOUS

The government of #Thailand has effectively closed down the kingdom for fear of a virus that may or may not be killing some people.

By that I mean in Italy doctors have admitted to including the words 'Covid-19 Related' onto the death certificates of those who have died of pre-existing illness. They claim they have been instructed to 'get their numbers up' and it is a funding issue. If this sounds far-fetched, unlikely or even fake news, then consider this. An American State Senator, Scott Jensen (R-Chaska), who is also a practicing physician, has revealed this week new CDC guidelines (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) that give doctors the authority to include 'suspected or likely' cases of COVID-19 on death certificates. That effectively means doctors can include a diagnosis of COVID-19 on death certificates even where there are NO lab results confirming any diagnosis at all. 'As a physician,' he says, 'I received an email last week from the Department of Health coaching me on how to fill out death certificates and I’ve never really received coaching from the vital statistics agency in terms of how to do a death certificate. Basically, I felt like they were saying, ‘You know, you don’t have to have a confirmed laboratory test for COVID-19 in order to make the death certificate be COVID-19,’ he said. Jensen claims the guideline implies that it 'would be appropriate to diagnosis on the death certificate COVID-19' if a deceased patient had contact with someone who had the virus but never actually tested positive themselves. 'Now we’ve never done that before. If someone has pneumonia and it’s in the middle of the flu epidemic, and I don’t have a test on influenza, I don’t diagnose influenza on the death certificate,” said Jensen. He called the guidance 'concerning' and said doctors should never place 'probabilities' or 'presumptions' on death certificates, but 'just the facts.' There is no evidence of that in Thailand - yet. In Thailand, as of April 10, the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country stands at 2,473. 1,427 are being treated, 1013 have recovered and been discharged, and there have been 33 deaths. This is, thankfully, still a small number. No doubt the government will credit their lock-down and other preventative measures. Such as closing convenience stores at 10pm and taping off cycling paths. Banning alcohol throughout the kingdom is another great way to prevent the spread of an invisible menace too, apparently. Look again at those COVID-19 figures (above) and then consider this; Last year (2019) in Thailand alone there were 98,741 cases of Dengue Fever. 106 of those people died. Across the world there were 4,700,522 Dengue Fever infections. This year, in only three Thai provinces, an outbreak has infected 8,147 between January 1 and April 7, according to Dr Asadang Ruayajin, deputy director general of the Department of Disease Control (DDC) This is not uncommon in Thailand, but the airport has never been closed before. Nor have all the bars, restaurants and beaches. We have never seen road-blocks and check-points all over the country testing people for Dengue Fever, Influenza, Malaria, Chicken Pox or anything else in the past. And meanwhile doctors in America and Italy are pumping up the numbers. Why? Well, fear is a great way to control people. Cranking the fear up to maximum level limits a person's ability to think for themselves. And there is clearly a lot of that going on around the world. In Great Britain, it is reported, uniformed police officers are patrolling supermarket aisles to check that old ladies are not making 'non-essential' purchases. Can you believe this? 'Excuse me madam, do you really need that blue hair rinse today, or the bunion cream?' Or, 'not so fast young lady, just how essential is this KY Jelly...?' In the Czech Republic police raided a NUDIST COLONY and people were told to put on their face-masks. The Thai provincial governors certainly appear to have lost their ability to think clearly, if decisions like closing down the motorway into Pattaya, to check people's temperature, is anything to go by. Most of the drivers, it turned out, weren't even going to Pattaya City, but somewhere else entirely. This madness, it seems, has now gone on long enough. Given the evidence we have, which includes the knowledge that doctors in America and Italy, to name only the two who have been caught out so far, are manipulating the death rates, questions need to start being asked by opposition groups. Governments around the world restricting the movements of free people need better evidence to support this behaviour than salivating, media hysteria. What is it we don't know? What aren't they telling us? Is it anything at all or does this all fade away in a few months and our glorious leaders remind us all how lucky we are to have them looking after us. That's communism. That's fascism. This is the Liberal Ideal. They will have us all in matching uniforms soon, for health and safety reasons. What they are telling us in Thailand is to beware of Dengue Fever, after rains in several regions has resulted in an over-supply of mosquitoes. Now that is real. Dengue Fever can be a nasty, nasty little bitch. So in order to avoid an increase in infections, Dr Asadang has urged people to get rid of breeding grounds for mosquito larvae. And so is asking everybody never to flush their toilets again. Ok, no he isn't. I made that part up. That would be just as stupid as wearing face-masks when riding bicycles. Oh, wait...... But he did remind people they can call the 1422 DDC hotline for advice, about the Dengue Fever. -Winston Smith, Health and Safety Correspondent https://bangkokjack.com/2020/04/11/avoid-dengue-fever-asia/ – Stay up to date with BangkokJack on Twitter, Instagram, & Reddit. Or join the free mailing list (top right) Please help us continue to bring the REAL NEWS - PayPal Read the full article

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bangkokjacknews · 5 years ago

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Worried about COVID-19? Well here comes Dengue Fever

The government of #Thailand has effectively closed down the kingdom for fear of a virus that may or may not be killing some people.

By that I mean in Italy doctors have admitted to including the words 'Covid-19 Related' onto the death certificates of those who have died of pre-existing illness. They claim they have been instructed to 'get their numbers up' and it is a funding issue. If this sounds far-fetched, unlikely or even fake news, then consider this. An American State Senator, Scott Jensen (R-Chaska), who is also a practicing physician, has revealed this week new CDC guidelines (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) that give doctors the authority to include 'suspected or likely' cases of COVID-19 on death certificates. That effectively means doctors can include a diagnosis of COVID-19 on death certificates even where there are NO lab results confirming any diagnosis at all. 'As a physician,' he says, 'I received an email last week from the Department of Health coaching me on how to fill out death certificates and I’ve never really received coaching from the vital statistics agency in terms of how to do a death certificate. Basically, I felt like they were saying, ‘You know, you don’t have to have a confirmed laboratory test for COVID-19 in order to make the death certificate be COVID-19,’ he said. Jensen claims the guideline implies that it 'would be appropriate to diagnosis on the death certificate COVID-19' if a deceased patient had contact with someone who had the virus but never actually tested positive themselves. 'Now we’ve never done that before. If someone has pneumonia and it’s in the middle of the flu epidemic, and I don’t have a test on influenza, I don’t diagnose influenza on the death certificate,” said Jensen. He called the guidance 'concerning' and said doctors should never place 'probabilities' or 'presumptions' on death certificates, but 'just the facts.' There is no evidence of that in Thailand - yet. In Thailand, as of April 10, the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country stands at 2,473. 1,427 are being treated, 1013 have recovered and been discharged, and there have been 33 deaths. This is, thankfully, still a small number. No doubt the government will credit their lock-down and other preventative measures. Such as closing convenience stores at 10pm and taping off cycling paths. Banning alcohol throughout the kingdom is another great way to prevent the spread of an invisible menace too, apparently. Look again at those COVID-19 figures (above) and then consider this; Last year (2019) in Thailand alone there were 98,741 cases of Dengue Fever. 106 of those people died. Across the world there were 4,700,522 Dengue Fever infections. This year, in only three Thai provinces, an outbreak has infected 8,147 between January 1 and April 7, according to Dr Asadang Ruayajin, deputy director general of the Department of Disease Control (DDC) This is not uncommon in Thailand, but the airport has never been closed before. Nor have all the bars, restaurants and beaches. We have never seen road-blocks and check-points all over the country testing people for Dengue Fever, Influenza, Malaria, Chicken Pox or anything else in the past. And meanwhile doctors in America and Italy are pumping up the numbers. Why? Well, fear is a great way to control people. Cranking the fear up to maximum level limits a person's ability to think for themselves. And there is clearly a lot of that going on around the world. In Great Britain, it is reported, uniformed police officers are patrolling supermarket aisles to check that old ladies are not making 'non-essential' purchases. Can you believe this? 'Excuse me madam, do you really need that blue hair rinse today, or the bunion cream?' The Thai provincial governors certainly appear to have lost their ability to think clearly, if decisions like closing down the motorway into Pattaya, to check people's temperature, is anything to go by. Most of the drivers, it turned out, weren't even going to Pattaya City, but somewhere else entirely. This madness, it seems, has now gone on long enough. Given the evidence we have, which includes the knowledge that doctors in America and Italy, to name only the two who have been caught out so far, are manipulating the death rates, questions need to start being asked by opposition groups. Governments around the world restricting the movements of free people need better evidence to support this behaviour than salivating media hysteria. What is it we don't know? What aren't they telling us? Is it anything at all or does this all fade away in a few months and our glorious leaders remind us all how lucky we are to have them looking after us. That's communism. That's fascism. This is the Liberal Ideal. They will have us all in matching uniforms soon, for health and safety reasons. What they are telling us in Thailand is to beware of Dengue Fever, after rains in several regions has resulted in an over-supply of mosquitoes. Now that is real. Dengue Fever can be a nasty, nasty little bitch. So in order to avoid an increase in infections, Dr Asadang has urged people to get rid of breeding grounds for mosquito larvae. And so is asking everybody never to flush their toilets again. Ok, no he isn't. I made that part up. That would be just as stupid as wearing face-masks when riding bicycles. Oh, wait...... But he did remind people they can call the 1422 DDC hotline for advice. -Winston Smith, Health and Safety Correspondent https://bangkokjack.com/2020/04/11/avoid-dengue-fever-asia/ – Stay up to date with BangkokJack on Twitter, Instagram, & Reddit. Or join the free mailing list (top right) Please help us continue to bring the REAL NEWS - PayPal Read the full article

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