Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

The gop couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (International) – Saturday/Sunday, April 4/5

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (International) – Saturday/Sunday, April 4/5

by | 33 Comments

This post is in: , ,


Reader Interactions

33Comments

  1. 1.

    OzarkHillbilly

    michael_nielsen@michael_nielsen
    Bill Gates is setting up factories to manufacture 7 leading vaccine candidates before we know which is best & safest; we can test the vaccines in parallel, and then throw away all but the factory for the best vaccine. May save many months.

    Just extraordinary.

    Getting ready to spend billions of foundation money on factories for 5 vaccines that won’t work just so when the best 2 are fully tested and approved they can go into production immediately, no time wasted. And on the grasping hand we have the profiteers selling PPEs and masks to the highest bidder, regardless of need.

    I don’t often say this about rich fucks but good on Gates and his wife and everyone at their foundation.

  2. 2.

    Jim Parish

    Is anyone else bothered by the first sentence of the first AP story: “No one should ever have known :victim’s: name.”?

  3. 3.

    mrmoshpotato

    Street cleaning drones!  (Gonna have to paint one Cubs colors and one White Sox colors.)

  6. 6.

    Robert Sneddon

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    The Manhattan Project managers had to make a choice — they had three competing engineering solutions to enrich uranium to make a bomb, they were gaseous diffusion, the calutron mass spectrometer and centrifuges but the engineers didn’t know which one would be best. Rather than mess around trying to figure it out they built production-level setups for all three methods and ran them for years because there was a war to be won and cost be damned.

    The world needs a vaccine for this disease — it’s already making a comeback in the Far East after the first peak of infections has died down — and if we have to throw away a dozen candidate vaccines, shutter a dozen billion-dollar vaccine manufacturing plants because their candidate didn’t make the cut then that’s what we need to do.

    Oh yeah, and we need to stay at home and wash our hands. Masks will not save you.

  7. 7.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Robert Sneddon: then that’s what we need to do.

    And that is what Gates and company are doing and that is why I said good on them.

     

    ETA too bad we don’t have a president who would do this.

  9. 9.

    Amir Khalid

    Malaysia’s daily numbers. 179 new cases (current cases 3,662), 4 deaths (total deaths 61). The Health Ministry’s director-general is warning that the numbers for new cases reported in Malaysia may rise as more testing is being done at infection hotspots.

  10. 10.

    zzyzx

    “Singapore has been one of the great success stories in countering @COVID19. But now it’s experiencing new cases, not just from imported ones. A new 4-week lockdown. How hard it is to achieve control, avoid a 2nd wave”

    Singapore is really having a first wave, not a second wave. What I want to see is cases like Lombardi and Wuhan and Spain and see what happens when they eventually open up. Will places that were ravaged still have enough vulnerable people to have the potential for a horrid second wave or will they basically be over it? I’m hoping that it’s closer to the latter obviously.

  11. 11.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    This is distressing news, insofar as it highlights the risk of a renewed outbreak in China

    Only if one wasn’t paying attention that that it didn’t add up that China only claims 3,000 dead from this virus, which is bizarrely low compared to other countries and less than the number of deaths the US gets in a typical flue season. If the China the largest country on earth, felt the need to shut down for two months, that means something seriously bad was happening.

    We’ve seen this with Trump, Fox News and Fundamentalist Churches here in real time; authoritarians always lie about bad news, the CCP is an authoritarian state.

  12. 12.

    WereBear

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: We’ve seen this with Trump, Fox News and Fundamentalist Churches here in real time; authoritarians always lie about bad news

     
    What can they do when every single Rush Limbaugh talking point has been trashed by the pandemic?

    TURN LIBERAL? As if.

    So they desperately lie and do nothing: because that’s been an increasing addiction for forty years of Reagan Revolution. The cure for dealing with reality…

  15. 15.

    Ken

    @zzyzx: I was talking to a family member a couple of days ago and said that the US will almost certainly have to go through multiple lockdowns. They hadn’t heard that. A competent Federal response would include getting that news out, but I suppose we can’t expect that.

  16. 16.

    WereBear

    @Ken:  A competent Federal response would include getting that news out, but I suppose we can’t expect that.

     
    No, we can’t.

    a) Doing the smart thing would be what a Pointy Headed Liberal would do.

    and

    b) It would interfere with the free market scooping up money with medical equipment stolen from taxpayers. Which for this White House… is the whole point of the enterprise.

    The deals they are doing! So bigly!

  20. 20.

    TS (the original)

    @catclub:

    Sure is typical GOP – design a computer system to deliberately fail those it is designed to assist – so Scott’s unemployment looks good & employers pay less taxes. They voted this imbecile into the Senate & he’s probably there for life.

  21. 21.

    Elizabelle

    Love it.  Headline in the NY Review of Books about our ridiculous Trump:

    Vector in Chief.

    That is what I am calling him from here on out.  Trump or Vector in Chief.  He is not my president.

  22. 22.

    YY_Sima Qian

    The Jia county lock down is due to four recent cases, where a symptomatic confirmed case was apparently infected by an asymptomatic case. Further contact tracing uncover two more asymptomatic cases. What triggered the shut down is the fact that the three asymptomatic cases are all doctors in a local hospital, who may have seen a number of patients before they were screened and tested positive. Discussions surround these cases helped push the China National Health Commission to start publishing asymptomatic case data from Apr. 1. The local and provincial government is trying to nip a potential outbreak in the bud. We all should expect these kind of events as the new normal even after the epidemic is substantially suppressed, until vaccines are widely available.

    As for reliability of Chinese data, those from early Jan. to Jan. 20 out of Wuhan were clearly false. No new cases were reported from the Wuhan municipal health commission and CDC during those two fateful weeks, as all of the officials were preoccupied with municipal and provincial party congresses. Retrospective investigations by Chinese media have shown at least two hundred new cases duringnthose two weeks, including nosocomial transmission. The first experts group sent by the National Health Commission in early Jan. probably did not have enough data to draw a lot of conclusions. The second group was sent in mid-Jan. (along with experts from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and WHO’s Beijing Office), and the local authorities clearly withheld case information and data of the outbreak, pressuring local hospitals to participate in their deception. Hence the infamous official pronouncement on Jan. 15, echoed by the WHO, that there was only evidence of limited human to human transmission, not yet evidence of sustained human to human transmission. The third group sent a week later finally poked through the veil of obfuscation and made public on Jan. 20 that human to human transmission was a real danger. Three days later, Wuhan was on lock down, followed by all of Hubei province a few days later.

    I would say the data from late Jan. on in Hubei is about as accurate as the authorities are able to manage at the time. Limited test kits, limited lab capacity and inaccurate test meant many cases and many deaths were missed, same as every other place overwhelmed by the rapidly escalating epidemic. On the other hand, China is the only nation to date to use clinical diagnosis to confirm cases, until testing was no longer bottleneck. This action cleared 15K cases from the pending suspect pool and added them to the confirmed count. Hardly the action of a government actively looking to suppress numbers. Other actions including daily checks by community workers on the temperatures of each household, banning the sale of medicine that alleviate fevers, so anyone with symptoms had to go to fever clinics to be screened, rigorous contact racing even at the height of the epidemic in Wuhan to try to uncover cases and cut transmissions chains. Other than South Korea, Germany and perhaps Israel, no other country facing a large outbreak is doing the above.

    It is always advisable to maintain a healthy skepticism of Chinese data and claims, and focus on the actions taken by the regime. However, to entirely dismiss all the lessons learned and shared by China (positive and negative), because of ideological moralizing, ultimately is counter productive. South Korea took pages out of the Chinese playbook by mobilizing the country to wartime footing, and isolating all cases in medical quarantine. While Italy’s lock down of the north was late epidemiologically, it was earlier than I expected. Would they have done so without the precedent from Hubei? NYT called the Wuhan lock down gross violation of human right. Convention centers and arenas across Europe and the US are being converted to makeshift medical facilities, following example set by Wuhan. The same NYT likened these makeshift facilities at Wuhan to WW II internment camps.

  24. 24.

    Cathie from Canada

    I think likely Trump is screaming at his staff to find more Chinese cases, because he thinks that this is how he can get out from under the ignominy of America having the highest COVID numbers in the world.

  25. 25.

    catclub

    @YY_Sima Qian:  I appreciate these, too.

     

    Did I read correctly that a medical team from Taiwan was included ina commision on Hubei?

     

    Ignoring politics for a medical emergency is impressive. Not what we expect in the US of A, anymore.

  26. 26.

    J R in WV

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    NYT called the Wuhan lock down gross violation of human right.

     

    The same NYT likened these makeshift facilities at Wuhan to WW II internment camps.

    The same NYT called Mr Adolph Hitler a delightful artistic individual well suited to lead Germany out of the depression that set in after WW I back in 1922. So the Times is still on top of political issues after all those years!!! Their fawning article is (was?) available on their archive site.

    There’s also a later one about his hideaway in the Bavarian Alps, how delightful the architectural design is. That one was run in 1938. They loved that guy !!

    ETA:  Thanks for your reporting from ground zero in this moving tragedy. So glad you survived your bout with the Trump Plague in Wuhan.

  27. 27.

    trollhattan

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    Thank you, super-informative!

    If the info from China is suspect I expect everything from Russia to be the inverse of reality. IDK if their vast geography helps matters or assures there will be pockets of outbreaks for at least a year. Or two, or three?

    Turns out our area’s very large Slavic community not only represents a third of all local cases, they’re quite active antivaxxers and as part of the package, anti-gay. Hooray!

  29. 29.

    Barbara

    @Cathie from Canada: The loss of 250,000 lives can be claimed as a great victory so long as a country with at least three times our population and a much less expensive health care system can be shown to have 250,001 deaths. I hate Trump.

  30. 30.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Jinchi: Professionally-manufactured and tested disposable masks worn correctly with other trained people around and supervisors double-checking fit and use has resulted in thousands of front-line medical personnel around the world contracting COVID-19.

    Home-made masks worn in a slapdash manner by Joe Public are like the folks who carried a piece of the True Cross or an amulet blessed by the Pope to ward off plague in the day, and like those powerful protections those masks will actually do little other than provide false confidence and get people sick.

    Wash your hands, stay at home.

  31. 31.

    J R in WV

    My last visit to my family doctor [who is both a family practice board cert Dr, but also a board cert Gerontologist] he told me of a patient he had years ago.

    Was being treated for leukemia, had immune system blasted out of existence  in the course of chemo, then somehow caught the flu… plain old flu. Dies in less than 24 hours, was in a negative pressure hospital suite, everyone was wearing “monkey suits” as Doc put it. Everyone caught the flu that was on the same floor of the hospital.

    Doc was down for 2 weeks, all the docs were sick, all the nurses were sick. Because the patient had no immunity at all, she produced an enormous volume of virus which overwhelmed  high-end personal protective equipment. Even the undertakers who took her away were all infected.

    Horrible story, but educational a little bit. I leave out the worst details, believe me.

  32. 32.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @catclub: There have always been mechanisms to for informal information sharing across the Taiwan Strait, established after the SARS epidemic. When the relations are cordial, these channels are wide open, when the relations are in deep freeze, these channels are constructed (but not closed, just reduced to a lower level). There are also agreed mechanisms for the WHO to share information with Taiwan during international health emergencies, but Taiwan wants to be acknowledged public ally as a nation state by the WHO, which is no going to happen.

  33. 33.

    Daddio7

    Why are people worried about a second or third wave? In a few months we should have enough tests produced to test every American, every two weeks. Also we should all have a tracking device with us at all times, cellphone or ankle bracelet. That way anyone testing positive and all their contacts for the last two weeks can be traced and isolated also. That would have stopped the first wave if instituted in February by a competent president. Will Democrats sit on their thumbs and allow this to continue. Nancy, just do it.

Comments are closed.