Coronavirus (COVID-19) General News Collection & Resources

[ghost]

27 minutes ago, rasbridge said:

I grew up with friends who only consumed meat from animals they hunted and killed. 

 

Personally, when I was young, my family was pretty self-sufficient as we grew and preserved all of the vegetables we consumed.  And, we raised beef and chickens.  Additionally, we hunted and fished.  So, I understand where food comes from and what it takes to produce it.  Based upon my experience, I understand that for many people, guns and ammo (for hunting) is necessary for their survival.

If you are a hunter chances are you already have guns and ammo. thus not needing to run out to Walmart to buy more, during a pandemic. It may be different where you are, but here hunting require permits  and limits. also, Hunting season are usual in late summer & fall; usually not early spring (again, depending where you are.) 

 

Also I am pretty sure hunters don't hunt with semi-auto AR's. Again, I am not anti gun or anti hunting. 

[rasbridge]

36 minutes ago, ghost said:

If you are a hunter chances are you already have guns and ammo. thus not needing to run out to Walmart to buy more, during a pandemic. It may be different where you are, but here hunting require permits  and limits. also, Hunting season are usual in late summer & fall; usually not early spring (again, depending where you are.) 

 

Also I am pretty sure hunters don't hunt with semi-auto AR's. Again, I am not anti gun or anti hunting. 

Typically, there are Permit Exemptions for Landowners.  For instance, where I live, resident landowners (who own 5 acres of more) and their immediate households may fish, trap, and hunt (except deer and turkey) on land they own.

 

Since you mentioned it, here are 7 animals hunters kill using an AR-15:

https://time.com/4390506/gun-control-ar-15-semiautomatic-rifles/

Edited April 10, 2020 by rasbridge

[Karlston]

9 Amazon Workers Describe the Daily Risks They Face in the Pandemic

As the novel coronavirus pandemic sweeps the globe, an otherwise marginalized class of workers is suddenly in the spotlight. Often undervalued and poorly paid, they are grocery store clerks, sanitation workers, medical professionals, and other employees who can’t stay home—even when the nation is on lockdown. In the United States, hundreds of thousands of these so-called essential workers are employed by or contract for Amazon, whose delivery network has emerged as a vital service for millions of Americans stuck inside their homes.

 

WIRED spoke with 9 people working for Amazon during the Covid-19 crisis over the last two weeks, and is publishing their accounts of being on the job, in their own words. They work in Amazon fulfillment centers, deliver packages and groceries, and stock food in Amazon cafeterias. Some are employed by Amazon directly, while others are contractors. Each of them say they are terrified for their health and that of their families, and many believe Amazon isn’t doing enough to ensure their safety. While the company has often framed its front-line workers as heroes, the people WIRED spoke with say they didn’t sign up for this level of risk.

 

Covid-19 has now spread to at least 50 Amazon facilities in the US, out of a total of more than 500, according to The New York Times. The outbreaks have led to employee protests in Detroit, New York City, and Chicago, where workers said Amazon was slow to notify them about infections and failed to conduct adequate cleaning. At Amazon-owned Whole Foods, staff staged a nationwide demonstration citing similar safety concerns and calling for free coronavirus testing for all employees. And more than 5,000 Amazon workers have signed a petition asking for additional benefits given the health crisis, including hazard pay and for the company to shut down any facility where a worker tests positive so it can be properly cleaned.

 

Amazon’s practices have attracted the attention of lawmakers including senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Robert Menendez, and Sherrod Brown, who sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos last month demanding answers about the company’s workplace safety measures. “Any failure of Amazon to keep its workers safe does not just put their employees at risk, it puts the entire country at risk,” they wrote. On Wednesday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced it was investigating an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania, after workers there said their health wasn’t being protected. Workers at a warehouse in California filed similar complaints with state and county regulators the same day.

 

“Our employees are heroes fighting for their communities and helping people get critical items they need in this crisis. Like all businesses grappling with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, we are working hard to keep employees safe while serving communities and the most vulnerable,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “We have taken extreme measures to keep people safe, tripling down on deep cleaning, procuring safety supplies that are available, and changing processes to ensure those in our buildings are keeping safe distances.”

 

Amazon says it has made over 150 changes to help protect its workforce, including distributing face masks to all staff, instituting social distancing protocols, staggering shift start times, and adding more space between workstations. The company is also checking whether employees have a fever when they show up for their shifts, though the practice won’t detect the significant number of Covid-19 cases that are asymptomatic. The Amazon spokesperson said it’s just “one of the many preventative measures Amazon is taking to support the health and safety of our customers and employees.”

 

In recent weeks, Amazon has raised wages for hourly workers, and said that it would let anyone concerned about coming into work to take unpaid time off through the end of April. After receiving criticism from lawmakers, it will also now allow anyone suspected of having Covid-19 or placed into quarantine to take two weeks of emergency paid sick leave. Prior to March 27, the company required workers obtain a positive test result to use the benefit, but a nationwide testing shortage made that extremely difficult.

 

The following interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

 

Warehouse Worker, Early 40s, Texas

 

My partner and I have both been working at Amazon for a few years. We’re awesome at what we do. I love the job itself, but I don’t like how the company handles people—almost like they’re disposable.

 

Since the virus came, for the last couple of weeks, we’ve taken advantage of the unpaid—not paid—time off. This next upcoming paycheck, I think I will be paid for six hours of work. I’m staying home because my mom, she had a pacemaker put in not too long ago, and she lives with me. We don’t want to go without money. In fact, I don’t know how we’re going to pay our bills this month. I’m down to about $200, and this stimulus check is probably not going to come for another month.

 

Amazon releases their own little news alerts, and one of them told us that we need to make sure we’re cleaning our scanners. They told us to do it—the people who are also working on the floor, who are also responsible for getting a certain number of packages out every shift. This is what kills me: When we walk through the main front doors, we hit these turnstiles to enter. Everyone has to touch them, and I have never, not one time in my life, seen anybody clean those things. I know that in my fulfillment center, we’ve got over 900 people who work there, and we have three entrances to choose from. All it’s going to take is one infected person.

 

You’ve got people that are working for $15 an hour, that now have to be excited that they’re making $17 an hour, going out there and basically putting their family at risk. If you’re saying our job is so damn important, and that everybody else should stay home, yet we have to show up like soldiers, why not protect us?

 

The day this interview was conducted, Amazon notified the worker about a confirmed case of Covid-19 at their workplace.

 

Food Vendor, Early 30s, Ohio

 

I’ve been at my job for under a year. I wasn’t aware that I would specifically be vending at Amazon, and that it would be my only location. We run open air markets within the warehouse, where employees can go and purchase things for lunch, your typical chips, soda. We have a couple of different sandwiches and stuff in coolers, that sort of thing. It’s a big job, there’s a lot to do. During peak, which is usually around Christmas time, we can be there up to 11, 12 hours a day. But it’s starting to be more like that now, as Amazon is hiring more and more people to keep up with demand for essential items. They just hired another 100 people today.

 

My employer never gave us any specific guidelines as far as social distancing goes. It’s kind of impossible to socially distance with our jobs, because our storage room is so small. They had us take out at least 70 percent of the microwaves, in the hopes that things would be more spaced out in the break rooms. But the problem is now, we have an overwhelming amount of employees trying to use way fewer microwaves. An employee asked today if we had any milk crates, because there’s not enough chairs. So we have people sitting on the floor, in the hallways, because there just simply isn’t enough room for everyone to be spaced six feet apart.

 

I’m petrified. It’s just me and my 16-year-old son, and he’s a type 1 diabetic. I’m scared of bringing something home to him with his diabetes, because I know that’s a much higher risk factor. I can’t even let him have his boyfriend over right now. I tell him, “Hey man, I would, but I’m such a high risk person to be around right now working at Amazon.” It makes it rough for everybody.

 

I do feel essential. While I’m not working at Amazon shipping things out to people, I’m helping feed the people that are doing that job. I had that realization even before the “essential” term became popular. Things started shutting down around here, and I was like, Why the hell can’t I stay at home? All I’m literally doing is putting sandwiches on a shelf. But the more I think about it, the more I think of it in terms of, I’m helping to sustain somebody so they can do their job. To me, that is essential. I’m definitely looking at it differently nowadays.

 

After this interview was conducted, multiple confirmed cases of Covid-19 were reported at their workplace. They are now taking unpaid time off.

 

Warehouse Worker, Late 30s, Illinois

 

I started working at Amazon in 2018. A couple of weeks ago, they started doing superficial stuff for the coronavirus. They put tape on the ground by the time clocks for social distancing, and they removed some of the time clocks. But then they hired more people, which made the crowding worse in some areas.

 

Now, when you walk in the door, they scan your head for your temperature. If it’s high, they send you home. But the issue is if you come in late, nobody is there to scan your head. Also, none of the managers know how to use the scanners, which I don’t get. You pull the trigger, aim at the person’s temple, and done. So they were just waiving people in anyway, it’s not really accomplishing anything. I think it’s too little, too late.

 

I feel that there’s no effort, and they’re not taking it seriously. They kept saying they were doing extensive cleaning, extensive cleaning—they weren’t. There aren’t enough wipes and spray; one wipe is used to clean four people’s stations. I said something to my manager, and he just shook his head and said, “It’s better than nothing.”

 

Yesterday we got emails and text messages saying that there’s now several confirmed cases at our warehouse. I think they should at least close the warehouse down for cleaning. Once somebody in the building has got it, they’ve touched so much, and everybody else has touched it, too. Nobody is going out and getting tested, so you don’t know how many cases there actually are. It wouldn’t take much—just shut it down for a day, do a deep cleaning, and then have everybody come back. If you did that once every other week, I’m sure it would help. Amazon is definitely more focused on their product moving out of the building than anything else, clearly. [In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said that not all instances require shutting down a facility entirely: "If someone hasn’t been at the building for quite some time, they were onsite only briefly, or the area they were in was already deep cleaned several times as a regular course of business, we may not need to close."]

 

Delivery Driver, Late 40s, South Carolina

 

I actually love the job, I really do. I work for a delivery company that contracts with Amazon. It pays the bills with a little left over, and you’re just out there, free. When you pull up in front of a little kid’s house and give him a box and he smiles and says thank you, it makes you feel like you’re doing something.

 

I just found out five minutes ago that someone tested positive at our building. They have not closed the building, they have not done anything. Before this, I wasn’t getting much information about the virus at work. My boss didn’t know anything, because Amazon wasn’t communicating with him. The only way I was finding out things was going online and looking at NPR, looking at your website. Today, after someone already contracted the virus, was the first time I’ve seen wipes and gloves available.

 

I’m trying to do my part in staying six feet away from people, but you still have customers coming out to the van, expecting us to give them their packages in hand. I have four grandkids, two kids, a wife, and two dogs. It’s very scary, because I may not be in the most vulnerable age range, but it’s still possible I could get sick. I just wish Amazon would step up to the plate and protect us.

 

Whole Foods Delivery Driver, Late 50s, New York City area

 

I’m a writer, and I started writing about the automotive industry about a decade ago. A few years back, I became fascinated with the potential for local delivery to help reduce carbon emissions. In 2018, I started doing delivery work for Roadie first, and then Whole Foods, to learn more about the industry from the inside. When one of my primary writing gigs evaporated, I was like Oh my god, I gotta pay the bills. Delivering for Whole Foods pays the bills, but only if you do it right.

 

The appreciation I feel from customers has an effect on me. When people thank you profusely for what you’re doing, even though it’s a menial task, it makes you feel good about it. Feeding people is really important. But the gig has always had its ups and downs. When I first started doing it primarily as research, my wife said, “Look if you do it when you’re in town, you better pull your baseball hat down over your eyes so nobody knows who you are.” It’s like dad’s delivering groceries—that’s embarrassing. That kind of sucks.

 

Now the coronavirus looms over me. Every time now when I wake up, I’m scared. It’s just like, Oh man, I gotta go into one of those contagion zones. I made my own mask and hand sanitizer. This first mask is duct taped together and it’s made from an old Nike golf shirt. I try to be really cautious about wiping down the steering wheel, wiping down the gearshift, any place I could touch—I wipe it down.

 

After this interview was conducted, the driver reported that Whole Foods has instituted more protections for workers, including social distancing measures, temperature screenings, and providing gloves.

 

Warehouse Worker, Early 60s, California

 

I’ve been with Amazon 11 months now. I went there with the idea that it was just going to be a temporary job until I could find something that was better suited for me. When I first started there, it was a great job, because it’s only part-time, it’s fairly flexible, and it gave me the opportunity to look for other things. I have been going to work through the pandemic, but I am starting to contemplate staying home because of some of the issues at Amazon.

 

Amazon, at least our facility, hasn’t enforced the policies as much as they could have. One problem we’re encountering is that once we’re on the floor and we’re doing our work, they don’t mandate social distancing. People aren’t staying six feet away. Instead of going around me, workers cut right in front of me, they bump into me. I’ve asked, please, six feet away, but they just ignore me and keep on going. Every time I’ve gone to management, their response is, “There’s nothing we can do about it, if there’s a problem you can just stay home.”

 

My feeling is they want to do the right thing, but they don’t know how to enforce it, so it’s not really happening. We have no hand sanitizers. We have no wipes. They’re not providing face masks.

 

My biggest concern is my parents, they’re 82 and 88 and they live close by. I call them every day to make sure they’re okay, but I’m very hesitant to go see them because I don’t know what I might be bringing to them. Especially my father. He’s 88, he’s blind, he’s frail. I don’t want to make him sick. So until this is all done, I can’t come up and see them, because I can’t risk making them sick.

 

Warehouse Worker, Early 30s, Florida

 

I previously worked in events and conferences, but when the virus hit, they started cutting my hours, so I applied to work at Amazon. I’ve been there about three weeks, or maybe a month. At my location, I was noticing that they have wipes, but they’re not actually disinfecting wipes. I picked up the can the other day to check, and they’re not. They’re for painters to use to remove paint that drips onto the floor. [An Amazon spokesperson disputes this: "Disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer are already standard across our network, and the procurement teams have worked tirelessly to create new sources of supply to keep these critical items flowing."]

 

Amazon is trying to do social distancing. They put markers on the floor, but the thing is, a lot of people are not taking this seriously. If there’s no supervisors on the floor that care, it’s not being enforced. I’ve had to tell people to back off from me a few times.

 

It’s very scary. I’m a single mom. My mom lives with me, and she doesn’t have any income. She has a lung condition, and she’s older, she’s 72. I try to stay away from them. I haven’t held my six year-old son since I started at Amazon. It’s very hard. He still doesn’t understand it. He’s always mad at me, he says that I’m mean.

 

I feel like this job is essential because people need deliveries, but it’s also essential for me because I need the money to feed my family. My son’s dad stopped working too, so it’s not like I’m getting child support. I have no choice. But I’m also thinking of stopping because I don’t want to put my family at risk. I’m not the only one thinking of not going to work. Amazon needs to take care of what they have, and I don’t think they’re doing that.

 

Warehouse Worker, Late 20s, Washington

 

The first US case of Covid-19 was in Seattle, so I was like, this is really bad news. I was thinking ahead, planning for quarantine and stuff, buying food. As the story got worse, I wondered what Amazon was going to do. I’ve worked there for two years. For me, the pay is good. I know it’s not the best pay in the world, but the benefits and pay work well for me. I’ve become friends with a lot of the people I work with. But now, with all the craziness, and with the recent Covid-19 case at my warehouse, I feel like they’re not doing enough. They’re putting profits over people right now, that’s what I want to express.

 

I found out there was a case of Covid-19 at my warehouse through a manager. I was just talking to him, and I told him I was stressed. He said “Yeah, especially with the announcement.” I said “What announcement?” He told me there was a confirmed case of the coronavirus at our warehouse, but I hadn’t heard anything. They should have let everyone know. I feel like they only let people in that person’s department know. I later got a notification about daily temperature screenings, but there was no email or notification about the case. The real official confirmation was through the news, not from Amazon.

 

I want to be taking time off, but Amazon has been deemed an essential business. I have to be there, and if I wasn’t, I would still be struggling with bills. I have rheumatoid arthritis, which makes me immunocompromised. It’s really stressing me out to go to work every day. I do have some paid time off saved up, but it wouldn’t sustain me for very long. I’m saving it—I feel like it isn’t even the peak of the craziness yet.

 

Grocery Warehouse Worker, Late 20s, Washington

 

I’m what’s called a Flex employee, which basically means part-time—you set your own hours. Ninety percent of my fulfillment center, and lots of other fulfillment centers, are grocery-based. We put together grocery orders for people. Compared to what I used to do, it’s an easy job. Sometimes there’s a little bit of pressure, but most of the time, you just walk around using a portable scanner. No one is breathing down your neck.

 

Because of the coronavirus, I haven’t been going in. For me, it’s just not worth the risk. While they are taking basic precautions, the fact of the matter is there are over 200, maybe 300 people that come in and out of this warehouse every day. They can’t possibly sanitize every single surface every two hours.

 

The last time I worked was a few weeks ago. We had a meeting, where the managers read a statement about the pandemic. They set up hand sanitizing stations, and told us to try to keep a six-foot distance. But the fact of the matter is, you’re in a warehouse. Most of the time you can keep that radius, but the cooler space and the freezer space are very compact. The aisles are narrower, and there’s not nearly as much square footage.

 

The suits were the final nail in the coffin for me. In the freezer, it’s around zero degrees Fahrenheit. Amazon has these big puffy bodysuits that you put on over your whole body, including your mouth, which you need to keep you insulated. You find one that fits you, you do your time in the freezer, then you come out and you take it off, and some other poor bastard uses it.

 

 

 

Source: 9 Amazon Workers Describe the Daily Risks They Face in the Pandemic (Wired)

[ghost]

16 minutes ago, rasbridge said:

Typically, there are Permit Exemptions for Landowners.  For instance, where I live, resident landowners (who own 5 acres of more) and their immediate households may fish, trap, and hunt (except deer and turkey) on land they own.

 

Since you mentioned it, here are 7 animals hunters kill using an AR-15:

https://time.com/4390506/gun-control-ar-15-semiautomatic-rifles/

Good thing i said "depending on where you are." Now as to the Semi-auto ARs being used to hunt, does not surprise me. People have used all types of weapon tools to kill/hunt. 

 

But anyways, this thread is about COVID-19 related news; we should probably go back to that subject.

 

[rasbridge]

New U.S. Projections Show Summer Spike if Coronavirus Restrictions Lifted

Source: https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2020-04-10/new-us-projections-show-summer-spike-if-coronavirus-restrictions-lifted-nyt

[dufus]

In a wide-ranging interview with Gates on Thursday afternoon, she gave her thoughts on the coronavirus pandemic, the inequality of it all, and how the world can go back to semi-normal. The highlights:

 

The world needs a vaccine delivered at mass scale to go back to "normal." A realistic timeline is about 18 months, the same time it took to create an Ebola vaccine.

 

 

 

 

The coronavirus pandemic will change parts of our lives forever, Melinda Gates told Business Insider in an interview. 

 

"I definitely think there are going to be things that are permanently changed," Gates told Business Insider Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell. "Our psyches are going to be permanently changed." 

 

Gates, who cofounded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has supported global health initiatives and has experiences with other pandemics, like the ebola outbreak. 

 

She said that our mindsets will change as we grow to understand the impact of living in an interconnected world. 

 

"I hope we change to realize that we're a global community," Gates said. That mindset will help the world plan for more epidemics in the future, she said. 

 

"We need to plan for disease. We are a global community," she said. "People travel. We've just learned that New York mostly got infected from people coming back from

 

Europe. We have to plan for these things as a global community in the future." 

 

The coronavirus has also impacted the way we work and live, and has shown new ways to get things done, Gates said. 

 

"We are learning some things about how to do more meetings online," she said. "We're learning how to take care of each other online. People are reaching out to the elderly in their homes and doing video calls and sending emails or dropping a meal off." 

 

As for when the world could potentially return to normal? "Nobody really knows the answer to that. It really is when we get a vaccine at scale," which could take around 18 months, Gates said. Read the full interview here.

 

sauce

 

poor billy mummy taking over

Edited April 10, 2020 by dufus

[dufus]

 

so if someone dies from being hit by a train and had a runny nose , it will be recorded as a covid19 death ?   where i come from it,s called lying. 

This is happening in many other countries besides the us !

Edited April 11, 2020 by dufus

[dufus]

UK will have to live with some restrictions until coronavirus vaccine is developed, say officials

 

boom

[dufus]

 

[rasbridge]

"Crime Rate Drops Across The Globe As Coronavirus Pandemic Keeps People Inside"

https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2020/04/11/crime-rates-drop-across-the-globe-as-coronavirus-pandemic-keeps-people-inside/

[ghost]

New York Times' coronavirus report outlines how Trump 'could have seen what was coming'

By Maegan Vazquez, Jason Hoffman and Kristen Holmes, CNN

 

Updated 7:48 PM ET, Sat April 11, 2020

 

 

(CNN)A new report on the Trump administration's missteps in the early days of the coronavirus' spread into the US was published in the New York Times on Saturday, detailing new instances showing how President Donald Trump ignored the warnings of his advisers about the lethal infectious disease approaching America's doorstep.

 

According to the report, Dr. Robert Kadlec, the top disaster response official at the Department of Health and Human Services, convened the White House coronavirus task force on February 21. During his meeting, the group conducted a mock-up exercise of the pandemic. It predicted 110 million infections, 7.7 million hospitalizations and 586,000 deaths. As a result, the group "concluded they would soon need to move toward aggressive social distancing, even at the risk of severe disruption to the nation's economy and the daily lives of millions of Americans."

 

However, it would take more than three weeks for Trump to enact social distancing guidelines on March 16.

 

Two days after that meeting Kadlec learned of human-to-human transmission from asymptomatic individuals, the Times report states. But instead of immediately implementing mitigation steps, the President's focus turned to messaging.

 

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, issued a warning that the virus would disrupt daily life. Trump canceled a meeting where mitigation efforts would be discussed. Instead, he appointed Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the task force and funneled coronavirus messaging through him. There were also other administration officials who went on television saying the virus was contained.

 

Over nearly three weeks from February 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226. Since then, more than half a million Americans have tested positive for the virus and authorities say hundreds of thousands more are likely infected.

 

The Times also describes how Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar had been briefing the President on the issue.

 

Azar "briefed him about the potential seriousness of the virus" during a January 18 phone call. A few days later, in what appeared to be his first comments about the virus to the press, Trump told a reporter at Davos, "We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's -- going to be just fine."

 

On another call on January 30, Azar warned Trump of the possibility of a pandemic. Trump reportedly responded by saying Azar was being alarmist.

 

On the January 30 call, Azar "was blunt, warning that the virus could develop into a pandemic and arguing that China should be criticized for failing to be transparent."

 

But Trump rejected the idea of criticizing China.

 

According to the Times, Trump told Azar to "stop panicking."

 

The President wouldn't change his tune about China until he heard of a Chinese government spokesman spreading a conspiracy asserting that the coronavirus originated from US troops.

 

That's around the time Trump began referring to the coronavirus as the "Chinese virus" and the "China virus." He has since backed off of using the terms.

 

The Times piece also outlines the struggle between national security and economic advisers over steps that should be taken in regard to China, a move Trump points to in order to show that he took the threat of coronavirus seriously from the start.

 

Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, was warned of asymptomatic spread of coronavirus in early January on a call with a Hong Kong epidemiologist who was a friend of his, according to the report. Pottinger, backed by national security adviser Robert O'Brien, pushed the President to take action against China and ultimately convinced him to enact travel restrictions. However, they faced pushback from Trump's economic team, who feared a strict policy toward China could hurt the trade deal between the two countries.

 

Another administration official sounding the alarm early was Trump's trade adviser, Peter Navarro. Many administration advisers dismissed Navarro's warnings about the coronavirus' potential spread in a January memo as alarmist.

 

Trump has publicly denied knowing about the January memo until it made headlines this month, but the Times reports that Trump was made aware of the memo, reportedly telling aides "he was unhappy that Mr. Navarro had put his warning in writing."

 

When asked on Tuesday about the memos after the Times first published a story detailing them, Trump responded, "I didn't see them, but I heard he wrote some memos talking about pandemic. I didn't see them. I didn't look for them either."

 

CNN's Jeremy Diamond contributed to this report.

 

CNN

Edited April 12, 2020 by ghost

[dufus]

 

[ghost]

Here's how hospitals are celebrating when a Covid-19 patient is released

By Amanda Jackson, CNN

 

Updated 8:01 AM ET, Sun April 12, 2020

 

 

A line of staff members and medical center leadership cheered their first Covid-19 patient on after he was discharged to go home and recover.

(CNN)For over two weeks, a woman in Texas laid in a hospital bed fighting for her life after testing positive for the coronavirus.

 

She spent 10 days on a ventilator to help her breathe. But she fought the virus and was released from the Austin hospital after 16 days.

 

To celebrate her recovery, staff at St. David's South Austin Medical Center lined the halls and cheered for her as she was being discharged.

 

Scenes like this are occurring at hospitals across the nation symbolizing hope in such a dark time.

At Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, the song "Here Comes the Sun" by The Beatles plays over the speaker system every time a Covid-19 patient is discharged, according to a hospital official.

 

"Little darling, the smile's returning to their faces," the lyrics for the song read. "Little darling, it seems like years since it's been here."

 

New York is one of the major epicenters for the American coronavirus outbreak with more than 181,000 confirmed cases and at least 8,650 deaths.

 

Another New York hospital, this one in Hudson Valley, is also using music to bring a little joy to medical staff and patients who are battling the pandemic. Orange County Executive Steve Neuhaus told a local radio show that the song "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey plays when a Covid-19 patient is released.

 

Other hospitals, just like in Austin, are lining the hallways and sending off their released patients with claps and cheers. In Arkansas, a veteran, who staff named their "first miracle patient," waved to staff as he was greeted with signs of encouragement and applause as he was being escorted to his family waiting outside of the hospital.

 

The Intensive Care Staff at Yale New Haven Hospital Saint Raphael Campus in Connecticut cheered, clapped and held signs of encouragement for a patient that was being transferred out of the ICU and to a regular room.

 

Moments like these are being shared on social media and giving hope to others as the cases across the US top 530,000.

 

CNN's Arman Azad contributed to this report.

 

CNN

 

 

[dufus]

Wuhan lab was performing coronavirus experiments on bats from the caves where the disease is believed to have originated - with a £3m grant from the US

 

The US National Institutes of Health, a government agency, awarded a $3.7million research grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology

The lab is the center of several conspiracy theories that suggest it is the original source of the coronavirus outbreak 

The institute experimented on bats from the source of the coronavirus  

They were captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan

Sequencing of the Covid-19 genome has traced it to bats to Yunnan's caves

The U.S. government funded research on coronavirus transmission in the lab over the past decade

 

sauce

 

the plot thickens 

[ghost]

Trump retweets call to fire Fauci amid coronavirus criticism

By Chandelis Duster, Kevin Liptak and Kaitlan Collins, CNN

 

Updated 9:35 AM ET, Mon April 13, 2020

 

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump on Sunday evening retweeted a user who called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be fired, the latest sign of apparent tension between the two men amid the coronavirus pandemic.

 

Trump's initial handling of the crisis has come under increasing scrutiny as it's been revealed that administration and health officials were sounding alarms for weeks before Trump took decisive actions such as calling for social distancing measures. He has disputed that his administration was slow to respond and has called for the economy to be reopened quickly, potentially by the beginning of May, despite health officials' warnings that doing so could risk a resurgence.

 

Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, conceded to CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday morning that earlier mitigation efforts could have saved more lives and again called for a cautious reopening of the nation, despite Trump's calls to quickly restart the economy.

 

"I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives," Fauci, said on "State of the Union" when asked if social distancing and stay-at-home measures could have prevented deaths had they been put in place in February, instead of mid-March.

"Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those decisions is complicated," added Fauci, who is a key member of the Trump administration's coronavirus task force. "But you're right, I mean, obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then."

 

Hours later, Trump retweeted a user who said it was "Time to #FireFauci" and praised Trump's decision to issue travel restrictions against China in early February. Fauci has praised the President's decision to implement travel restrictions abroad in Europe and in China, telling reporters last month the move "absolutely has" mitigated cases in the US.

 

CNN has reached out to the White House for additional comment about Trump's retweet.

 

The tweet retweeted by Trump suggested that Fauci mistakenly downplayed the initial threat of coronavirus to the US in late February when he said the "country as a whole ... still remains at low risk," though the infectious disease expert was referring specifically to an outbreak in Washington state and qualified that "this is an evolving situation." Fauci did, however, tell radio host John Catsimatidis in late January that coronavirus "isn't something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about," adding, "because we have ways of preparing and screening" those coming from countries impacted by the virus.

 

LISTEN: The Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction Podcast

 

The relationship between Fauci, who has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, and Trump has been the subject of widespread speculation. Trump last month praised Fauci for being "so professional," but at a White House briefing earlier this month, he refused to let Fauci answer a question about the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential treatment for coronavirus despite Fauci's caution.

 

In meetings, Fauci isn't hesitant to offer unvarnished thoughts or analysis even when it seems to contradict the President. He's previously warned the speed of developing a coronavirus vaccine isn't nearly where Trump has suggested it could be and he's cautioned that the possible treatments Trump touts in public haven't yet proved effective.

 

Frank public disagreements between Trump and a top official are virtually unprecedented in his administration. Earlier in the crisis, Trump grew enraged when an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested the situation would worsen badly in the United States, believing her assessment overly fatalistic.

 

Blunt candor hasn't always endeared Fauci to Trump either; the President has complained in private when it seems he's being contradicted by the nation's top infectious disease specialist. But Trump has also said he prefers the direct approach.

 

Fauci described the challenges of working with Trump in an interview with the journal Science last month. Asked how he responds to falsehoods from the President during press conferences, Fauci said, "I can't jump in front of the microphone and push him down," according to the interview.

 

"OK, he said it. Let's try and get it corrected for the next time," Fauci said.

 

Allies push to discredit experts

 

Trump tweets Easter wishes as Americans remain under coronavirus lockdown

 

As conversations intensify in the White House about how and when to give guidance to reopen the country, the President is talking more and more to friends from Wall Street, hedge fund managers and others in the financial world pressuring him to put a specific date on the calendar for when businesses can reopen -- and to do it soon, according to a person familiar with the President's conversations.

 

Meanwhile, the President's allies in conservative media have begun waging a campaign to discredit some on his team as narrowly focused on charts and models rather than the economic pain inflicted on millions of Americans.

 

Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host whom Trump awarded a surprise Medal of Freedom during this year's State of the Union address, called Fauci a "Clinton sympathizer" on his program last week. Tucker Carlson, whose intervention in early March helped Trump take the outbreak more seriously, said on his Fox program Fauci had been "wrong repeatedly."

 

When Trump initially decided Easter was the date he hoped to have the country open again, it caught some aides off guard and was not based on any data-focused discussions.

 

Officials, realizing it was unrealistic, slowly tried to get the President to back off that timeline by showing him models that projected thousands of dead and polling that showed Americans favored keeping the restrictions back in place.

 

"That was just an aspiration. That would have been incredible," Trump said last week. "But I don't think we're going to be very far behind."

 

Now, there is no similarly concerted effort underway to convince Trump to ease up on the May timeline for reopening the country, people familiar with the matter said.

CNN

 

 

[ghost]

Nearly 30% of Americans believe coronavirus was made in a lab, Pew poll shows

By Scottie Andrew, CNN

 

 

(CNN)Despite evidence from infectious disease experts suggesting otherwise, nearly 30% of Americans in a new Pew poll said they believe the novel coronavirus was likely created in a lab.

 

The latest poll from the public opinion fact tank shows that misinformation around the virus is still king, even as fact checkers and public health officials work furiously to dispel it and save American lives.

 

A total of 23% of adults polled said they believe the virus was created intentionally. This is almost certainly not true, according to the genetic detectives studying the virus's origins.

 

And 43% -- a plurality, but not an overwhelming majority -- said the virus likely came about naturally. This is most likely the truth, according to virus experts.

The poll was conducted between March 11 and 16. During that time, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, but most states hadn't received stay-at-home orders yet.

Its origin is up for debate, but it wasn't made in a lab

There's still much we don't know about the coronavirus pandemic, but virus experts agree on one piece of its origin story: The virus likely originated in a bat, not in a Chinese lab.

 

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that mostly sicken animals. Some, like Covid-19 and SARS before it, "jump the species barrier" and sicken humans, too.

 

That seems to be what happened with Covid-19. In early February, Chinese researchers published an article in Nature -- a top science journal -- that concluded the "2019-nCoV is 96% identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus."

 

The once widely held belief that the virus originated in a Chinese wet market is debated, too: While some virus experts told CNN earlier this month that the hygienic conditions of the market made it prime grounds for "zoonotic spillover," an article published in the Lancet shows that a third of the first 41 patients had no contact with the wet market, including the first confirmed patient.

 

Though at least one virus expert didn't rule out the idea that the virus was created in a lab, CNN could not independently verify those claims, and Chinese and Western scientists have repeatedly denied that.

A pandemic of misinformation

Previous pandemics didn't unfold in an era when information travels faster than a virus.

 

The Covid-19 pandemic has given way to what the World Health Organization called an "infodemic" -- inaccurate information about the virus, its origin and how it spreads is flooding social media, and unsophisticated algorithms have shoved those bunk theories into the public consciousness.

 

Take the conspiracy that 5G networks are somehow linked to the coronavirus. It started as a fringe theory among New Agers and QAnon followers. Soon, it ended up on celebrities' Instagram accounts, and Twitter published at least two "moments" debunking it.

Twitter and other social networking apps are tightening up as a result. WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging service, is limiting the number of times a message can be forwarded to a user in efforts to keep conspiracies from infiltrating multiple groups at a time. Social media services now show buffer messages on top of search pages that warn users of misinformation.

 

Whether it will be enough to change people's minds and potentially save lives has yet to be seen.

 

CNN

 

[Karlston]

Yet Another Consequence of the Pandemic: More Plastic Waste

This new normal means mountains of single-use plastic—and few places to put it but the dump.

 

Photograph: Getty Images

 

So you got your jumbo pack of toilet paper from Costco. You speed home so nobody Mad Maxes you off the highway and steals your treasure, and immediately rip open the plastic packaging and throw it in the recycling bin. You stash rolls in the bathroom but also hide them around the house, in case your family becomes less of a family and more of a free-for-all, and everyone ends up fighting to the death over TP.

 

A few days later, you take out your recycling, figuring that plastic wrap will find new life as plastic wrap elsewhere. The reality is it will become trash, because, this being capitalism, it wouldn’t be economically feasible to recycle it even at the best of times. But now, with the coronavirus pandemic worsening, even stalwart recyclables like bottles and cans and cardboard are, in many places, going straight to the dump.

 

In some ways, the pandemic has been great for the environment: With heavy industries shutting down and fewer cars on the road, we’re spewing less greenhouse gases and air quality is vastly improving. “The world is breathing better, objectively,” says Tom Szaky, the founder and CEO of the recycling company TerraCycle. “This is the great irony—the world will breathe better but wake up to an even bigger garbage crisis.”

 

Recycling was already in a crisis in recent years, due to a confluence of factors. But now the coronavirus pandemic is here to kneecap it. “Many recyclers, because of health and safety concerns, are also stopping the service,” says Szaky. “Recycling—that's been in sort of a crash—is now getting even worse.”

 

The recycling industry has been suffering from a trio of maladies. First, given that plastic is oil, when oil prices fall—as they have in recent years—plastic gets cheaper to make. This corrupts the economics of recycling. To be financially feasible, a recycling operation has to make more money than what it costs to gather the waste and process it. If oil, and therefore plastic, is cheap to begin with—and the coronavirus crisis has thoroughly cratered the price of oil—it doesn’t make economic sense for a company to process and sell recycled materials if they end up being more expensive than the virgin plastic another company is making.

 

You might think that the science is lagging, that it’s just not possible to recycle the materials we would want to, or perhaps that the recycling infrastructure isn’t robust enough. “It has nothing to do with that,” says Szaky. “It has everything to do with the economic equation: Is there a business model?”

 

The second reason is that, for decades, the US sold mountains of recyclable materials to China for processing. But in 2018, China said no thanks to all that anymore and banned imports of plastic and mixed paper. That was part of the nation’s bid to boost its own domestic garbage collection and, well, not have their country drown in plastic bottles. That left the US without a massive market upon which to jettison its waste.

 

“The third is what no one notices, that the quality of the waste is going down,” says Szaky. This is known as “lightweighting,” and it was happening long before the pandemic began. By making plastic bottles thinner, the manufacturer saves money by using less plastic. But, Szaky says, “it becomes progressively less profitable for a garbage company to bother recycling.”

 

And so an industry already in tumult has run headlong into the coronavirus pandemic. Now single-use plastics are more popular than ever as people panic-buy disposable items like water bottles, plus other products wrapped safely in the confines of plastic, like hand sanitizer and tissues and foods. Then, of course, people scrub these all with sanitizing wipes, themselves packaged in single-use plastic containers.

 

Toilet paper sales in the US in March were up 112 percent from the previous year—and would have been far higher if it weren’t for shortages—while aerosol disinfectants were up 343 percent. In the last week of February, hand sanitizer sales were up 313 percent from the same week last year. Amazon has hired 100,000 extra workers to keep up with demand—packing individually wrapped products into cardboard boxes bound for your doorstep.

 

In addition, the restaurant where you used to eat food off plates using metal utensils now sells you a to-go bag full of individually wrapped dishes. And I doubt you’ll want to reuse that bag. Indeed, in the San Francisco Bay Area, you’re not even allowed to bring your reusable shopping bags to the grocery store anymore, lest you bring the virus from your home to the checkout counter. In early March, Starbucks stopped filling customers’ reusable cups for the same reason, before shuttering stores altogether. “So disposability is going like crazy,” says Szaky. “And during Covid, we saw that the recycling equation that was bad anyway, and trending down, is even worse.”

 

Even if the industry could handle this crush of “recyclables,” and even if it were economically feasible to process all the stuff, many recyclers have shut down in response to the pandemic. Curbside recycling programs have been suspended by dozens of county and local governments, from Miami to Los Angeles County, according to the trade publication Waste Dive. Recycling facilities are struggling to figure out how to protect their workers, who are concerned about virus exposure from handling materials.

 

 

TerraCycle, which gets many of its recyclables from stores, has obviously seen materials dry up, too. “I mean, we have collection points in 100,000 retailers around the world, and all of those are closed right now,” says Szaky.

 

In addition, over half of the states with container redemption programs—the way you as an individual can get money for each can or bottle you collect—are temporarily suspending enforcement. “Thus, materials that would normally find its way to recyclers are being channeled to landfills and incinerators,” says Rachel Meidl, a fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute, who studies plastics.

 

Making matters worse is the deluge of waste coming out of hospitals running on overdrive right now: You can’t just recycle a plastic face shield a doctor used while treating a Covid patient. Any biohazardous waste generated from Covid-19 at medical facilities, or samples from coronavirus test sites, has to be properly packaged and sent to a hazardous waste facility for incineration.

 

All told, the coronavirus crisis is producing more and more waste that’s either contaminated or not economical to recycle, and would be even if the recycling infrastructure was still running at full capacity. “With restaurants shifting to take-out, which requires the use of single-use plastics, consumers stockpiling groceries and bottled water, and the medical community rapidly turning over protective equipment, there has undoubtedly been an uptick in plastic waste due to the coronavirus pandemic,” says Meidl.

 

When we finally get a vaccine and the crisis begins to wane, our skies will once again fill with smog as we commute and spin up heavy industries, and the temptation will be to rely more heavily than ever on single-use plastics out of fears of sharing any lingering germs. But there are ways to do better. TerraCycle, for instance, runs a program that delivers products like shampoo in durable containers that customers ship back once the product is gone, for cleaning and reuse.

 

We need this kind of behavioral shift, because recycling isn’t a panacea; indeed, it was the plastic industry’s push for recycling that got us into this mess. By shifting the blame for plastic pollution onto the consumers, the industry manipulated us into thinking the problem was ours to solve. The solution for the past few decades has been to encourage individuals to recycle, not to demand that the industry stop churning out so much single-use plastic. That narrative could be crumbling, though, as scientists continue to uncover the pervasiveness of plastic pollution: Sea creatures’ stomachs are filling up with plastic bags, and microplastics are blowing from cities onto pristine mountaintops.

 

The trouble is that our modern society wouldn’t exist without the stuff—it’s just too damn useful. Big investments from industries and governments could develop better recycling technologies and more easily recyclable plastics that would increase the profitability of recycling. But it matters, too, whether we think of plastics as essentially disposable or recyclable. “The bottom line is, no matter how much government funding is allocated toward recycling efforts,” says Meidl, “there first needs to be a significant paradigm shift in human behavior where plastic is deemed as a resource and not a waste.”

 

---

 

WIRED is providing free access to stories about public health and how to protect yourself during the coronavirus pandemic. Sign up for our Coronavirus Update newsletter for the latest updates, and subscribe to support our journalism.

 

 

Source: Yet Another Consequence of the Pandemic: More Plastic Waste (Wired)

[dufus]

Deja Vu: The Swine Flu Vaccination Fraud of 1976

 

video

 

CBS ” 60 MINUTES” documentary on the swine flu epidemic of 1976 in the U.S. It went on air only once and was never shown again. Watch this video documentary and listen to testimony of people who caught Gullian-Barre paralysis because of the swine flu vaccine. They sued the US government for damages. 500 cases of Gullian-Barre paralysis, including 25 deaths—not due to the swine flu itself, but as a direct result of the vaccine. At the time President Gerald Ford, on advice from the CDC, called for vaccination of the ENTIRE population of the United States. The difference now, and what is the REAL danger, we have no questioning media.

 

 

 

WHO Says 70 Vaccines in the Works, With Three Leading Candidates

 

There are 70 coronavirus vaccines in development globally, with three candidates already being tested in human trials, according to the World Health Organization, as drugmakers race to find a cure for the deadly pathogen.

 

 

Edited April 13, 2020 by dufus

[ghost]

Ebola drug can infiltrate, trick coronavirus from the inside, Alberta study suggests

[ghost]

Video: FedEx driver sanitizes package for vulnerable girl

 

Some delivery drivers would just toss the package and leave.

Edited April 13, 2020 by ghost

[rasbridge]

After more than 17,000 deaths, how Spain is coping with Covid-19

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/after-more-than-17000-deaths-how-spain-is-coping-with-covid-19

[ghost]

U.S. governors push back on Trump's claim he has 'total' authority to reopen economy

Constitution gives public health, safety duties primarily to state and local officials

The Associated Press · Posted: Apr 13, 2020 12:41 PM ET | Last Updated: 32 minutes ago

 

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Monday. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)

 

comments

U.S. President Donald Trump claimed the authority Monday to decide how and when to reopen the economy after weeks of tough social distancing guidelines aimed at fighting the new coronavirus. But governors from both parties were quick to push back, noting they have the primary constitutional responsibility for ensuring public safety in their states and would decide when it's safe to begin a return to normal operations.

 

Democratic leaders in the Northeast and along the West Coast announced separate state compacts to co-ordinate their efforts to scale back stay-at-home orders or reopen businesses on their own timetables, even as Trump tried to say it's his call.

 

"When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total," Trump said at Monday's White House coronavirus briefing. "The governors know that."

 

But he offered no specifics about the source of his authority or his plan to reopen the economy.

 

Anxious to put the twin public health and economic crises behind him, Trump has backed federal social distancing recommendations that expire at the end of the month. But it has been governors and local leaders who have instituted mandatory restrictions, including shuttering schools and closing non-essential businesses.

 

Taking to Twitter, Trump wrote that some are "saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect ... it is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons."

 

Trump can use his bully pulpit to pressure states to act or threaten them with consequences, but the Constitution gives public health and safety responsibilities primarily to state and local officials.

'The house is still on fire'

Meanwhile, the president's guidelines have little force. Governors and local leaders have issued orders that carry fines or other penalties, and in some jurisdictions extend out into the early summer.

 

"All of these executive orders are state executive orders and so therefore it would be up to the state and the governor to undo a lot of that," New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu said on CNN.

 

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, told reporters on a conference call that until people are healthy, reopening the economy's "not going to work."

 

A patient arrives in an ambulance cared for by medical workers wearing personal protective equipment outside NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City on Monday. (John Minchillo/Associated Press)

"Seeing how we had the responsibility for closing the state down, I think we probably have the primary responsibility for opening it up," he added.

 

Wolf joined governors in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island in agreeing to co-ordinate their actions. The governors of California, Oregon and Washington announced a similar pact. While each state is building its own plan, the three West Coast states have agreed to a framework saying they will work together, put their residents' health first and let science guide their decisions.

 

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy stressed the efforts would take time.

 

Members of the Florida National Guard assist medical personnel at a COVID-19 drive-thru swab testing site in Jacksonville, Fla., on Monday. (Bob Self/Florida Times-Union Via AP)

"The house is still on fire," he said on a conference call with reporters. "We still have to put the fire out, but we do have to begin putting in the pieces of the puzzle that we know we're going to need ... to make sure this doesn't reignite."

 

Though Trump abandoned his goal of rolling back social distancing guidelines by Sunday, he has been itching to reopen an economy that has dramatically contracted as businesses have shuttered, leaving millions of people out of work and struggling to obtain basic commodities. The closure has also undermined Trump's reelection message, which hinged on a booming economy.

 

Trump's claim that he could force governors to reopen their states represents a dramatic shift in tone. For weeks now, Trump has argued that states, not the federal government, should lead the response to the crisis. And he has refused to publicly pressure states to enact stay-at-home restrictions, citing his belief in local control of government.

 

A worker sprays disinfectant on a walkway area in front of a grocery store in Dallas on Monday. (LM Otero/Associated Press)

While Trump can use his daily White House briefings and Twitter account to try to shape public opinion and pressure governors to bend to his will, "there are real limits on the president and the federal government when it comes to domestic affairs," John Yoo, a University of California at Berkeley law school professor, said on a recent Federalist Society conference call.

 

"The government doesn't get opened up via Twitter. It gets opened up at the state level," Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said.

 

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, a supporter of Trump, said the question of when to lift restrictions would be "a joint effort" between Washington and the states.

Trump says won't fire Fauci

Talk about how and when to reboot the nation's economy has come as Trump has bristled at criticism that he was slow to respond to the virus and that lives could have been saved had social distancing recommendations been put in place sooner.

 

That frustration was amplified by comments made by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's nation's top infectious diseases expert. Asked Sunday on CNN if acting earlier could have saved lives, Fauci said that, "obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives."

 

Trump responded by reposting a tweet that referenced Fauci's comments and included the line, "Time to #FireFauci," raising alarms that Trump might consider trying to oust the 79-year-old doctor.

 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, left, speaks about the coronavirus as Trump looks on in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Monday. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)

Trump has complained to aides and confidants about Fauci's positive media attention and his willingness to contradict the president in interviews and from the briefing room stage, according to two Republicans close to the White House. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal conversations.

 

But at Monday's briefing, Trump said, "I'm not firing him. I think he's a wonderful guy."

 

Trump has told aides that he knows blowback to removing Fauci would be fierce and that — at least for now — he is stuck with the doctor. He has, on more than one occasion, however, urged that Fauci be left out of task force briefings or have his speaking role curtailed, according to the Republicans.

 

CBC News

[aum]

If only Fauci had the 'total' authority ... 

[Karlston]

John Conway, inventor of the Game of Life, has died of COVID-19

After 50 years, people are still discovering interesting Game of Life patterns.

Enlarge / John Conway.

Thane Plambeck

51 with 49 posters participating

COVID-19 has claimed the life of Princeton mathematician John Conway. He was 82 years old.

 

The British-born Conway spent the early part of his career at Cambridge before moving to Princeton University in the 1980s. He made contributions in various areas of mathematics but is best known for his invention of Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton in which simple rules give rise to surprisingly complex behaviors. It was made famous by a 1970 Scientific American article and has had a lively community around it ever since then. (Don't confuse it with Milton Bradley's board game of the same name.)

 

Conway's Game of Life is played on a two-dimensional plane with square cells. Each square can be either black ("alive") or white ("dead"). Simple deterministic rules dictate how the state of the board in one step leads to the next step. If a live square has two or three live neighbors (counting diagonals), it stays alive. If a dead cell has three live neighbors, it switches to black and becomes alive. Otherwise, the cell becomes—or stays—dead.

Quuxplusone

Conway developed these rules in the late 1960s, before the invention of the personal computer. He performed early experiments on a Go board and discovered that these rules could produce surprisingly complex behaviors. Before long, people were writing software to accelerate runs of the Game of Life.

 

One of the first non-trivial structures to be discovered was the glider, a five-square structure that moves diagonally across the board. People soon discovered that a wide range of these moving structures, dubbed spaceships, were possible. Spaceships could be of different sizes and move at different rates. They could also move in a number of different directions: vertically, horizontally, diagonally, and even at other angles.

Lucas Vieira

In 1970, mathematician Bill Gosper discovered the first glider gun, a Game of Life structure that generates an infinite stream of gliders. Go enthusiasts found a variety of other guns, and they also found other examples of structures that emit other structures.

Puffers move across the Go board and leave behind chaos that congeals into static debris. Rakes move across the board emitting a stream of spaceships. Breeders leave a trail of guns behind them, with each gun generating a stream of gliders or other spaceships.

 

These structures can become unbelievably complex. This video, for example, shows a gun that consists of several large structures that each generates irregular streams of gliders. A bunch of gliders—37 to be exact—collide with one another in just the right way to produce a complex spaceship called a 6-engine cordership, which then proceeds in another direction. It takes 784 moves to produce a cordership before the cycle repeats.

Enlarge / A Turing machine in Conway's Game of Life.

Nathaniel / Conwaylife.com

These elements, in turn, can become building blocks for still more complex structures. Mathematicians have demonstrated that it is possible to construct a Turing Machine on a Game of Life board. The Church-Turing thesis tells us that a Turing machine is theoretically capable of computing any function we can compute on modern computers—at least given enough time and storage space. So it's theoretically possible, if not particularly efficient, to compute any function using the right arrangement of Game of Life cells.

 

More than 50 years after Conway invented the Game of Life, it continues to have an active community of both professional mathematicians and amateurs. The Conwaylife.com website has an extensive Wiki documenting hundreds of interesting Game of Life patterns. Game of Life enthusiasts have made thousands of posts at the site's forums.

 

If you'd like to try out Conway's Game of Life, it's easy to do. There's a solid Web-based game of life implementation here that will let you experiment with basic patterns. If you want to go deeper, you'll likely want to download one of the many Game of Life software packages that are freely available online.

 

Source: John Conway, inventor of the Game of Life, has died of COVID-19 (Ars Technica)

[dufus]

U.S. Diplomats Warned about Safety Risks in Wuhan Labs Studying Bats Two Years before Coronavirus Outbreak

 

 

 

U.S. officials warned in January 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s work on “SARS-like coronaviruses in bats,” combined with “a serious shortage” of proper safety procedures, could result in human transmission and the possibility of a “future emerging coronavirus outbreak.”

 

In a series of diplomatic cables, one of which was obtained by The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, U.S. Embassy officials warned their superiors that the lab, which they had visited several times, posed a serious health risk that warranted U.S. intervention. The officials were concerned enough about their findings to categorize the communications as “Sensitive But Unclassified,” in order to keep them out of the public eye.

 

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable reads.

 

“The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official told Rogin. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”

 

While China has stated the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan, U.S. officials are skeptical of the claim, with National Review detailing how the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted jobs in November and December of last year to show how they had been working on “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses,” which had “confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases” in December.

 

“The idea that is was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” a U.S. official told Rogin.

 

The Wuhan Insititute of Virology is China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety, known as BSL-4. But its work on bats — led by Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman” for her work with that species — is conducted at the lower protection level of BSL-2.

 

The 2018 cable confirms that Shi — whose team published research in November 2017 revealing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003 — was then working on “SARS-like coronaviruses.” Shi’s team was also the first to reveal in February that the new outbreak was a bat-derived coronavirus.

 

“Most importantly, the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases,” the cable states.

 

“From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”

 

sorce

Edited April 14, 2020 by dufus