North America

SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 Evening Update 2-25-2020: The Pandemic Hide the Name & Blame Games

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The themes of this update will be on issues of COVID-19 spread, World Headlines, border closings, the CDC news conference, developments with fomite spread, how American Public Health institutions build a liablity law suit proof diagnostic test and how that limits tests for community spread and a new recommended COVID-19 sites, social media and videos section.
 
Top line, There are currently 80,420 confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, including 2,710 fatalities as of the 24 February 2020 at 5:24 p.m. ET time hack on the BNO News corona virus tracking site (https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/) There are 39 nations including China plus three “Chinese special administrative regions” (Macao, Hong Kong and Taiwan) that have reported COVID-19 infections. China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Italy, Iran and R.O.K. all appear to have local, or endemic, spread of the disease. Italy has spawned further spread in Spain proper, it’s Canary Islands possession, Austria, Germany, and possibly Croatia. And now Brazil in South America and Algeria reporting a case signals North West Africa have added two new regions to the Pandemic spread list. The virus has spread from Asia to Europe, North America, Australia and Africa.
 
All of the above meets the pre-COVID-19 WHO standard for a “Pandemic” that requiring endemic spread in multiple nations in multiple WHO regions. However, the WHO just decided that it was time to retire the term “Pandemic” because…something…[insert reasons here]. The WHO statement for doing so was a master piece of unintelligible double talk that boils down to “Lets not scare the “Normies” and set off more “Run, Hide & Hoard” panics like seized Italy, ROK and Singapore in the last few days. Meanwhile the WHO is cheering-on China’s “Hospice-Prison system for the infected” Quarantine as a “Model” in aiding China’s restarting the World economy.
ITALY COVID-19 Confirmed Cases and Deaths 25 Feb 2020
ITALY COVID-19 Confirmed Cases and Deaths 25 Feb 2020
 
World Headline Summary
o WHO warns the rest of the world “is not ready for the virus to spread…”
o CDC warns Americans “should prepare for possible community spread” of virus.
o San Francisco Mayor declares state of emergency
o Later, CDC says pandemic not a question of it, but when
o Brazil may have South America’s first coronavirus case
o Germany confirms 2nd case on Tuesday, brings total to 17
o Italy cases spike to 322; deaths hit 10
o Japan’s Shiseido tells 8k employees to work from home
o Trump Economic Advisor Kudlow tries to jawbone stock markets higher
o HHS Sec. Azar warns US lacks stockpiles of masks
o Italy Hotel in Lockdown After First Coronavirus Case in Liguria
o Algeria confirms 1st case
o First case in Switzerland
o Kuwait halts all flights to Singapore and Japan
o Iran confirms 95 cases, 15 deaths
o First case in Austria
o Spain reports 7 cases in under 24 hours, including in Madrid, Canary Islands, Barcelona
o Iran Deputy Health Minister infected with Covid-19
Pandemic Border Closures
Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Armenia, and UAE blocked border crossings by Iranians.
Russia, North Korea and Vietnam are blocking border crossings from China
Austria and Switzerlan are blocking border crossings from Italy.
El Salvador on Tuesday announced it would prevent entry of people from Italy and South Korea.
 

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Ayiti Pa Nimewo Yo

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I. Departure

Our transportation to Aéroport International Toussaint Louverture was a decrepit Honda Civic with no working inside door handles, no exhaust system, and a barely functional starter. The guesthouse driver poured a liter of water into the radiator immediately before starting the engine so that it would not overheat, even though the drive was only 3 kilometers. Our luggage proved too big for the trunk, so most of the team’s belongings were wedged in beneath the open trunk lid, which was not secured by so much as a single bungee cord. Threading through the remnants of at least a dozen barricades on Avenue Gerard Téodart half an hour before sunrise, we high-centered on some rubble and dragged a sizable rock for several hundred meters before the driver backed the car up to dislodge it. After we made the turn onto Boulevard Toussaint Louverture, there were no more barricades, thanks to the proximity of a MINUSTAH logistics base and a Police Nationale d’Haïti station. There were pedestrians, of course—Port-au-Prince is very much a city that never sleeps—but not many, and few vehicles thanks to severely interrupted fuel deliveries, which had nearly stranded us altogether. One of the team members riding in the back seat later told me that the gas gauge was on “E.”

What is happening when a Third World country loses a key component of its energy supply, and what might be the lessons to learn for those apprehensive over a significant breakdown of logistics in the US?

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Fixing the border facility crisis

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It’s useful to review how to fix conditions of overcrowding in a facility. There are two fixes available.

1. You build more capacity
2. You increase training and oversight of the personnel running the facilities if they’re not behaving adequately

Both of these fixes require more money allocated by Congress. It helps when the Executive requests more funding but Congress doesn’t require it.

Go look at the legislative history. President Trump asked for more funds, Congress turned him down. It wasn’t his own party that denied him, it was the Democratic delegation that was against relief.

President Trump sought to work around the restrictions by declaring an emergency and using military construction money. It was left wing advocates who went to court to fight Trump, preventing him from building more facilities.

The left wing solution is to cause so much suffering so that our hearts break and we stop enforcing the law.

That’s cruel. It’s cruel on purpose.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alleges misbehavior by camp personnel. She is one of a small select group, just 535 people strong who could directly improve the situation by introducing legislation that would force improvements in behavior. She has yet to introduce any.

The Congresswoman is a prominent part of the cruelty agenda.

In a normal country, hard questions would be asked by the mainstream media of those who have recently been part of this cruelty agenda.

Poisoned Fruit of the Poisoned Tree

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This week, the month-long mystery of the missing college student, Mollie Tibbits, was sadly resolved, with the discovery of her body in a local cornfield. Developments in the search for her were updated frequently over the last few weeks, and always featured at the top, or near to the top of headlines on the English tabloid, the Daily Mail. Which, for all its’ eccentricities, abuse of grammar, spelling, penchant for the flamingly obvious, providing Piers Morgan with a salary, extreme Kardashian-worship, and light-to-moderate Trump disdain, does cover the American news scene without much fear or favor.
The longer the mystery of her disappearance went on, though – the greater the chance of a less than happy ending. And as it turns out that the chief suspect in her kidnapping and murder is a man with a distinctly dodgy background – an illegal alien of Mexican background, whose’ identity papers are something of a mystery. His American employers seemed to believe that everything was hunky-dory; this lends the cynical among us to assume that such paperwork must have been better forgeries than the usual run.

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Quote of the Day (Follow Up)

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Conrad Black:

Mr. Trump isn’t the problem, but among the symptoms of the problem are that the director and deputy director of the FBI have been fired for cause as the Bureau virtually became the dirty-tricks arm of the Democratic National Committee, and that, as the Center for Media Studies and Pew Research have both recorded, 90% of national-press comment on Mr. Trump is hostile. Mr. Trump may have aggravated some of the current nastiness, but his chief offense has been breaking ranks with the bipartisan coalition that produced the only period of absolute and relative decline in American history.

I think Black is too harsh on George W. Bush but this column is otherwise excellent.