by Oui
Sun Mar 29th, 2020 at 09:06:30 AM EST
As the oldest veterans of WWII are dwindling to zero, the baby boomers and half a generation before are part of a healthy group because of food, physical exercise, and economic well being.
Today this group is callously put in harm's way by their own government.
Too many weird and strange policy initiatives have been launched by a handful of countries.
Coronavirus: How to understand the death toll | BBC News |
by Nick Triggle
Each day news of more deaths is a huge source of alarm to people across the country - as well as a tragedy for the families involved.
Projections of how bad it could get have prompted strict measures to be taken, with pubs, clubs, theatres and schools closed and people told to stay at home.
A key piece of modelling which has informed government has been done by Imperial College London.
It suggested 500,000 could die if we do nothing, while the government's previous strategy to slow the spread was likely to lead to 250,000 deaths.
Instead, it is hoped the steps which have been taken, which are essentially about suppressing the virus, will limit deaths to 20,000.
In an appearance before the Health Select Committee in March, Sir Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser, said that would be "horrible", but still a "good outcome" given where we are.
Not wearing masks to protect against coronavirus is a 'big mistake,' top Chinese scientist says | Science Mag |
Gao oversees 2000 employees--one-fifth the staff size of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention--and he remains an active researcher himself. In January, he was part of a team that did the first isolation and sequencing of severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19. He co-authored two widely read papers published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that provided some of the first detailed epidemiology and clinical features of the disease, and has published three more papers on COVID-19 in The Lancet.
His team also provided important data to a joint commission between Chinese researchers and a team of international scientists, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO), that wrote a landmark report after touring the country to understand the response to the epidemic.
His research specializes in viruses that have fragile lipid membranes called envelopes--a group that includes SARS-CoV-2--and how they enter cells and also move between species.
BoJo: You Are To Blame for Number of Deaths
After the British herd immunity error in judgement … in every phase looking for victims to blame, his pandemic size failure now putting fear in society …
Austerity, the NSH and cost of lives ...
Please die to save the economy, UK Gov is ready to help ...
State vs State instead of any resemblance the Americans are fighting a common enemy: COVID-19 …
The Dis-United Chief in the White House, taking sides in a divided America: Red States vs Blue States. This ain’t over yet, grab the popcorn and watch the biggest threat to the United States of America since Abraham Lincoln vs. Stephen Douglas.
CDC asks residents of N.Y., N.J. and Connecticut to refrain from 'non-essential travel' for 14 days | NBC News |
Governors and mayors, not the federal government, have the broadest quarantine and isolation authority, as the constitution leaves that kind of police power in the hands of the states.
Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the authority to detain people suspected of having an infectious disease without getting approval from state and local officials, that authority is rarely used and experts on public health law say that any attempt to leverage that power to create a federally mandated quarantine would likely be challenged in court.
We knew Trump felt pretty uncomfortable sitting in that chair behind the desk in the Oval Office … the inscription: “The Buck Stops Here” has been replaced by the bust of Winston Churchill. Knowingly stupid, I wasn’t aware he has surrounded himself with more of the same in his room of advisors. Tweet along Mr. President, hop-a-long Lone Ranger as the Great States of America are being infected by one of so many coronaviruses that could have been quarantined in time. Defending Red States from Blue States will lead to your demise … the sooner the better. The USA has been turned around into a “shithole” nation by Hollywood’s apprentice. Nice experiment … should have been modelled by London’s Imperial College and approved by lab tests beforehand. Too Bad!
Florida Governor Bans Reporter From Coronavirus Briefings Because She Asked For Social Distancing | Politicua USA |
Reporters do vital work every single day. Without journalists and reporters on the scene, the news could become nothing more than unchallenged propaganda.
Gov. DeSantis is partially responsible for the fact that coronavirus cases have surged to over 4,000 because he refused to cancel spring break and has been slow to put other restrictions in place. The governor is helping Trump to blame the spread of the virus in Florida on New Yorkers.
Republicans are trying to downplay the virus, and the message being sent is that if anyone in the state of Florida asks for basic safety precautions, the governor will retaliate.
5 Ways a Coronavirus Pandemic Could Change the 2020 Election | NY Mag |
And China was already battling slowing growth and mounting debt loads before an epidemic forced it to lockdown entire cities, constraining the consumption of hundreds of millions of people, and pushing countless small businesses to the brink of bankruptcy. Even if the virus had been contained within the country, its resultant disruptions would have been sufficient to dampen the outlook for global growth by a modest but significant degree.
And the virus has not been contained. In fact, coronavirus cases are spiking in Iran, South Korea, and Italy, where it has incapacitated the commercial center of Milan.
COVID-19 isn’t exceptionally lethal, but, for that very reason, it is exceptionally contagious. Ordinary influenza viruses kill about 0.1 percent of those infected. The H5N1 avian flu virus had a fatality rate around 60 percent. COVID-19, by contrast, appears to kill a bit less than 2 percent of those who contract it. This makes a coronavirus diagnosis less harrowing for the individual, but it also makes the bug’s emergence a more profound threat to global public health than many more fatal ailments. The severely ill don’t travel much; the dead shake few hands. But the median victim of coronavirus may not know that they are sick at all for the first few days the virus is incubating inside them. And at least some reports suggest individuals can spread the disease even before they are symptomatic. Regardless, many who do present with symptoms will be unable to distinguish the disease from the common cold. In other words, the virus is nonlethal enough to spread widely, but sufficiently deadly to be experienced as a public health crisis and mass killer of the elderly or already infirm.
China’s heavy-handed quarantine measures appear to have been somewhat effective. New cases in the country are declining. But it’s not clear whether this trend will survive the resumption of business as usual, which the Chinese authorities are understandably anxious to commence. Meanwhile, COVID-19’s arrival in Milan — a financial hub and tourist haven frequented by border-hopping E.U. elites — threatens to hasten the its ascent to the status of an official global pandemic.
Ryan Avent, a columnist for The Economist, outlines the potential economic fallout of this increasingly likely scenario.
