It Appears The Perpetrators Of The French Chloroquine Heist Were Very Well Informed

asiatimes |  What’s going on in the fifth largest economy in the world arguably points to a major collusion scandal in which the French government is helping Big Pharma to profit from the expansion of Covid-19. Informed French citizens are absolutely furious about it.

My initial question to a serious, unimpeachable Paris source, jurist Valerie Bugault, was about the liaisons dangereuses between Macronism and Big Pharma and especially about the mysterious “disappearance” – more likely outright theft – of all the stocks of chloroquine in possession of the French government.

Respected Professor Christian Perronne talked about the theft live in one of France’s 24/7 info channels: “The central pharmacy for the hospitals announced today that they were facing a total rupture of stocks, that they were pillaged.”

With input from another, anonymous source, it’s now possible to establish a timeline that puts in much-needed perspective the recent actions of the French government.

Here’s the timeline:

On January 13, Agnes Buzyn, still France’s Health Minister, classifies chloroquine as a “poisonous substance,” from now on only available by prescription. An astonishing move, considering that it has been sold off the shelf in France for half a century.

On March 16, the Macron government orders a partial lockdown. There’s not a peep about chloroquine. Police initially are not required to wear masks; most have been stolen anyway, and there are not enough masks even for health workers. In 2011 France had nearly 1.5 billion masks: 800 million surgical masks and 600 million masks for health professionals generally. 

But then, over the years, the strategic stocks were not renewed, to please the EU and to apply the Maastricht criteria, which limited membership in the Growth and Stability Pact to countries whose budget deficits did not exceed 3% of GDP. One of those in charge at the time was Jerome Salomon, now a scientific counselor to the Macron government.    

On March 17, Agnes Buzyn says she has learned the spread of Covid-19 will be a major tsunami, for which the French health system has no solution. She also says it had been her understanding that the Paris mayoral election “would not take place” and that it was, ultimately, “a masquerade.”

What she does not say is that she didn’t go public at the time she was running because the whole political focus by the Macron political machine was on winning the “masquerade.” The first round of the election meant nothing, as Covid-19 was advancing. The second round was postponed indefinitely. She had to know about the impending healthcare disaster. But as a candidate of the Macron machine she did not go public in timely fashion.

In quick succession:

The Macron government refuses to apply mass testing, as practiced with success in South Korea and Germany.

Le Monde and the French state health agency characterize Raoult’s research as fake news, before issuing a retraction.

Professor Perrone reveals on the 24/7 LCI news channel that the stock of chloroquine at the French central pharmacy has been stolen.

Thanks to a tweet by Elon Musk, President Trump says chloroquine should be available to all Americans. Sufferers of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, who already have supply problems with the only drug that offers them relief, set social media afire with their panic.

US doctors and other medical professionals take to hoarding the medicine for the use of themselves and those close to them, faking prescriptions to indicate they are for patients with lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.

Morocco buys the stock of chloroquine from Sanofi in Casablanca.

Pakistan decides to increase its production of chloroquine to be sent to China.

Switzerland discards the total lockdown of its population; goes for mass testing and fast treatment; and accuses France of practicing  “spectacle politics.”

Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, having had himself treated with chloroquine, without any government input, directly calls Sanofi so they may deliver chloroquine to Nice hospitals.

Because of Raoult’s research, a large-scale chloroquine test finally starts in France, under the – predictable – direction of INSERM, which wants to “remake the experiments in other independent medical centers.” This will take at least an extra six weeks – as the Elysee Palace’s scientific council now mulls the extension of France’s total lockdown to … six weeks.

If joint use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin proves definitely effective among the most gravely ill, quarantines may be reduced in select clusters.

The only French company that still manufactures chloroquine is under judicial intervention. That puts the chloroquine hoarding and theft into full perspective. It will take time for these stocks to be replenished, thus allowing Big Pharma the leeway to have what it wants: a costly solution.  

It appears the perpetrators of the chloroquine theft were very well informed.

The U.K. No Longer Considers COVID-19 A High Consequence Infectious Disease

armstrongeconomics |  One of the people who has assisted in this panic over the coronavirus has been Neil Ferguson, who led the @imperialcollege authors who warned of 500,000 deaths and 2.2 million people would be infected from the coronavirus. Now, low and behold, Ferguson has himself tested positive for the virus and has suddenly announced a change of view. Ferguson has been a major contributing factor in causing the world economy to collapse. He has advocated locking down the economy which has been behind the movement around the world.

I find this very curious that he would advocate shutting down the economy when he knows the economic damage this would have. The number of people whose jobs will be lost, and small businesses destroyed around the world is incalculable. Ferguson now says both that the U.K. should have enough ICU beds and that the coronavirus will probably kill under 20,000 people in the U.K.  and interestingly he now admits that more than half of whom would have died by the end of the year in any case because they were so old and sick. Ferguson now predicts that the epidemic in the U.K. will peak and subside within “two to three weeks” after advocating 18+ months of quarantine would be necessary.

As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK 

Dr. Heather Heying and Bandit Bret Weinstein Hold Forth On The Coronavirus Situation

nakedcapitalism |   We can make a highly suggestive correlation between globalizers and COVID-19 if we look at two simple maps. First, as is well known, one of the main distinctions between the places that are “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward” (i.e., globalizers) and the dull provincials in flyover is the possession of passports. (A passport is a likely marker for the sort of person who asks “Why don’t they just leave?”; “front-row kids,” in Chris Arnade’s parlance, as distinguished from, say, grocery workers, who he calls “back-row” kids.) Here is a map of passport ownership by state: 

The correlation is rather neat, don’t you think? It makes sense that the first case was in a globalist, passport-owning city like Seattle on the West Coast; and it makes sense that the world capital of globalization, passport-owning New York City, now has a major outbreak.

Oh, and the ability to travel by air correlates to income (a proxy for class)

If Elites Had Led With This Nut-Shrivelling Horror, We Would All Be United In World War C!!!

SCMP |  Doctors in the central Chinese city of Wuhan plan to embark on a long-term study of

the effects of the coronavirus on the male reproductive system, building on small-scale research indicating that the pathogen could affect sex hormone levels in men.

 

Though still preliminary and not peer reviewed, the study is the first clinical observation of the potential impact of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, on the male reproductive system, especially among younger groups.

In a paper published on the preprint research platform medRxiv.org, the researchers – from Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University and the Hubei Clinical Research Centre for Prenatal Diagnosis and Birth Health – said they analysed blood samples from 81 men aged 20 to 54 who tested positive for the coronavirus and were hospitalised in January.

 

The median age of the participants was 38 and roughly 90 per cent of them had only mild symptoms. The samples were collected in the last days of their stay in hospital.

Using the samples, the team looked at the ratio of testosterone to luteinising hormone (T/LH). A low T/LH ratio can be a sign of hypogonadism, which in men is a malfunction of the testicles that could lead to lower sex hormone production.

The average ratio for the Covid-19 patients was 0.74, about half the normal level.

Testosterone is the main male sex hormone critical for the development of primary and secondary sexual characteristics including testes, muscle, bone mass and body hair. Luteinising hormone is found in both men and women, and best known for its ability to trigger ovulation.

 

 

 

It's Only An Emergency When The Elites Say It's An Emergency...,

securityreform |  On March 13, the White House declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency. The profound impact of the outbreak will persist for months, and steps to contain and mitigate its effects have been hampered by congressional, presidential, and federal agency malfeasance. In every sense, the crisis is both national and an emergency. 

In that respect, the situation differs markedly from the nearly three dozen ‘national emergencies’ that the U.S. government currently recognizes. As a result of congressional indifference and the expansion of the national security state, Donald Trump today claims extraordinary emergency powers to address ‘emergencies’ that were declared as far back as 1979, or in response to issues ranging from “the anchorage and movement of vessels” to the U.S.-Mexico border. In terms of urgency, these are outliers. Most of the national emergencies that remain active are simply procedural vehicles to slap sanctions on foreign government officials. All of this begs the question: are any of these ‘emergencies’ at all relevant to the health, well-being, or livelihoods — to say nothing of the actual physical security — of the majority of Americans? When weighed against a genuine public health crisis like COVID-19, do these events even constitute emergencies, in any meaningful sense of the word? 

“... the bipartisan security framework that allows the president to declare emergencies with virtually unchecked impunity is itself a perpetuation of working-class insecurity.”

Taking a hard look at what the U.S. government considers a national emergency — and who has the power to define them[1] — says a great deal about the conditions that our government and the leaders of both parties deem to be ordinary and sustainable. The record is not encouraging. 

None of the 34 currently active national emergencies relates to the persistent crises of healthcare access, social mobility, and student debt. No emergency proclamation addresses the immanent risk of climate change. Instead, each emergency was declared by the president (Republican or Democrat) over the narrow policy preferences or political interests of the national security establishment. As it turns out, the bipartisan security framework that allows the president to declare emergencies with virtually unchecked impunity is itself a perpetuation of working-class insecurity.  

Emergencies all the way down

The U.S. has been in a state of persistent national emergency since November 1979, when President Jimmy Carter declared the first national emergency of the modern era, in response to the U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran. Following the declaration, Carter seized Iranian government assets and set off on an unsuccessful covert mission to free the U.S. diplomatic staff and intelligence operatives held captive in Tehran. Without doubt, the hostage-taking constituted an acute crisis for those involved, but compared to the steady erosion of personal dignity and economic stability caused by the austerity policies of the post-war period, such an event is hardly an emergency, and it is by no means national. 

Fast forward to the present (and several dozen ‘emergencies’ later), in February 2019, President Trump declared that “the current situation at the southern border presents a border security and humanitarian crisis that threatens core national security interests and constitutes a national emergency.” Thus, a caravan predominantly consisting of tired, hungry, and poor asylum seekers and migrants was deemed to constitute a ‘national emergency’. Meanwhile, the moral emergency presented by the ineptly mismanaged and criminal system of child detention centers that was a byproduct of this border policy was entirely ignored.

Not only do these emergency declarations signal the moral indifference of the national security establishment, they also reveal the overlap between parochial military, diplomatic, and corporate interests.

Look Here Magne, STOP PLAYING! Get These Peasants Back To Work!!!

bloomberg |  The billionaire Tom Golisano was smoking a Padron cigar on his patio in Florida on Tuesday afternoon. He was worried.

“The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people,” said Golisano, founder and chairman of the payroll processor Paychex Inc. “I have a very large concern that if businesses keep going along the way they’re going then so many of them will have to fold.”

President Donald Trump says he doesn’t want the cure for the Covid-19 pandemic “to be worse than the problem,” and some of America’s wealthiest people and executives are echoing his rallying cry. They want to revive an economy that could face its worst quarterly drop ever -- even if it means pulling back on social distancing measures that public health officials say can help stop coronavirus. These investors aren’t prizing profits over lives, they say, they’re just willing to risk some horrors to avoid others.

“You’re picking the better of two evils,” said Golisano, who wants people to go back to their offices in states that have been relatively spared by the coronavirus, but remain at home in hot spots. “You have to weigh the pros and cons.”

In New York, where hospitals are at a tipping point and getting pummeled by patients, Governor Andrew Cuomo says the economy shouldn’t be restarted “at the cost of human life” and that he’s developing a plan that “lets younger people get back to work.”

The question is when they should do it.

Trump, guided by a group of hedge fund and private equity titans, wants the country up and running again by Easter, though public health officials warn that’s too soon for a virus that’s killed more than 18,400 and infected at least 400,000 worldwide. Only companies with less than 500 employees are required to provide paid sick leave for workers out with Covid-19. Economists from Northwestern University calculated that keeping social distancing practices in place until cases decline could save 600,000 lives nationwide.

Even MORE Fascinating When Shit Don't...., (Run Downhill That Is)

nola |  Toilet paper shortages – and hoarding – during the coronavirus outbreak have apparently led to the clogging of New Orleans area sewer pipes, as residents have increasingly turned to nonflushable paper in the bathroom. 

The Sewerage & Water Board said Friday it has been dealing with more sewer backups than normal, and urged residents to "think before they flush." 

"As a reminder, only human waste and toilet paper are flushable," an S&WB spokeswoman said. "Baby wipes, paper towels, and even 'flushable' wipes may clog your sewer line and cause overflows." 

The Jefferson Parish sewerage officials said the same thing this week. Residents living in apartments and other concentrated areas need to be especially careful. 

The backups come as New Orleans area grocers have struggled in recent weeks to keep toilet paper in stock. Shoppers at Walmart, Rouses and elsewhere have been seen filling entire carts with the toilet paper packages that have been placed on shelves.

Others seeking the household staple have had to go without. The scenario has led to physical fights in some stores, and now, to sewer backups.

Fascinating The Unexpected Ways That Shit Runs Downhill...,

CTH |  How weak and tenuous does a corporate financial position need to be such that being closed for one week means informing all nationwide landlords of your inability to pay the rent next week?   Consider this example: 

  

CALIFORNIA – The Cheesecake Factory, one of the most popular sit-down restaurant chains in the country, says it will not be able to make upcoming rent payments for any of its storefronts on April 1 because of significant loss of income due to the coronavirus crisis.

[…]  Company chairman and CEO David Overton writes, “Due to these extraordinary events, I am asking for your patience, and frankly, your help.” He continues, “we appreciate our landlords’ understanding given the exigency of the current situation.” The letter says that the company hopes to resume paying rent as soon as possible.

[…]  The Cheesecake Factory was founded in Beverly Hills in 1972 and maintains its original location on Beverly Drive, with 39 locations in California. In total, it operates 294 restaurants in 39 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Toronto, Canada. In 2019, the company also acquired Phoenix-based Fox Restaurants, including North Italia, Flower Child, and The Henry. Most of the company’s landlords are malls, including Simon and Westfield.  (read more)

This is one small example; however, it is an opportunity to imagine the beginning of a process were Blue team corporations start to tell Red team financiers they are refusing to pay their debts.

Why Is Democratic Presidential Candidate Joltin Joe Obidenbama Missing In Action?

jacobinmag |  Let’s look at the state of things for a second. The world is currently grappling with a deadly global pandemic, one that has already led to cities across the world being placed into lockdown, and looks to be leading to an unprecedented economic crisis. Despite bungling the response in a way that could be called criminal, the president has now gotten out in front, holding daily press briefings that have allowed him to feed misinformation directly to the public, and taking steps that, while grossly inadequate for the moment, have already outstripped the Obama administration’s economic response in 2008 — with the result that, for the moment at least, a large majority of Americans now approves of Trump’s handling of the crisis.

Being an election year, there are several things a Democratic challenger should be doing. One is exuding a sense of calm, stability, and competence, to convey “presidentialness” and contrast with Trump’s chaotic behavior. Being the Democratic Party’s prospective leader, they should be helping to set the legislative agenda and drive the party’s ideas about the response to this unprecedented emergency. And they should be communicating with the public as much as possible, providing reassurance and guidance while denying the president a monopoly of the airwaves.

Biden, like Sanders, first held a press conference on March 12, the day the crisis first became real for many people, which started half an hour late due to technical difficulties. He then held a virtual town hall the day after, which saw Biden falsely claim credit for the Endangered Species Act before wandering off camera, an event so marred by technical difficulties that the “disjoined effort,” in Biden’s words, had to be ended early. Then came the debate, in which Biden was allowed by the moderators to brazenly lie about almost every aspect of his record, a contrast from debates in the past.

In the lead up to the last Tuesday’s elections — even as the coronavirus death toll climbed, cities went into lockdown, and health and government officials urged people to stay inside at all costs — Biden’s campaign encouraged voters to turn out, falsely assuring them it was safe. The result was a day of chaos and confusion that almost certainly assisted the virus’s continued spread. Biden then gave a brief victory speech that ended in another odd moment that quickly went viral, now par for the course for the campaign.

And until today, that was the last almost anyone saw of the Democratic frontrunner. For almost a whole week, as the crisis has exponentially worsened by day, Biden seemed to have vanished off the face off the earth, surfacing only last Friday in a call with the press. He was “desperately” trying to “be in daily or at least, you know, significant contact with the American people and communicate what I would be doing,” he told reporters, as if regular, successful livestreaming hadn’t already been accomplished by both his opponent and millions of teenagers.

Gov. Cuomo Overplayed His Hand And In The Process Badly Played Himself

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo blasted FEMA during a press conference for sending 400 medical ventilators when his state needs 30,000. 

However, in 2015 the New York State Department of Health specifically studied the issue, warned about a critical lack of ventilators during a pandemic, and the New York Governor made a specific decision NOT to order them: [pdf link here]

sicsempertyrannis |   For the past week it appeared that NY Governor Cuomo realized it was more important to be an adult and eschew partisan politics. That was then. He is now in full partisan panic pandemonium. He is now accusing the Feds of dragging their feet in getting NYC 30,000 ventilators. 

Here is the quote:

"What are you doing sending 400 when I need 30,000 ventilators," Cuomo said. "You're missing the magnitude of the problem."

No Cuomo, you do not understand. For starters, you do not have 10,000 patients on a ventilator now. The number of patients who test positive does not mean that all will require a ventilator. The numbers available so far indicate most who test positive for corona virus are not being hospitalized. That means the numbers for ventilators are not going to skyrocket and immediately outstrip the existing capability.

But Cuomo is missing a more important point. Shame on him. He has a duty to help educate his constituency. Let us start with the production reality--you cannot magically produce ventilators overnight. The existing manufacturers have limited, not UNLIMITED, capabilities to expand production. Bringing other companies, like GM on line, will require about a month to retool and repurpose machinery and quality control techs.

Producing the machines is the easy part. It is the human infrastructure that is the problem. If there are 30,000 ventilators up and running then you need an additional 45,000 ICU qualified nurses and an additional 22,500 Respiratory Therapy Technicians. (I am assuming one ICU nurse can handle two patients per shift. There are three eight hour shifts per day. I am assuming that one Respiratory Therapy Tech can handle 8 ventilators per shift and there are three eight hour shifts per day).  

 

Shouldn't Gov. Cuomo Be Managing and Solving The Rikers Island Coronavirus Nexus?

No Corporate Bailouts: In The Land Of Opportunity, If You Struggle, You Can Make It!

Thank You Rich People For All Your Many Gifts

NYTimes | About 50 guests gathered on March 5 at a home in the stately suburb of Westport, Conn., to toast the hostess on her 40th birthday and greet old friends, including one visiting from South Africa. They shared reminiscences, a lavish buffet and, unknown to anyone, the coronavirus.

Then they scattered.

The Westport soirée — Party Zero in southwestern Connecticut and beyond — is a story of how, in the Gilded Age of money, social connectedness and air travel, a pandemic has spread at lightning speed. The partygoers — more than half of whom are now infected — left that evening for Johannesburg, New York City and other parts of Connecticut and the United States, all seeding infections on the way.

Westport, a town of 28,000 on the Long Island Sound, did not have a single known case of the coronavirus on the day of the party. It had 85 on Monday, up more than 40-fold in 11 days.

Worry, rumors and recriminations engulfed the town. Political leaders fielded hundreds of emails and phone calls from residents terrified that their children or vulnerable family members had been exposed. Who threw the party, and who attended? They wanted to know. Rumors flew that some residents were telling health officials they had attended the party so they could obtain a scarce test.

Officials refused to disclose the names of the hosts or any guests, citing federal and state privacy rules. Mr. Marpe posted a videotaped statement to the town website on March 20. “The fact of the matter is that this could have been any one of us, and rumor-mongering and vilification of individuals is not who we are as a civil community,” he said.

As the disease spread, many residents kept mum, worried about being ostracized by their neighbors and that their children would be kicked off coveted sports teams or miss school events.

One local woman compared going public with a Covid-19 diagnosis to “having an S.T.D.”

“I don’t think that’s a crazy comparison,” said Will Haskell, the state senator who represents Westport. He has been fielding frantic phone calls from constituents.

Most residents were exercising recommended vigilance, Mr. Haskell said, but one call that stuck out to him was from a woman awaiting test results whose entire family had been exposed to the virus. “She wanted to know whether or not to tell her friends and social network,” he said, because she was worried about “social stigma.”

Hot Zone In The Heartland

thebulletin | Before 1990, there had been only two BSL-4 labs in the United States: one at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, and another at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D.), in Fort Detrick, Maryland. In the nineteen-nineties, three were added. In the first seven years after 9/11, the United States opened ten more. In a 2007 report, Keith Rhodes, then the chief technologist in the Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.)—the independent watchdog that conducts research for Congress—observed that there was “a major proliferation of high-containment BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs is taking place in the United States.” Rhodes counted fifteen known American BSL-4 labs (including N.B.A.F.) but suggested that there could be others; the number of BSL-3 labs appeared to have increased even more. “No single federal agency knows how many such labs there are in the United States,” Rhodes wrote, and “no one is responsible for determining the aggregate risks associated with the expansion of these high-containment labs.” In theory, the Federal Select Agent Program keeps tabs, since any lab in possession of a substance on its list has to register; a 2017 report from the G.A.O. counted two hundred and seventy-six high-containment select-agent labs in the United States. But the actual number is almost certainly higher, because not every dangerous pathogen is on the federal list.

In the summer of 2008, at the same time that D.H.S. was choosing a site for N.B.A.F., the F.B.I. announced that it had found the sender of the anthrax letters: Bruce Ivins, a mentally unstable biodefense researcher with high-level security clearances at U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D. Ivins died of an apparent suicide before he could be officially charged; subsequently, journalists have raised questions about some of the evidence against him. All the same, the possibility of Ivins’s involvement raised disturbing questions for those who work in biodefense. “A more ominous threat than terrorists taking up biology,” the epidemiologist Ali Khan wrote, in his 2016 book “The Next Pandemic,” could be “biologists taking up terrorism.”

Manhattan is surrounded by a rolling sea of golden grass—the Flint Hills, North America’s last remaining tallgrass prairie. “No grass anywhere can put weight on cattle more quickly or more economically,” Jim Joy, a historian of ranching, wrote. In the nineteenth century, cattlemen from Texas and elsewhere began driving their herds overland to graze in the Flint Hills. Today, Kansas is at the geographical center of the American beef industry. It is the third-largest cattle-producing state in the country, and its immediate neighbors—Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Colorado—are all in the top ten.

During and after the N.B.A.F. site-selection process, many scientists found it baffling that anyone would consider installing a high-containment animal-disease laboratory in the middle of livestock country. “It doesn’t make sense—it’s just insane,” Laura H. Kahn, a physician and research scholar at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, told me. Abigail Conrad, who was a developmental biologist at K-State when D.H.S. was making its choice, said that the decision “defies reason”; her husband, Gary, also a biologist, called it “beyond ludicrous,” “almost criminal,” and “genuinely stupid.”

Once infected with foot-and-mouth, animals with cloven hooves—cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, deer, bison—come down with fevers and painful blisters. A cow’s milk production can decline. Adult animals can lose weight, and young ones can die. An animal that recovers can still transmit the disease to others. According to the authors of a 2013 paper in the journal Preventive Veterinary Medicine, in countries that are officially foot-and-mouth-free but experience occasional outbreaks, “the costs involved in regaining free status have been enormous.” During the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak in England, exclusion zones made travel difficult; tourism from overseas declined by ten per cent. The ultimate cost of containing the outbreak was nearly five billion in today’s dollars. Its source remains undetermined.

In 2007, Britain experienced another, smaller foot-and-mouth outbreak, with only eight confirmed cases. In that instance, investigators were able to trace the infection to the Pirbright Institute, a world-renowned high-containment animal-disease research facility in Surrey. A building at Pirbright had an aging, faulty drainpipe; heavy rains probably washed the live virus from the defective drain out into the open, where truck tires picked it up. According to the G.A.O., one reason to confine foot-and-mouth study to an island is that “there is always some risk of a release from any biocontainment facility.” In fact, for just this reason, foot-and-mouth disease cannot be brought onto the U.S. mainland without the explicit permission of the Secretary of Agriculture.

Pandemic Root Cause: Infected Rich Asses Played Hide And Seek Among The Masses

slate |  Professor John P.A. Ioannidis of Stanford University—by reputation one of the smartest people in fields ranging from epidemiology to biomedical data science—published a somewhat controversial piece in Stat News last week that warned of the possibility that our best efforts might end up backfiring:

If the health system does become overwhelmed, the majority of the extra deaths may not be due to coronavirus but to other common diseases and conditions such as heart attacks, strokes, trauma, bleeding, and the like that are not adequately treated. If the level of the epidemic does overwhelm the health system and extreme measures have only modest effectiveness, then flattening the curve may make things worse: Instead of being overwhelmed during a short, acute phase, the health system will remain overwhelmed for a more protracted period.

Ioannidis’ piece got some pushback by public health experts who worried that his questioning might make people less likely to follow instructions to self-isolate and stay indoors. But even his critics seem to agree that it is absolutely critical for us to have better data. 

We are currently quite lacking in data and sorely in need of it. We need to know many more things about the virus and what it does to the human body, including whom it affects and how to treat it. We need better testing to figure out how many people in the United States have it, even as the people on the front lines are realizing that they themselves have to shift their efforts away from containment approaches and toward treatment and mitigation of spread. 

We also need data on how our current approach is working and data on what the costs of this approach really are. We need to know how much our current version of social distancing, with everyone still going to the grocery store every few days, is affecting the rate of spread. We need to figure out how much people being stuck at home might lead to an uptick in domestic abuse or suicide. We need to know if more women are giving birth at home, and if more women are being forced to carry pregnancies that they don’t want as their right to abortion is interrupted. We need to know how the people who are laid off from their jobs are getting food, and if they are still willing to access health care when the financial cost of doing so might be very uncertain. We are all engaged in an enormous, high-stakes nationwide experiment right now, and we need all of this data to answer the question: Are we doing the right thing? 

And still, the questions remain: How long can we really do this for? What else could we do? What should we do next? 

Academic physicians Aaron Carroll and Ashish Jha have a piece in the Atlantic in which they consider the various possible scenarios in front of us. The extremes are helpfully familiar—on one side, do nothing, which we’re already doing better than; on the other side, stay like this for the next 18 months or so, the current accepted timeline until there’s a vaccine. But Carroll and Jha argue that there is a third path available, somewhere in the middle of these two strategies. They think that once we do the social distancing necessary to get the initial numbers under control (which will still take time), we can create a new type of plan, a middle road that keeps public health manageable without keeping the country completely shut down.

Rich Mexicans FUBAR'd Poor Mexicans - All Around The World The Same Song...,

LATimes |  Each winter, some of Mexico’s wealthiest residents flock to the snowy slopes of Colorado to ski, shop and socialize.

This year, at least 14 — and probably many more — came home infected with the coronavirus.

In a country that has not yet been hard hit by the pandemic, the travelers have become a focal point of efforts to prevent the virus from spreading widely.

Several of Mexico’s most prominent business leaders — including a banking executive, the chairman of Mexico’s stock exchange and the chief executive of the company that makes Jose Cuervo tequila — tested positive for the virus after traveling to Vail, a ski resort west of Denver.

Public health authorities are now scrambling to find others who recently returned from the resort, including an estimated 400 people who flew on two charter planes from Colorado to the state of Jalisco. 

“We need these people to understand that they have a very high probability of having acquired the virus and are a potential risk,” Jalisco Gov. Enrique Alfaro said in a video on Facebook in which he implored those who made the trip to contact health authorities. 

“We don’t want this to be the start of a major coronavirus spread,” added Fernando Petersen, Jalisco’s top health official. 

The state’s health department said that it has already contacted 73 passengers on those flights and that roughly 40% of them report coronavirus-like symptoms but have not yet been tested.

Of Jalisco’s 27 confirmed coronavirus patients, 11 had been in Vail in recent weeks, the department said. 

The frantic effort to find the ski trip participants has highlighted an uncomfortable fact: It is people wealthy enough to travel outside the country who have brought the coronavirus back to mostly poor Mexico. Yet if the disease spreads, it is those with the least who will probably suffer the most. 

As of Friday, Mexico had confirmed just one coronavirus death, that of a 41-year-old man who had recently traveled to the United States and — to the dismay of health authorities — later attended a rock concert at a stadium in Mexico City.

Relax, Just Let It Happen...,

libertyblitzkrieg |  It didn’t take long for the most opportunistic, nefarious and corrupt actors in the U.S. to turn a pandemic crisis into another massive power grab attempt. We’ve seen it before; after 9/11 and also throughout the response to the financial crisis a decade ago. The irredeemable sociopaths who always make the big, important decisions used those crises to consolidate wealth and power. They’re going for it again.

There are many examples, but let me list a few:

– The EARN IT bill, by which senators are attempting to destroy widespread public use of encryption, i.e. private communications. (EFF)

– The White House and the CDC are asking Facebook, Google and other tech giants to give them greater access to Americans’ smartphone location data. (CNBC)

– The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies. (Politico)

– U.S. Senators are attempting to use the crisis as an opportunity to pull off a gigantic corporate coup. (Matt Stoller, BIG)

We often get distracted debating the implications of Fed actions, and in the process lose sight of the bigger picture. The real question we need to be asking is why do we allow a handful of unelected banker welfare agents the right to shape our entire world? It’s a crazy system, and until we start questioning the underlying premises of everything about our world, we’ll remain confused and subjugated.

Elites Conspiring to Create A Permanent Underclass Who'll Work For Peanuts

unz |  This is the contempt these people have for you and me and everyone else who isn’t a part of their elitist gaggle of reprobates. Here’s a clip from another article at the WSJ that helps to show how the financial media is pushing this gigantic handout to corporate America:.

“The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and banking regulators deserve congratulations for their bold, necessary actions to provide liquidity to the U.S. financial system amid the coronavirus crisis. But more remains to be done. We thus recommend: (1) immediate congressional action …. to authorize the Treasury to use the Exchange Stabilization Fund to guarantee prime money-market funds, (2) regulatory action to effect temporary reductions in bank capital and liquidity requirements… (NOTE–So now the banks don’t need to hold capital against their loans?) .. additional Fed lending to banks and nonbanks….(Note -by “nonbanks”, does the author mean underwater hedge funds?)…

We recommend that the Fed take further actions as lender of last resort. First, it should re-establish the Term Auction Facility, used in the 2008 crisis, allowing depository institutions to borrow against a broad range of collateral at an auction price (Note–They want to drop the requirement for good Triple A collateral.) … Second, it should consider further exercising its Section 13(3) authority to provide additional liquidity to nonbanks, potentially including purchases of corporate debt through a special-purpose vehicle” (“Do More to Avert a Liquidity Crisis”, Wall Street Journal )

This isn’t a bailout, it’s a joke, and there’s no way Congress should approve these measures, particularly the merging of the US Treasury with the cutthroat Fed. That’s a prescription for disaster! The Fed needs to be abolished not embraced as a state institution. It’s madness!

And look how the author wants to set up an special-purpose vehicle (SPV) so the accounting chicanery can be kept off the books which means the public won’t know how much money is being flushed down the toilet trying to resuscitate these insolvent corporations whose executives are still living high on the hog on the money they stole from credulous investors. This whole scam stinks to high heaven!

Meanwhile America’s working people will get a whopping $1,000 bucks to tide them over until the debts pile up to the rafters and they’re forced to rob the neighborhood 7-11 to feed the kids. How fair is that?

And don’t kid yourself: This isn’t a bailout, it’s the elitist’s political agenda aimed at creating a permanent underclass who’ll work for peanuts just to eek out a living.

The Plague is US

off-guardian |  The outward story of The Plague revolves around a malignant disease that breaks out in a town that is quarantined when the authorities issue a state of emergency. After first denying that they have a problem, the people gradually panic and feel painfully isolated. 

Death fear runs rampant, much like today with the coronavirus. The authorities declare martial law as they warn that the situation is dire, people must be careful of associating, especially in groups, and they better obey orders or very many will die. So the town is cordoned off.

Before this happens and the first signs that something is amiss emerge, the citizens of the town of Oran, Algeria remain oblivious, for they “work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich.” Bored by their habits, heavily drugging themselves with drink, and watching many movies to distract themselves, they failed to grasp the significance of “the squelchy roundness of a still-warm body” of the plague-bearing rats that emerge from their underworld to die in their streets.

“It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of their secret humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails.” To them the plague is “unthinkable,” an abstraction, until all their denials are swept aside as the truth emerges from the sewers and their neighbors and families die from the disease. 

“Stupidity has a way of getting its way;” the narrator, Dr. Rieux tells us, “as we should see if we were not always so wrapped up in ourselves …. plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

The American people are wrapped up in themselves. Nor do they recognize the true rats. They are easily surprised; fooled would be a better word. 

Camus uses a physical plague to disguise his real subject, which is the way people react when they are physically trapped by human rats who demand they obey orders and stay physically and mentally compliant as their freedom is taken from them.

You Peasants Are All In This Together

off-guardian |  The rush to elevate self-isolation to Olympian heights as a way to combat the spread of COVID-19 has gotten to the celebrities. Sports figures are proudly tweeting and taking pictures from hotel rooms (Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton being a case in point). Comics are doing their shows from home. Thespians are extolling the merits of such isolation and the dangers of the contagion.

All speak from the summit of comfort, the podium of pampered wealth: embrace social distancing; embrace self-isolation. Bonds of imagined solidarity are forged. If we can do it, so can you.

The message of warning varies in tones of condescension and encouragement. Taylor Swift prefers to focus on her cat. “For Meredith, self-quarantining is a way of life,” she posted on Instagram. “Be like Meredith.” Meredith, of course, had little choice in the matter.

John Legend delivered a concert on Instagram, wife Chrissy Teigen beside towelled and quaffing wine. “Social distancing is important, but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring. I did a little at-home performance to help lift your spirits.”

Then there was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who actually boasted two miniature ponies. “We will get through this together.” So good of him to let us know.

Others, like model Naomi Campbell, can barely hide their revelations, moments of acute self-awakening amidst crisis. 

A long dormant, cerebral world, awoken by a virus. 

Similarly, singer Lady Gaga has found that within that deodorised, heavily marketed form of celebrity is the heart of a human. “This is reminding me I think a lot of us,” she reflected on Instagram “what it is to both feel like and be like a human being.”

Self-isolation has seen the rich with their entourages making an escape for holiday homes and vast retreats. Then come the eccentric and the slightly ludicrous options: the well-stocked and equipped bunker; the safe room. Such an approach is far more representative of the estrangement between haves and have-nots.

St. Louis Fed Calls For $2.5 Trillion Fiat Stimulus To Offset Controlavirus Lockdown

bloomberg |  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard predicted the U.S. unemployment rate may hit 30% in the second quarter because of shutdowns to combat the coronavirus, with an unprecedented 50% drop in gross domestic product.

Bullard called for a powerful fiscal response to replace the $2.5 trillion in lost income that quarter to ensure a strong eventual U.S. recovery, adding the Fed would be poised to do more to ensure markets function during a period of high volatility.

“Everything is on the table” for the Fed as far as additional lending programs, Bullard said in a telephone interview Sunday from St. Louis. “There is more that we can do if necessary” with existing emergency authority. “There is probably much more in the months ahead depending on where Congress wants to go.”

Bullard’s grave assessment of the world’s largest economy underscores the critical need for Congress and the White House to quickly find agreement on a massive aid program. The Fed last week restarted financial crisis-era programs to help the commercial paper and money markets, after cutting interest rates to near zero and pledging to boost its holdings of Treasuries by at least $500 billion and of mortgage securities by at least $200 billion.

 “This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in the second quarter,” Bullard said. “The overall goal is to keep everyone, households and businesses, whole” with government support. “It is a huge shock and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under control.”

The U.S. central bank bought $272 billion of government debt last week, of the more than $500 billion authorized, which Bullard emphasized should not be seen as a limit.

14 Million Newly Unemployed: These Peasants Have No Rights The 9% Is Bound To Acknowledge

NYTimes |  The rumor unsettled Deborah Santamaria.

A fellow janitor at 555 California Street, a 52-story office tower in San Francisco’s financial district, told her he heard that a floor of the building was being closed because a worker had contracted the novel coronavirus. At 63, Ms. Santamaria counted herself among those most vulnerable to a virus that had killed thousands worldwide and was rapidly spreading across the United States.

Her supervisor at Able Services, the contractor that employs her, reassured her that nothing was wrong, she said.

It was not until five days later that a news article appeared saying that Wells Fargo had temporarily evacuated its offices in the building after an employee had tested positive for the coronavirus.

The bank had notified building management, which alerted the cleaning contractor. But according to the employees and their union representatives, no one had told the janitors.

“I felt as if I didn’t matter,” said Ms. Santamaria, who earns $22 an hour.

While many Americans are fleeing their offices to avoid any contact with the coronavirus, low-wage janitors are sometimes being asked to do the opposite. Although millions of Californians have been ordered to shelter in place, janitors are still being asked to go into offices to battle the invisible germs that threaten public health, even as those germs, and the new, powerful cleaning solutions they are being asked to use, may endanger their own health.

They often operate without specialized protective gear. And the increasing demand for their services is adding new stress and risks.

Janitors cleaning the Amazon headquarters in Seattle complained that a new disinfectant they were asked to use made their eyes and skin burn. In San Francisco, janitors said they have been asked to clean offices without having been told that people who had or were exposed to the virus had worked there.

Janitors wonder why they are left in the dark when companies go to great lengths to ensure that the tech, finance and other workers occupying the buildings they clean are aware of the most remote possibility of coming into contact with the virus. It shows, they say, how disparities play out in a public health crisis — how their lives sometimes seem to be valued less than those of people with resources and power.

“None of our families should be treated as second-class citizens,” Olga Miranda, the president of the Service Employees International Union Local 87, told the janitors at 555 California last week. She had gathered the largely immigrant work force in a plaza in front of the building and told them to walk off the job to protest the cleaning company’s failure to notify them about the coronavirus case.

Coronapocalypse Expendables

themarshallproject |  In Houston, the massive county jail has stopped admitting people arrested for certain low-level crimes. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, people who usually spend their days fighting with each other—public defenders and prosecutors—joined forces to get 75 people released from jail in a single day. And outside Oakland, California, jailers are turning to empty hotel rooms to make sure the people they let out have a place to go.

Across the country, the coronavirus outbreak is transforming criminal justice in the most transient and turbulent part of the system: local jails. Run mostly by county sheriffs, jails hold an ever-changing assortment of people—those who are awaiting trial and cannot afford to pay bail; those convicted of low-level offenses; overflows from crowded prisons. 

Even without a global pandemic, many local jails struggle to provide adequate medical care for a population that is already high-risk: many people in jails suffer from addiction or mental illness. Some have died after lax medical care for treatable illnesses. 

“Basically, the shit hit the fan,” said Corbin Brewster, chief public defender of Tulsa County. “COVID-19 is just a magnifying glass for all the problems in the criminal justice system.” 

Local officials’ responses have run the gamut. In the crisis of the moment, some are adopting measures long urged by criminal justice reformers: declining to prosecute or freeing people who have committed drug offenses or nonviolent crimes; releasing the sick or elderly; trying to reduce the jail population. For example, officials have been temporarily transferring some at-risk detainees to housing units in Kent, Washington, which were built to house homeless people.

But others have stuck to tough-on-crime tactics or rhetoric. The sheriff in Bristol County, near Boston, argued the incarcerated would be safer locked up, as would the public. 

Because millions of people each year cycle in and out of jail, experts have long warned that these lockups have the potential to be petri dishes of infection—an assertion coronavirus will test.

Controlavirus Lockdown A Two-Piece And A Biscuit Apocalypse

nbcdfw |  Doctors at Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth say stress from the coronavirus pandemic may be linked to the six cases of child abuse they saw this week, one resulting in death.

Dr. Jayme Coffman, medical director of the CARE team at Cook Children’s, said all six cases were related to physical abuse. 

They typically consult about eight a month.

“Thursday night, we had one child admitted with unfortunately, life-threatening injuries, which they succumbed to, as well as four other children in the emergency department at the same time who were treated and released,” Coffman said. “It was like, we have to reach out to the community.”

Coffman said all of the children were 6 years old or younger. Though she said they could not say with full certainty the impacts of COVID-19 motivated the abuse, “it’s hard to think that it’s just coincidental”. 

“There’s no way for us to directly link that, but that’s the concern – are these families under more stress related to financial issues, whether it’s lost jobs or concerns for their jobs?” she said. “We also saw similar types of things happen during the recession where, in our trauma department, the most common cause of trauma death in children was motor vehicle collisions. During the recession, that changed to abusive head trauma, and I don’t want to see that again.”

Shellie McMillon, chief program officer at the Alliance For Children, described the spike in cases at Cook Children’s as heartbreaking.

“One thing we know is that educators, our school professionals are the largest group of people who report suspected child abuse and that makes sense. They’re usually with kids a good portion of the day,” McMillon said. “Now that kids are not in school, they’re at home – a lot of times, they don’t have that, what we call a trusted adult, to maybe tell about what’s going on.”

McMillon said one of the crucial things parents or caretakers should keep in mind if they are stressed is to not hesitate to ask for help.

Controlavirus: The Cure Is Vastly Worse Than The Contagion

NYTimes |  The data from South Korea, where tracking the coronavirus has been by far the best to date, indicate that as much as 99 percent of active cases in the general population are “mild” and do not require specific medical treatment. The small percentage of cases that do require such services are highly concentrated among those age 60 and older, and further so the older people are. Other things being equal, those over age 70 appear at three times the mortality risk as those age 60 to 69, and those over age 80 at nearly twice the mortality risk of those age 70 to 79.

These conclusions are corroborated by the data from Wuhan, China, which show a higher death rate, but an almost identical distribution. The higher death rate in China may be real, but is perhaps a result of less widespread testing. South Korea promptly, and uniquely, started testing the apparently healthy population at large, finding the mild and asymptomatic cases of Covid-19 other countries are overlooking. The experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which houses a contained, older population, proves the point. The death rate among that insular and uniformly exposed population is roughly 1 percent.

We have, to date, fewer than 200 deaths from the coronavirus in the United States — a small data set from which to draw big conclusions. Still, it is entirely aligned with the data from other countries. The deaths have been mainly clustered among the elderly, those with significant chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, and those in both groups.

Why does this matter?

I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.

Worse, I fear our efforts will do little to contain the virus, because we have a resource-constrained, fragmented, perennially underfunded public health system. Distributing such limited resources so widely, so shallowly and so haphazardly is a formula for failure. How certain are you of the best ways to protect your most vulnerable loved ones? How readily can you get tested?

We have already failed to respond as decisively as China or South Korea, and lack the means to respond like Singapore. We are following in Italy’s wake, at risk of seeing our medical system overwhelmed twice: First when people rush to get tested for the coronavirus, and again when the especially vulnerable succumb to severe infection and require hospital beds.

Yes, in more and more places we are limiting gatherings uniformly, a tactic I call “horizontal interdiction” — when containment policies are applied to the entire population without consideration of their risk for severe infection.

But as the work force is laid off en masse (our family has one adult child home for that reason already), and colleges close (we have another two young adults back home for this reason), young people of indeterminate infectious status are being sent home to huddle with their families nationwide. And because we lack widespread testing, they may be carrying the virus and transmitting it to their 50-something parents, and 70- or 80-something grandparents. If there are any clear guidelines for behavior within families — what I call “vertical interdiction” — I have not seen them.

You're All In This Together But Don't Get It Twisted, We Come First!

npr |  While average Americans fret on social media about empty toilet paper aisles, author Nelson Schwartz says the wealthy are installing hospital-grade filtration systems and building safe rooms. 

The coronavirus has exposed the vast inequalities in our health care system: Rich Americans from movie stars to Instagram influencers are getting access to COVID-19 tests before many sick people showing relevant symptoms.

In "The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business," Schwartz writes about how private services like concierge doctors disincentivize investments in health care and other public services.

Wealthy people can pay concierge doctors an annual fee for around the clock care. Now, he says, in the era of coronavirus, one concierge doctor who stocked up on virus swabs is organizing drive-through testing in Silicon Valley for his clients only.

Another medical concierge firm is helping people with underlying conditions like respiratory distress get oxygen concentrators, he says. The firm is also writing 90-day prescriptions and arranging nebulizers for taking drugs in case the supply chain is disrupted.

“Concierge docs are doing what they can to help their patients, even if that means jumping the line,” he says. “In the age of the coronavirus pandemic, not all patients are created equal.”

This is how health care works in this country right now, but Schwartz says it’s frightening because “we're all in it together.” Testing only a small number of people puts everyone at risk, he says.

People showing COVID-19 symptoms need to receive tests over the “worried well,” he says.