1227: Boozing and Beefing

Hi Adam,

I am a long time produce of the show and have been a fan

since episode…. Well, sometime before 200.

So I as a dude named Ben at a major clinical laboratory

and I was shown a report of the positive cases of Corona Virus (COVID19) that

have passed through our lab. After

having processed THOUSANDS of swabs over the last two weeks, the real rate of positive cases we have found

less than 0.1% (Yes, that is less than 1 tenth of one percent).

Yes, the number of positive results are that low. Very sad.

TYFYC!

Dude Named Ben

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sat, 21 Mar 2020 10:15

Wyze Detour:The staff of Whisper are spies for the Chinese Ministry of State Security. This has previously been claimed for Wyze and that will be shown two days from now. Very briefly, the evidence level against Wyze should be rated as "German Record Keeping" because there is just so much that is incriminating. Millions of documents from the Tianjin State Security Bureau from Elasticsearch clusters gathered over the last 10 months with all the watermarks one would expect of official Chinese government documents. I warned the attorneys from Perkins Coie several hours ago, including Eric Weis who I have great respect for and actually has a degree in Computer Science, that they needed to be prepared to drop them as a client.

They were part of a conspiracy called the "Xiaomi Ecological Toolchain" program, which was supposed to hide the fact that Xiaomi existed as 150 companies making the same IOT platform and cameras. This was done because of the situation with Huawei, and the fact that it became too big of a target to effectively work anymore and made the Western powers too nervous.

Their connection to the Tianjin State Security Bureau, also known as APT 10, who were behind the infamous Cloud Hopper attacks, is also shown in the documents. Additionally much of what will be written in this post can be confirmed with members of the Chinese Executive Congressional Company, who I have enormous respect for. Additionally Peter Mattis (who can confirm at least a few things in here if you ask him) should know that I owe him personal thanks for his book "Chinese Communist Espionage" that came out in November from the Naval Press Institute. I would also like him to know that I have identified the name, function, and org charts of the 16th and 17th Bureau of the MSS, previously unknown to US intelligence community. I am enormously proud of this fact, which required learning the hardest thing I ever have studied as a sysadmin for the last decade (Elasticsearch), and I hope it servers as a small token of thanks for his work.

Bribery:What follows is very true, very interesting, and only a subset of the evidence can be posted simply due to how much there is. Additionally, I find it surprising the coverage that Whisper got. Yes the Shenzhen State Security Bureau is bad, but they are not that competent, at least compared to the Shanghai State Security Bureau. We will show breaches from them later that are in my opinion are bigger than Whisper by a large margin. Large American companies are involved in this. Because we are writing about it here we are going to in advance recuse ourselves from any legal work, fees, or moneys we could collect from the lawsuits that will follow these disclosures. All of them involve the CCPA, so the money is significant. I am happy to update what I've said here to close every possible loophole where we could receive a hefty hefty payoff. I very much mean it.

Below is a screenshot from the hefty hefty payoff I could have taken earlier today had I not thrown down the gauntlet and wrote this post. It comes from their formerly of HUAWEI vp of engineering. Also caching issues don't exist on a cluster of their size configured the way it was. I am happy to go over the _health and _settings endpoint data we pulled with any Elasticsearch engineer who feels to the contrary. I have not replied and never will.

Military Data:Whisper has lied about working with the Department of Defense. No one at DoD has ever worked, asked for, or can produce evidence of ANY relationship with Whisper.Whisper has a special database index of military related blackmail information. We have this information and it contains the full names of thousands of service members. We are going over the data with a Lieutenant Colonel and his AG and are deciding what to do with the data and the implications under UCMJ. Years ago Whisper pretended to start a military suicide prevention program in order to defer suspicion that they were gathering military members data. It never happened and no one at the Department of Defense will produce any piece of evidence to the contrary. Again this never happened because it was lie to cover up a crime.

Additionally, military data is routinely combed for blackmail related information. Network requests show that this data is immediately sent back to China. As best we can tell, it appears to proxy through the 381 subdomains under the Kik.com domain. The domains have a series of numbers in them which appear to refer to the /16 subnet in Asia where the data is sent. So for example if a subdomain was "talk11820an", that would be mean send audio data to 118.20.0.0/16 for Android phones. The "an" stands for Android.

The specific GPS data Whisper was after was that of 1,381 Department of Defense sites across the world. This same list is actually used by other apps, forming a complete, live, planetary surveillance system. It the most terrifying thing I have ever seen. From the Pacific to the Aleutians to North Carolina and Cairo they have a single unified dashboard of a large portion of service members. We are posting the full list below. This was the best decision to do, it is preposterous and amusing to see who will say otherwise, and yes we already showed it to the FBI and the Department of the Army. Also it is pretty much all available via the Open Street Map anyway. A reporter did ask me yesterday if it included Area 51 data, and I thought that was not likely at all but to humor her I checked. And sure enough it included the entire Area numerical system from the Atomic Energy Commission who first created it decades ago. Area 7, Area 15, etc. The full list will be at the bottom of this post.

Below is, for the most part, a completely anonymized map of individuals in Washington a few days/weeks ago although we aren't going to going into detail. It is a subset and I am not going to say of whom. It comes from more than the Whisper app, and after the query was written to gather all of the data, we uploaded it to Google Maps to produce the below.

All of these points are accurate to the 20-meter level. Whisper does not obfuscate GPS data in anyway, and actually goes to great lengths now to get accuracy to the centimeter level. This is why they began collecting SSID data of users wifi, in order to leverage a Skyhook like service. Additionally the centimeter level accuracy is very doable, and probably not that exotic. The best lesson of electromagnetic spectrum research / history is that no matter how cool you think satellites are, terrestrial based antenna systems always win in the end. Hence why you are using a "cell phone", so named for the cell of coverage formed around an antenna tower, and not a satellite phone.

Structure:Whisper tracks any Points of Interest a user enters. What constitutes a POI is defined for them and also regularly updated for them by the MSS. They still track all GPS data of every user as the app pings back I want to emphasize. As for the interest points it appears to be military POIs and then just regular POIs.

Some of the regular POIs, which is a list of about 20,000 places in the US, appear to contain legal adult gentleman's clubs but also what we are going to hypothesize is brothels that form some sort of human trafficking network. We were able to come to that conclusion after cross referencing parts of the list with arrest sites, and were surprised to see how much overlap there was with massage parlors and places where prostitution busts were made. We didn't analyze the full list, but some of the points are also mundane grocery stores.

Anyway attached to every user is a special field call osm_ids. This list contains all of the numerical Open Street Map Identity numbers that a user ever visits going back to 2012. Because permissions were much less defined for phones back years ago, the data there can be incredibly revealing. Also people don't regularly uninstall apps and indeed forget about them most of the time, so a user can use the app once but still build up an extraordinary amount of GPS data even up to the present moment.

Whisper also has a feature called "feeds" (somewhat similar to groups) that often have the same name as POIs. I am looking forward to reading tomorrow Whispers reply to the question of who exactly created a "feed" for every Minuteman III nuclear missile silo in North Dakota and Montana. All 400. This would have had to have been done manually within the map and not simply taken from OSM (which will be there excuse for how those points got there in the first place).

A screenshot is below. I will talk tomorrow about what all of the sexual data is for, but for now you should know that groups are created for all of the military locations you see at the end of this post. If you ever search for these special places, join the group briefly, etc. you are added to a "special" list Whisper keeps internally. The list below is a user, either a bot or a real person working in an office (think IRA), who follows only two types of groups. Sexual interest groups that could offer a lifetime of blackmail material, and US Nuclear Missile silos in the most remote parts of the Dakotas and Eastern Montana.

First these silos are the subject of a small wikipedia war, with individuals engaged in deleting them and then adding them back to wikipedia. This data is in no way public, and the fact that it is on Wikipedia funny and preposterous. No other page that an average user will ever come across has data curated to such an extraordinary degree of care and presentation. Also the person who originally found the Whisper cluster, which surprisingly wasn't me even though I usually do the full pipeline of target acquisition, ingest, and analysis, only did this by looking at source IPs of edits to those pages.

The full list of military sites is below:

12 Service Battalion14/a. Zona Militar144 Airfield Engineering Squadron14CINE17a Zona Militar188th Fighter Wing Air National Guard Security Squadron193rd Special Operations Wing PA ANG2100 Walkley Road23rd Marines, 4th Marines Division24a Zona Militar25 Zona Militar2749 Inuvik Army Cadets27º Batall"n de Infanter­a de Marina32 Batall"n de Infanteria35° ZONA MILITAR3rd/329th IO (Support Battalion)443 Maritime Helicopter Squadron51e Ambulance de campagne8 WING - CFB Trenton89 Batallon de infanteria89th Army Reserve of WichitaAberdeen Proving GroundAcademia Polic­asAdelphi Laboratory CenterAeropuerto Nacional Fausto Vega SantanderAir 1Air National GuardAlabama National GuardAlaska National Guard ArmoryAliamanu Military ReservationAlki Point LighthouseAlpine Tower & Litter Evac CourseAlzada Mini-Mutes Radar SiteAmphibious Base CoronadoAnderson Readiness CenterAndrews Air Force BaseAnniston Army DepotArea 1Area 10Area 11Area 12Area 15Area 16Area 17Area 2Area 20Area 22Area 25Area 26Area 27Area 29Area 3Area 30Area 4Area 7Area 8Area 9Armed Forces RecruitingArmed Forces Reserve CenterArmed Forces Retirement Center GulfportArmoryArmurerie des Canadian Grenadier GuardsArmy Aviation Support Facility (Oklahoma National Guard)Army National GuardArmy ReserveArmy Reserve Center OrlandoArnold Air Force BaseArnold Air Force Base AirportAUX FieldAvon Park Auxiliary AirfieldAZ National GuardB T Collins Army Reserve CenterBakersfield Emitter SiteBarksdale Air Force Basebarrie armoriesBarry M Goldwater West RangeBarry M. Goldwater Air Force RangeBase Aerea Militar No. 12Base Aerea No. 9Base des Forces canadiennes BagotvilleBase des Forces canadiennes GagetownBase des Forces canadiennes GreenwoodBase des Forces canadiennes Saint-JeanBase des Forces canadiennes ValcartierBase Exercise Evaluation Skills Training AreaBase militaire de SenneterreBase Militar SantiagoBatall"n de Infanter­a de Marina - Fusileros ParacaidistasBay Street ArmouryBeale Air Force BaseBeatty Street ArmouryBel Air ArmoryBelleville ArmouryBellmore Maintenance FacilityBellows Air Force StationBenton Air Force StationBernard Franklin Armory - Georgia National GuardBessborough Armoury -- 15 BC Field Regiment (RCA)BFC FarnhamBFC Montr(C)al - Garnison Montr(C)alBG Louis G. Smith ArmoryBlasting AreaBlue Ash Air StationBlue Grass Army DepotBoeing Airborne Laser FacilityBoise Air Terminal Air Guard StationBolling Air Force BaseBrampton ArmouryBrea Recruiting OfficeBrighton CompoundBrockville ArmouryBroken Arrow Armed Forces Reserve CenterBuckley Air Force BaseBuffalo Coast Guard StationBumpy Oak Military InstallationC.F.B. Edmonton (Cardiff)C.F.B. Edmonton (Riverbend Receiver)Cadet Summer Training Center (TASCTC)California Air National GuardCalifornia Army National Guard ArmoryCalifornia National Guard AmoryCalifornia National Guard ArmoryCamp AtterburyCamp BeauregardCamp BlandingCamp BonnevilleCamp BouchardCamp BullisCamp ClarkCamp CookCamp DavidCamp Dawson Air Force Reserve CenterCamp DodgeCamp FretterdCamp Grafton Training CenterCamp GraylingCamp H. M. Smith / Marine Corps Base HawaiiCamp JohnsonCamp Joseph T RobinsonCamp Joseph T. Robinson, Arkansas National GuardCamp LincolnCamp Livingston (historic)Camp MabryCamp Malakole Military ReservationCamp McCainCamp MurrayCamp NavajoCamp ParksCamp Peary Military ReservationCamp Pendleton SouthCamp Perry Air National Guard StationCamp Perry Range Bullet Impact Zone approx (3.5 miles offshore, boaters tune to Channel 16)Camp RapidCamp RellCamp RileaCamp RipleyCamp RobertsCamp San Luis ObispoCamp SmithCamp StanleyCamp SwiftCamp VillereCamp Wesley HarrisCamp WilliamsCamp Williams Military ReservationCamp WithycombeCampo MarteCampo Militar 26-ACampo Militar 31 ACampo Militar 37-ACampo Militar 37-CCampo Militar Numero 1Canadian Forces Base Alert;Station des Forces canadiennes AlertCanadian Forces Base KingstonCanadian Forces Base ShearwaterCanadian Forces Base ShiloCanadian Forces Base TorontoCanadian Forces Camp VernonCanadian Forces Maritime Experimental and Test RangesCanadian Forces Station BarringtonCanadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC)Cannon AFBCape Canaveral Air Force StationCape Cod Canal AccessCape Cod PAVE PAWS Radar StationCape Lisburne Long Range Radar SiteCape Lisburne Long Range Radar StationCape Newenham Long Range Radar SiteCape Newenham Long Range Radar StationCarling CampusCarlisle BarracksCarolina T-Wall & High Ropes CourseCavalier Air Force StationCDF Training SiteCENCAP Poligono de TiroCenters for Disease Control and PreventionCentro de Estudios Superiores NavalesCFB AlertCFB BordenCFB Cold LakeCFB ComoxCFB DundurnCFB EdmontonCFB Esquimalt - Albert HeadCFB Esquimalt - DockyardCFB Esquimalt - Mary HillCFB Esquimalt - NadenCFB Esquimalt - Rocky PointCFB Esquimalt - Work PointCFB GagetownCFB GreenwoodCFB HalifaxCFB KingstonCFB LondonCFB MassetCFB MontrealCFB Moose JawCFB Nanoose BayCFB North BayCFB ShearwaterCFB ShiloCFB StadaconaCFB SuffieldCFB UplandsCFB WainwrightCFB Willow ParkCFB Windsor ParkCFB WinnipegChamp de manoeuvre BanffChamp de manoeuvre KorahChamp de manoeuvre SudburyChamp de manoeuvre SussexChamp de tir Cedar SpringsChamp de tir et champ de manoeuvre MeafordChamp de tir et champ de manoeuvre PetawawaChamp de tir et champ de manoeuvre ShiloChamp de tir et champ de manoeuvre ValcartierChamp de tir et secteur d'entrainement 5e GSSChamp de tir Prince AlbertCharleston Air Force BaseCHESTNUTChocolate Mountains Gunnery RangeCity Employee Training FacilityCivil Air Patrol Maryland WingClaiborne RangeClarks IslandClausen Tracking SiteCoast Guard Air Station Barbers PointCoast Guard Air Station Cape CodCoast Guard Air Station ClearwaterCoast Guard Air Station Humboldt BayCoast Guard Air Station KodiakCoast Guard Auxillary RochesterCoast Guard Base CharlestonCoast Guard Base HonoluluCoast Guard Base MobileCoast Guard Base South PortlandCoast Guard Communication Area Master Station PacificCoast Guard Communication Station (Point Reyes)Coast Guard facilitiesCoast Guard HospitalCoast Guard Station Atlantic CityCoast Guard Station BayfieldCoast Guard Station Boothbay HarborCoast Guard Station Cape CanaveralCoast Guard Station Cape DisappointmentCoast Guard Station Cape MayCoast Guard Station CharlevoixCoast Guard Station Coos BayCoast Guard Station DestinCoast Guard Station Fire IslandCoast Guard Station FrankfortCoast Guard Station GalvestonCoast Guard Station GeorgeCoast Guard Station Grand HavenCoast Guard Station Grand IsleCoast Guard Station GrangevilleCoast Guard Station Grays HarborCoast Guard Station HollandCoast Guard Station Humboldt BayCoast Guard Station Indian River InletCoast Guard Station Jones Beach FreeportCoast Guard Station JonesportCoast Guard Station Los Angeles-Long BeachCoast Guard Station LudingtonCoast Guard Station ManisteeCoast Guard Station MarquetteCoast Guard Station MilwaukeeCoast Guard Station MorichesCoast Guard Station Neah BayCoast Guard Station New HavenCoast Guard Station New OrleansCoast Guard Station Oakland;Coast Guard IslandCoast Guard Station OswegoCoast Guard Station Panama CityCoast Guard Station Ponce de LeonCoast Guard Station Port HuronCoast Guard Station RaymondvilleCoast Guard Station Rio VistaCoast Guard Station Sault Saint MarieCoast Guard Station SeattleCoast Guard Station ShinnecockCoast Guard Station StillpondCoast Guard Station Sturgeon BayCoast Guard Station Two RiversCoast Guard Station Yaquina BayCoast Guard Training Center PetalumaCoast Guard YardCOL 3CoL RS McLaughlin ArmouryCold Lake Air Weapons RangeColler Rec CenterColonel P. Schulstad United States Army Reserve CenterColony Radar Bomb Scoring SiteColorado National GuardColumbus Air Force BaseConnaught Range and Primary Training CentreCornwall ArmouryCraney Island Fuel DepotCreech Air Force BaseCSTI Training SiteCuartel General de la 28a. Zona MilitarCuartel Morelos 2da Regi"n MilitarCuddeback Lake Air Force Gunnery RangeCudjoe Key Air Force SiteCuerpo de Guardias PresidencialesCurtis Bay DepotDade Correctional InstitutionDalhart Army Airfield #1 (Aband)Dam NeckDare County Bombing RangeDavis-Monthan Air Force BaseDefence R&D Canada '' OttawaDefence Research and DevelopmentDefense Distribution CenterDefense Intelligence AgencyDefense Mapping AgencyDefense Supply Center ColumbusDefense Supply Center PhiladelphiaDefense Supply Center RichmondDelaware National Guard Bethany Beach Training SiteDepartment of DefenseDepartment of National DefenceDeseret Chemical DepotDevensDistrict of Columbia ArmoryDixie Target RangeDND Bedford RangeDND PropertyDND Woodline BuildingDobbins Air Reserve BaseDoD Suffolk ComplexDOEDover Air Force BaseDPV YardDRDC TorontoDriver Naval Radio Transmitting FacilityDugwayDugway Proving GroundDugway Proving Ground (East)Dugway Proving Ground (West)Dyess Air Force BaseEdwards Air Force BaseEglin Air Force BaseEielson Air Force BaseEkalaka Mini-Mutes Radar SiteEllsworth Air Force BaseElmendorf Air Force BaseErie ArmoryEscondido McMullen RangeEstacion NavalEstacion Naval Playa Del CarmenEstacion Navel De Busqueda RescateEthan Allen Firing RangeEustis National Guard ArmoryF E Warren Air Force BaseFairchild Air Force BaseFallon StationFargo Air National Guard BaseFederal Aviation AdministationFederal Law Enforcement Training CenterFifth Regiment ArmoryFinland Air Force StationFleet Anti-Submarine WarfareFlorida National Guard 690th MP Company ArmoryFlorida National Guard ArmoryFlorida National Guard HeadquartersFOB GloryFord Island Naval ReservationFormer Open Detonation Treatment FacilityFort Baker Military ReservationFort BarretteFort BelvoirFort Belvoir South PostFort BenningFort BlissFort Bliss - McGregor RangeFort Bliss Castner RangeFort BraggFort CampbellFort CarsonFort Chaffee Maneuver Training CenterFort Custer Training CenterFort DelawareFort Detrick US Military ReservationFort DevensFort DixFort DouglasFort DrumFort EustisFort FrontenacFort George G MeadeFort GordonFort HoodFort Howard Veterans Administration HospitalFort Hunter LiggettFort Indiantown Gap Training SiteFort IrwinFort JacksonFort KnoxFort LeavenworthFort Leonard WoodFort Lesley J. McNairFort LewisFort McClellanFort McPhersonFort MeadeFort MissoulaFort MyerFort NorfolkFort Polk SouthFort RichardsonFort RileyFort Riley Military ReservationFort Sam HoustonFort ShafterFort SillFort StewartFort WainrightFort WainwrightFort William Henry HarrisonFort Yukon Air Force StationFOX-1Francis E. Warren Air Force BaseFreshman FieldFuel PointGalena AirportGarnison St-jeanGeneral Lucius D. Clay National Guard CenterGeneral Purpose Warehouse AreaGirvin Emitter SiteGoodfellow Air Force BaseGoodyear BarracksGrand Forks Air Force BaseGrissom AFBGSA bldgGuelph ArmouryGulfport-Biloxi Regional Airport Air National GuardH.M.C.S. YorkHamilton Air Force BaseHammond Mini-Mutes Radar SiteHancock Field Air National Guard BaseHangar PresidencialHanscom Air Force BaseHavre Air Force StationHawthorne Army DepotHaycreek Mini-Mute Radar SiteHeals Rifle RangeHelemano Military HousingHelemano Military ReservationHenri-Julien Armoury-Fusiliers Mont-RoyalHenry W. McMillan National Guard ArmoryHer"ico Colegio MilitarHickam HousingHill Aerospace MuseumHill Air Force RangeHill FOBHMCS CabotHMCS CarletonHMCS DiscoveryHMCS MalahatHMCS PrevostHMCS Quadra - Cadet Summer Training CentreHMCS StarHMCS Tecumseh ArmouryHMCS UNICORNHolland Drop ZoneHolloman afb military checkpointHolloman Air Force BaseHolston Army Amunition Plant (Area A)Holston Army Amunition Plant (Area B)Homestead Air Reserve BaseHomestead BaseHulett Mini-Mutes Radar SiteHunter Army AirfieldHunters Point AnnexHurlburt FieldICBM SiloIII Regi"n MilitarIllinois Air National Guard Midway ArmoryIllinois National Guard General Jones ArmoryIllinois National Guard Northwest ArmoryImperial Emitter SiteIndian Mountain Long Range Radar SiteIndiana National GuardInkey Barley RangeIOGMMC ExplanadaIowa Air National GuardIowa Army National GuardIowa Falls ArmoryIowa National Guard ArmoryIqaluitIX Zona NavalJackson BarracksJackson Barracks Air National Guard StationJackson Park Support AreaJefferson Proving GroundsJericho GarrisonJFT NJoint Base AndrewsJoint Base Cape CodJoint Base Elmendorf-RichardsonJoint Base Lewis-McChordJoint Base McGuire-Dix-LakehurstJoint Expeditionary Base Little Creek - Fort Story CentralJoint Expeditionary Base Little Creek - Fort Story EastJoint Expeditionary Base Little Creek - Fort Story East EastJoint-Use AreaJose F Valdez United States Army Reserve Center - 405th Civil Affairs BattalionJuniper Butte Annex RangeKansas Army Ammunition PlantKansas National GuardKansas Regional Training Center SalinaKapolei - Kalaeloa Harbor and Naval ShipyardKapyong BarracksKeaukaha Military ReservationKeesler Air Force BaseKegelman Air Force Auxiliary FieldKenora ArmouryKilauea Military CampKing Salmon Air Force StationKing Salmon AirportKirtland Air Force BaseKirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage ComplexKodiak StationKokee Air Force StationKotzebue Air Force StationKunia Regional SIGINT Operations CenterLa Citadelle de Qu(C)becLa Posta Microwave StationLAB-6Lac-Saint-DenisLackland Air Force BaseLackland Training AnnexLaguna Army AirfieldLake City Army Ammunition PlantLakehurst Naval Air StationLangley Air Force BaseLaughlin Air Force BaseLaunch Facility A-02Launch Facility A-03Launch Facility A-04Launch Facility A-05Launch Facility A-06Launch Facility A-10Launch Facility A-11Launch Facility B-02Launch Facility B-03Launch Facility B-04Launch Facility B-06Launch Facility B-07Launch Facility B-09Launch Facility B-10Launch Facility B-11Legion Parking LotLes casernes ConnaughtLetterkenny Army DepotLieber Army Reserve CenterLieutenant-General E. C. Ashton ArmouryLima Army Tank PlantLincoln Communication AnnexLittle Mountain Test AnnexLittle Rock Air Force BaseLittle Rock Airforce BaseLog FOBLone Star Army Ammunition PlantLoom Lobby RangeLos Alamitos Army Air FieldLos Alamitos Reserve Center and Air StationLos Angeles Air Force BaseLos Angeles Air Force Base (Fort Macarthur Housing Area)Los Angeles Air Force Base (Pacific Crest Housing Area)Los Angeles Air Force Base (Sun Valley)Louisiana national GuardLuke Auxiliary Airfield #1 (Closed)M203 RangeMacDill Air Force BaseMaine Air National Guard BaseMakapuu Military ReservationMakua Military ReservationMalmstrom Air Force BaseMalstrom I-3 'Spanish Coulee' Minuteman III Missile SiloMan¨ge Militaire (Ruines)Man¨ge Militaire de BeauportMan¨ge Militaire de SalaberryManzano BaseManzano Weapons Storage Entrance AreaMarch Air Reserve BaseMare Island California Naval ShipyardMarietta Air Force StationMarine Barracks WashingtonMarine Corp Recruit Depot Parris IslandMarine Corps Air Station BeaufortMarine Corps Air Station Camp PendletonMarine Corps Air Station Cherry PointMarine Corps Air Station MiramarMarine Corps Auxiliary Landing Field BogueMarine Corps Base Camp PendletonMarine Corps Base KaneoheMarine Corps Base QuanticoMarine Corps Logistics Base AlbanyMarine Corps Logistics Base BarstowMarine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center BridgeportMarine Corps Recruit DepotMarine Corps Recruit Depot Parris IslandMarine Corps Recruit Depot San DiegoMarine Corps Recruit Depot SdMarine Corps Recruit Depot Sd;Naval Base Point Loma (Anti-Submarine Warfare Command)Marine Corps Reserve Support Command Kansas CityMarine Corps/Naval reserve Training Center SpokaneMarinette ArmoryMartindale Army HeliportMaryland Air National GuardMaryland Army National GuardMaryland Army National Guard - Olney Military ReservationMaryland Army National Guard Notchcliff ReservationMaryland National GuardMassachusetts Military ReservationMassachusetts National GuardMatagorda Island AFB (Abandoned)Mather AFB Munitions Storage (formerly)Maxwell Air Force BaseMaxwell-Gunter Air Force BaseMcAlester Army Ammunition PlantMcClellan Air Force BaseMcConnell Air Force BaseMcEntire Air Guard StationMcGuire Air Force BaseMcNary Field HeliportMelrose RangeMeridian Naval Air StationMid TargetMilan Army Ammunition PlantMilan ArsenalMilitary HousingMilitary Ocean Terminal ConcordMill Valley Air Force StationMinnesota National Guard Austin ArmoryMinot Air Force BaseMinuteman III Missile Launch Facility A-02Minuteman III Missile Launch Facility E-02Minuteman III Missile Launch Facility E-03Minuteman III Missile Launch Facility E-04Minuteman III Missile Launch Facility E-05Minuteman III Missile Launch Facility E-06Minuteman III Missile Launch Facility E-09Minuteman III Missile Launch Facility E-10Minuteman III Missile Launch Facility E-11Missile Alert Facility A-01Missile Alert Facility B-01Missile Alert Facility C-01Missile Alert Facility D-01Missile Alert Facility E-01Missile Alert Facility F-01Missile Alert Facility G-01Missile Alert Facility H-01Missile Alert Facility I-01Missile Alert Facility J-01Missile Alert Facility K-01Missile Alert Facility L-01Missile Alert Facility M-01Missile Alert Facility N-01Missile Alert Facility O-01Missile Alert Facility P-00Missile Alert Facility P-01Missile Alert Facility Q-00Missile Alert Facility Q-01Missile Alert Facility R-00Missile Alert Facility R-01Missile Alert Facility S-00Missile Alert Facility T-00Mississippi Army Ammunition PlantMississippi Army National GuardMissouri National GuardMoody Air Force BaseMoody Air Force Base-Grand Bay RangeMoss Park ArmouryMothball FleetMott National Guard ArmouryMount Laguna Air Force StationMountain Home AFBMountain Home Air Force BaseMountain View AirfieldMS-20 Nike Missle Control Site (historic)MS-20 Nike Missle Launch Site (historic)MS-40 Nike Missle Site (historic)MS-70 Nike Missle Launch Site (historic)MS-90 Nike Missle Launch Site (historic)Munitions BunkersMurphy Dome Air Force StationNanaimo Military CampNAS Norfolk Naval Shipyard - Paradise Creek SouthNAS Norfolk Naval Shipyard - South GateNAS Norfolk Naval Shipyard - Southeastern Public Service AuthorityNAS Norfolk Naval Shipyard - St HelenaNAS Oceana - CommissaryNAS Oceana - Midway Manor HousingNASA Goddard Space Flight CenterNASA Langley Research CenterNational Geospatial-Intelligence AgencyNational GuardNational Guard ArmoryNational Guard Armory GroundsNational Guard Armory HarrodsburgNational Guard Base Military Training Area Camp RobertsNational Guard Base Mta Camp RobertsNational Guard Heritage GalleryNational Reconnaissance OfficeNational Solar Thermal Test FacilityNaval Air Station AdakNaval Air Station and Joint Reserve Base Fort WorthNaval Air Station Corpus ChristiNaval Air Station DallasNaval Air Station FallonNaval Air Station JacksonvilleNaval Air Station Key WestNaval Air Station KingsvilleNaval Air Station LemooreNaval Air Station MeridianNaval Air Station New OrleansNaval Air Station North IslandNaval Air Station OceanaNaval Air Station Patuxent RiverNaval Air Station Peary Court AnnexNaval Air Station PensacolaNaval Air Station Whiting FieldNaval Air Station Willow GroveNaval Air Warfare Center China LakeNaval Air Warfare Center WarminsterNaval Amphibious Base CoronadoNaval Amphibious Base Little CreekNaval Auxiliary Air Station Brown FieldNaval Auxillary Landing Field FentressNaval Base CoronadoNaval Base Kitsap - BangorNaval Base Kitsap - Fuel StorageNaval Base PhiladelphiaNaval Base Point Loma (Old Town Campus)Naval Base San DiegoNaval Base San Diego (Broadway Complex)Naval Base San Diego (Southwest Division Naval Facilities Engineering Command)Naval Base Ventura CountyNaval Base Ventura County (Construction Battalion Center Port Hueneme)Naval Communications Station StocktonNaval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station PacificNaval Construction Battalion Center GulfportNaval Fleet Operation Control Center PacificNaval Hospital BremertonNaval Industrial Reserve Ordnance PlantNaval Inventory Control Point (NAVICP)Naval Magazine Indian IslandNaval Operational Support CenterNaval Outlying Landing Field BarinNaval Outlying Landing Field BronsonNaval Outlying Landing Field CoupevilleNaval Outlying Landing Field HaroldNaval Outlying Landing Field Imperial BeachNaval Outlying Landing Field PaceNaval Outlying Landing Field Santa RosaNaval Outlying Landing Field SilverhillNaval Outlying Landing Field WolfNaval Postgraduate School (Monterey)Naval Postgraduate School annexNaval Radio Station CutlerNaval Research LabNaval Reservation San Clemente IslandNaval Reserve (San Nicolas Island)Naval Reserve CenterNaval Ship Parts Control Center MechanicsburgNaval Station BremertonNaval Station EverettNaval Station Great LakesNaval Station InglesideNaval Station MayportNaval Station NewportNaval Station NorfolkNaval Station PascagoulaNaval Station San DiegoNaval Submarine Base BangorNaval Submarine Base Kings BayNaval Submarine Base New LondonNaval Supply Center Red HillNaval Supply Detachment MontereyNaval Support Activity AnnapolisNaval Support Activity BethesdaNaval Support Activity CraneNaval Support Activity Mid-SouthNaval Support Activity New OrleansNaval Support Activity NorfolkNaval Support Activity Panama CityNaval Support CenterNaval Support Detachment MontereyNaval Support Facility Indian HeadNaval Surface Warfare Center Corona DivisionNaval Surface Warfare Center CraneNaval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren MainsideNaval Surface Weapons CenterNaval Undersea Warfare CenterNaval Undersea Warfare Center KeyportNaval Weapons Station CharlestonNaval Weapons Station ConcordNaval Weapons Station EarleNavsoc Nswu -1Navy and Marine Corps Reserve CenterNavy Operational Support Center AlamedaNavy Operations Sugar Grove ( Closed )Navy: High pressure JP-5 fuel pipeline control facilityNavy: JP-5 fuel pipline access facilityNavy's Acoustic Research DetachmentNCSM DonnaconaNDHQNebraska Avenue ComplexNebraska National Guard ArmoryNellis AFB Weapons Storage AreaNellis Air Force BaseNETENevada National Security SiteNevada Test and Training RangeNew Boston Air StationNew Hampshire State ArmoryNew Jersey Army National Guard at Teaneck ArmoryNew Jersey National Guard Sea Girt UnitNew Mexico Air National GuardNew Mexico National GuardNew River Ordnance WorksNew Scotland Ave Armory (historical)New York Army National GuardNewburyport & Merrimack River Coast Guard StationNiagara Falls Air Force BaseNiagara Falls International Airport Air Reserve StationNike Site S-13/14NO ENTRYNOLF Site 8NORADNorth Boulder Army BaseNorth Riverside ArmoryNoveno Regimiento de Caballer­a Motorizada. Quinta Zona MilitarNPTU Student ParkingNRS Mill CoveNSA Norfolk - Northwest AnnexNSA Norfolk Naval ShipyardNSA Norfolk Naval Shipyard - New Gosport HousingNSA Norfolk Naval Shipyard - Paradise Creek NorthNSA Norfolk Naval Shipyard - Scott Center Naval AnnexNSA Norfolk Naval Shipyard - St. Juliens Creek AnnexNSA Norfolk Naval Shipyard - Stanley Court HousingNSA-AT&T's ECI Fairview Nassau SIGINT StationNSA/CSS Georgia Cryptologic CenterNSA/CSS Hawaii Regional Operations Security CenterNWS Yorktown - New KentObstacle FieldOffutt Air Force BaseOgdensburg State ArmoryOklahoma National Guardold NDMCOnizuka AFS (Decommissioned)Opheim Air Force StationOregon Air National Guard Kliever Memorial ArmoryOregon Department of the MilitaryOregon National GuardOregon National Guard ArmoryOrlando Naval Training CenterOsborne Head Navel FacilityOscura Range CampOtis AfbOwen Sound ArmouryPA National GuardPacific Missile Range Facility Barking SandsPalehua Air Force InstallationPapago Army Air Support FieldParade GroundParkers Pond Training AreaPatrick Air Force BasePatuxent Naval Air Test CenterPatuxent River NASPAVE PAWS Site IV (decommissioned)Pecos Electronic Scoring SitePermanent High Explosives Test SitePeterson Air Force BasePicatinny ArsenalPikesville National Guard ArmoryPine Bluff ArsenalPinecastle Impact RangePi±on Canyon Maneuver SitePlant 1 AreaPlant 2 AreaPlant 3 AreaPlant 4 AreaPōhakuloa Training AreaPoint Arena Air Force StationPoint Lookout Tracking StationPolice Shooting RangePol­gono Naval de las BajadasPope FieldPortland Air Guard StationPortsmouth Naval ShipyardPost Emitter SitePresidio of MontereyPrisonPT CoursePueblo Chemical DepotQueen Charlotte ArmouriesR4808N - Air Force Flight Test Center (Detachment 3) - Area 51Radar SiteRadar StationRadford Army Ammunition PlantRandolph AFB Auxiliary FieldRandolph Air Force BaseRange BRange CRange ERDDC ValcartierReb TargetRED DEER ARMOURYRedstone ArsenalRemote Training Site WarnerspgReno/Tahoe International Airport Air Guard StationReserve Training CenterReten MilitarRhode Island Air National GuardRhodes Canyon Range CenterRifle RangeroadblockRobins Air Force BaseRochester ArmoryRocky Mountain National Army Cadet Summer Training CentreRome LaboratoryRomney CreekROTC BuildingROTC Leadership Development CenterSacramento ArmorySalaberry ArmourySan Francisco Naval Communication Station - StocktonSan Joaquin Depot SharpeSan Joaquin Depot TracySan Nicolas IslandSault Ste Marie ArmourySavanna Army DepotSavannah Air National Guard BaseSavannah River SiteSaylor Creek RangeSchofield BarracksSchofield Barracks East RangeSchriever Air Force BaseScott Air Force BaseSeaforth ArmourySeal Bay Armoury - The Canadian Scottish Regiment (Princess Mary's) - 5 Platoon B CompanySeal Beach Naval Weapons StationSeal Beach Naval Weapons Station (Fallbrook Annex)Seaplane BaseSEARAY Target Range ComplexSeattle ArmorySecretar­a de Marina - 24 Batall"n de Infanter­a de Marina - Guardias PresidencialesSecretar­a de Marina - Instalaciones LogisticasSedenaSegunda Regi"n NavalSegunda Regi"n Naval, Ensenada B.C.Selfridge Air National Guard BaseSelfridge Army GarrisonS(C)ptima Zona MilitarSepulveda Air National Guard StationSERGEANT WILLIAM MERRIFIELD, ARMOURYShade Tree RangeShades of GreenShadow MountainShaw Air Force BaseSheppard Air Force BaseSicily Drop ZoneSierra Army DepotSilver Strand Training ComplexSmithers Emitter SiteSmokey Point Navy Support ComplexSmoky Hill Weapons RangeSNohomish ArmorySolomons Navy Recreation CenterSouth Dakota Army National GuardSouthern Tip AreaSouthwest Warehouse AreaSpace Fence Transmitting SiteSpringfield Air National Guard BaseStanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard ComplexStarfire Optical RangeStaten Island ArmoryStation des Forces canadiennes AlertStation des Forces canadiennes MassetStation des Forces canadiennes Mill CoveStation des Forces canadiennes ShelburneSte-Catherine ArmouryStewart Air Guard StationStone Ranch Military ReservationSudbury ArmourySugar Grove U.S. Naval Radio StationSunflower Army Ammunition PlantSupervisor of Shipbuilding Conversion and Repair Facility PascagoulaSusquehanna Ordinance Works Hydro Electric StationTatalina Long Range Radar SiteTavares National Guard ArmoryTelecommunications and Information Systems CommandTennessee Air National GuardTERCERA ZONA NAVAL ZN-3Texas Armory National GuardTexas Army National GuardTexas Cryptologic CenterThe Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of CanadaThe Ghost FleetThe Royal Westminster RegimentTin City Air Force StationTinker Air Force BaseTire FOBTobyhanna Army DeoptTonopah Test RangeTooele Army Depot North AreaTownsend Air-To-Ground RangeTravis Air Force BaseTripler Army Medical CenterTruman AnnexTruro ArmouryTucson International Airport Air Guard StationTulsa Air National GuardTulum Naval Air StationTyndall Air Force BaseU S Airforce Vetro SiteU S Army Corp of EngineersU S Army Reserve CenterU. S. Coast Guard Station KetchikanU.S. Army Garrison Fort Hunter LiggettU.S. Army ReserveU.S. Coast Guard CAMSLANT Transmitter Site PungoU.S. Customs and Border Protection Advanced Training FacilityU.S. Marshales Urban VillageU.S. Naval ObservatoryU.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center Dahlgren LabU.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and SurgeryUmatilla Chemical DepotUnited States Air Force AcademyUnited States Air Force Plant 42United States Army Reserve Training CenterUnited States Army Soldier Systems CenterUnited States Army: Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point (MOTSU)United States Coast GuardUnited States Coast Guard - Air Station SacramentoUnited States Coast Guard - Yankeetown StationUnited States Coast Guard Air StationUnited States Coast Guard Air Station Traverse CityUnited States Coast Guard Long Range Navigation C station Boise City (discontinued)United States Coast Guard Loran Support UnitUnited States Coast Guard Sector Field Office Cape HatterasUnited States Coast Guard Sector Field Office Fort MaconUnited States Coast Guard Sector JacksonvilleUnited States Coast Guard StationUnited States Coast Guard Station Hatteras InletUnited States Coast Guard Station HobuckenUnited States Coast Guard Station New HavenUnited States Coast Guard Station Oak IslandUnited States Coast Guard Station Oregon InletUnited States Coast Guard Station Wrightsville BeachUnited States Coast Guard Training CenterUnited States Naval Research LaboratoryUnited States Naval Reserve Training CenterUpper Air StationUpper Kipapa Ammunition Storage SiteUS Air Force Transmitting CenterUS Army - National Ground Intelligence CenterUS Army Construction Engineering Research LaboratoryUS Army Fort AP HillUS Army Fort Lee Military ReservationUS Army National GuardUS Army National Guard ArmoryUS Army ReserveUS Army Reserve CenterUS Army Reserve CentreUS Coast GuardUS Coast Guard (Cove Pt Lighthouse)US Coast Guard Air Station Humboldt BayUS Coast Guard StationUS Coast Guard Station San FranciscoUS Department of Veterans Affairs Medical CenterUS Marine Corps ReserveUS Marine Corps Reserve CenterUS Marine Corps Reserve Training CenterUS Military Brandywine Communication CenterUS National GuardUS Naval Electronic Systems CenterUS Naval Health Clinic at CharlestonUS Naval ReservationUS Naval Weapons Station EarleUS Navy BRAC Investigation AreaUS Navy Hewitt Farms HousingUS Navy Lafayette River ComplexUS Navy Special Designated AreaUS Navy Supply Center Cheatham AnnexUS Navy Yorktown Fuel DepotUSAF Academy Bullseye Auxiliary AirfieldUSCGUSCG Station Eatons NeckUSCG Station ProvincetownUSCG Training Center YorktownUSCGC Roanoke islandUSO Welcome ServicesUtah Air National GuardUtah National Guard AmoryUtah Test and Training RangeV Region MilitarV zona militarVance Air Force BaseVancouver BarracksVandenberg Air Force BaseVandenberg Air Force Base Launch Facility 03Vandenberg Air Force Base Launch Facility 05Vandenberg Air Force Base Launch Facility 07Vandenberg Air Force Base Launch Facility 08Vandenberg Air Force Base Launch Facility 09Vandenberg Air Force Base Launch Facility 10Vandenberg Air Force Base Launch Facility 24Vandenberg Air Force Base Launch Facility 25Vandenberg Air Force Base Launch Facility 26Varnum Memorial ArmoryVehicle StorageVermont National Guard ArmoryVerona Test AnnexVeterans Administration ClinicVint Hill Farms Station Military Reservation (Closed)Virginia National GuardVolk Field Air National Guard BaseVolunteer Training Site CatoosaWabash Valley Correctional FacilityWaianae Army Recreation CenterWaikane Valley Impact AreaWakakalaua Ammunition Storage TunnelWallops Flight Facility Launch SiteWallops Flight Facility Main BaseWallops Flight Facility MainlandWalter Reed Army Medical CenterWalter Reed Hospital AnnexWappapello Training SiteWarren Grove Gunnery RangeWarren Grove RangeWarrenton Training Center Military ReservationWash PointWashington National GuardWashington Navy YardWatervliet ArsenalWenatchee ArmoryWest Coast Radio Receiving StationWest PointWest Point Military ReservationWestover Air Reserve BaseWheeler Army AirfieldWhidbey Island Naval Air StationWhite SandsWhite Sands Missile RangeWhitehall ArmoryWhiteman AFBWhiteman Air Force BaseWilliam ArmouryWilliam T. Fitzsimons US Army Reserve CenterWindsor ArmouryWisconsin Army National GuardWright-Patterson Air Force BaseWyoming Army National Guard Armory, SheridanX Zona Naval MilitarXII Region MilitarXX Regimiento Caballer­a MotorizadoXXIII Zona Militar

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Archived Version

Sat, 21 Mar 2020 10:09

Summary:Story: Whisper has exposed all user information by leaving their production database cluster open for the last several weeks. This first post will generally summarize some of the less sensitive data that was exposed. The military data will be shown in Post 2 in a few hours as the classified data is removed.Authentication: All user passwords have been exposed via oauth codes, tokens, and other login credentials.Revealed: Sexual fetish groups, suicide groups, and hate group membership of users can all be seen. Whether or not a user is a predator, if they are banned from posting near high schools, and their private messages can all be viewed.Military: Detailed, personal, and live data can be viewed of service members on bases, missile silos, and US embassies throughout the world.Furthermore:Counterclaim: Whipser.sh will contest these assertions and lie to protect the company. The ES cluster has been downloaded and preserved along with detailed network logs to prevent this.Contact: both the FBI and the Washington Post were informed at various points during this investigation.Kik: appeared to be partially compromised in this breach. This will be documented in a second or third essay Lastly:Five: Whisper.sh will argue all Whispers are public anyway so this open database doesn't matter. What they mean though is that yes the Whisper Post with about 5 fields of metadata was available to allNinety: What we found though was the same Whisper Post but with about 90 fields of metadata that ranged from last known geolocation to the actual password token.Since 2014 there has been significant concern about the security, anonymity, and safety of the Whisper app. These concerns I think are not only valid but are worse than was realized.

The Whisper database is 5 TB in size and stretches across 75 different servers. This is all text data, which is extraordinary to see. All user images and videos are accessible as well, but hosted elsewhere in cloud storage buckets.

There is lots of damaging material and information that can be backwards engineered from the data made available. Most often that is not necessary because people simply disclose their real names in either posts or private messages to other users, and this can be viewed in the database. Some examples of the compromising content people post on Whisper:

It is possible to backwards link every post above to the original user.

From there one has the geocoordinates of nearly every place they've visited, and the ability to log into their account with their password/credentials. Depending on when the account was created and how much the user engaged with the app, dozens and dozens of fields of metadata can be reviewed

Whisper has tried to protect themselves against this I think by disclosing all of this to some degree in their privacy policy. It should be noted now that companies are almost shockingly open in their policies, nearly to the point of self-incrimination. From time to time it is good to actually read them just to see what we mean here. Additionally anytime a change in privacy policy email is sent out, that can effectively be used to infer breaches.

Yet from a legal theory standpoint that is a very ''2013ish'' strategy and it relies on the courts believing that average end-users can tell the effective privacy of an app or service. Even professionals struggle with this. It is hard to imagine most judges, particularly after the first few cases have been tried, adhering to this viewpoint.

User Data:If you create a user right now in Whisper, it will show up online in the database being described here. Our tests showed that within about 20-25 seconds, all of the information you entered would appear in the main database cluster. This user, ''hackingelasticsearchlegally'', was created just a few minutes before this paragraph now was typed out:

All of the columns holding data are as follows:

admin_deleteadmin_emailadmin_idageapns_tokenapns_token_regularapns_token_urbanapp_idapproved_whisper_countappsflyer_idbannedbanned_from_feedsbanned_from_high_schoolsbanned_from_listbanned_from_messagingbanned_from_messaging_tsbot_message_countcampaignchat_profile_updated_tschat_ratingchat_rating_countclient_versionconversation_countersconversation_migration_versionconversations_received_countconversations_started_countcountrycreated_by_adminnicknamenickname_historynickname_tscrossed_paths_count_versioncrossed_paths_unlock_tscrossed_paths_unlockedcrosspath_unlocked_push_sentcrossroads_bucketdeleted_countdeleted_flag_countdeleted_user_countdevice_iddisabledfeed_idsfeed_ids_v2feed_typesfeedsfeeds_migration_versionfirst_whisper_createdflagged_countflagged_count_since_trustedgendergeo_latgeo_longeo_titlegeo_title_update_tsgeohashgood_creatorhas_datametrical_profilehas_mixpanel_profilehas_mixpanel_profile_tshas_received_sme_messagehearts_per_whisperifainput_languageinterested_inintersection_countintersection_creator_countipis_inside_walled_gardenkey_fingerprintlanguagelast_conversation_timelast_crosspathlast_crosspath_activity_feed_updatelast_crosspath_avglast_crosspath_push_numberlast_current_poi_createlast_current_poi_postlast_feed_unlocklast_heartlast_hyper_local_nearby_whisperlast_intersection_count_update_tslast_location_update_tslast_loginlast_my_feed_lookup_timelast_my_feed_read_timelast_nearby_user_update_tslast_nearby_whisperlast_new_feed_postlast_replylast_significant_feedslast_updatedlast_updated_token_tslast_whisper_of_the_daylast_whisper_textlast_whisper_tslast_wid_tslimited_ad_trackinglocalelocationlatlon},location_metalocation_permission_levelme2_countme2s_migration_versionmigration_versionmixpanel_ab_cohortmost_active_hournew_pinnuxonly_nearby_conversationsosm_idsn150940434,r114690,r148838,r253556,r4468307,r4468409,w43356824],pinpin_enabledpin_selectedpost_create_viewpredator_probabilitypredator_probability_update_tspublic_keypublic_uidpuidpush_comment_replypush_crosspathpush_current_poi_createpush_current_poi_postpush_feed_unlockpush_geopush_heartpush_new_feed_postpush_popular_storypush_replypush_significant_feedspush_wotdregenerate_keysregion_validationregisteredreply_whisper_countshared_secretsmestatesuspectedsuspected_datesystem_localetesting_featurestimezonetoken_typetop_level_whisper_counttrustedtstt_keytt_migrationtt_secrettt_tokenuidunread_notificationsunsubscribed_schoolupdate_last_nearby_on_loginupdated_fromurbanurban_lock_screenversionwalled_garden_reasonwalled_garden_tswhisper_countwhispers_approved_since_untrustedwhispers_deleted_by_admin_since_trustedwhispers_deleted_by_flag_since_trustedwhispers_forbidden_since_trustedwhispers_to_be_approved

Some of the top feeds/groups, which are used to collect blackmail on members, particularly military, is shown below. We go into this in a little bit more detail in Essay 2 and then finally we show, based on Gary King's research at Harvard, how this statistically and historically reflects the tactics of the MSS and its predecessor organizations.

As you can see, nearly every of the top groups is dedicated to getting a member to perform an action that clearly could be used against them later. "Sexy Lady Selfies", "Sexual Confessions", and "Roleplay Only" are designed to trick users into totally destabilizing their lives.

Alt

Whisper's database contains a significant amount of information on children throughout the United States. Here we see the coordinates for one user who is at a middle school.

Here is more of the full actual record:

It is possible for instance to find all of the sexual messages posted by the teen and pre-teen children of US congresspersons. For instance, if you take any user who has set foot in the Capitol, and also one of the deeply wealthy private schools that dot the Northern Virginia / DC capital area,

In 2014 Whisper endured a very large amount of criticism over its privacy practices. The Guardian wrote a particularly scathing article, a screenshot of which we can see above. Whisper then wrote a 5 page detailed response to this article.

Because the database has data going back to 2014 we can analyze some of these claims. A few things jump out.

Whisper explicitly lied to The Guardian and their investors about their practices. These were not subtle lies but statements that claimed things when in fact Whisper was doing the exact opposite.DreadThe data collected by Whisper since 2014 has grown more detailed and aggressive. Not only did they lie in 2014, they continued and accelerated the practices. This database mostly goes back to the founding of Whisper in 2012. It is not clear if all records have been kept, but a very overwhelming majority of them certainly have. Also as the total size of the database is 5 TB and it would not make sense for Whisper to really have deleted any records, knowing the data/marketing value they could hold, one can conclude for a second time that most of the data since 2012 has been preserved.

One way to show this specifically is with timestamps. There is something in computer science called Epoch Time, or the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970. We find values pretty equally distributed from 1350000000 (latter 2012) or so to 1550000000 (latter 2019 and all the way up to today).

Whisper also seems to have gone to great lengths to keep and document content that should have been deleted. First there is an S3 bucket called ''whisper-deleted.s3.amazonaws.com''

Second, there are many record types that show for instance all the groups you've *unsubscribed* from, or all the previous usernames you used to have. There is something of a spirit of ''German record keeping'' in the diligence to maintain so much for so long. We do not believe it is asking much to think that for some strange reason, right or wrong, MediaLab considers this data very valuable and worth maintaining, increasing, and keeping.

All user passwords/login credentials have been exposed. It is possible to login as any user anywhere. Here is an example of the exact shell code you would run if you wanted to see how everything worked at a very low level for one particularly important service. We simply send the key and token, which are Base64'd together, to the message API endpoint, and then we will receive a 2XX http status code. From there we have lots of options as documented in the TigerText API.

The Whisper app rates users on how likely they are to be a sexual predator. Currently it has rated 9,000 users with a probability of 100%. Another 10,000 have a probability of 50%, as seen below.

The last time the predator probability score was updated is also made available, as seen here:

Would it be possible to learn a little more about this user? We can see that they likely are involved in Spokane Community College.

Additionally, if a user has been banned for soliciting a minor, that will come up as well.

A sample of 10,000 records yields the following distribution. We can see that illegal or inappropriate sexual / content behavior seems to account for 80% of bans. Spamming and being under age make up the remaining 20%.

Whisper appears to have abandoned its Bug Bounty program in 2015 for unknown reasons. They paid out a modest amount of bounties before leaving the platform of Hackerone.com entirely.The copyright date of Whisper.sh still reads ''2017''. To see something small like this suggests that the site didn't really have the focus of the engineering team and many things were just left as is and never fixed.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 07:40

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and three of her Senate colleagues sold off stocks worth millions of dollars in the days before the coronavirus outbreak crashed the market, according to reports.

The data is listed on a U.S. Senate website containing financial disclosures from Senate members.

Feinstein, who serves as ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and her husband sold between $1.5 million and $6 million in stock in California biotech company Allogene Therapeutics, between Jan. 31 and Feb. 18, The New York Times reported.

SENS. RICHARD BURR, KELLY LOEFFLER SOLD MILLIONS IN STOCK BEFORE CORONAVIRUS CRIPPLED MARKETS, REPORTS FIND

When questioned by the newspaper, a spokesman for the Democrat from San Francisco said Feinstein wasn't directly involved in the sale.

''All of Senator Feinstein's assets are in a blind trust,'' the spokesman, Tom Mentzer, told the Times. ''She has no involvement in her husband's financial decisions.''

''All of Senator Feinstein's assets are in a blind trust. She has no involvement in her husband's financial decisions.''

'-- Tom Mentzer, Feinstein spokesman

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is seen in an undated photo. (Associated Press)

Reports identified the three other senators as Richard Burr of North Carolina, Kelly Loeffler of Georgia and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, all Republicans.

Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, used more than 30 transactions to dump between $628,000 and $1.72 million on Feb. 13, according to ProPublica.

The report said the transactions involved a significant percentage of the senator's holdings and took place about a week before the impact of the virus outbreak sent stock prices plunging to the point where gains made during President Trump's term in office were largely erased.

''Senator Burr filed a financial disclosure form for personal transactions made several weeks before the U.S. and financial markets showed signs of volatility due to the growing coronavirus outbreak,'' a Burr spokesperson said. ''As the situation continues to evolve daily, he has been deeply concerned by the steep and sudden toll this pandemic is taking on our economy.''

Burr was an author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, a law that helps determine the federal response to situations such as the coronavirus outbreak, ProPublica reported. Burr's office would not comment on what kind of information Burr might have received about coronavirus prior to his stock sales, the outlet reported.

NPR reported that Burr made ominous comments about coronavirus behind closed doors last month.

''There's one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,'' Burr said at a Feb. 27 meeting of business leaders in Washington. ''It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.''

Loeffler was appointed to the Senate in December by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp after incumbent Sen. Johnny Isakson resigned because of health issues '' despite allies of President Trump having urged Kemp to select Rep. Doug Collins instead.

Loeffler and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, sold stock Jan. 24, the same day she sat in on a briefing from two members of Trump's Coronavirus Task Force, The Daily Beast reported.

CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE

Between that day and Feb. 14, the couple sold stock worth a total between $1.2 million and $3.1 million, the report said. In addition to the sales, they also purchased stock in a maker of software that helps people work at home '' just before millions of Americans were forced to leave their offices because of the outbreak, the report said.

Loeffler slammed the Daily Beast report as a "ridiculous and baseless attack" in a pair of late-night tweets.

"This is a ridiculous and baseless attack. I do not make investment decisions for my portfolio. Investment decisions are made by multiple third-party advisors without my or my husband's knowledge or involvement," Loeffler wrote. "As confirmed in the periodic transaction report to Senate Ethics, I was informed of these purchases and sales on February 16, 2020 '-- three weeks after they were made."

Inhofe sold as much as $400,000 in stock all on Jan. 27, in companies such as PayPal, Apple and real estate company Brookfield Asset Management, The New York Times reported.

The Senate financial disclosure data is available by clicking here.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:27

On Monday, March 2nd, the Dow Jones Industrial Average set its biggest-ever point gain.

But Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) was massively selling.

Johnson, who has a net worth estimated at over $36 million, made a major transaction.

The exact amount is unknown, as ethics forms only require disclosure in broad ranges, but Johnson reported selling over $5 million that day '-- and potentially up to $25 million.

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In a report filed today, Sen. Ron Johnson R-WI with a very large stock sale earlier this month. pic.twitter.com/c9QbjYOcPa

'-- Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) March 20, 2020

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) reported dumping stock before market crash.

Johnson's sale was reportedly related to a family business which is not publicly traded on an exchange.

I deleted a tweet about Ron Johnson's stock dump because ''stock dump'' wasn't a accurate description '-- Johnson sold off his share in his family's company '-- here's the filing https://t.co/plOM1tIGF7

'-- Alex Thomas (@AlexThomasDC) March 20, 2020

Johnson's sale was reportedly announced February 11th.

''A San Francisco-based private equity firm, Gryphon Investors, has made an equity investment in Oshkosh-based Pacur LLC, the supplier of specialty plastic packaging materials to the medical device industry that was led by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson prior to his election to the U.S. Senate in 2010,'' BizJournals reported. ''Details of the transaction were not disclosed.''

Report typos and corrections to:

[email protected] .

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Archived Version

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:26

The GOP Senate Caucus faced a massive scandal on Thursday after multiple GOP senators revealed in public filings that they had sold large stock holdings after private briefings on the coronavirus scandal.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) have all be implicated in the scandal.

Now conservative Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe has also been caught up, after reporting he sold in late February.

Enjoy this story? ...then let us make a small request. Like you, we believe in the power of progressive journalism '-- and we're investing in investigative reporting as others give it the ax. Raw Story readers like you power our reporting. Click here to support us for as little as $1.There have been calls for the implicated lawmakers to resign from office over the scandal.

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Thu, 19 Mar 2020 23:32

Log in Sign up Tania Singh @ TwinklingTania According to stock sales disclosures by Senators after a closed door briefing on January 24 about the Coronavirus threat, the following senators sold stocks:Senator Richard BurrSenator Kelly LoefnerSenator Dianne Feinstein,Senator Ron JohnsonSenator Jim Inhofe

7:28 PM - 19 Mar 2020 Eric Santiestevan @ esantiestevan

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@TwinklingTania They should be arrested.

View conversation · Josh DeFamio @ JoshDeFamio

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@esantiestevan @TwinklingTania Need to see which stocks they sold first.

View conversation · A Sentient Pile of SpaghettiðŸ' @ spagritty

2h Replying to

@TwinklingTania @ExtraHighMarx I'd just like to thank California's voters for not even giving Feinstein's challengers a first, let alone second, thought in 2018. She's a warmongering, corrupt conservative and California can definitely do better.

View conversation · Vera ðŸ"¸''š§¸ 🕉¸ ðŸŒ>> @ Vera08248960

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@TwinklingTania pic.twitter.com/2bzWOwajl7 View conversation · The hockey misser @ knck1es

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@Vera08248960 @lauraevf1968 @TwinklingTania Now this

pic.twitter.com/rTly0UUsTq View conversation · Tom Perez wants voters to get coronavirus @ DavidAgStone

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@TwinklingTania pic.twitter.com/aKPLXaZiZX View conversation · Thisisstupid''ŠðŸ¼ðŸŒ¹ @ MoralReactions

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@DavidAgStone @TwinklingTania Better fucking do this NYC. 🥴

View conversation · Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) @ edburmila

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@TwinklingTania Isn't it weird that so many senators have hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of dollars to play around with in the stock market? Weird.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 09:36

This story was delivered to Business Insider Intelligence Payments & Commerce Briefing subscribers earlier this morning.To get this story plus others to your inbox each day, hours before they're published on Business Insider, click here.The application enables the mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) giant to form a Utah-based bank, per PYMNTS. The approval, which was conditional and will mandate Square to maintain capital at a higher rate than other FDIC-insured banks, will enable the brand to begin developing the bank in earnest. The bank is expected to launch in 2021, and will focus primarily on issuing loans to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as well as deposit products.

Business Insider Intelligence

Square's process to become a bank has been a long road. The firm initially filed for an industrial loan company (ILC) bank charter in September 2017 but faced considerable backlash from the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), which opposes these licenses because of concerns that they allow nonbanks to skirt regulation, and ultimately withdrew.

After withdrawing, the brand went into talks with regulators, revised details of the application, hired new staff, and reapplied in late 2018 in the hopes that these improvements would help its chances. Those improvements look to be successful now that the bank has been approved and Square can begin to launch Square Financial Services.

Launching the bank could ultimately bolster Square Capital '-- a core segment of the firm's business '-- in ways that deepen and extend its customer acquisition channel. Square doesn't expect the launch of Square Financial Services to have a material impact this year, but that could change next year, setting the brand up for long-term success.

Square Capital, the firm's lending segment, is a lucrative offering for the firm, which makes bolstering the platform valuable. In Q4 2019, Square Capital facilitated 97,000 loans worth $671 million '-- a figure that is up 42% annually. The segment is also set to continue to grow as the firm adjusts risk models that improve the way Square determines creditworthiness, which could keep losses down and improve success rates, in turn growing the whole program.

Because Square Capital is a big contributor to the brand's subscription and services-based revenue segment '-- a profit driver for Square '-- extending loans could help the company maintain profitability. Additionally, extending working capital and business loans has historically improved a business' overall performance, meaning that more lending might boost Square's core processing sector as well.

Extending lending might help Square further improve its competitive positioning in ways that help it attract customers. Square is operating in a very competitive space, with a number of providers, including Clover (owned by Fiserv, formerly First Data), PayPal, Poynt, and Stripe angling to serve businesses with full-suite solutions that go beyond payments.

Improving lending and offering more bank-like services could make the brand increasingly attractive '-- especially to larger sellers, which are more likely to need capital '-- because cash flow and access to capital is already a major hurdle for sellers and could be set to worsen as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

Want to read more stories like this one? Here's how to get access:

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Thu, 19 Mar 2020 15:22

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 03:54

Doctor Grace, an oncologist at Lennox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, was on The Ingraham Angle again last night to explain the uses of hydroxychloroquine, why it works, and how it has saved the lives of his patients. He is treating over 100 patients with the coronavirus and none have died.

The bureaucracy is attempting to impede the use of some medicines already in use for other diseases, and one of them is hydroxychloroquine. That needs to stop when people are dying.

Dr. Grace said that the reason the elderly are in trouble with Cov-19 is that their immune systems are quite strong and it's the strength of that which causes the damage to the lungs and death. The hydroxychloroquine reduces the effects of the immune system and reduces the replication of the virus.

CNN claims people have been holding out false hope with drugs like hydroxychloroquine.

Dr. Grace explained why the drugs are nothing to dismiss. From the test results, there is only 1 chance in 10,000 this could happen by chance alone.Dr. Grace said ''we accept one chance in twenty.'' His point was that one in ten thousands is almost statistical certainty of effectiveness whereas one in twenty is deemed significant. This is ''huge,'' he said. He added that there many wonderful breakthroughs in cancer that the bureaucracy lets them fall by the wayside.

Watch:

Dr. Fauci did say he did not mean to sound as if he was dismissing the drugs:

Correction: A reader corrected my statement on the last paragraph.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 19:53

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 19:03

Why TraceTogether?

Protect ourselves

If you had close contact with a COVID-19 case, whether or not you know the person, TraceTogether helps contact tracers call you more quickly.

Protect our loved ones

Being contacted earlier allows us to better protect those around us, reducing the spread of COVID-19.

Protect our community

TraceTogether makes it faster to complete contact tracing on a national level. When more people use it, we will be safer together.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 12:09

This is why I believe, Donald called the virus a hoax at first! Until he said, OK you guys want a crisis - let's make it a crisis!And, now you have every politician taking advantage of it!Because the American people, said "how high" when the gov. said JUMP!

pic.twitter.com/L6YIXn5zKD

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 12:07

Can someone please explain exactly what is going on here?

WASHINGTON (INTELLIHUB) '-- United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a slip of the tongue while addressing the American people from the White House when he stated that COVID-19 is a live military exercise.

''This is not about retribution,'' Pompeo explained. ''This matter is going forward '-- we are in a live exercise here to get this right.''

@realDonaldTrump is mad that the deep state took control through Continuity of Government, there has been a coup? pic.twitter.com/GcrjNNvVsc #Covid_19 #CoronavirusPandemic #MartialLaw

'-- Shepard Ambellas (@ShepardAmbellas) March 21, 2020

With a disgusted look on his face, President Trump replied: ''You should have let us know.''

Military Exercise meaning (from Wikipedia): ''A military exercise or war game is the employment of military resources in training for military operations, either exploring the effects of warfare or testing strategies without actual combat. This also serves the purpose of ensuring the combat readiness of garrisoned or deployable forces prior to deployment from a home base.''

What is actually going on here? Does the White House care to explain?

(C)2020. INTELLIHUB.COM. All Rights Reserved.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 12:06

GENEVA/LONDON (Reuters) - The window of opportunity to contain wider international spread of the epidemic of the new coronavirus disease is closing, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Friday, after cases were reported in Iran and Lebanon.

FILE PHOTO: Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaks at the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany February 15, 2020. REUTERS/Andreas Gebert

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, asked whether the outbreak is at a ''tipping point'' after new cases and deaths in Iran from COVID-19, and cases in Lebanon and Canada, said that he still believed the virus spread could be stopped.

''Although the window of opportunity is narrowing to contain the outbreak, we still have a chance to contain it,'' he said.

''If we don't, if we squander the opportunity, then there will be a serious problem on our hands,'' he said.

China has reported more than 75,500 cases and 2,239 deaths, Tedros said. He voiced concern about an increase in infections in the northern province of Shandong - where more than 200 cases were announced earlier in prisons - and said it was seeking more information.

Twenty-six other countries have reported 1,151 cases and eight deaths.

''Although the total number of cases outside China remains relatively small, we are concerned about the number of cases with no clear epidemiological link, such as travel history to China or contact with a confirmed case,'' he said.

He said it was ''very concerning'' that Iran had reported 18 cases and four deaths in just the past two days, adding that the WHO was supplying testing kits to Tehran.

Tedros, asked whether sanctions imposed on Iran for its nuclear programme might hamper delivery of medical aid, said:

''Emergency situations are excluded.''

Lebanon confirmed its first coronavirus case on Friday and said it was monitoring two other potential cases after a 45-year-old woman arriving from the holy city of Qom in Iran on Thursday tested positive, Health Minister Hamad Hassan said.

Dr. Sylvie Briand, director of WHO global infectious hazard preparedness, referring to Iran, said: ''The concern is more about the fact that we seen an increase in cases, a very rapid increase in a matter of a few days...What is the extent of this outbreak and the transmission in Iran?

''Also because we have seen other cases picked up in Lebanon and Canada, so we are just wondering also about the potential of more exported cases in the coming days.''

There are different patterns of transmission in different places, Briand said, adding: ''We have lots of diversity, different outbreaks showing different phases.''

Tedros said that a WHO-led team of international experts and their Chinese counterparts would visit Wuhan, the epicentre of the epidemic, on Saturday. The full team, which arrived in China last weekend, includes experts from the U.S. Centres for Disease Control (CDC).

Reporting by Kate Kelland in London and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, editing by Nick Macfie and Cynthia Osterman

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 09:43

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 09:35

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 08:30

Fredo: ''I don't follow rules.'' Typical Sociopathic Demonrat Criminal.

Vote Up 26 0 Vote Down Reply

Don't call me Fredo or I will kick your @$$.

Vote Up 11 0 Vote Down Reply

Lighten up Fredo.

Vote Up 10 0 Vote Down Reply

Two Fredo dipshits doing what Fredo Dipshits do.

Vote Up 38 0 Vote Down Reply

The combined IQ in that picture of Andrew and Fredo is 64.

And Andrew's IQ is 63.

Vote Up 21 0 Vote Down Reply

The Smothers Brothers: Mom Liked You Best

Vote Up 17 0 Vote Down Reply

Two Fredos. One family.

Vote Up 18 0 Vote Down Reply

ðŸ'(C)for brains arguing with ðŸ'(C)for brains.

Oh, I thought it was funny. Please everyone lighten up just a little.

Vote Up 10 -15 Vote Down Reply

Funny, but revealing some underlying animosity. Perhaps a manifestation of the frustration they are experiencing from their TDS.

Vote Up 11 0 Vote Down Reply

What a couple of Dorks'.....it's obvious Fredo has mommie issues, and Drew baby has humor issues.

Vote Up 15 0 Vote Down Reply

When Barbara Bush told JEB! that he was NOT her favorite:

Low Energy Jeb: ''Mom'...'...'....Please clap.''

Andrew just sent Chris a new fishing pole'...

And Fredo sent Drew a dead fish.

coming from a family with 5 boys, I loved the exchange!

That's some frickin dumb DNA.

Vote Up 11 0 Vote Down Reply

Two Italian brothers walk into a bar'...'...'...'.....

The third one ducks. And gets the cannoli.

F. Tard. These guys make me believe abortion should be legalized and mandatory for Liberals.

omg what an embarrassment!

Actually, this is so bizarre, if I were to wear a tin foil hat, it almost sounds like some mobster double speak'...

Two dipshits ! Ol mario is rollin in that box.

Where was Mario when little Andrew was bobbing little Fredo up and down in the bathtub?

Who do you think was filming with the super 8?

These are the guys me and my friends used to beat up when we were kids

I'm sorry you ddn't finish the job.

That was an awkwardly choreographed vanity segment.

This is why the truly STUPID should be allowed in the public square

will the cuomo brothers be getting the $1000 check too?

when will governor cuomo suspend the tolls? he can start with his fathers bridge.

how about suspending the sales tax on prepared foods?

when will he refund this months ezpass fees and suspend all ezpass withdrawals until further notice?

how bout suspending the fees on truckers who bring is everything we need.

You should send these ideas to POTUS. It would be awesome for him to tell Cuomo how he can do more.

Ha! There are two Fredo's, I always suspected that was the case.

I believe CNN just became a comedy show about fake news.

I didn't know Fredo had a twin.

I'm not a fan of them, but I thought it was cute. Just some good ole familial back and forth.

Would have been amazing if the governor would have called chris fredo.

Put too many gerbils in a cage and see what happens!

I remember there were. rumors on why Cuomo did not run for President way back when ,now I know why 2 criminal thugs twit & twat

OMG

''Taken care of me? YOU take care of ME? You'r my kid brother. You ever think about that?''

There you have it FREDO TIMES TOO

Some things just run in the family, even ''stupid''.

Could you imagine if Andrew had called him Fredo??

Nothing like says trash quite like publicly airing your family's dirty laundry.

Fredo: That not true!! Mom loves me too!!!

Fredo has problems but of course that's why he is on CNN.

BWAHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAthe liberal commie dogs are starting to get frightenedthey were too stoopid to understand what the anarchists in their group was doing and now they are starting to get scaredit can only make you laugh!piglosi is so frightened of a mob ripping her out of her mansion in SF that she had them declare marshall law out thereand these two clowns are scared that they are gonna need to call snake to get them into nyc and that that will kill big bro's chance of grabbing the nomination in milwaukke ( a pipe dream that killarry,big mike and mittens all share)

What a pair of Fredos, er, weirdos.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 08:02

| March 20, 2020 03:12 PM

The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg slammed President Trump on Friday by claiming that U.S. citizens wouldn't be ''stuck'' inside their homes if the country had better leadership.

''The interesting thing about all of this is whatever channel you're watching, you're still watching from home. You're watching from inside your house,'' Goldberg said via Skype, as she is staying home amid coronavirus fears. ''Because a pandemic has happened, and you are stuck, and whatever side you're on, you understand that when you have leadership, you would not '-- you would not be stuck in your house.''

Earlier this week, the actress criticized Trump for using the term ''Chinese virus,'' agreeing with some of his critics that the phrase is xenophobic.

"People, as we've seen, people start punching people '-- Asian folks out. They will attack," Goldberg said. ''So we need to stop calling it or labeling it like it's they did it to us. Mother Nature really did this to us."

Trump has insisted on using the term in public remarks and social media, calling it ''accurate'' because the illness is believed to have originated in China.

"I didn't appreciate the fact that China was saying that our military gave it to them. Our military did not give it to anybody," he told reporters Wednesday.

"China was putting out information, which was false, that our military gave this to them. That was false. And rather than having an argument, I said, I had to call it where it came from. It did come from China. So, I think it's a very accurate term," he added.

There have been around 265,495 confirmed coronavirus cases around the world, 87,363 recoveries, and 11,147 deaths, according to the latest reading by the Johns Hopkins University tracker. In the United States, there have been 16,000 cases, 121 recoveries, and 210 deaths.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 18:13

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 15:00

Replying to

@MrHanky66755421 @ReillocNaes @DineshDSouza There are portions of it which were circulated on the dark Web now surfacing, there's audio and some stills, trust me you do not want to see it, a child's desperate blood curdling screams, blood splatters and a still of what's left of the child's face after being flayed alive.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:39

Melania "Einstein Visa" Trump was forced to give a hostage video type statement talking about how we are all going to be totally fine from the coronavirus hoax and it is...creepy.

From her robotic, monotone voice to her emotionless and frozen face, to her cold and uniform like choice of black turtleneck clothing. The only way it could be less comforting is if she had Donald Trump star in it with her.

Twitter had...thoughts.

Whoever is running our universe simulation is having a huge laugh right now.

'-- Scott Wainner (@scottwww) March 19, 2020

Is it wrong that I'm expecting the porn music background and the pool man to arrive with an unpaid bill?ðŸ‹

'-- Lori Bowe (@BoweLori) March 19, 2020

Oh for the love of God. The fact that someone thought this was a good idea is emblematic of this administration

'-- Henry L. Miller (@HenryLMiller1) March 19, 2020

It would 'Be Best' if she would just go away.

'-- rwkdover (@rwkdover) March 19, 2020

This is literally the last person anybody needs to hear from.

'-- Debbie (@mtyler281) March 19, 2020

and my contribution...I held back my real thoughts.

nothing is as comforting as a botox frozen faced, mail order bride, wearing a black turtleneck funeral jumpsuit, reading words with zero emotion about a pandemic her husband called a hoax just a week ago https://t.co/Ei12LfALYB

'-- Red Quarantine Queen Painter (@Redpainter1) March 19, 2020

#TrumpVirus #BeBest

Can you help us out?

For 16 years we have been exposing Washington lies and untangling media deceit. We work 7 days a week, 16 hours a day for our labor of love, but with rising hosting and associated costs, we need your help! Could you donate $20 for 2020? Please consider a one time or recurring donation of whatever amount you can spare. It will be greatly appreciated and help us continue our mission of exposing the real FAKE NEWS!

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:04

An anti-President Trump Donald John TrumpOn The Money: McConnell introduces third coronavirus relief proposal | Democrats seek bigger stimulus with less aid for business | Washington scrambles to prevent unemployment spike Hillicon Valley: Twitter targets coronavirus misinformation | Facebook bans sanitizer, virus test ads to prevent price gouging | DHS defines critical jobs during outbreak | Remote working apps surge Overnight Defense: 'Tens of thousands' of National Guard troops could be activated for coronavirus response | Hospital ships could take week to deploy | Trump says military to help Americans stuck in Peru MORE group of Republicans released a new ad Thursday blasting the president's messaging over the coronavirus pandemic.

The ad, released by Republicans for the Rule of Law, shows President Trump at the World Economic Forum in January being asked whether there were ''words of a pandemic'' and the president responding "no, not at all."

The ad shifts to Trump speaking to Fox News Host Sean Hannity Sean Patrick HannityTrump says US military to help Americans stuck in Peru get home Slow testing rollout sets back US coronavirus response Trump blames Obama for coronavirus testing issues, says 'changes have been made' MORE saying ''Well, we pretty much shut it down,'' about the spread of coronavirus before going on to include other clips of Trump, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow Lawrence (Larry) Alan KudlowMORE , Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson Benjamin (Ben) Solomon CarsonOn The Money: Senate sends coronavirus aid package to Trump | Lawmakers race to draft next stimulus | Stocks close with steep loses | Treasury offers guidance on deferring tax payments The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump invokes defense law to bolster coronavirus response Trump orders HUD to suspend evictions and foreclosures MORE and Vice President Pence discussing the spread of the virus between January and this month, with a growing count of the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. overlaid throughout the ad.

''America needs a President who tells the truth. Our lives depend on it,'' the ad says.

A Feb. 25 clip included in the ad shows Kudlow telling reporters, ''We have contained this, I won't say airtight, but pretty close to airtight.'' A March 13 clip shows Trump telling reporters, ''No I don't take responsibility at all,'' during a press conference, where he also said that ''we were given a set of circumstances and we were given rules, regulations, and specifications from a different time.''

The group, who supported the president's impeachment, said the ad will air on ''Fox & Friends'' Friday morning, according to their website.

Chris Truax, a spokesman for the Republicans for the Rule of law, released a statement saying "Accurate and timely information is America's most potent defense against the pandemic we now face," Truax continued, saying the majority of "Republicans who have been misled by the president's self-serving coronavirus lies are our families, our friends, and our neighbors,'' USA Today reported.

"We urge them, and all Americans, to get their coronavirus information from the CDC and other reliable sources. This isn't about politics. It's about saving hundreds of thousands of American lives," continued said.

More than 237,600 people have been infected by the coronavirus around the world. Nearly 10,000 people have died, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:29

A reporter from right-leaning One America News was roasted on social media on Thursday after asking President Trump Donald John TrumpDe Blasio calls on Trump to deploy military to set up hospitals in New York Hillicon Valley: Facebook launches portal for coronavirus information | EU sees spike in Russian misinformation on outbreak | Senate Dem bill would encourage mail-in voting | Lawmakers question safety of Google virus website Trump signs coronavirus aid package with paid sick leave, free testing MORE if he thought the term "Chinese food" is racist, with one member of the press calling it "the dumbest question I've ever heard."

The backlash against OAN's Chanel Rion comes after she also raised eyebrows for accusing "major left-wing media," including some reporters in the White House briefing room, of teaming up "with Chinese communist party narratives."

''Mr. President, do you consider the term 'Chinese food' to be racist because it is food that originated from China?'' Rion asked, preparing for another question about the media.

''I don't think that's racist at all,'' Trump replied.

''On that note, major left-wing media, even in this room, have teamed up with Chinese communist party narratives, and they are claiming you are racist for making these claims about 'Chinese virus,''' Rion continued. ''Is it alarming that major media players, just to oppose you, are siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals, and Latin gangs and cartels and they work right here out of the White House with direct access to you and your team?''

''It amazes me when I read the things that I read,'' Trump replied. "I don't think anybody has done as much as I have done in three years."

"This administration has done a great job. But the press is very dishonest," the president added.

Backlash on the questions from Rion was immediate on social media, and it came from across the political spectrum.

This might be the dumbest question I've ever heard. https://t.co/laU5gA6cQC

'-- Siraj Hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) March 19, 2020This is it. You're in the White House press briefing room with access to the most powerful person in the world. You stand up, put on a serious face, open your mouth, and ask https://t.co/UEVRFc6sp2

'-- CJ Ciaramella (@cjciaramella) March 19, 2020So the "Chinese food" vs. "Chinese virus" argument from the OANN person almost made the exact opposite point of what she intended. Bizarre & unhelpful. The coronavirus originated in Wuhan, China & was covered up by the Chinese Communist Party. It's not more complicated than that.

'-- JERRY DUNLEAVY (@JerryDunleavy) March 19, 2020Thank god we have OANN in the briefing room at this critical moment in our nations history

'-- Sam Stein (@samstein) March 19, 2020Idiot ''reporter'' for the right-wing ''news'' outlet @OANN at White House coronavirus briefing tells Trump that the term ''Chinese virus'' can't be racist because the term ''Chinese food'' is not racist.As if food is the same as a deadly virus.

'-- Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) March 19, 2020the OAN chinese food question is every bit as stupid PBS's yamiche alcindor taking yesterday's briefing down the "kung flu" rabbit hole. funny part is that only one of these questions has journos all upset and calling for a group to have its credentials stripped.

'-- ' (@BecketAdams) March 19, 2020Rion serves as White House correspondent for One America News.

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Thu, 19 Mar 2020 23:57

Log in Sign up Daily Caller @ DailyCaller NBC's

@KeirSimmons says that China "helped" the world by "delaying" the spread of coronavirus and that it is now "worrying that they may get re-infected...from the rest of the world"

pic.twitter.com/WSkmGctnmt 3:24 PM - 19 Mar 2020 Twitter by: Kyle Drennen @kjdrennen J.T. Marlin @ JTMarlinLLC

7h Replying to

@DailyCaller @KeirSimmons at least we know who's in China's pocket.

View conversation · Ozark Finesse Guy Redux @ DTReeves2

6h Replying to

@JTMarlinLLC @DailyCaller @KeirSimmons More like zipper.

View conversation · g_edward_mcauley @ mcauley_g

6h Replying to

@DailyCaller @KeirSimmons If NOBODY leaves China AND NOBODY travels to China, then China won't be reinfected you

#CCPbootlicker.

#CCPcoronavirus #WuhanCoronavirus View conversation · Trakker @ tyrelle123

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@mcauley_g @DailyCaller @KeirSimmons China will reinfect itself

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@DailyCaller @KeirSimmons NBC stands for now backing China

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@devillier_al @DailyCaller @KeirSimmons ABC Always Backed China

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6h Replying to

@DailyCaller @KeirSimmons How many tools does the CCP need at NBC?

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6h Replying to

@ricky_ole @DailyCaller @KeirSimmons I believe the Chinese refer to it as "Elite Capture"

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@DailyCaller @KeirSimmons P R O P A G A N D A

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Thu, 19 Mar 2020 17:18

March 19, 2020 2020-03-19T11:31:44-04:00 https://images.c-span.org/Files/dac/20200319113402001_hd.jpg President Trump, joined by a notably smaller group of members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force than previous briefings, held a news conference on the response to the pandemic. The president said that hydroxychloroquine, a common drug used to treat malaria, could be used as a possible treatment for patients infected with coronavirus. While its efficacy in treating the illness is not fully known, the president said that at least they know the drug is safe to use. ''It's shown very, very encouraging early results, and we're going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately,'' he said. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams called on millennials and members of Generation Z to donate blood. ''You'll feel good about it and you'll be helping your country and your community during this crisis, and you might even save a life,'' said Dr. Adams.President Trump, joined by a notably smaller group of members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force than previous briefings, held a news conference on the response to the pandemic.'... read more

President Trump, joined by a notably smaller group of members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force than previous briefings, held a news conference on the response to the pandemic. The president said that hydroxychloroquine, a common drug used to treat malaria, could be used as a possible treatment for patients infected with coronavirus. While its efficacy in treating the illness is not fully known, the president said that at least they know the drug is safe to use. ''It's shown very, very encouraging early results, and we're going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately,'' he said. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams called on millennials and members of Generation Z to donate blood. ''You'll feel good about it and you'll be helping your country and your community during this crisis, and you might even save a life,'' said Dr. Adams. close

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People in this videoDaniel Abel Deputy Commandant U.S. Coast Guard->Operations Jerome Adams M.D. Surgeon General Department of Health and Human Services Alex M. Azar II Secretary Department of Health and Human Services Stephen Biegun Deputy Secretary Department of State Deborah L. Birx M.D. Coordinator White House->Coronavirus Response Ben Carson Sr., M.D. Secretary Department of Housing and Urban Development Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II Acting Director Department of Homeland Security->U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Mark Esper Secretary Department of Defense Anthony S. Fauci M.D. Director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Brett Giroir M.D. Assistant Secretary Department of Health and Human Services->Health Joe Grogan Director White House->Domestic Policy Council Stephen Hahn M.D. Commissioner U.S. Food and Drug Administration Robert Kadlec M.D. Assistant Secretary Department of Health and Human Services->Preparedness and Response Christopher Liddell Deputy Chief of Staff White House Steven T. Mnuchin Secretary Department of the Treasury Robert O'Brien National Security Adviser White House Robert Redfield M.D. Director Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Anne Schuchat M.D. Principal Deputy Director Centers for Disease Control and Prevention->Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry Joel Szabat Acting Undersecretary Department of Transportation->Policy Seema Verma Administrator Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Robert Wilkie Secretary Department of Veterans Affairs Chad Wolf Acting Secretary Department of Homeland Security More People '; }, afterShow: function() { twttr.widgets.load(); }, helpers: { title: { type: 'inside' } } }); $('section.program-people ul li a.person-image').click(function(e) { e.preventDefault(); var personid = $(this).attr('id'); personid = personid.replace('-link', ''); $('div.person-images a#'+personid+'-image').click(); }); });

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Thu, 19 Mar 2020 15:22

| March 18, 2020 03:03 PM

Baltimore Mayor Jack Young pleaded with his city to stop filling hospital beds with gunshot wound victims.

A mass shooting in a park on Tuesday left seven Baltimore residents hospitalized. In a statement about the shooting, Young said hospitals don't have room to tolerate gunshot victims as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps across the United States.

"We cannot clog up our hospitals and their beds with people that are being shot senselessly, because we're going to need those beds for people who might be infected with the coronavirus," Young said on Wednesday. "And it could be your mother, your grandmother, or one of your relatives. So take that into consideration.''

He added, "I want to reiterate how completely unacceptable the level of violence is that we have seen recently. We will not stand for mass shootings and an increase in crime.''

Young said that the city would be looking to arrest those responsible for any shootings that take place, saying, "For those of you who want to continue to shoot and kill people of this city, we're not going to tolerate it. We're going to come after you, and we're going to get you.''

There has been an uptick in gun violence since Friday, according to Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison. The mass shooting on Tuesday night left all seven victims in serious, but stable, condition. One responding officer was also shot during the incident, and the department is still searching for the gunman.

Young declared a citywide emergency and urged people to stay inside. Baltimore had five positive cases of the coronavirus as of Wednesday.

Homicides and gun violence have long been a problem for Baltimore. Young has been criticized for not taking responsibility for the problems in his city. He has brushed off such criticisms, saying, "I'm not committing the murders '... It's not any lack of leadership on my part. I've been moving this city forward.''

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Thu, 19 Mar 2020 15:19

WATCH: "History has shown that when we're afraid, we want someone to blame. And we often turn to xenophobia, and we know that doesn't really solve anything -- it only creates more problems."

on.nbc7.com/3oajxBP pic.twitter.com/Jfy8yi61Kj

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 07:17

Pedestrians walk in Central Park on March 20 in New York City as the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States. | Cindy Ord/Getty Images

The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies '-- part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.

Documents reviewed by POLITICO detail the department's requests to lawmakers on a host of topics, including the statute of limitations, asylum and the way court hearings are conducted. POLITICO also reviewed and previously reported on documents seeking the authority to extend deadlines on merger reviews and prosecutions.

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A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the documents.

The move has tapped into a broader fear among civil liberties advocates and Donald Trump's critics '-- that the president will use a moment of crisis to push for controversial policy changes. Already, he has cited the pandemic as a reason for heightening border restrictions and restricting asylum claims. He has also pushed for further tax cuts as the economy withers, arguing that it would soften the financial blow to Americans. And even without policy changes, Trump has vast emergency powers that he could legally deploy right now to try and slow the coronavirus outbreak.

The DOJ requests '-- which are unlikely to make it through a Democratic-led House '-- span several stages of the legal process, from initial arrest to how cases are processed and investigated.

The Justice Department seal. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In one of the documents, the department proposed that Congress grant the attorney general power to ask the chief judge of any district court to pause court proceedings ''whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.''

The proposal would also grant those top judges broad authority to pause court proceedings during emergencies. It would apply to ''any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings,'' according to draft legislative language the department shared with Congress. In making the case for the change, the DOJ document wrote that individual judges can currently pause proceedings during emergencies, but that their proposal would make sure all judges in any particular district could handle emergencies ''in a consistent manner.''

The request raised eyebrows because of its potential implications for habeas corpus '''' the constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest and seek release.

''Not only would it be a violation of that, but it says 'affecting pre-arrest,''' said Norman L. Reimer, the executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. ''So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.''

Reimer said the possibility of chief judges suspending all court rules during an emergency without a clear end in sight was deeply disturbing.

''That is something that should not happen in a democracy,'' he said.

The department also asked Congress to pause the statute of limitations for criminal investigations and civil proceedings during national emergencies, ''and for one year following the end of the national emergency,'' according to the draft legislative text.

Trump recently declared the coronavirus crisis a national emergency.

Another controversial request: The department is looking to change the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure in some cases to expand the use of videoconference hearings, and to let some of those hearings happen without defendants' consent, according to the draft legislative text.

''Video teleconferencing may be used to conduct an appearance under this rule,'' read a draft of potential new language for Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 5(f), crossing out the phrase ''if the defendant consents.''

''Video teleconferencing may be used to arraign a defendant,'' read draft text of rule 10(c), again striking out the phrase ''if the defendant consents.''

Confirmed U.S. Cases: 26,747 | U.S. Deaths: 340

Reimer said forcing people to have hearings over video rather than in person would threaten civil liberties.

''If it were with the consent of the accused person it would be fine,'' he said. ''But if it's not with the consent of the accused person, it's a terrible road to go down. We have a right to public trials. People have a right to be present in court.''

The department also wants Congress to change the law to explicitly say that people with Covid-19 '''' the illness caused by the novel coronavirus '''' are not included among those who may apply for asylum. And the department asked for the same change regarding people who are ''subject to a presidential proclamation suspending and limiting the entry of aliens into the United States,'' according to the draft legislative language.

Layli Miller-Munro, the CEO of the Tahirih Justice Center, which advocates for women and girls fleeing violence, said the language would block anyone on a presidential travel ban list from seeking asylum in the U.S.

''I think it's a humanitarian tragedy that fails to recognize that vulnerable people from those countries are among the most persecuted and that protecting them is exactly what the refugee convention was designed to do,'' she said.

The asylum request comes as the Trump administration on Friday said that it would begin denying entry to all migrants illegally crossing the U.S. southern border, including those seeking asylum.

''I hope we come out of this with a sense of oneness, interconnectedness,'' Miller-Munro said of the coronavirus pandemic. ''Borders can't protect us. Viruses do not care.''

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 07:11

All 50 of the nation's governors have declared emergencies in their states and now many are starting to activate their Air and Army National Guard to help deal with the growing coronavirus pandemic. Governors across 28 states have mobilized components of the Army and Air National Guard to assist in their state's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 3,300 guardsmen have been called up to state active-duty status, with more states expected to activate additional Guard resources as the novel coronavirus continues to spread.

All 50 states have issued emergency declarations, a critical step before mobilizing National Guard resources.

Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin have all activated Guard components.

Puerto Rico is the first and only U.S. territory to also activate guardsmen thus far.

Current National Guard COVID-19 response missions include, but are not limited to: Weapons of Mass Destruction - Civil Support Teams (WMD-CSTs), Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) training and sample collection; response planners; support to medical testing facilities; response liaisons and support to state Emergency Operations Centers; support to healthcare professionals - assessments, transportation; logistics support; assisting with disinfecting/cleaning of common public spaces; providing transportation support for health care providers; collecting and delivering samples; and assisting with sample administration.

''We expect multiple states to use their WMD-CSTs to assist in sample collection, donning and doffing PPE techniques and decontamination techniques,'' said Lt. Col. Jennifer Cope, Chief, National Guard Bureau Weapons of Mass Destruction Program Office

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The National Guard Bureau (NGB) on the federal level assists in ''synchronization'' and planning between the states, and their coordination center is a ''24/7 operation working at increased capacity in anticipation of COVID-19 requirements,'' the bureau said.

Currently, the NGB has not received state-level assistance requests, as of Wednesday morning.

''This COVID-19 pandemic is a historic event and it requires a historic response from the National Guard,'' said Air Force Gen. Joseph Lengyel, National Guard Bureau chief. ''My number one priority is taking care of our National Guard Soldiers, Airmen and their families. The readiness of our force will be critical to the success of this nation's COVID-19 response efforts.''

Despite the growing number of activated Guard components, during a Tuesday press conference, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper did not commit to federalizing the Guardsmen, instead opting to support governors in their individual responses.

''As we get requests in, we will look at activating, if we need to, at the federal level or using the Reserves, whatever the case may be. We want to be very supportive with regard to our prioritization in terms of supporting the American people and the governors,'' Esper said. ''Right now, we are really focused on Guard and Reserve '-- in that order. There hasn't been a need yet, a request, for active duty. So we will take these requests in due time.''

Members of the Florida National Guard (FLNG) gather with local hospital staff to collaborate on donning and doffing personal protective equipment (PPE) during Task Force '' Medicals' response to the COVID-19 virus, March 17, 2020. The FLNG is mobilizing up to 500 Citizen-Soldiers and Airmen in support of the Florida Department of Health response in Broward County. (Sgt. Leia Tascarini/Army) Here are the latest updates of National Guard activations across the United States:

Arkansas As of Tuesday, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has activated 20 National Guard personnel to state active-duty status to support the state's emergency operations center. The mobilized guardsmen are medics from the 39th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, headquartered at Camp Robinson.

There are currently 22 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state, according to the Arkansas Department of Health.

California Late Tuesday night, California Gov. Gavin Newsom placed the California National Guard ''on alert'' in preparation for state-wide mobilization.

''The National Guard has been directed by the governor to be prepared to perform humanitarian missions across the state including food distribution, ensuring resiliency of supply lines as well as supporting public safety as required," a press release stated.

''As Californians make sacrifices over the coming weeks to protect our shared health, we are all grateful for medical providers, first-responders and National Guard personnel who are assisting those who are most vulnerable to COVID-19," Newsom said in the release.

Gov. @GavinNewsom Places National Guard Personnel on Alert to Support COVID-19 Community Readiness pic.twitter.com/YjiyiFhZxC

'-- CaliforniaGuard (@CalGuard) March 18, 2020 Previously, the California Air National Guard activated a 10-person ''medical augmentation team" from the 144th Fighter Wing of the California Air National Guard ''to provide emergency pre-hospital stabilization response for up to 24 patients per 24-hour operations,'' according to the National Guard Bureau.

Currently, state health officials have confirmed 472 cases of COVID-19 with over 11,000 people self-monitoring.

In a Tuesday press conference, President Donald Trump mentioned the possibility of sending the Army Corps of Engineers to California to increase hospital bed capacities.

''The Army Corps of Engineers is ready, willing and able. We have to give them the go ahead if we find that it's going to be necessary," the president said. ''We're talking to California about different sites, but we can have a lot of units up fairly quickly if we need them.''

Colorado Colorado has 50 guardsmen mobilized on state active-duty status, ''assisting local and state agencies with medical support and logistics at drive-up COVID-19 testing centers in various communities throughout the state," according to the National Guard Bureau.

In addition, 30 full-time Guard personnel are advising state and local partners across Colorado on ''validated tactics, techniques and procedures for future screening missions in Colorado," a release added.

Florida Following early emergency declaration from Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida National Guard activated additional personnel over the weekend, bringing a total to 300 guardsmen.

These guardsmen are assisting with planning functions in the State Emergency Operations Center and logistics in the State Logistics Readiness Center.

A medical task force is also being stood up in Broward County, state officials said, and Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a Wednesday press conference that 800 sets of personal protective equipment (PPE) are being provided to National Guard personnel.

Florida currently has 314 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with seven deaths and over 950 tests pending, according to the Florida Department of Health and state officials.

Iowa Six guardsmen of the Iowa National Guard are serving as liaisons officers in the State Emergency Operations Center, while the Iowa Air National Guard is providing facilities and flight line support to the Iowa Department of Public Health, according to Col. Michael Wunn, Iowa National Guard director of public affairs.

There are 29 confirmed cases in Iowa with 199 persons being monitored, according to the Iowa Department of Public Health.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois has recently mobilized 60 Army and Air National Guard personnel to state active-duty status, according to Lt. Col. Brad Leighton, public affairs director at the Illinois National Guard.

Forty-three of these guardsmen are from the 182nd Airlift Wing Medical Group out of Peoria, Illinois, who will assist state health officials, including with COVID-19 screening and testing.

Governor JB Pritzker has activated about 60 Illinois National Guard service members to assist with COVID-19 response. These include 43 Airmen from the Peoria-based 182nd Airlift Wing's Medical Group and 17 planners and liaison officers from both Army and Air National Guard units.

'-- IL National Guard (@IL_Natl_Guard) March 17, 2020 Seventeen planning liaison officers are also assisting officials throughout the state with logistics and planning.

Illinois currently has 160 confirmed cases with one death, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards directed the Louisiana National Guard to activate over 238 soldiers and airmen so far, not including full-time Guardsmen, to assist with the COVID-19 response

And the number Guardsmen and equipment is anticipated to increase until the situation is stabilized.

More than 100 soldiers and airmen are stationed at three sites in Jefferson Parish and New Orleans to assist local agencies with COVID-19 testing. The drive-up testing stations have begun to take delivery of the necessary testing kits and protective equipment and are scheduled to become operational within the next few days.

Maryland In Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan activated around 400 guardsmen from the Maryland Army and Air National Guard over the weekend to augment the state's capabilities.

In a press conference on Monday, Hogan said a total of 1,000 guardsmen will be activated by the day's end with an additional 1,200 on ''enhanced readiness'' status, expected to be activated this week.

At the direction of Major General Timothy Gowen, as of Monday, 1,000 @MDNG soldiers and airmen are fully activated and another 1,200 guardsmen are currently in a state of enhanced readiness.

'-- Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) March 16, 2020 These guardsmen include two Area Support Medical Companies to assist state health officials in screening patients, transporting supplies and distributing food.

''One of things that the governor mentioned was the distribution of the Strategic National Stockpile mission, particularly personal protective equipment,'' said Maj. Gen. Timothy E. Gowen, Maryland adjutant general, in the press conference. ''That's always been a standing mission for us, and we are going to execute that in the coming days.''

New Jersey On Monday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy activated the New Jersey National Guard to assist in the state's response.

''We will be working closely with the [New Jersey] Office of Emergency Management to assist fellow residents as we change from our civilian attire and put on our uniforms to serve this state'.... Our most likely mission sets are focused on capability gaps.'' said Brig. Gen. Jemal Beale, adjutant general of New Jersey. ''They are things like advise and assist, logistics, transportation, traffic control, security or bringing in our engineers to maybe bring a facility back online that's needed in some way, shape or form for COVID-19.''

Gov. Murphy said the role of the Guardsmen will likely focus on food delivery and manning drive-thru test locations in the intermediate '-- with the possibility of converting "a building for some self-quarantine reasons'' if needed.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has specifically called for an increased role for the National Guard and for involvement from the Army Corps of Engineers in combating COVID-19.

In a Wednesday press conference, Gov. Cuomo stated that President Donald Trump has agreed to send the USNS Comfort to New York Harbor to provide additional beds for patients. The hospital ship has around 1,000 beds, although Secretary of Defense Mark Esper noted on Tuesday that the Pentagon's medical resources are ''focused on trauma."

''[Hospital ships] don't necessarily have segregated spaces to deal with infectious diseases,'' Esper said. "One of the ways you can use field hospitals or hospital ships in between is to take the pressure off of civilian hospitals when it comes to trauma cases, to open up civilian hospital rooms for infectious diseases.''

This announcement follows Cuomo's call on Monday for the New York National Guard to assist state officials in expanding in-patient hospital capabilities in anticipation of a spike in positive novel coronavirus cases requiring hospitalization.

''We are going to organize the National Guard to work with the building unions and work with private developers to find existing facilities that could most easily be adapted to medical facilities," Cuomo said in the press conference. ''Meaning dormitories, meaning former nursing homes: facilities that have that basic configuration that could be retrofitted.''

As of Wednesday, the New York National Guard '-- including personnel from the Army and Air National Guard, the New York Guard (state defense force), and the New York Naval Militia '-- has 900 personnel activated to assist in the state's response, according to a press release.

Guardsmen are manning five drive-thru testing sites throughout the state, according to Col. Richard Goldenberg, public affairs officer at the New York National Guard.

Cuomo was the first governor to activate the National Guard to assist in the state's response in New Rochelle, New York, a suburb of New York City, where a ''cluster'' of cases were confirmed.

Guardsmen continue to assist with food delivery, logistics and cleaning services in the previously identified ''containment area.''

In addition, guardsmen, including Army National Guard combat medic specialists and Air National Guard medical technicians, are ''assisting state officials with the collection of samples'' at drive-thru testing locations, the official added.

According to the governor, New York State has 2,382 positive cases of COVID-19, including 1,000 new cases and 549 hospitalizations, as of Wednesday morning.

Oregon The Oregon National Guard is also providing support and on Thursday announced that approximately 25 Citizen-Soldiers are assisting the Oregon Health Authority with the setup of a medical facility in Salem, Oregon.

Officials say the assistance ranges from Military Department Civilians providing maintenance and mechanical support, to uniformed personnel setting up facilities for civilian medical personnel.

Guardsmen have coordinated with Oregon Health Authority, the Oregon Military Department, Department of Homeland Security, Oregon Department of Transportation, Department of Corrections and other state local and non-governmental agencies.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has activated 50 National Guard personnel to serve as ''subject matter expert planners to assist the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency," the National Guard Bureau said.

''One of the most important National Guard missions is to support our own communities,'' said Maj. Gen. Anthony Carrelli, adjutant general of Pennsylvania. ''Assisting and serving our fellow neighbors is a very personal effort as this is where we live. We are all in this together.''

A message from Gen. Joseph L. Lengyel, chief of the National Guard Bureau https://t.co/RFIwpC9Zff

'-- PA National Guard (@PANationalGuard) March 18, 2020 Guardsmen will also be supporting dozens of Pennsylvania residents who had previously been quarantined at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia, after departing from the Grand Princess cruise ship.

Puerto Rico The Puerto Rico National Guard has been activated by Gov. Wanda Vzquez Garced to screen passengers arriving on the island via the airport and cruise ship ports. This mobilization follows extended missions to respond to multiple hurricanes and earthquakes.

''We are currently structuring this new mission to support the mitigation and control efforts of state and federal agencies in response to the COVID-19 emergency,'' said Brig. Gen. Miguel M(C)ndez, commanding officer of Task Force-Puerto Rico, in a press release. ''Our staff is being evaluated and trained for this new contingency and is being deployed at Luis Mu±oz Mar­n Airport to carry out the assigned functions.''

Rhode Island Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo has also activated a handful of National Guard personnel to State Active Duty Status. Currently, around ten Guardsmen are ''providing response planners, liaisons and support to the state Emergency Operations Center, and logistics support,'' according to officials.

The state has confirmed 23 positive cases with over 300 pending results, according to state health officials.

National Guard activation powers A state's governor may activate the National Guard under ''State Active Duty'' status ''in response to natural or man-made disasters or Homeland Defense missions.'' In this capacity, guardsmen remain ''command and control'' of the governor and are sourced and paid for by the state, according to the National Guard Bureau.

Across 50 states, three territories, and the District of Columbia, there are approximately 450,000 Air and Army National Guard personnel who ''frequently train side-by-side with state and local emergency responders'' in domestic operations, the National Guard Bureau noted.

A governor may also activate the guardsmen to support other states through assistance agreements in a multi-state response to an emergency, although the funding comes from the federal government under Title 32 U.S.C. status. No states have sent personnel to neighboring states thus far.

''The National Guard has unique capabilities such as its Civil Support Teams and [Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and high-yield Explosive Enhanced Response Force Packages (CERFPs)] that could provide local first responders with additional resources to combat COVID-19,'' the previous release added.

''20 National Guard Civil Support Teams (CSTs) have provided COVID-19 response support by conducting Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) training for first responders at the request of civilian agencies,'' a National Guard Bureau press release stated. ''CST professionals' HAZMAT and biohazard expertise make them well-suited for training how to properly don and maintain PPE.''

The defense secretary retains the authority to order National Guard forces to active duty under Title 10U.S.C. when ''necessary to maintain the national health, safety, or interest,'' according to the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Framework.

As of Tuesday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper did not allude to plans to federalize National Guard components.

This story will continue to be updated as the National Guard Bureau releases daily reports on National Guard activities nationwide. If you or someone you know has been called up to State Active Duty status, please contact Military Times managing editor Howard Altman, haltman@militarytimes.com, if you are interested in sharing about your experience.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 07:06

Authored by Aaron Ginn via Medium.com,

After watching the outbreak of COVID-19 for the past two months, I've followed the pace of the infection, its severity, and how our world is tackling the virus. While we should be concerned and diligent, the situation has dramatically elevated to a mob-like fear spreading faster than COVID-19 itself.

When 13% of Americans believe they are currently infected with COVID-19 (mathematically impossible), full-on panic is blocking our ability to think clearly and determine how to deploy our resources to stop this virus. Over three-fourths of Americans are scared of what we are doing to our society through law and hysteria, not of infection or spreading COVID-19 to those most vulnerable.

The following article is a systematic overview of COVID-19 driven by data from medical professionals and academic articles that will help you understand what is going on (sources include CDC, WHO, NIH, NHS, University of Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, NEJM, JAMA, and several others). I'm quite experienced at understanding virality, how things grow, and data. In my vocation, I'm most known for popularizing the ''growth hacking movement'' in Silicon Valley that specializes in driving rapid and viral adoption of technology products. Data is data. Our focus here isn't treatments but numbers. You don't need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn't say. Numbers are universal.

I hope you walk away with a more informed perspective on how you can help and fight back against the hysteria that is driving our country into a dark place. You can help us focus our scarce resources on those who are most vulnerable, who need our help.

Note: The following graphs and numbers are as of mid-March 2020. Things are moving quickly, so I update this article twice a day. Most graphs are as of March 20th, 2020.

* * *

Total cases are the wrong metricA critical question to ask yourself when you first look at a data set is, ''What is our metric for success?''.

Let's start at the top. How is it possible that more than 20% of Americans believe they will catch COVID-19? Here's how. Vanity metrics '-- a single data point with no context. Wouldn't this picture scare you?

Look at all of those large red scary circles!

These images come from the now infamous John Hopkins COVID-19 tracking map. What started as a data transparency effort has now molded into an unintentional tool for hysteria and panic.

An important question to ask yourself is what do these bubbles actually mean? Each bubble represents the total number of COVID-19 cases per country. The situation looks serious, yet we know that this virus is over four months old, so how many of these cases are active?

Immediately, we now see that just under half of those terrifying red bubbles aren't relevant or actionable. The total number of cases isn't illustrative of what we should do now. This is a single vanity data point with no context; it isn't information or knowledge. To know how to respond, we need more numbers to tell a story and to paint the full picture. As a metaphor, the daily revenue of a business doesn't tell you a whole lot about profitability, capital structure, or overhead. The same goes for the total number of cases. The data isn't actionable. We need to look at ratios and percentages to tell us what to do next '-- conversion rate, growth rate, and severity.

Time lapsing new cases gives us perspectiveBreaking down each country by the date of the first infection helps us track the growth and impact of the virus. We can see how total cases are growing against a consistent time scale.

Here are new cases time lapsed by country and date of first 100 total cases.

Here is a better picture of US confirmed case daily growth.

The United States is tracking with other European nations at doubling every three days or so. As we measure and test more Americans, this will continue to grow. Our time-lapse growth is lower than China, but not as good as South Korea, Japan, Singapore, or Taiwan. All are considered models of how to beat COVID-19. The United States is performing average, not great, compared to the other modern countries by this metric.

Still, there is a massive blindspot with this type of graph. None of these charts are weighted on a per-capita basis. It treats every country as a single entity, as we will see this fails to tell us what is going on in several aspects.

On a per-capita basis, we shouldn't be panickingEvery country has a different population size which skews aggregate and cumulative case comparisons. By controlling for population, you can properly weigh the number of cases in the context of the local population size. Viruses don't acknowledge our human borders. The US population is 5.5X greater than Italy, 6X larger than South Korea, and 25% the size of China. Comparing the US total number of cases in absolute terms is rather silly.

Rank ordering based on the total number of cases shows that the US on a per-capita basis is significantly lower than the top six nations by case volume. On a 1 million citizen per-capita basis, the US moves to above mid-pack of all countries and rising, with similar case volume as Singapore (385 cases), Cyprus (75 cases), and United Kingdom(3,983 cases). This is data as of March 20th, 2020.

But total cases even on a per-capita basis will always be a losing metric. The denominator (total population) is more or less fixed. We aren't having babies at the pace of viral growth. Per-capita won't explain how fast the virus is moving and if it is truly ''exponential''.

COVID-19 is spreading, but probably not acceleratingGrowth rates are tricky to track over time. Smaller numbers are easy to move than larger numbers. As an example, GDP growth of 3% for the US means billions of dollars while 3% for Bermuda means millions. Generally, growth rates decline over time, but the nominal increase may still be significant. This holds true of daily confirmed case increases. Daily growth rates declined over time across all countries regardless of particular policy solutions, such as shutting the borders or social distancing.

The daily growth data across the world is a little noisy.

Weighing daily growth of confirmed cases by a relative daily growth factor cleans up the picture, more than 1 is increasing and below 1 is declining. For all of March, the world has hovered around 1.1. This translates to an average daily growth rate of 10%, with ups and downs on a daily basis. This isn't great, but it is good news as COVID-19 most likely isn't increasing in virality. The growth rate of the growth rate is approximately 10%; however, the data is quite noisy. With inconsistent country-to-country reporting and what qualifies as a confirmed case, the more likely explanation is that we are increasing our measurement, but the virus hasn't increased in viral capability. Recommended containment and prevention strategies are still quite effective at stopping the spread.

Cases globally are increasing (it is a virus after all!), but beware of believing metrics designed to intentionally scare like ''cases doubling''. These are typically small numbers over small numbers and sliced on a per-country basis. Globally, COVID-19's growth rate is rather steady. Remember, viruses ignore our national boundaries.

Viruses though don't grow infinitely forever and forever. As with most things in nature, viruses follow a common pattern '-- a bell curve.

Watch the Bell CurveAs COVID-19 spreads and declines (which it will decline despite what the media tells you), every country will follow a similar pattern. The following is a more detailed graph of S. Korea's successful defeat of COVID-19 compared also to China with thousands of more cases and deaths. It is a bell curve:

Here is a more detailed graph of S. Korea graphed against the total number of cases.

Here is a graph from Italy showing a bell curve in symptom onset and number of cases, which may point to the beginning of the end for Italy '--

JAMA '-- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/coronavirus-alert

Bell curves is the dominant trait of outbreaks. A virus doesn't grow linearly forever. It accelerates, plateaus, and then declines. Whether it is environmental or our own efforts, viruses accelerate and quickly decline. This fact of nature is represented in Farr's law. CDC's of ''bend the curve'' or ''flatten the curve'' reflects this natural reality.

It is important to note that in both scenarios, the total number of COVID-19 cases will be similar. ''Flattening the curve'''s focus is a shock to the healthcare system which can increase fatalities due to capacity constraints. In the long-term, it isn't infection prevention. Unfortunately, ''flattening the curve'' doesn't include other downsides and costs of execution.

Both the CDC and WHO are optimizing virality and healthcare utilization, while ignoring the economic shock to our system. Both organizations assume you are going to get infected, eventually, and it won't be that bad.

A low probability of catching COVID-19The World Health Organization (''WHO'') released a study on how China responded to COVID-19. Currently, this study is one of the most exhaustive pieces published on how the virus spreads.

The results of their research show that COVID-19 doesn't spread as easily as we first thought or the media had us believe (remember people abandoned their dogs out of fear of getting infected). According to their report if you come in contact with someone who tests positive for COVID-19 you have a 1''5% chance of catching it as well. The variability is large because the infection is based on the type of contact and how long.

The majority of viral infections come from prolonged exposures in confined spaces with other infected individuals. Person-to-person and surface contact is by far the most common cause. From the WHO report, ''When a cluster of several infected people occurred in China, it was most often (78''85%) caused by an infection within the family by droplets and other carriers of infection in close contact with an infected person.

From the CDC's study on transmission in China and Princess Cruise outbreak -

A growing body of evidence indicates that COVID-19 transmission is facilitated in confined settings; for example, a large cluster (634 confirmed cases) of COVID-19 secondary infections occurred aboard a cruise ship in Japan, representing about one fifth of the persons aboard who were tested for the virus. This finding indicates the high transmissibility of COVID-19 in enclosed spaces

Dr. Paul Auwaerter, the Clinical Director for the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine echoes this finding,

''If you have a COVID-19 patient in your household, your risk of developing the infection is about 10%'....If you were casually exposed to the virus in the workplace (e.g., you were not locked up in conference room for six hours with someone who was infected [like a hospital]), your chance of infection is about 0.5%''

According to Dr. Auwaerter, these transmission rates are very similar to the seasonal flu.

Air-based transmission or untraceable community spread is very unlikely. According to WHO's COVID-19 lead Maria Van Kerkhove, true community based spreading is very rare. The data from China shows that community-based spread was only a very small handful of cases. ''This virus is not circulating in the community, even in the highest incidence areas across China,'' Van Kerkhove said.

''Transmission by fine aerosols in the air over long distances is not one of the main causes of spread. Most of the 2,055 infected hospital workers were either infected at home or in the early phase of the outbreak in Wuhan when hospital safeguards were not raised yet,'' she said.

True community spread involves transmission where people get infected in public spaces and there is no way to trace back the source of infection. WHO believes that is not what the Chinese data shows. If community spread was super common, it wouldn't be possible to reduce the new cases through ''social distancing''.

''We have never seen before a respiratory pathogen that's capable of community transmission but at the same time which can also be contained with the right measures. If this was an influenza epidemic, we would have expected to see widespread community transmission across the globe by now and efforts to slow it down or contain it would not be feasible,'' said Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of WHO.

An author of a working paper from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University said, ''The current scientific consensus is that most transmission via respiratory secretions happens in the form of large respiratory droplets '... rather than small aerosols. Droplets, fortunately, are heavy enough that they don't travel very far and instead fall from the air after traveling only a few feet.''

The media was put into a frenzy when the above authors released their study on COVID-19's ability to survive in the air. The study did find the virus could survive in the air for a couple of hours; however, this study was designed as academic exercise rather than a real-world test. This study put COVID-19 into a spray bottle to ''mist'' it into the air. I don't know anyone who coughs in mist form and it is unclear if the viral load was large enough to infect another individual As one doctor, who wants to remain anonymous, told me, ''Corona doesn't have wings''.

To summarize, China, Singapore, and South Korea's containment efforts worked because community-based and airborne transmission aren't common. The most common form of transmission is person-to-person or surface-based.

Common transmission surfacesCOVID-19's ability to live for a long period of time is limited on most surfaces and it is quite easy to kill with typical household cleaners, just like the normal flu.

COVID-19 be detected on copper after 4 hours and 24 hours on cardboard.

COVID-19 survived best on plastic and stainless steel, remaining viable for up to 72 hours

COVID-19 is very vulnerable to UV light and heat.

Presence doesn't mean infectious. The viral concentration falls significantly over time. The virus showed a half-life of about 0.8 hours on copper, 3.46 hours on cardboard, 5.6 hours on steel and 6.8 hours on plastic.

According to Dylan Morris, one of the authors, ''We do not know how much virus is actually needed to infect a human being with high probability, nor how easily the virus is transferred from the cardboard to one's hand when touching a package''

According to Dr. Auwaerter, ''It's thought that this virus can survive on surfaces such as hands, hard surfaces, and fabrics. Preliminary data indicates up to 72 hours on hard surfaces like steel and plastic, and up to 12 hours on fabric.''

COVID-19 will likely ''burn off'' in the summerDue to COVID-19's sensitivity to UV light and heat (just like the normal influenza virus), it is very likely that it will ''burn off'' as humidity increases and temperatures rise.

Released on March 10th, one study mapped COVID-19 virality capability by high temperature and high humidity. It found that both significantly reduced the ability of the virus to spread from person-to-person. From the study,

''This result is consistent with the fact that the high temperature and high humidity significantly reduce the transmission of influenza. It indicates that the arrival of summer and rainy season in the northern hemisphere can effectively reduce the transmission of the COVID-19.''

The University of Maryland mapped severe COVID-19 outbreaks with local weather patterns around the world, from the US to China. They found that the virus thrives in a certain temperature and humidity channel. ''The researchers found that all cities experiencing significant outbreaks of COVID-19 have very similar winter climates with an average temperature of 41 to 52 degrees Fahrenheit, an average humidity level of 47% to 79% with a narrow east-west distribution along the same 30''50 N'' latitude'', said the University of Maryland.

''Based on what we have documented so far, it appears that the virus has a harder time spreading between people in warmer, tropical climates,'' said study leader Mohammad Sajadi, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine in the UMSOM, physician-scientist at the Institute of Human Virology and a member of GVN.

In the image below, the zone at risk for a significant community spread in the near-term includes land areas within the green bands.

Children and Teens aren't at riskIt's already well established that the young aren't particularly vulnerable. In fact, there isn't a single death reported below the age of 10 in the world and most children who test positive don't show symptoms. As well, infection rates are lower for individuals below the age of 19, which is similar to SARS and MERS (COVID-19's sister viruses).

According to the WHO's COVID-19 mission in China, only 8.1% of cases were 20-somethings, 1.2% were teens, and 0.9% were 9 or younger. As of the study date February 20th, 78% of the cases reported were ages 30 to 69. The WHO hypothesizes this is for a biological reason and isn't related to lifestyle or exposure.

''Even when we looked at households, we did not find a single example of a child bringing the infection into the household and transmitting to the parents. It was the other way around. And the children tend to have a mild disease,'' said Van Kerkhove.

According to a WSJ article, children have a near-zero chance of becoming ill. They are more likely to get normal flu than COVID-19.

A World Health Organization report on China concluded that cases of Covid-19 in children were ''relatively rare and mild.'' Among cases in people under age 19, only 2.5% developed severe disease while 0.2% developed critical disease. Among nearly 6,300 Covid-19 cases reported by the Korea Centers for Disease Control & Prevention on March 8, there were no reported deaths in anyone under 30. Only 0.7% of infections were in children under 9 and 4.6% of cases were in those ages 10 to 19 years old

Only 2% of the patients in a review of nearly 45,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases in China were children, and there were no reported deaths in children under 10, according to a study published in JAMA last month. (In contrast, there have been 136 pediatric deaths from influenza in the U.S. this flu season.)

About 8% of cases were in people in their 20s. Those 10 to 19 years old accounted for 1% of cases and those under 10 also accounted for only 1%.

However even if children and teens are not suffering severe symptoms themselves, they may ''shed'' large amounts of virus and may do so for many days, says James Campbell, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Children had a virus in their secretions for six to 22 days or an average of 12 days. ''Shedding virus doesn't always mean you're able to transmit the virus'', he notes. It is still important to consider that prolonged shedding of high viral loads from children is still a risky combination within the home since the majority of transmission occurs within a home-like confined environment.

A strong, but unknown viral effectWhile the true viral capacity is unknown at this moment, it is theorized that COVID-19 is more than the seasonal flu but less than other viruses. The average number of people to which a single infected person will transmit the virus, or Ro, range from as low as 1.5 to a high of 3.0

Newer analysis suggests that this viral rate is declining. According to Nobel Laureate and biophysicist Michael Levitt, the infection rate is declining -

''Every coronavirus patient in China infected on average 2.2 people a day '-- spelling exponential growth that can only lead to disaster. But then it started dropping, and the number of new daily infections is now close to zero.'' He compared it to interest rates again: ''even if the interest rate keeps dropping, you still make money. The sum you invested does not lessen, it just grows more slowly. When discussing diseases, it frightens people a lot because they keep hearing about new cases every day. But the fact that the infection rate is slowing down means the end of the pandemic is near.''

What about asymptomatic spread?The majority of cases see symptoms within a few days, not two weeks as originally believed.

On true asymptomatic spread, the data is still unclear but increasingly unlikely. Two studies point to a low infection rate from pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. One study said 10% of infections come from people who don't show symptoms, yet. Another WHO study reported 1.2% of confirmed cases were truly asymptomatic. Several studies confirming asymptotic spread have ended up disproven. It is important to note there is a difference between ''never showing symptoms'' and ''pre-symptomatic'' and the media is promoting an unproven narrative. Almost all people end up in the latter camp within five days, almost never the former. It is very unlikely for individuals with COVID-19 to never show symptoms. WHO and CDC claim that asymptomatic spread isn't a concern and quite rare.

Iceland is leading the global in testing its entire population of ~300,000 for asymptomatic spread, not just those that show symptoms. They randomly tested 1,800 citizens who don't show symptoms and, as far as they knew, were not exposed to positive individuals. Of this sample, only 19 tested positive for COVID-19, or 1.1% of the sample.

Obviously, this type of viral spread is the most concerning; however based on the level of media attention and the global size of positive infections, it seems more probable we keep looking for a COVID-19 viral trait that doesn't exist.

Another way of looking at virality and asymptotic spread is the number of flight attendants, airport staff, or pilots that have tested positive for COVID-19. Out of the thousands of flights since November 2019, only a handful of airport and airline staff have tested positive (such as AA pilot, some BA staff, and several TSA employees).

Outside of medical and hospital staff, these individuals are in greatest contact with infected persons in confined spaces. Despite having no protective gear and most likely these people were asymptomatic, airline and airport staff aren't likely to catch COVID-19 compared to the rest of the population. Those employed in the travel sector are infected at a lower rate than the general population or healthcare workers.

''We still believe, looking at the data, that the force of infection here, the major driver, is people who are symptomatic, unwell, and transmitting to others along the human-to-human route,'' Dr. Mike Ryan of WHO Emergencies Program.

If the symptoms are so close to other less fatal coronaviruses, what is the positivity rate of those tested?

93% of people who think they are positive aren'tLooking at the success in S. Korea and Singapore, the important tool in our war chest is measurement. If we are concerned about the general non-infected population, what is the probability those who show symptoms actually test positive? What is the chance that the cough from your neighbor is COVID-19? This ''conversion rate'' will show whether or not you have a cold (another coronavirus) or heading to isolation for two weeks. Global data shows that ~95% of people who are tested aren't positive. The positivity rate varies by country.

UK: 7,132 concluded tests, of which 13 positive (0.2% positivity rate).

UK: 48,492 tests, of which 1,950 (4.0% positivity rate)

Italy: 9,462 tests, of which 470 positive (at least 5.0% positivity rate).

Italy: 3,300 tests, of which 99 positive (3.0% positivity rate)

Iceland: 3,787 tests, of which 218 positive (5.7% positive rate)

France: 762 tests, of which 17 positive, 179 awaiting results (at least 2.2% positivity rate).

Austria: 321 tests, of which 2 positive, awaiting results: unknown (at least 0.6% positivity rate).

South Korea: 66,652 tests with 1766 positives 25,568 awaiting results (4.3% positivity rate).

United States: 445 concluded tests, of which 14 positive (3.1% positivity rate).

In the US, drive-thru testing facilities are being deployed around the nation. Gov. Cuomo of NY released initial data from their drive-thru testing. Out of the 600~ that was tested in a single day, ~7% were positive. Tested individuals actively show symptoms and present a doctor's note. This result is similar to public tracking on US nationwide positivity rate.

University of Oxford's Our World in Data attempts to track public reporting on individuals tested vs positive cases of COVID-19. For the US, it estimates 14.25% of those tested are positive.

Last week, the US was significantly behind in testing, near the bottom of all countries worldwide. As of March 20th, a week later, the US is much closer to other G8 and European countries, but there is a long way to go.

Based on the initial results and the results from other countries, the total number of positive COVID-19 cases will increase as testing increases, but the fatality rate will continue to fall and the severity case mix will fall.

In general, the size of the US population infected with COVID-19 will be much smaller than originally estimated as most symptomatic individuals aren't positive. 93% '-- 99% have other conditions.

Globally, the US has a long way to go to catch up in testing. As testing expands, the total number of cases will increase, but the mild to severe case ratio will decline dramatically.

1% of cases will be severeLooking at the whole funnel from top to bottom, ~1% of everyone who is tested for COVID-19 with the US will have a severe case that will require a hospital visit or long-term admission.

Globally, 80''85% of all cases are mild. These will not require a hospital visit and home-based treatment/ no treatment is effective.

As of mid-March, the US has a significantly lower case severity rate than other countries. Our current severe caseload is similar to South Korea. This data has been spotty in the past; however, lower severity is reflected in the US COVID-19 fatality rates (addressed later).

Early reports from CDC, suggest that 12% of COVID-19 cases need some form of hospitalization, which is lower than the projected severity rate of 20%, with 80% being mild cases.

For context, this year's flu season has led to at least 17 million medical visits and 370,000 hospitalizations (0.1%) out of 30''50 million infections. Recalling that only comparing aggregate total cases isn't helpful, breaking down active cases on a per-capita basis paints a different picture on severity. This is data as of March 20th, 2020.

Declining fatality rateAs the US continues to expand testing, the case fatality rate will decline over the next few weeks. There is little doubt that serious and fatal cases of COVID-19 are being properly recorded. What is unclear is the total size of mild cases. WHO originally estimated a case fatality rate of 4% at the beginning of the outbreak but revised estimates downward 2.3% '-- 3% for all age groups. CDC estimates 0.5% '-- 3%, however stresses that closer to 1% is more probable. Dr. Paul Auwaerter estimated 0.5% '-- 2%, leaning towards the lower end. A paper released on March 19th analyzed a wider data set from China and lowered the fatality rate to 1.4%. This won't be clear for the US until we see the broader population that is positive but with mild cases. With little doubt, the fatality rate and severity rate will decline as more people are tested and more mild cases are counted.

Higher fatality rates in China, Iran, and Italy are more likely associated with a sudden shock to the healthcare system unable to address demands and doesn't accurately reflect viral fatality rates. As COVID-19 spread throughout China, the fatality rate drastically fell outside of Hubei. This was attributed to the outbreak slowing spreading to several provinces with low infection rates.

John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Meta-Research Innovation Center recently wrote about fatality rates and how our current instrumentation is leading to faulty policy solutions:

''The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.

Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data '-- there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew '-- the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases '-- a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection '-- than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty'...''

''Reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.''

Looking at the US fatality, the fatality rate is drastically declining as the number of cases increases, halving every four or five days. The fatality rate will eventually level off and plateau as the US case-mix becomes apparent.

4.06% March 8 (22 deaths of 541 cases)

3.69% March 9 (26 of 704)

3.01% March 10 (30 of 994)

2.95% March 11 (38 of 1,295)

2.52% March 12 (42 of 1,695)

2.27% March 13 (49 of 2,247)

1.93% March 14 (57 of 2,954)

1.84% March 15 (68 of 3,680)

1.90% March 16 (86 of 4,503)

1.76% March 17 (109 of 6,196)

1.66% March 18 (150 of 9,003)

1.51% March 19th (208 of 13,789)

1.32% March 20th (256 of 19,383)

Source: Worldometers.info

Mapped against other countries, our fatality rate and case-mix are following a similar pattern to South Korea which is a good sign, a supposed model of how to manage COVID-19.

Here are deaths weighted by the total number of cases as of March 20th, 2020. Ranked by the total number of cases, our death rate is closer to South Korea's than Spain's or Italy's.

The initial higher fatality rate for the US is trending much lower than originally estimated.

A study of about half deaths within the US (154 of 264), almost all fit a similar demographic profile as the other global ~11,000 fatalities.

Another analysis by Nature, comparing the fatality rate (since revised down) and infectious rate of COVID-19 to other illnesses. COVID-19 is now within range of its other sisters of less potent coronaviruses.

As the global health community continues to gather and report data, the claim that ''COVID-19 isn't just like the flu'' (though still severe) is looking less credible as fatality rates continue to decline and measuring of mild cases increases.

It is important to consider case-mix when looking at fatality rates. The fatality rate is significantly higher for patients with an underlying condition.

The fatality rates by underling condition mimics the rise in the average fatality rate with those with underlying conditions who get the seasonal flu.

Pneumonia and influenza: 1.53% '-- 1.93%

Chronic lower respiratory disease: 1.48% '-- 1.93%

All respiratory causes: 3.04% '-- 4.14%

Heart disease: 3.21% '-- 4.4%

Cancer: 0.68% '-- 1.05%

Diabetes: 0.26% '-- 0.39%

For all underlying conditions: 10.17% '-- 13.67%.

Comparing case-mix across countries with a wide range of fatality (China and Italy) and those with low fatality rates (S. Korea) reveals a stark difference in age; therefore, underlying conditions also vary significantly across countries. These two factors contribute the most to a country's fatality rate.

Source: Goldman Sachs

Divided by most at risk and low risk, Italy had significantly more cases of high at-risk patients than Germany or Korea

Source: https://medium.com/@andreasbackhausab/coronavirus-why-its-so-deadly-in-italy-c4200a15a7bf

Based on an initial CDC study of 2,449 COVID-19 cases (almost half of current US cases have missing demographic data), the United States case-mix looks more like S. Korea and Germany rather than China or Italy. Approximately 69% of COVID-19 cases are in the lower at-risk population of under 65, while 31% are older than 65 higher risk population.

This suggests the US will experience a declining fatality rate; however, the US has over 100 million adults with underlying and chronic illnesses that will negatively impact our fatality rate.

An older population skew within the infected population explains most of the disparity in fatality rates between high and low countries. According to a study of the fatalities of COVID-19 cases in Italy, 99% of all deaths had an underlying pathology. Only 0.8% had no underlying condition.

Most of those infected in Italy were over the age of 60, but the median age of a fatality was 80. All of Italy's fatality under the age of 40 were males with serious pre-existing medical conditions.

This doesn't factor in a wide variance in healthcare capacity, such as hospital beds per 1,000 citizens which could affect health outcomes; however, this doesn't seem to be highly correlated with fatality rates at this moment.

S. Korea '-- 11.5

Germany '-- 8.3

China '-- 4.2

Italy '-- 3.4

United States '-- 2.9

Singapore '-- 2.4

So what should we do?The first rule of medicine is to do no harm.

Local governments and politicians are inflicting massive harm and disruption with little evidence to support their draconian edicts. Every local government is in a mimetic race to one-up each other in authoritarian city ordinances to show us who has more ''abundance of caution''. Politicians are competing, not on more evidence or more COVID-19 cures but more caution. As unemployment rises and families feel unbearably burdened already, they feel pressure to ''fix'' the situation they created with even more radical and ''creative'' policy solutions. This only creates more problems and an even larger snowball effect. The first place to start is to stop killing the patient and focus on what works.

Start with basic hygieneThe most effective means to reduce spread is basic hygiene. Most American's don't wash their hands enough and aren't aware of how to actually wash your hands. Masks aren't particularly effective if you touch your eyes with infected hands. Ask businesses and public places to freely distribute disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer to the customers and patrons. If you get sick or feel sick, stay home. These are basic rules for preventing illness that doesn't require trillions of dollars.

More dataThe best examples of defeating COVID-19 requires lots of data. We are very behind in measuring our population and the impact of the virus but this has turned a corner the last few days. The swift change in direction should be applauded. Private companies are quickly developing and deploying tests, much faster than CDC could ever imagine. The inclusion of private businesses in developing solutions is creative and admirable. Data will calm nerves and allow us to utilize more evidence in our strategy. Once we have proper measurement implemented (the ability to test hundreds every day in a given metro), let's add even more data into that funnel '-- reopen public life.

Open schoolsClosing schools is counterproductive. The economic cost for closing schools in the U.S. for four weeks could cost between $10 and $47 billion dollars (0.1''0.3% of GDP) and lead to a reduction of 6% to 19% in key health care personnel.

CDC's guidance on closing schools specifically for COVID-19 -

Available modeling data indicate that early, short to medium closures do not impact the epi curve of COVID-19 or available health care measures (e.g., hospitalizations). There may be some impact of much longer closures (8 weeks, 20 weeks) further into community spread, but that modeling also shows that other mitigation efforts (e.g., handwashing, home isolation) have more impact on both spread of disease and health care measures. In other countries, those places who closed school (e.g., Hong Kong) have not had more success in reducing spread than those that did not (e.g., Singapore).

Based on transmission evidence children are more likely to catch COVID-19 in the home than at school. As well, they are more likely to expose older vulnerable adults as multi-generational homes are more common. As well, the school provides a single point of testing a large population for a possible infection in the home to prevent community spread.

Open up public spacesWith such little evidence of prolific community spread and our guiding healthcare institutions reporting the same results, shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses. The data is overwhelming at this point that community-based spread and airborne transmission is not a threat. We don't have significant examples of spreading through restaurants or gyms. When you consider the environment COVID-19 prefers, isolating every family in their home is a perfect situation for infection and transmission among other family members. Evidence from South Korea and Singapore shows that it is completely possible and preferred to continue on with life while making accommodations that are data-driven, such as social distancing and regular temperature checks.

Support business and productivityThe data shows that the overwhelming majority of the working population will not be personally impacted, both individually or their children. This is an unnecessary burden that is distracting resources and energy away from those who need it the most. By preventing Americans from being productive and specializing at what they do best (their vocation), we are pulling resources towards unproductive tasks and damaging the economy. We will need money for this fight.

At this rate, we will spend more money on ''shelter-in-place'' than if we completely rebuilt our acute care and emergency capacity.

Source: https://www.macrobond.com/posts/blog-central-banks-go-big-covi-19-market-crash-crisis/

Americans won't have the freedom to go help those who get sick, volunteer their time at a hospital, or give generously to a charity. Instead, big government came barrelling in like a bull in a china shop claiming they could solve COVID-19. The same government that continued to not test incoming passengers from Europe and who couldn't manufacture enough test kits with two months' notice.

Let Americans be free to be a part of the solution, calling us to a higher civic duty to help those most in need and protect the vulnerable. Not sitting in isolation like losers.

People fear what the government will do, not an infectionRampant hoarding and a volatile stock market aren't being driven by COVID-19. An overwhelming majority of American's don't believe they will be infected. Rather hoarding behavior strongly demonstrates an irrational hysteria, from purchasing infective household masks to buying toilet paper in the troves. This fear is being driven by government action, fearing what the government will do next. In South Korea, most citizens didn't fear infection but the government and public shaming. By presenting a consistent and clear plan that is targeted and specific to those who need the most help will reduce the volatility and hysteria. A sign the logic behind these government actions aren't widely accepted, nor believed as rational by the American people is the existence itself of the volatility and hysteria. Over three-fourths of Americans are scared not of COVID-19 but what it is doing to our society.

In CDC's worst-case scenario, CDC expects more than 150''200 million infections within the US. This estimate is hundreds of times bigger than China's infection rate (30% of our population compared to 0.006% in China). Does that really sound plausible to you? China has a sub-par healthcare system, attempted to suppress the news about COVID-19 early on, a lack of transparency, an authoritarian government, and millions of Chinese traveling for the Lunar Festival at the height of the outbreak. In the US, we have a significant lead time, several therapies proving successful, transparency, a top tier healthcare system, a democratic government, and media providing ample accountability.

Infection isn't our primary risk at this point.

Expand medical capacityCOVID-19 is a significant medical threat that needs to be tackled, both finding a cure and limiting spread; however, some would argue that a country's authoritarian response to COVID-19 helped stop the spread. Probably not. In South Korea and Taiwan, I can go to the gym and eat at a restaurant which is more than I can say about San Francisco and New York, despite a significantly lower caseload on a per-capita basis.

None of the countries the global health authorities admire for their approach issued ''shelter-in-place'' orders, rather they used data, measurement,and promoted common sense self-hygiene.

Does stopping air travel have a greater impact than closing all restaurants? Does closing schools reduce the infection rate by 10%? Not one policymaker has offered evidence of any of these approaches. Typically, the argument given is ''out of an abundance of caution''. I didn't know there was such a law. Let's be frank, these acts are emotionally driven by fear, not evidence-based thinking in the process of destroying people's lives overnight. While all of these decisions are made by elites isolated in their castles of power and ego, the shock is utterly devastating Main Street.

A friend who runs a guy will run out of cash in a few weeks. A friend who is a pastor let go of half of his staff as donations fell by 60%. A waitress at my favorite breakfast place told me her family will have no income in a few days as they force the closure of restaurants. While political elites twiddle their thumbs with models and projections based on faulty assumptions, people's lives are being destroyed with Marxian vigor. The best compromise elites can come up with is $2,000.

Does it make more sense for us to pay a tax to expand medical capacity quickly or pay the cost to our whole nation of a recession? Take the example of closing schools which will easily cost our economy $50 billion. For that single unanimous totalitarian act, we could have built 50 hospitals with 500+ beds per hospital.

Eliminate arcane certificate of need and expand acute medical capacity to support possible higher healthcare utilization this season.

Don't let them forget it and voteThese days are precarious as Governors float the idea of martial law for not following ''social distancing'', as well as they liked while they violate those same rules on national TV. Remember this tone is for a virus that has impacted 0.004% of our population. Imagine if this was a truly existential threat to our Republic.

The COVID-19 hysteria is pushing aside our protections as individual citizens and permanently harming our free, tolerant, open civil society. Data is data. Facts are facts. We should be focused on resolving COVID-19 with continued testing, measuring, and be vigilant about protecting those with underlying conditions and the elderly from exposure. We are blessed in one way, there is an election in November. Never forget what happened and vote.

You may ask yourself. Who is this guy? Who is this author? I'm a nobody. That is also the point. The average American feels utterly powerless right now. I'm an individual American who sees his community and loved ones being decimated without given a choice, without empathy, and while the media cheers on with high ratings.

When this is all over, look for massive confirmation bias and pyrrhic celebration by elites. There will be vain cheering in the halls of power as Main Street sits in pieces. Expect no apology, that would be political suicide. Rather, expect to be given a Jedi mind trick of ''I'm the government and I helped.''

The health of the State will be even stronger with more Americans dependent on welfare, another trillion stimulus filled with pork for powerful friends, and a bailout for companies that charged us $200 change fees for nearly a decade. Washington DC will be fine. New York will still have all of the money in the world. Our communities will be left with nothing but a shadow of the longest bull market in the history of our country.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 06:52

The creation of a chimeric SARS-like virus has scientists discussing the risks of gain-of-function research.Update (March 11, 2020): On social media and news outlets, a theory has circulated that the coronavirus at the root of the COVID-19 outbreak originated in a research lab. Scientists say there is no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab.

MERS coronavirus

R alph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team's efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team's results, which were published in Nature Medicine.

The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus'--or other coronaviruses found in bat species'--may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-function research. ''If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,'' Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.

In October 2013, the US government put a stop to all federal funding for gain-of-function studies, with particular concern rising about influenza, SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). ''NIH [National Institutes of Health] has funded such studies because they help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and preparedness efforts,'' NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement at the time. ''These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better.''

Baric's study on the SHC014-chimeric coronavirus began before the moratorium was announced, and the NIH allowed it to proceed during a review process, which eventually led to the conclusion that the work did not fall under the new restrictions, Baric told Nature. But some researchers, like Wain-Hobson, disagree with that decision.

The debate comes down to how informative the results are. ''The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,'' Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University, told Nature.

But Baric and others argued the study's importance. ''[The results] move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger,'' Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which samples viruses from animals and people in emerging-diseases hotspots across the globe, told Nature.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 06:48

Click here to read the full article.

The Trump Department of Justice has asked Congress to craft legislation allowing chief judges to indefinitely hold people without trial and suspend other constitutionally-protected rights during coronavirus and other emergencies, according to a report by Politico's Betsy Woodruff Swan.

While the asks from the Department of Justice will likely not come to fruition with a Democratically-controlled House of Representatives, they demonstrate how much this White House has a frightening disregard for rights enumerated in the Constitution.

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The DOJ has requested Congress allow any chief judge of a district court to pause court proceedings ''whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation,'' according to draft language obtained by Politico. This would be applicable to ''any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil processes and proceedings.'' They justify this by saying currently judges can pause judicial proceedings in an emergency but that new legislation would allow them to apply it ''in a consistent manner.''

Related Video: With Coronavirus Closures, USS Constitution Adds Live Virtual Tours

But the Constitution grants citizens habeas corpus which gives arrestees the right to appear in front of a judge and ask to be released before trial. Enacting legislation like the DOJ wants would essentially suspend habeas corpus indefinitely until the emergency ended. Further, DOJ asked Congress to suspend the statute of limitations on criminal investigations and civil proceedings during the emergency until a year after it ended.

Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told Politico the measure was ''terrifying,'' saying, ''Not only would it be a violation of [habeas corpus], but it says 'affecting pre-arrest.' So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.''

''That is something that should not happen in a democracy,'' he added.

DOJ also asked Congress to amend the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to have defendants appear at a hearing via videoconference instead of in-person, but only with the defendant's consent. But it's not just Americans' rights the DOJ wants to violate. They also asked Congress to pass a law saying that immigrants who test positive for COVID-19 cannot qualify as asylum seekers

As coronavirus spreads through the country, activists are calling on politicians in office to release prisoners and immigrants held in detention centers, both of which can be a hotbed of virus activity with so many people in close quarters and limited or non-existent supplies of soap, sanitizer, and protective equipment. Some states have already begun to do so. But with this, the Trump administration is taking steps to hold more people in prisons for an undetermined amount of time '-- showing their priority is not saving lives but giving themselves more power.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 06:42

Saturday Mar 21, 2020 at 6:23 PM

CONCORD '' Gov. Chris Sununu on Saturday ordered all grocery and retail stores temporarily transition to the use of single-use paper or plastic bags due to the threat of the spread of the coronavirus, meaning customers' use of reusable bags is banned.

The governor said the order applies to all supermarkets, grocery, convenience and retail stores selling any product and any other similar establishment engaged in in-store sale of retail products.

''Our grocery store workers are on the front lines of COVID-19, working around the clock to keep New Hampshire families fed,'' Sununu said. ''With identified community transmission, it is important that shoppers keep their reusable bags at home given the potential risk to baggers, grocers and customers.''

Sununu said his emergency order directs all grocers and retail stores in the state to temporarily transition to only use new paper or plastic grocery bags provided by stores ''as soon as feasibly possible.''

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 06:40

The coronavirus pandemic is exacting a heavy toll on Italy, with hospitals overwhelmed and a nationwide lockdown imposed. But experts are also concerned about a seemingly high death rate, with the number of fatalities outstripping the total reported in China.

Of the 47,000 people confirmed coronavirus patients in Italy, 4,032 so far have died - with a record increase of 627 in the last 24 hours.

By contrast China has almost twice as many cases, 81,250, but 3,253 fatalities.

In very crude terms, this means that around eight per cent of confirmed coronavirus patients have died in Italy, compared to four per cent in China. By this measure Germany, which has so far identified 13,000 cases and 42 deaths, has a fatality rate of just 0.3 per cent.

So why the disparity?

According to Prof Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy's minister of health, the country's mortality rate is far higher due to demographics - the nation has the second oldest population worldwide - and the manner in which hospitals record deaths.

''The age of our patients in hospitals is substantially older - the median is 67, while in China it was 46,'' Prof Ricciardi says. ''So essentially the age distribution of our patients is squeezed to an older age and this is substantial in increasing the lethality.''

A study in JAMA this week found that almost 40 per cent of infections and 87 per cent of deaths in the country have been in patients over 70 years old.

And according to modelling the majority of this age group are likely to need critical hospital care - including 80 per cent of 80-somethings - putting immense pressure on the health system.

But Prof Ricciardi added that Italy's death rate may also appear high because of how doctors record fatalities.

''The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.

''On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many had two or three,'' he says.

Other experts have also expressed scepticism about the available data. Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that countries do not yet have a good indication of how many mild infections they have.

If further testing finds more asymptomatic cases spreading undetected, the mortality rate will drop.

''It's too early to make a comparison across Europe,'' he says. ''We do not have detailed sero-surveillance of the population and we do not know how many asymptomatic people are spreading it.''

Prof McKee adds that testing is not currently consistent across the continent, or world.

''In Germany, epidemiological surveillance is more challenging - simply because of the complexity of working in a federal state and because public health is organised very much at the local level."

But there are other factors that may have contributed to Italy's fatality rates, experts say. This includes a high rate of smoking and pollution - the majority of deaths have been in the northern region Lombardy region, which is notorious for poor air quality.

Workers stand next to coffins and remains of the coronavirus victims, in Bergamo, Italy Credit : FOTOGRAMMA/EPA-EFEAnd there's also no question that parts of Italy's health system have been overwhelmed with a surge of coronavirus patients and are struggling to cope.

''Doctors in Italy haven't been dealing with one or two patients in care... but up to 1,200,'' says Dr Mike Ryan, health emergencies programme executive director at the World Health Organization. ''The fact they're saving so many is a small miracle in itself.''

This pressure is likely to get worse as more healthcare workers are infected and have to isolate - already, 2,000 have contracted the virus in Italy.

"Based on Italy's experience, there is a real concern for the UK,'' adds Prof McKee. ''Compared to almost every other European country we have a relative shortage of ventilators and medical staff.''

Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 06:32

A combination of two existing drugs is proving to be effective at eliminating the novel coronavirus in patients confirmed to have the infection. Treatment with both hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, and the antibiotic azithromycin dramatically shortened the recovery time for people with COVID-19. More trials on a larger scale will be needed before we know just how effective this drug combo is. Visit BGR's homepage for more stories.A specific combination of existing drugs has shown it is capable of wiping out the novel coronavirus in a small-scale study conducted in France. Doctors gave confirmed COVID-19 patients a drug cocktail that included the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin. The results of the trial were published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.

A total of 30 COVID-19 patients participated in the trials. The participants were split into three groups. Ten of the patients received just the anti-malaria drug, while another group of ten receive both hydroxychloroquine in combination with the antibiotic. The third group of 10 were the control group and did not receive any treatment.

Remarkably, the anti-malaria medication proved to significantly reduce the duration of the infection in the patients who received it, but the combination of both drugs produced truly astounding results. In fact, by the fifth day of treatment, all of the patients who received the drug combo tested negative for the active virus.

The test is indeed promising, but it was so small in scale that it's difficult to know how much stock to put in it. A much larger test would give us a more accurate idea of how effective these treatment options are, but it's hard not to feel optimistic about it based on these results.

This is hardly the only drug trial to examine the effectiveness of existing medications on COVID-19 patients, and there have been several experimental treatments that show promise. A flu drug from Japan may be effective in treating patients, based on a report from China earlier this week, while other institutions are experimenting with the blood pressure drug losartan to see if it can prevent the virus from infecting patients in the first place.

What allowed the COVID-19 pandemic to cause such a disruption in our lives is that we know so little about it. No, it's not the most deadly virus in the world, not by a long shot, but it's extremely contagious and spreads rapidly through a population. Finding drugs that work to combat that spread is vital, and it's only natural that we try existing options first while other drugs built specifically for this illness are in development.

For now, practicing social distancing and heeding the advice of health officials to stay home and avoid each other are the most important things we can do to slow the outbreak. Giving our healthcare systems room to breathe and not burying hospitals under a flood of patients will help mitigate serious consequences, and that responsibility is shared equally by all of us.

Image Source: MOURAD BALTI TOUATI/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Mike Wehner has reported on technology and video games for the past decade, covering breaking news and trends in VR, wearables, smartphones, and future tech. Most recently, Mike served as Tech Editor at The Daily Dot, and has been featured in USA Today, Time.com, and countless other web and print outlets. His love ofreporting is second only to his gaming addiction.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 06:31

Baltimore's plan to combat the coronavirus? Release different scum into the streets and ask nicely that they behave.

Baltimore is experiencing a different type of epidemic, one that is about to get worse during the China virus epidemic. The record homicides in 2019 have spilled over into 2020, and now the city's mayor, Jack Young, has a novel approach to end the bloodshed. He is begging the gangsters and street thugs to suspend their day job of target practice on city streets in order to free up bed space for potential coronavirus patients.

Following the murder of seven people in a shootout downtown on Tuesday night, WJZ13 reported that Young had a message for the city's murderers. ''We cannot clog up our hospitals and their beds with people that are being shot senselessly because we're going to need those beds for people infected with the coronavirus,'' pleaded the mayor. ''And it could be your mother, your grandmother or one of your relatives. So take that into consideration.''

Wow, why have we never thought of this brilliant idea? If we only had asked them nicely!

The problem is that his plea rings hollow, as Baltimore officials are joining other blue cities in publicly announcing to criminals that they will not be arrested for numerous crimes. Now, there will be even less of a deterrent for criminals than even before, particularly with few witnesses on the streets and numerous vacant stores to loot.

On the same day Mayor Young issued his impassioned plea to suspend the murders, the city's infamous prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, announced that she would be dismissing pending criminal charges for the following offenses: possession of drugs including heroin, attempted distribution of any drug, prostitution, trespassing, minor traffic offenses, open container, and urinating in public.

But given her track record of avoiding prosecutions of even more serious crimes (except for charges against police), one can't help but wonder if this is just the tip of the iceberg. If this is what she is willing to publicly announce, how many more crimes will she quietly dismiss?

Mosby is also urging the governor to release some prisoners, as other liberal politicians are doing.

Let's put aside, for a moment, the fact that urination in public and prostitution are not exactly the sort of actions you want to occur during an epidemic. What these radical leftists refuse to recognize is that the very reason why there is so much murder in Baltimore is because they are not deterring and punishing the career criminals and gang members for the other crimes they commit prior to murder.

According to the Maryland Public Policy Institute, from 2016 to 2018, Mosby dropped 36 percent of the cases for felony possession of a gun, and only 27 percent of felony possession cases resulted in a conviction.

Baltimore police report that arrests declined nearly 15 percent from 2017 to 2019. Shockingly, arrests declined for vandalism, rape, and yes, even for homicide, despite the fact that the number of actual homicides surged. Gee, more homicides, but a 40 percent decline in homicide arrests '' what gives? Well, arrests for drugs plummeted 30 percent. Perhaps, these ''low-level'' drug offenders aren't so low-level, but in fact, are often those who commit murder but are now not taken off the streets while we still have the chance to prevent homicide.

Indeed, according to Baltimore police, in 2018, of the 86 homicide suspects arrested, 70 had prior criminal records. Fifty-two had been previously arrested for, you guessed it, drugs! Yet it's a system of catch-and-release, where, thanks to Mosby, they barely serve any time behind bars and are back on the streets to engage in more gang-related violence.

Now, even fewer of these ticking time bombs will be taken off the streets. Yet the mayor thinks he can shame the gangsters into dropping their guns out of concern for the health of their grandparents?!

The absurd irony is that, as of this morning, there were only eight confirmed cases of coronavirus in Baltimore City, and nobody was reported to be in critical condition. In ''Charm City,'' you are exponentially more likely to die of homicide than of coronavirus. Now with armed criminals undeterred from committing crimes on largely vacant streets, and law-abiding citizens barred from carrying guns, Baltimoreans will have more than one reason to quarantine in their homes.

Author: Daniel Horowitz Daniel Horowitz is a senior editor of Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @RMConservative.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 04:23

| March 21, 2020 05:19 PM

Donald Trump Jr. slammed a news article MSN posted Friday that criticized his father for touting a malaria drug that could potentially slow the spread of the coronavirus because it's reportedly deadly if administered at a level of more than 2 grams.

The article, published by Bloomberg News with the headline ''Virus Drug Touted by Trump, Musk Can Kill In Just Two Grams,'' highlighted potential dangers of the decades-old malaria drug chloroquine, which has been linked to some positive findings related to recovery from the coronavirus.

''What's your point?'' Trump Jr. asked on Twitter. ''2 grams of caffeine can kill you too, but no one is planning on prescribing that much.''

''This bullshit is why everyone hates and doesn't trust the media, he added. ''They are trying to create fear for clicks with misleading and irrelevant info. You people truly suck!''

What's your point? 2 grams of caffeine can kill you too, but no one is planning on prescribing that much.This bullshit is why everyone hates and doesn't trust the media. They are trying to create fear for clicks with misleading and irrelevant info.

You people truly suck! https://t.co/HU2KtD37TW

'-- Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) March 21, 2020 The tweet was liked and retweeted by thousands after just a few minutes.

Trump Jr. wasn't the only verified Twitter account to suggest that chloroquine is not unique when it comes to useful drugs being deadly depending on the dose.

''FACTS,'' Dr. Milton Wolf wrote before mentioning 3 points. ''1. Every drug ever in history kills if overdosed. 2. Even water kills if taken in excess. 3. The American media is garbage. They'll claim a cure is a killer just to bash @realDonaldTrump. They are the enemy of the people.''

FACTS:1. Every drug ever in history kills if overdosed.

2. Even water kills if taken in excess.

3. The American media is garbage. They'll claim a cure is a killer just to bash @realDonaldTrump. They are the enemy of the people. https://t.co/s0JEBo1Q8c

'-- Dr. Milton Wolf (@MiltonWolfMD) March 21, 2020 ''Wait until you hear about morphine,'' National Review editor Charles C.W. Cooke responded.

''The corporate press is the enemy of the people,'' author Michael Malice added.

President Trump has routinely expressed optimism that malaria drugs can be used to ease the symptoms of the coronavirus that has killed almost 300 people in the United States and infected tens of thousands more.

''HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,'' the president tweeted Saturday. ''The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents).....be put in use IMMEDIATELY. PEOPLE ARE DYING, MOVE FAST, and GOD BLESS EVERYONE! @US_FDA @SteveFDA @CDCgov @DHSgov."

HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents).....

'-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2020 Israeli drug company Teva Pharmaceutical Industries announced Thursday they are donating 6 million doses of hydroxychloroquine to the U.S., with millions more to come.

Researchers recently released findings showing that six patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin tested negative for coronavirus after six days and 57.1% of 20 patients treated only with hydroxychloroquine tested negative after six days.

Trump has been widely criticized by media outlets for being intrigued by the possibility of effectively treating the coronavirus, as evidenced by a Mother Jones article Saturday accusing the president of ''pushing a dangerous drug'' and urging people not to listen to his advice.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 04:22

When Chinese scientists identified a mystery virus in December 2019, they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples, and suppress the news. When Chinese medical professionals began to sound the alarm, they were seized by police. For weeks, when Chinese state media went on air or to print, they ignored the virus’s spread. When government cadres heard rumors of some new SARS-like virus, they kept their heads down and continued praising party leader Xi Jinping.

China’s strategy to fight COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, though later praised by the World Health Organization and scientists worldwide, consisted of cover-ups, lies, and repression. It also failed miserably, exposing the world to this deadly sickness.

After claiming yesterday to have no new cases of the virus, China is now trying to take a victory lap, emphasizing the strength of its response—and the United States’ apparent failures—while spreading conspiracies that the U.S. government manufactured the virus. And while U.S. President Donald Trump’s sluggishness toward the outbreak merits criticism, China’s endangering of the world with its initial incompetence is certainly more to blame. Some of Trump’s fiercest public critics, however, have in their condemnations of the president remarkably ignored China’s faults or even praised the Chinese Communist Party’s response. In doing so, they are propagating falsehoods—and Chinese propaganda.

The details of China’s critical missteps are long-running and have been widely reported. When academics in 2007 and 2019 warned that a SARS-like virus could emerge from China’s wet markets, the CCP allowed these markets to stay open. A February Washington Post analysis of Chinese statements, leaked accounts, and interviews with public health officials and medical experts concluded that China’s “bureaucratic culture that prioritizes political stability over all else probably allowed the virus to spread farther and faster.” A March study by researchers at the U.K.’s University of Southampton showed that if China had acted three weeks earlier than it did, the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95 percent and its geographic spread limited significantly.

Wuhan health officials by the end of December had confirmed nearly three dozen cases of the virus and closed a market they thought was related to its spread. And yet Chinese authorities spent January denying the virus could spread between humans—something doctors had known was happening since December—and allowed a Lunar New Year banquet involving tens of thousands of families to take place in Wuhan as planned. The Chinese government later let some 5 million people leave the city without screening.

Remarkably, according to even the CCP’s own account, Xi knew about the virus for two weeks before saying anything to the public. The CCP’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, mentioned the epidemic and Xi’s actions to fight it for the first time only on Jan. 21—the same day the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first coronavirus case in the United States.

China’s failure to contain the virus can be explained by the divergence between the country’s modernized public health system and its outdated autocratic political structures. The ills of the draconian latter negated the potential benefits of the former, allowing the virus to spread from Wuhan to Thailand and South Korea and beyond.

Trust for Xi’s regime is now waning within China and across the public health world. Some global leaders are increasingly doubting the reliability of China’s data and the usefulness of its guidance on combating the virus, but others, like Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, continue to praise Chinese assistance.

Seemingly hoping to preempt any potential loss of foreign trust, China’s propagandists have gone into overdrive, spectacularizing their country’s purported altruism and leadership: The Chinese Embassy in Italy, in a statement laden with South China Sea–related propaganda, claimed to be “donating” ventilators and sending experts to that country; journalists reported that China is sending similar “aid” to Spain; Chinese experts have carried out training sessions for 10 Pacific Island countries and dispatched medical experts, along with supplies of masks and virus detection kits, to Iran and Iraq.

This is all part of Xi’s wide-scale propaganda effort to gaslight the world into believing that China is not only not responsible for but is responding best to the pandemic, ultimately portraying his country as a magnanimous and trustworthy global leader.

But many of China’s claims are easily refuted. China did not stop the virus from spreading; Beijing’s negligence allowed the outbreak to go global. China is not donating but selling ventilators, face masks, and other goods to Italy and Spain. According to Italian media, an array of other European countries are also planning to purchase ventilators from China.

Xi’s regime, even amid a crisis it enabled, is just applying the same simple economic strategy as it does through the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s Marshall Plan–like state-backed global investment and marketing campaign: exporting domestic overcapacity abroad. China, home to too many unemployed workers and industrial firms, generally sends both to the global south through the initiative.

And now, as the world—thanks to Chinese state failure—gasps for air, China is there to sell us its excess ventilators and face masks. These sales will both serve as fodder for propaganda and help the country rejuvenate its shellshocked business sector.

While China charges the world for its assistance, it is, in fact, Trump’s United States that has already provided up to $100 million of aid to China and other countries affected by the pandemic.

And yet, despite all of this, more than a few Western thought leaders have aped Chinese falsehoods to critique Trump’s apparent failures and praise Xi’s purported successes.

Rachel Maddow on her show hosted New York Times reporter Donald McNeil, who opined that China had “enormous success in beating down its epidemic.” Maddow then thanked McNeil for detailing the “distance between” China’s response and “what we’re preparing for.” Her show, highlighting Trump’s failures compared with China’s supposed victories, later shared a clip of the segment on Twitter with the headline “How coronavirus testing works in a country that takes the problem seriously.”

A March 13 Times opinion page headline similarly proclaimed: “China Bought the West Time. The West Squandered It.”

In a tweet that garnered some 50,000 likes, Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum wrote: “China has reacted to the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy by sending aid. The US has reacted by suspending flights. Who is the superpower?”

American politicians and leaders have also broadly enabled China’s manipulation of concerns over racism to muddle the debate over who’s to blame for the virus’s spread. It is true that there’s no excuse for the use, including by Trump administration officials, of derogatory terms such as “Kung flu” or conspiracy theories suggesting the virus was grown in a Chinese lab, but there’s nothing inherently racist about stating that the virus originated in China.

And while there’s absolutely no excuse for the Trump administration’s dangerous stoking of anger at China to deflect criticism from its own failures, we also must not allow the Chinese regime—the same one holding over a million Muslims in concentration camps—to weaponize claims of racism. Indeed, China’s new accusations of xenophobia reflect little more than the political inconvenience of pointing out the virus’s geographical source.

This is all part of the CCP’s disinformation campaign designed “to deflect attention away from the very well-documented fact that the Chinese government deliberately delayed ringing the alarm bell on the coronavirus,” according to Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese politics. This strategy “dovetails very nicely with the persistent message from the Chinese government over the past few years that all of humanity is a ‘community of common destiny’ in which China is a leading power.”

The CCP’s messaging has produced mixed success at home. Many Chinese social media users, encouraged by a Chinese regime seeking to restore its legitimacy, have turned their frustration toward Trump and the U.S.; others, however, are now attacking state media, even though some prominent Chinese who criticized their own government have vanished under mysterious circumstances.

It’s evidently in Xi’s interest to play up Trump’s missteps and cast China as superior. And although it’s understandable that American thinkers want to criticize Trump’s poor response to the crisis, this does not excuse their being duped into spreading outright falsehoods and gifting China’s appalling authoritarian regime—the same one that recently revoked press credentials for numerous American journalists—praise of which it is certainly not deserving.

Our ideological arbiters, as they critique Trump, must engage more thoughtfully with the facts to avoid swallowing and spreading Chinese propaganda.

For more on the impact of the coronavirus, listen to this week’s episode of Slate Money.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 04:21

By Frances Mulraney For Dailymail.com 16:16 21 Mar 2020, updated 21:01 21 Mar 2020

The teenagers were seen in a Purcellville grocery store on WednesdayThey were coughing near produce and filming it for social mediaThe store immediately informed the police and removed the producePolice believed there was no criminal intentSearches under #coughingchallenge, #grocerystorechallenge and #coronaviruschallenge reveal similar videosPolice warn parents to monitor social media activity now schools are closed Coronavirus symptoms: what are they and should you see a doctor?Police in Virginia are not pressing charges against two teenagers identified as having filmed themselves coughing on produce in a grocery store and uploading the video to social media.

Authorities are warning of the 'disturbing trend' which has appeared on social media as the coronavirus pandemic worsened, calling on parents to monitor their children's actions online.

The incident in Purcellville, Virginia, some 55 miles from the White House, took place in a Harris Teeter store on March 18, the Washington Examiner reports, but police determined that there was no criminal intent involved.

Videos have been emerging on social media such as this one where a person pretends to cough in a grocery store and the other reacts to it. Police cautioned against the videos Police revealed that there was no criminal intent with the videos and the teens were warnedPurcellville Police Department released an update on Friday revealing that two teens involved in the incident were identified after being seen on Wednesday 'reportedly coughing on produce, while filming themselves and posting it on social media'.

The store quickly informed the police and removed the produce involved, taking measures to ensure the safety of their customers from the coronavirus.

'The two juveniles questioned admitted to their involvement, and it was determined that there was no criminal intent,' the police statement read.

'The investigation concluded the teenagers were getting close to other patrons and coughing into their own sleeves, while filming it on their phones.

'After viewing the video footage, officers determined no actual customers or produce were spit or coughed on directly, but we appreciate the store's swift action in reporting the incident to police and removing any items in question to ensure the health of store patrons and employees.

'Due to the age of the minors involved, no names or video footage will be released,' the statement added.

With schools closed to allow for social distancing to lessen the spread of the coronavirus, police also asked parents to monitor their children's activities, including activities on social media 'to discourage the promotion of any such fear-inducing behavior'.

'With school closures in effect, this allows for more idle time among children, especially teenagers who are often not supervised as closely,' police said.

'We have learned that this appears to be a disturbing trend on social media across the country, and we ask for help from parents to discourage this behavior immediately.'

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In Facebook posts under the police statement, people questioned why more wasn't being done to keep children and teenagers at home when they are supposed to be social distancing.

'Went to walk on W&OD today and saw a group of 5 teens walking across from the library. Kind of defeats the notion of cancelling school- even if in a small way,' one man wrote.

I live in Village Case neighborhood and the kids have been out every afternoon, walking, biking, skateboarding in groups. Mostly looks like middle school aged kids,' another woman added.

'I support getting out into fresh air every day but these kids are congregating and socializing which defeats the social distancing guidelines. I pray they all stay well.'

Some people called for them to be arrested as police have done in other social media challenges: 'They should be arrested just as the people with the licking ice cream situation.'

Schools around the country closed over the last two weeks to aid authorities in combating the spread of the coronavirus.

While evidence from China, the country first hit by a major outbreak, suggested that younger people were not at risk from the virus as much as the elderly, the number of cases in the U.S. so far is suggesting that all young people may not be as safe from serious health complications as first believed.

The shopper is shown running from people sneezing in social media videosThe TikTok video was take in a grocery store In this video posted to TikTok and posted under #coughingchallenge and #coronaviruschallenge, two people are shown shopping while one pretends to coughPurcellville police but did not cite any other examples where teens had been seen coughing on grocery store produce for social media challenges but searches under #coronaviruschallenge, #coughingchallenge and #grocerystorechallenge did reveal similar videos.

In one video posted to TikTok, two people are seen inside a grocery store with one coughing and sneezing as he walks past the other shopping. He's eventually handed some toilet paper to deal with the sneezes.

Another filmed in a Canadian store jokes at the reaction people have if a person starts to cough amid the current pandemic.

This video posted to TikTok showed one man running away when the other began to cough Many are posting the the #grocerystorechallange with their attempts to shop through crowds Some TikTok users are posting dances from grocery stores as they try to lighten the moodAs one man pretends to cough, the other runs in the opposite direction down the aisle.

Many of those posted under the hashtags are of customers attempting to shop amid the panic with long lines and empty shelves making the normal chore more of a challenge than it used to be.

Others are performing dances within grocery stores to try and raise the spirits of those battling through the crowds to stock up.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 04:16

U.S. | Americans Coping With the Coronavirus Are Clogging ToiletsSewage systems and toilets are backing up as consumers clean their homes with disinfectant wipes and turn to paper towels, napkins and baby wipes to cope with the lack of toilet paper.

Wastewater treatment officials across the county have beseeched residents not to flush wipes down the toilet using the hashtag #WipesClogPipes. Credit... Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times Many Americans seem to be following the recommendations of public health officials to clean and sterilize countertops, doorknobs, faucets and other frequently touched surfaces in their homes.

The problem? Many are then tossing the disinfectant wipes, paper towels and other paper products they used into the toilet.

The result has been a coast-to-coast surge in backed-up sewer lines and overflowing toilets, according to plumbers and public officials, who have pleaded with Americans to spare the nation's pipes from further strain.

Many say the woes besieging the nation's infrastructure have been compounded by the lack of toilet paper on store shelves, which is leading some to use paper towels, napkins or baby wipes instead.

Across the country '-- in Charleston, S.C.; northeastern Ohio; Lexington, Ky.; Austin, Texas; and Spokane, Wash. '-- wastewater treatment officials have beseeched residents not to flush wipes down the toilet using the hashtag #WipesClogPipes.

''Flushable wipes are not truly flushable,'' said Jim Bunsey, chief operating officer of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District. ''They might go down the drain, but they do not break up like regular toilet paper.''

The plumbing repair company Roto-Rooter issued a similar plea to its customers, and said that substituting facial tissue for toilet paper was ''another bad idea,'' unless it's used in small amounts and flushed frequently.

The California State Water Resources Control Board warned this week that ''even wipes labeled 'flushable' will clog pipes and interfere with sewage collection and treatment throughout the state.''

''Flushing wipes, paper towels and similar products down toilets will clog sewers and cause backups and overflows at wastewater treatment facilities, creating an additional public health risk in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic,'' it said.

The agency said wastewater treatment plants across California were reporting problems.

It noted that most urban sewage systems depend on gravity and water flow to move toilet paper and waste, and were not designed to accommodate disinfectant wipes and paper towels, which do not break down as easily and clog the system.

The board noted that clogged sewer lines are more than just a headache for residents cooped up in their homes during a pandemic. Spills flow into lakes, rivers and oceans, where they can harm public health and the environment, it said.

Plumbers said they were fielding an increase in calls from people working from home and self-quarantining.

''We have noticed an uptick in the amount of clogged main sewer lines and, when we dispatch our technicians, we are pulling baby wipes out of the line and we're seeing paper towels and Lysol wipes,'' Mark Russo, vice president of Russo Brothers & Company, a plumbing and heating service in East Hanover, N.J., said on Saturday.

''These items are things that should never be flushed down the toilet,'' he said.

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Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo

SAN FRANCISCO '-- Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Saturday that California is enlisting technology industry titans Elon Musk and Tim Cook in his state's coronavirus defense as he issued a warning about public gatherings.

Days after cryptically alluding to an unnamed tech executive who had offered help in manufacturing needed medical equipment, Newsom confirmed that Musk '-- the founder of California-based Tesla and SpaceX '-- is ''working overtime'' to produce ventilators. Musk pledged to procure 250,000 masks, Newsom said, while Apple CEO Cook committed to providing 1 million.

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Newsom, speaking at a press conference, said those are two instances in an outpouring of support from the private and nonprofit sectors. He noted that Bloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar is repurposing ventilators, universities have offered up space and sports teams had conveyed that ''you want our arena? You can have our arena.''

''It's ennobling and it makes you feel like we truly can meet this moment,'' Newsom said.

The federal government has continued to lend a hand, Newsom said, most recently by providing a set of medical field units that will add some 2,000 beds to California's health care system. Newsom said the first unit had already arrived in Riverside.

Speaking during California's first weekend under a statewide stay-at-home order, Newsom acknowledged that some residents had not heeded a moratorium on public gatherings.

''The young people who are at the beaches thinking it's a party: Time to grow up. Time to wake up. Time to recognize it's not just about the old folks, it's about your impact on their lives,'' Newsom said. ''If you need to exercise, exercise. Just don't do it in a public setting.''

Earlier in the day, California reported 1,224 confirmed cases and 23 deaths so far. Newsom said the state has 21 million masks in reserves after distributing 10 million last week.

While Newsom did not rule out the possibility of restricting access to outdoor spaces, he said he hoped that would not be necessary. He reiterated that officials are broadly relying on social pressure to prod people into limiting their contact, rather than expanded enforcement like the state's ability to ''shut down businesses that are abusive.''

Newsom noted that the order is still relatively new and has not permeated some communities but he said a media campaign is seeking to inform more people.

This article tagged under:California

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 04:06

One of the first acts of the federal precursor to the Food and Drug Administration in 1916 was to crack down on the sale of a cowboy's cure-all called Stanley's Snake Oil, which government chemists discovered promised much more than it delivered. The product helped give rise to the expression snake-oil salesman.

If Donald Trump wasn't quite the quintessential snake-oil salesman at a news briefing this week and on Twitter Saturday '-- touting preliminary and even unproven medical remedies to the new coronavirus pandemic '-- he came disturbingly close.

Perhaps eager to demonstrate haste and hope after squandering weeks with a glacial rollout of COVID-19 testing kits, the president pitched Thursday that his FDA is now "slashing all the red tape" to review new therapies that:

'–º"Have shown very encouraging '-- very, very encouraging early results."

'–º"Could be a game changer. Very powerful."

'–º"Could be a tremendous breakthrough."

FDA contradicts Donald TrumpShortly after Trump made these remarks, the FDA rushed out a statement making it clear that there are no approved therapies or drugs to treat COVID-19.

Maybe clinical trials of these therapies will show promising results. We surely hope so. But for now, Trump risks giving Americans false hope about some pills they might use to ward off the effects of a virus 10 times more lethal, and three times as contagious, as the common flu.

His specific pitch focused on antiviral drugs used to treat other diseases. But none of them has yet shown safe and effective against COVID-19, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading immunologist and a member of the White House's anti-coronavirus task force.

Moreover, there was no "immediate" FDA move to make them available as a coronavirus treatment. To the contrary, agency chief Stephen Hahn said clinical trials are underway, and scientists are hoping for the best. However, he added Thursday during a White House briefing, "what's also important is not to provide false hope."

COVID-19, chloroquine, remdesivirTrump specifically focused on an anti-malarial drug called chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, and an antiviral drug used to treat Ebola, known as remdesivir. (A third antiviral drug, lopinavir''ritonavir, used as an HIV treatment, was recently found ineffective against COVID-19.)

Fauci said any supporting evidence for the antiviral drugs is largely anecdotal. "We've got to able to determine if they work and if they're safe," Fauci told a Journal of the American Medical Association podcast the day before Trump began pitching both of them as potential success stories. "That's going to be really a challenge as the weeks unfold and (coronavirus) cases increase."

The contrast between Trump's hype and Fauci's scientific method played out like reality TV on Friday as both appeared to contradict each other during a remarkable White House news briefing. "I disagree," Trump said, with Fauci nearby. "I feel good about (the treatments). That's all it is. Just a feeling. You know, I'm a smart guy."

For a public eager for some semblance of leadership in a national crisis, the display was far from reassuring.

The same presidential obstinacy surfaced Saturday, when Dr. Trump informed his 75 million Twitter followers about a tiny French study of 48 people showing that chloroquine, when combined with the antibiotic used in Z-Pak medication, might be effective against the coronavirus. "A real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine," Trump tweeted.

It will take more than a year to produce a vaccine to finally quell COVID-19. In the meantime, it's vital to study existing or new antivirals that might dampen the effect or duration of the new coronavirus. But it's also important, as the FDA chief said, not to offer false hope while that research is underway.

In this crisis, all Americans must stay vigilant with social distancing and personal hygiene to avoid infection. If Trump's promises about quick cures cause people to relax their preparedness because they believe that some pill to protect them is right around the corner, it places everyone more at risk.

If you can't see this reader poll, please refresh your page.

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 04:03

Mike Pence attracts the Coronavirus like ugly broads are attracted to CoronavirusAs another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.This blog has praised Dr. Anthony Fauci after his first shortcoming in not standing up to Obama appointees who allowed Coronavirus into the United States. I will not challenge him on his love letters to Hillary Clinton either.This blog will challenge him for his dismissal on two occasions in the use of the malaria drug Chlorquine, in which he has incorrectly stated that results of tests were anecdotal, giving the impression, that the information was from some coffee shop.In both cases Chloroquinine was established in medical protocols in Australia and France on Coronavirus patients. The Australians were using Chlorquinine with zinc and HIV medications with success. The French have administered Chloroquinine with the antibiotic Azithromycin.The layman's version of Chloroquinine is that it changes the PH or acidity in the red blood cells to a level which kills the Coronavirus, or more to the point, so the virus when it infects a cell, can not begin replicating inside the cell and direct other cells to reproduce it.It is like zapping it with a bug light. Six patients in the study were asymptomatic, while 22 had upper respiratory tract infection symptoms and eight had lower respiratory tract infection symptoms. Researchers treated 20 cases in the study. These cases “showed a significant reduction of the viral carriage at D6-post inclusion compared to controls, and much lower average carrying duration than reported of untreated patients in the literature.”“Azithromycin added to hydroxychloroquine was significantly more efficient for virus elimination,” the researchers added. “Despite its small sample size our survey shows that hydroxychloroquine treatment is significantly associated with viral load reduction/disappearance in COVID-19 patients and its effect is reinforced by azithromycin.”There is absolutely no doubt about this. What is fascinating is Chloroquinine and these anti malarial drugs are unique in they have worked in combinations with zinc, HIV drugs and now antibiotics. The reason behind this is, Corona Wuhan is a Bat Virus, which has HIV spliced into it as another virus, along with tuberculosis fungus, and an outerlayer of bacteria.What Chloroquinine is exposing is that the super virus, having bacteria, fungus and alternative virus agents is like Superman in having a kryptonite weakness, as in being so deadly on a wide facet, each facet allows an open door to kick the stuffing out of it.Chloroquine is like General George Patton in grabbing a Nazi by the nose, or holding Corona at bay, while another medication outflanks it and kills it. With HIV drugs, Corona is stopped from reproducing in ACE2 cells so it dies. With antibiotics the bacteria is wiped out and again the virus dies.These are facts which have been proven and Dr. Grace on Laura Ingraham, explained that there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that a drug would have this result by accident. This has happened now in Australia and France, and in dozens of cases which have been under study by medical professionals. Dr. Fauci using the word anecdote does a disservice to this treatment and professionals.2005 US NIH Study Found Chloroquine Was Effective in Treating Coronavirus In Primates  NIH is where Dr. Anthony Fauci is. The question is rising in this, why did he not bring this information forward, and now why is he attempting to suppress human trials which confirm what the primate trials at NIH proved.This is compounded by CNN and other outlets in Trump Derangement Syndrome who are now fixated on Coronavirus as a way to destroy Donald Trump. Russiagate with Robert Mueller, Impeachment with Adam Schiff could not get Donald Trump, but now with an epidemic they appear to hope will destroy America, they believe they can destroy Donald Trump as President.Coronavirus treatment: Dr. Donald Trump peddles snake oil and false hopeUSA Today With Dr. Fauci, who has done a good job the past weeks, it almost appears that he has like Dr. Strangelove, grown to love Coronavirus, as it has provided notoriety and admiration, and if a cure is found, no one will pay attention to this old man at the end of his career, and he is phobic that a cure will appear and end his fame.That is a forensic psychological assessment of Anthony Fauci as it is one thing to be cautious and an entirely different thing to place professional medical studies into doubt. Alex Jones stating that toothpaste will cure Coronavirus is anecdotal. French and Australian medical professionals following established medical protocols is fact.It was Barack Hussein Obama appointees, who were holdovers in the Trump administration, who went against his orders in bringing infected people into the United States who began the spread of this pandemic in the United States. It was the President who began the process of shutting this down as Obama's protocols has opened the door in open borders and bringing in pandemics to the American Heartland.Dr. Fauci is now standing in the way, and those in media who have hoped this pandemic would end the Trump Presidency are destroying the moral of the American and world public. The President is stating there is hope. He never said this was a cure, but it looked promising. The President has been cutting red tape so these tests and these treatments are approved by FDA so American Doctors can begin prescribing these drugs to patients and not be sued or be placed in legal jeopardy.There is not a sick person in America who given the opportunity would not be taking the Chloroquine combination, as it certainly is not going to hurt anyone or worsen their condition. That is the point in this, people should have that right to have these drugs, because at the very least, the placebo effect will give them hope, courage and help them fight to arrest this virus.I would not have shared the drug Chloroquine if it did not make medical sense. There are proofs this drug combination works, and Dr. Fauci should remedy himself of appearing he likes celebrity more than ending this plague, and his horrid leftist media trolls are guilty of killing people, by standing in the way of mass prescriptions, which are not going to do any harm to any Coronavirus patient.For those lambasting Donald Trump over his early statements on Coronavirus, and the "new" unsubstantiated charges that the Intelligence Community was warning the President of this pandemic, read the headline in which his NIH chief was telling the President in February that this virus was not a threat to the United States.Risk of coronavirus in U.S. is 'minuscule' NIH's Dr ... https://www.usatoday.com /story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-disease-official-anthony-fauci-risk-of-coronavirus-in-u-s-is-minuscule-skip-mask-and-wash-hands/4787209002/ Feb 17, 2020 If that testing shows the virus has slipped into the country in places federal officials don't know about, "we've got a problem," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy ...Rush Limbaugh did enough damage with his Coronavirus is the Common Cold propaganda. Dr. Fauci is about to remembered as the nut who loved Coronavirus more than curing Americans.  Once again, another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.agtG

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 04:02

Martin J Vincent1Special Pathogens Brach, Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, Georgia, 30333, USA

Eric Bergeron2Laboratory of Biochemical Neuroendocrinology, Clinical Research Institute of Montreal, 110 Pine Ave West, Montreal, QCH2W1R7, Canada

Suzanne Benjannet2Laboratory of Biochemical Neuroendocrinology, Clinical Research Institute of Montreal, 110 Pine Ave West, Montreal, QCH2W1R7, Canada

Bobbie R Erickson1Special Pathogens Brach, Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, Georgia, 30333, USA

Pierre E Rollin1Special Pathogens Brach, Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, Georgia, 30333, USA

Thomas G Ksiazek1Special Pathogens Brach, Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, Georgia, 30333, USA

Nabil G Seidah2Laboratory of Biochemical Neuroendocrinology, Clinical Research Institute of Montreal, 110 Pine Ave West, Montreal, QCH2W1R7, Canada

Stuart T Nichol1Special Pathogens Brach, Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, Georgia, 30333, USA

1Special Pathogens Brach, Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, Georgia, 30333, USA

2Laboratory of Biochemical Neuroendocrinology, Clinical Research Institute of Montreal, 110 Pine Ave West, Montreal, QCH2W1R7, Canada

Corresponding author.

Received 2005 Jul 12; Accepted 2005 Aug 22.

Copyright (C) 2005 Vincent et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This article has been

cited by other articles in PMC.

AbstractBackgroundSevere acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is caused by a newly discovered coronavirus (SARS-CoV). No effective prophylactic or post-exposure therapy is currently available.

ResultsWe report, however, that chloroquine has strong antiviral effects on SARS-CoV infection of primate cells. These inhibitory effects are observed when the cells are treated with the drug either before or after exposure to the virus, suggesting both prophylactic and therapeutic advantage. In addition to the well-known functions of chloroquine such as elevations of endosomal pH, the drug appears to interfere with terminal glycosylation of the cellular receptor, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2. This may negatively influence the virus-receptor binding and abrogate the infection, with further ramifications by the elevation of vesicular pH, resulting in the inhibition of infection and spread of SARS CoV at clinically admissible concentrations.

ConclusionChloroquine is effective in preventing the spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. Favorable inhibition of virus spread was observed when the cells were either treated with chloroquine prior to or after SARS CoV infection. In addition, the indirect immunofluorescence assay described herein represents a simple and rapid method for screening SARS-CoV antiviral compounds.

Keywords: severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, chloroquine, inhibition, therapy

BackgroundSevere acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is an emerging disease that was first reported in Guangdong Province, China, in late 2002. The disease rapidly spread to at least 30 countries within months of its first appearance, and concerted worldwide efforts led to the identification of the etiological agent as SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV), a novel member of the family Coronaviridae [1]. Complete genome sequencing of SARS-CoV [2,3] confirmed that this pathogen is not closely related to any of the previously established coronavirus groups. Budding of the SARS-CoV occurs in the Golgi apparatus [4] and results in the incorporation of the envelope spike glycoprotein into the virion. The spike glycoprotein is a type I membrane protein that facilitates viral attachment to the cellular receptor and initiation of infection, and angiotensin-converting enzyme-2 (ACE2) has been identified as a functional cellular receptor of SARS-CoV [5]. We have recently shown that the processing of the spike protein was effected by furin-like convertases and that inhibition of this cleavage by a specific inhibitor abrogated cytopathicity and significantly reduced the virus titer of SARS-CoV [6].

Due to the severity of SARS-CoV infection, the potential for rapid spread of the disease, and the absence of proven effective and safe in vivo inhibitors of the virus, it is important to identify drugs that can effectively be used to treat or prevent potential SARS-CoV infections. Many novel therapeutic approaches have been evaluated in laboratory studies of SARS-CoV: notable among these approaches are those using siRNA [7], passive antibody transfer [8], DNA vaccination [9], vaccinia or parainfluenza virus expressing the spike protein [10,11], interferons [12,13], and monoclonal antibody to the S1-subunit of the spike glycoprotein that blocks receptor binding [14]. In this report, we describe the identification of chloroquine as an effective pre- and post-infection antiviral agent for SARS-CoV. Chloroquine, a 9-aminoquinoline that was identified in 1934, is a weak base that increases the pH of acidic vesicles. When added extracellularly, the non-protonated portion of chloroquine enters the cell, where it becomes protonated and concentrated in acidic, low-pH organelles, such as endosomes, Golgi vesicles, and lysosomes. Chloroquine can affect virus infection in many ways, and the antiviral effect depends in part on the extent to which the virus utilizes endosomes for entry. Chloroquine has been widely used to treat human diseases, such as malaria, amoebiosis, HIV, and autoimmune diseases, without significant detrimental side effects [15]. Together with data presented here, showing virus inhibition in cell culture by chloroquine doses compatible with patient treatment, these features suggest that further evaluation of chloroquine in animal models of SARS-CoV infection would be warranted as we progress toward finding effective antivirals for prevention or treatment of the disease.

ResultsPreinfection chloroquine treatment renders Vero E6 cells refractory to SARS-CoV infectionIn order to investigate if chloroquine might prevent SARS-CoV infection, permissive Vero E6 cells [1] were pretreated with various concentrations of chloroquine (0.1''10 μM) for 20''24 h prior to virus infection. Cells were then infected with SARS-CoV, and virus antigens were visualized by indirect immunofluorescence as described in Materials and Methods. Microscopic examination (Fig. '‹ 1A ) of the control cells (untreated, infected) revealed extensive SARS-CoV-specific immunostaining of the monolayer. A dose-dependant decrease in virus antigen-positive cells was observed starting at 0.1 μM chloroquine, and concentrations of 10 μM completely abolished SARS-CoV infection. For quantitative purposes, we counted the number of cells stained positive from three random locations on a slide. The average number of positively stained control cells was scored as 100% and was compared with the number of positive cells observed under various chloroquine concentrations (Fig. '‹ 1B ). Pretreatment with 0.1, 1, and 10 μM chloroquine reduced infectivity by 28%, 53%, and 100%, respectively. Reproducible results were obtained from three independent experiments. These data demonstrated that pretreatment of Vero E6 cells with chloroquine rendered these cells refractory to SARS-CoV infection.

Prophylactic effect of chloroquine. Vero E6 cells pre-treated with chloroquine for 20 hrs. Chloroquine-containing media were removed and the cells were washed with phosphate buffered saline before they were infected with SARS-CoV (0.5 multiplicity of infection) for 1 h. in the absence of chloroquine. Virus was then removed and the cells were maintained in Opti-MEM (Invitrogen) for 16''18 h in the absence of chloroquine. SARS-CoV antigens were stained with virus-specific HMAF, followed by FITC-conjugated secondary antibodies. (A) The concentration of chloroquine used is indicated on the top of each panel. (B) SARS-CoV antigen-positive cells at three random locations were captured by using a digital camera, the number of antigen-positive cells was determined, and the average inhibition was calculated. Percent inhibition was obtained by considering the untreated control as 0% inhibition. The vertical bars represent the range of SEM.

Postinfection chloroquine treatment is effective in preventing the spread of SARS-CoV infectionIn order to investigate the antiviral properties of chloroquine on SARS-CoV after the initiation of infection, Vero E6 cells were infected with the virus and fresh medium supplemented with various concentrations of chloroquine was added immediately after virus adsorption. Infected cells were incubated for an additional 16''18 h, after which the presence of virus antigens was analyzed by indirect immunofluorescence analysis. When chloroquine was added after the initiation of infection, there was a dramatic dose-dependant decrease in the number of virus antigen-positive cells (Fig. '‹ 2A ). As little as 0.1''1 μM chloroquine reduced the infection by 50% and up to 90''94% inhibition was observed with 33''100 μM concentrations (Fig. '‹ 2B ). At concentrations of chloroquine in excess of 1 μM, only a small number of individual cells were initially infected, and the spread of the infection to adjacent cells was all but eliminated. A half-maximal inhibitory effect was estimated to occur at 4.4 ± 1.0 μM chloroquine (Fig. '‹ 2C ). These data clearly show that addition of chloroquine can effectively reduce the establishment of infection and spread of SARS-CoV if the drug is added immediately following virus adsorption.

Post-infection chloroquine treatment reduces SARS-CoV infection and spread. Vero E6 cells were seeded and infected as described for Fig. 1 except that chloroquine was added only after virus adsorption. Cells were maintained in Opti-MEM (Invitrogen) containing chloroquine for 16''18 h, after which they were processed for immunofluorescence. (A) The concentration of chloroquine is indicated on the top. (B) Percent inhibition and SEM were calculated as in Fig. 1B. (C) The effective dose (ED50) was calculated using commercially available software (Grafit, version 4, Erithacus Software).

Electron microscopic analysis indicated the appearance of significant amounts of extracellular virus particles 5''6 h after infection [16]. Since we observed antiviral effects by chloroquine immediately after virus adsorption, we further extended the analysis by adding chloroquine 3 and 5 h after virus adsorption and examined for the presence of virus antigens after 20 h. We found that chloroquine was still significantly effective even when added 5 h after infection (Fig. '‹ 3 ); however, to obtain equivalent antiviral effect, a higher concentration of chloroquine was required if the drug was added 3 or 5 h after adsorption.

Timed post-infection treatment with chloroquine. This experiment is similar to that depicted in Fig. 2 except that cells were infected at 1 multiplicity of infection, and chloroquine (10, 25, and 50 μM) was added 3 or 5 h after infection.

Ammonium chloride inhibits SARS-CoV infection of Vero E6 cellsSince chloroquine inhibited SARS-CoV infection when added before or after infection, we hypothesized that another common lysosomotropic agent, NH4Cl, might also function in a similar manner. Ammonium chloride has been widely used in studies addressing endosome-mediated virus entry. Coincidently, NH4Cl was recently shown to reduce the transduction of pseudotype viruses decorated with SARS-CoV spike protein [17,18]. In an attempt to examine if NH4Cl functions similarly to chloroquine, we performed infection analyses in Vero E6 cells before (Fig. '‹ 4A ) and after (Fig. '‹ 4B ) they were treated with various concentrations of NH4Cl. In both cases, we observed a 93''99% inhibition with NH4Cl at '‰¥ 5 mM. These data indicated that NH4Cl ('‰¥ 5 mM) and chloroquine ('‰¥ 10 μM) are very effective in reducing SARS-CoV infection. These results suggest that effects of chloroquine and NH4Cl in controlling SARS CoV infection and spread might be mediated by similar mechanism(s).

NH4Cl inhibits SARS-CoV during pre or post infection treatment. NH4Cl was added to the cells either before (A) or after (B) infection, similar to what was done for chloroquine in Figs 1 and 2. Antigen-positive cells were counted, and the results were presented as in Fig. 1B.

Effect of chloroquine and NH4Cl on cell surface expression of ACE2We performed additional experiments to elucidate the mechanism of SARS-CoV inhibition by chloroquine and NH4Cl. Since intra-vesicular acidic pH regulates cellular functions, including N-glycosylation trimming, cellular trafficking, and various enzymatic activities, it was of interest to characterize the effect of both drugs on the processing, glycosylation, and cellular sorting of SARS-CoV spike glycoprotein and its receptor, ACE2. Flow cytometry analysis was performed on Vero E6 cells that were either untreated or treated with highly effective anti-SARS-CoV concentrations of chloroquine or NH4Cl. The results revealed that neither drug caused a significant change in the levels of cell-surface ACE2, indicating that the observed inhibitory effects on SARS-CoV infection are not due to the lack of available cell-surface ACE2 (Fig. '‹ 5A ). We next analyzed the molecular forms of endogenous ACE2 in untreated Vero E6 cells and in cells that were pre-incubated for 1 h with various concentrations of either NH4Cl (2.5''10 mM) or chloroquine (1 and 10 μM) and labeled with 35S-(Met) for 3 h in the presence or absence of the drugs (Fig. '‹ 5B and '‹ 5C ). Under normal conditions, we observed two immunoreactive ACE2 forms, migrating at ~105 and ~113 kDa, respectively (Fig. '‹ 5B , lane 1). The ~105-kDa protein is endoglycosidase H sensitive, suggesting that it represents the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) localized form, whereas the ~113-kDa protein is endoglycosidase H resistant and represents the Golgi-modified form of ACE2 [19]. The specificity of the antibody was confirmed by displacing the immunoreactive protein bands with excess cold-soluble human recombinant ACE2 (+ rhACE2; Fig. '‹ 5B , lane 2). When we analyzed ACE2 forms in the presence of NH4Cl, a clear stepwise increase in the migration of the ~113-kDa protein was observed with increasing concentrations of NH4Cl, with a maximal effect observed at 10 mM NH4Cl, resulting in only the ER form of ACE2 being visible on the gel (Fig. '‹ 5B , compare lanes 3''5). This suggested that the trimming and/or terminal modifications of the N-glycosylated chains of ACE2 were affected by NH4Cl treatment. In addition, at 10 mM NH4Cl, the ER form of ACE2 migrated with slightly faster mobility, indicating that NH4Cl at that concentration might also affect core glycosylation. We also examined the terminal glycosylation status of ACE2 when the cells were treated with chloroquine (Fig. '‹ 5C ). Similar to NH4Cl, a stepwise increase in the electrophoretic mobility of ACE2 was observed with increasing concentrations of chloroquine. At 25 μM chloroquine, the faster electrophoretic mobility of the Golgi-modified form of ACE2 was clearly evident. On the basis of the flow cytometry and immunoprecipitation analyses, it can be inferred that NH4Cl and chloroquine both impaired the terminal glycosylation of ACE2, while NH4Cl resulted in a more dramatic effect. Although ACE2 is expressed in similar quantities at the cell surface, the variations in its glycosylation status might render the ACE2-SARS-CoV interaction less efficient and inhibit virus entry when the cells are treated with NH4Cl and chloroquine.

Effect of lysomotropic agents on the cell-surface expression and biosynthesis of ACE2. (A) Vero E6 cells were cultured for 20 h in the absence (control) or presence of chloroquine (10 μM) or NH4Cl (20 mM). Cells were labeled with anti-ACE2 (grey histogram) or with a secondary antibody alone (white histogram). (B) Biosynthesis of ACE2 in untreated cells or in cells treated with NH4Cl. Vero E6 cells were pulse-labeled for 3 h with 35S-Met, and the cell lysates were immunoprecipitated with an ACE2 antibody (lane 1). Preincunbation of the antibody with recombinant human ACE2 (rhACE2) completely abolished the signal (lane 2). The positions of the endoglycosidase H-sensitive ER form and the endoglycosidase H-resistant Golgi form of ACE2 are emphasized. Note that the increasing concentration of NH4Cl resulting in the decrease of the Golgi form of ACE2. (C) A similar experiment was performed in the presence of the indicated concentrations of chloroquine. Note the loss of terminal glycans with increasing concentrations of chloroquine. (D) The terminal glycosidic modification of ACE2 was evaluated by neuraminidase treatment of immunoprecipitated ACE2. Here cells were treated with 1''25 μM concentrations of chloroquine during starvation, pulse, and 3-h chase.

To confirm that ACE2 undergoes terminal sugar modifications and that the terminal glycosylation is affected by NH4Cl or chloroquine treatment, we performed immunopreipitation of 35S-labeled ACE2 and subjected the immunoprecipitates to neuraminidase digestion. Proteins were resolved using SDS-PAGE (Fig '‹ 5D ). It is evident from the slightly faster mobility of the Golgi form of ACE2 after neuraminidase treatment (Fig '‹ 5D , compare lanes 1 and 2), that ACE2 undergoes terminal glycosylation; however, the ER form of ACE2 was not affected by neuraminidase. Cells treated with 10 μM chloroquine did not result in a significant shift; whereas 25 μM chloroquine caused the Golgi form of ACE2 to resolve similar to the neuraminidase-treated ACE2 (Fig '‹ 5D , compare lanes 5 and 6). These data provide evidence that ACE2 undergoes terminal glycosylation and that chloroquine at anti-SARS-CoV concentrations abrogates the process.

Effect of chloroquine and NH4Cl on the biosynthesis and processing of SARS-CoV spike proteinWe next addressed whether the lysosomotropic drugs (NH4Cl and chloroquine) affect the biosynthesis, glycosylation, and/or trafficking of the SARS-CoV spike glycoprotein. For this purpose, Vero E6 cells were infected with SARS-CoV for 18 h. Chloroquine or ammonium chloride was added to these cells during while they were being starved (1 h), labeled (30 min) or chased (3 h). The cell lysates were analyzed by immunoprecipitation with the SARS-specific polyclonal antibody (HMAF). The 30-min pulse results indicated that pro-spike (proS) was synthesized as a ~190-kDa precursor (proS-ER) and processed into ~125-, ~105-, and ~80-kDa proteins (Fig. '‹ 6A , lane 2), a result identical to that in our previous analysis [6]. Except for the 100 μM chloroquine (Fig. '‹ 6A , lane 3), there was no significant difference in the biosynthesis or processing of the virus spike protein in untreated or chloroquine-treated cells (Fig. '‹ 6A , lanes 4''6). It should be noted that chloroquine at 100 μM resulted in an overall decrease in biosynthesis and in the levels of processed virus glycoprotein. In view of the lack of reduction in the biosynthesis and processing of the spike glycoprotein in the presence of chloroquine concentrations (10 and 50 μM) that caused large reductions in SARS-CoV replication and spread, we conclude that the antiviral effect is probably not due to alteration of virus glycoprotein biosynthesis and processing. Similar analyses were performed with NH4Cl, and the data suggested that the biosynthesis and processing of the spike protein were also not negatively affected by NH4Cl (Fig. '‹ 6A , lanes 7''12). Consistent with our previous analysis [6], we observed the presence of a larger protein, which is referred to here as oligomers. Recently, Song et al. [20] provided evidence that these are homotrimers of the SARS-CoV spike protein and were incorporated into the virions. Interestingly, the levels of the homotrimers in cells treated with 100 μM chloroquine and 40 and 20 mM NH4Cl (Fig. '‹ 6A , lanes 3, 9, and 10) were slightly lower than in control cells or cells treated with lower drug concentrations.

Effects of NH4Cl and chloroquine (CQ) on the biosynthesis, processing, and glycosylation of SARS-CoV spike protein. Vero E6 cells were infected with SARS-CoV as described in Fig. 2. CQ or NH4Cl was added during the periods of starvation (1 h) and labeling (30 min) with 35S-Cys and followed by chase for 3 h in the presence of unlabeled medium. Cells were lysed in RIPA buffer and immunoprecipitated with HMAF. Virus proteins were resolved using 3''8% NuPAGE gel (Invitrogen). The cells presented were labeled for 30 min (A) and chased for 3 h (B). The migration positions of the various spike molecular forms are indicated at the right side, and those of the molecular standards are shown to the left side. proS-ER and proS-Golgi are the pro-spike of SARS-Co in the ER and Golgi compartments, respectively and proS-ungly is the unglycosylated pro-spike ER.

The data obtained from a 30-min pulse followed by a 3-h chase (Fig. '‹ 6B , lanes 2 and 8) confirmed our earlier observation that the SARS-CoV spike protein precursor (proS-ER) acquires Golgi-specific modifications (proS-Golgi) resulting in a ~210-kDa protein [6]. Chloroquine at 10, 25, and 50 μM had no substantial negative impact on the appearance of the Golgi form (Fig. '‹ 6B , compare lane 2 to lanes 4''6). Only at 100 μM chloroquine was a reduction in the level of the Golgi-modified pro-spike observed (lane 3). On the other hand, NH4Cl abrogated the appearance of Golgi-modified forms at '‰¥10 mM (compare lane 8 with 9''11) and had a milder effect at 1 mM (lane 12). These data clearly demonstrate that the biosynthesis and proteolytic processing of SARS-CoV spike protein are not affected at chloroquine (25 and 50 μM) and NH4Cl (1 mM) doses that cause virus inhibitory effects. In addition, with 40, 20, and 10 mM NH4Cl, there was an increased accumulation of proS-ER with a concomitant decrease in the amount of oligomers (Fig. '‹ 6B , lanes 9''11). When we examined the homotrimers, we found that chloroquine at 100 μM and NH4Cl at 40 and 20 mM resulted in slightly faster mobility of the trimers (Fig. '‹ 6B , lanes 3, 9, and 10), but lower drug doses, which did exhibit significant antiviral effects, did not result in appreciable differences. These data suggest that the newly synthesized intracellular spike protein may not be a major target for chloroquine and NH4Cl antiviral action. The faster mobility of the trimer at certain higher concentration of the drugs might be due the effect of these drugs on the terminal glycosylation of the trimers.

DiscussionWe have identified chloroquine as an effective antiviral agent for SARS-CoV in cell culture conditions, as evidenced by its inhibitory effect when the drug was added prior to infection or after the initiation and establishment of infection. The fact that chloroquine exerts an antiviral effect during pre- and post-infection conditions suggest that it is likely to have both prophylactic and therapeutic advantages. Recently, Keyaerts et al. [21] reported the antiviral properties of chloroquine and identified that the drug affects SARS-CoV replication in cell culture, as evidenced by quantitative RT-PCR. Taken together with the findings of Keyaerts et al. [21], our analysis provides further evidence that chloroquine is effective against SARS-CoV Frankfurt and Urbani strains. We have provided evidence that chloroquine is effective in preventing SARS-CoV infection in cell culture if the drug is added to the cells 24 h prior to infection. In addition, chloroquine was significantly effective even when the drug was added 3''5 h after infection, suggesting an antiviral effect even after the establishment of infection. Since similar results were obtained by NH4Cl treatment of Vero E6 cells, the underlying mechanism(s) of action of these drugs might be similar.

Apart from the probable role of chloroquine on SARS-CoV replication, the mechanisms of action of chloroquine on SARS-CoV are not fully understood. Previous studies have suggested the elevation of pH as a mechanism by which chloroquine reduces the transduction of SARS-CoV pseudotype viruses [17,18]. We examined the effect of chloroquine and NH4Cl on the SARS-CoV spike proteins and on its receptor, ACE2. Immunoprecipitation results of ACE2 clearly demonstrated that effective anti-SARS-CoV concentrations of chloroquine and NH4Cl also impaired the terminal glycosylation of ACE2. However, the flow cytometry data demonstrated that there are no significant differences in the cell surface expression of ACE2 in cells treated with chloroquine or NH4Cl. On the basis of these results, it is reasonable to suggest that the pre-treatment with NH4Cl or chloroquine has possibly resulted in the surface expression of the under-glycosylated ACE2. In the case of chloroquine treatment prior to infection, the impairment of terminal glycosylation of ACE2 may result in reduced binding affinities between ACE2 and SARS-CoV spike protein and negatively influence the initiation of SARS-CoV infection. Since the biosynthesis, processing, Golgi modification, and oligomerization of the newly synthesized spike protein were not appreciably affected by anti-SARS-CoV concentrations of either chloroquine or NH4Cl, we conclude that these events occur in the cell independent of the presence of the drugs. The potential contribution of these drugs in the elevation of endosomal pH and its impact on subsequent virus entry or exit could not be ruled out. A decrease in SARS-CoV pseudotype transduction in the presence of NH4Cl was observed and was attributed to the effect on intracellular pH [17,18]. When chloroquine or NH4Cl are added after infection, these agents can rapidly raise the pH and subvert on-going fusion events between virus and endosomes, thus inhibiting the infection.

In addition, the mechanism of action of NH4Cl and chloroquine might depend on when they were added to the cells. When added after the initiation of infection, these drugs might affect the endosome-mediated fusion, subsequent virus replication, or assembly and release. Previous studies of chloroquine have demonstrated that it has multiple effects on mammalian cells in addition to the elevation of endosomal pH, including the prevention of terminal glycosyaltion of immunoglobulins [22]. When added to virus-infected cells, chloroquine inhibited later stages in vesicular stomatitis virus maturation by inhibiting the glycoprotein expression at the cell surface [23], and it inhibited the production of infectious HIV-1 particles by interfering with terminal glycosylation of the glycoprotein [24,25]. On the basis of these properties, we suggest that the cell surface expression of under-glycosylated ACE2 and its poor affinity to SARS-CoV spike protein may be the primary mechanism by which infection is prevented by drug pretreatment of cells prior to infection. On the other hand, rapid elevation of endosomal pH and abrogation of virus-endosome fusion may be the primary mechanism by which virus infection is prevented under post-treatment conditions. More detailed SARS CoV spike-ACE2 binding assays in the presence or absence of chloroquine will be performed to confirm our findings. Our studies indicate that the impact of NH4Cl and chloroquine on the ACE2 and spike protein profiles are significantly different. NH4Cl exhibits a more pronounced effect than does chloroquine on terminal glycosylation, highlighting the novel intricate differences between chloroquine and ammonium chloride in affecting the protein transport or glycosylation of SARS-CoV spike protein and its receptor, ACE2, despite their well-established similar effects of endosomal pH elevation.

The infectivity of coronaviruses other than SARS-CoV are also affected by chloroquine, as exemplified by the human CoV-229E [15]. The inhibitory effects observed on SARS-CoV infectivity and cell spread occurred in the presence of 1''10 μM chloroquine, which are plasma concentrations achievable during the prophylaxis and treatment of malaria (varying from 1.6''12.5 μM) [26] and hence are well tolerated by patients. It recently was speculated that chloroquine might be effective against SARS and the authors suggested that this compound might block the production of TNFα, IL6, or IFNÎ" [15]. Our data provide evidence for the possibility of using the well-established drug chloroquine in the clinical management of SARS.

ConclusionChloroquine, a relatively safe, effective and cheap drug used for treating many human diseases including malaria, amoebiosis and human immunodeficiency virus is effective in inhibiting the infection and spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. The fact that the drug has significant inhibitory antiviral effect when the susceptible cells were treated either prior to or after infection suggests a possible prophylactic and therapeutic use.

MethodsSARS-CoV infection, immunofluorescence, and immunoprecipitation analysesVero E6 cells (an African green monkey kidney cell line) were infected with SARS-CoV (Urbani strain) at a multiplicity of infection of 0.5 for 1 h. The cells were washed with PBS and then incubated in OPTI-MEM (Invitrogen) medium with or without various concentrations of either chloroquine or NH4Cl (both from Sigma). Immunofluorescence staining was performed with SARS-CoV-specific hyperimmune mouse ascitic fluid (HMAF) [8] followed by anti-mouse fluorescein-coupled antibody.

Eighteen hours after infection, the virus-containing supernatants were removed, and the cells were pulsed with 35S-(Cys) for 30 min and chased for 3 h before lysis in RIPA buffer. Clarified cell lysates and media were incubated with HMAF, and immunoprecipitated proteins were separated by 3''8% NuPAGE gel (Invitrogen); proteins were visualized by autoradiography. In some experiments, cells were chased for 3 h with isotope-free medium. Clarified cell supernatants were also immunoprecipitated with SARS-CoV-specific HMAF.

ACE2 flow cytometry analysis and biosynthesisVero E6 cells were seeded in Dulbecco's modified Eagle medium (Invitrogen) supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum. The next day, the cells were incubated in Opti-MEM (Invitrogen) in the presence or absence of 10 μM chloroquine or 20 mM NH4Cl. To analyze the levels of ACE2 at the cell surface, cells were incubated on ice with 10 μg/mL affinity-purified goat anti-ACE2 antibody (R&D Systems) and then incubated with FITC-labeled swine anti-goat IgG antibody (Caltag Laboratories). Labeled cells were analyzed by flow cytometry with a FACSCalibur flow cytometer (BD Biosciences). For ACE2 biosynthesis studies, Vero E6 cells were pulsed with 250 μCi 35S-(Met) (Perkin Elmer) for 3 h with the indicated concentrations of chloroquine or NH4Cl and then lysed in RIPA buffer. Clarified lysates were immunoprecipitated with an affinity-purified goat anti-ACE2 antibody (R&D systems), and the immunoprecipitated proteins were separated by SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis.

Competing interestsThe author(s) declare that they have no competing interests.

Authors' contributionsMV did all the experiments pertaining to SARS CoV infection and coordinated the drafting of the manuscript. EB and SB performed experiments on ACE2 biosynthesis and FACS analysis. BE performed data acquisition from the immunofluorescence experiments. PR and TK provided critical reagents and revised the manuscript critically. NS and SN along with MV and EB participated in the planning of the experiments, review and interpretation of data and critical review of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the content of the manuscript.

AcknowledgementsWe thank Claudia Chesley and Jonathan Towner for critical reading of the manuscript. This work was supported by a Canadian PENCE grant (T3), CIHR group grant #MGC 64518, and CIHR grant #MGP-44363 (to NGS).

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Sun, 22 Mar 2020 03:58

2005 US NIH Study Found Chloroquine Was Effective in Treating Coronavirus In Primates '-- Why Was This Ignored? by Jim Hoft March 21, 2020

On Thursday and Friday morning Governor's Gavin Newsom from California and Andrew Cuomo from New York announced complete lockdown on state residents due to the coronavirus pandemic.

As of Saturday morning 3-21-2020:** There are 19,775 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US.** There are 276 deaths blamed on the coronavirus.** The current mortality rate from confirmed cases is 1.3%** There are no official numbers that include the number of citizens who had the virus but were not sick enough to seek medical attention.** There are an estimated 22,000 flu deaths and 36 million cases in the US each year.

On Thursday President Trump announced the breaking news that the US will immediately begin using chloroquine to treat coronavirus.

President Trump called the news of chloroquine's effectiveness in treating the COVID-19 virus a ''game changer.''

This came after three international studies found chloroquine along with Azithromycin was successful in treating the coronavirus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci immediately rebuked President Trump on his claims on chloroquine saying, ''There is no magic drug out there right now.''

Dr. Fauci questioned chloroquine as an effective treatment for the coronavirus.

But this should not have surprised the the coronavirus experts.Back in 2005 the National Institutes of Health published on choloquine's effectiveness in treating coronavirus in primates!

This was a study on primates that should have been discussed earlier after the virus was identified in China.

Obviously, it was an important study on likely coronavirus treatments.

From the article.

BackgroundSevere acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is caused by a newly discovered coronavirus (SARS-CoV). No effective prophylactic or post-exposure therapy is currently available.

ResultsWe report, however, that chloroquine has strong antiviral effects on SARS-CoV infection of primate cells. These inhibitory effects are observed when the cells are treated with the drug either before or after exposure to the virus, suggesting both prophylactic and therapeutic advantage. In addition to the well-known functions of chloroquine such as elevations of endosomal pH, the drug appears to interfere with terminal glycosylation of the cellular receptor, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2. This may negatively influence the virus-receptor binding and abrogate the infection, with further ramifications by the elevation of vesicular pH, resulting in the inhibition of infection and spread of SARS CoV at clinically admissible concentrations.

ConclusionChloroquine is effective in preventing the spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. Favorable inhibition of virus spread was observed when the cells were either treated with chloroquine prior to or after SARS CoV infection. In addition, the indirect immunofluorescence assay described herein represents a simple and rapid method for screening SARS-CoV antiviral compounds.

The study even includes a picture.

Chloroquine has been known to treat coronavirus, at least in primates, since 2005.Why did it take months for US doctors and international scientists to figure this out?This is a shocking development.This post was updated to show chloroquine's effects on primates.The drug has been know to treat coronavirus for years.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 19:02

U.S. President Donald Trump to hold coronavirus news conference on Friday, March 13. Chip Somodevilla/GettyEven as President Trump says he tested negative for coronavirus, the COVID-19 pandemic raises the fear that huge swaths of the executive branch or even Congress and the Supreme Court could also be disabled, forcing the implementation of "continuity of government" plans that include evacuating Washington and "devolving" leadership to second-tier officials in remote and quarantined locations.

But Coronavirus is also new territory, where the military itself is vulnerable and the disaster scenarios being contemplated -- including the possibility of widespread domestic violence as a result of food shortages -- are forcing planners to look at what are called "extraordinary circumstances".

Above-Top Secret contingency plans already exist for what the military is supposed to do if all the Constitutional successors are incapacitated. Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law.

According to new documents and interviews with military experts, the various plans '' codenamed Octagon, Freejack and Zodiac '' are the underground laws to ensure government continuity. They are so secret that under these extraordinary plans, "devolution" could circumvent the normal Constitutional provisions for government succession, and military commanders could be placed in control around America.

"We're in new territory," says one senior officer, the entire post-9/11 paradigm of emergency planning thrown out the window. The officer jokes, in the kind of morbid humor characteristic of this slow-moving disaster, that America had better learn who Gen. Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy is.

He is the "combatant commander" for the United States and would in theory be in charge if Washington were eviscerated. That is, until a new civilian leader could be installed.

'We're in territory we've never been in before'

What happens, government expert Norman Ornstein asked last week, if so many members of Congress come down with the coronavirus that the legislature cannot meet or cannot muster a quorum? After 9/11, Ornstein and others, alarmed by how little Washington had prepared for such possibilities, created a bipartisan Continuity of Government Commission to examine precisely these and other possibilities.

It has been a two-decade long futile effort, Ornstein says, with Congress uninterested or unable to either pass new laws or create working procedures that would allow emergency and remote operations. The rest of the federal government equally is unprepared to operate if a pandemic were to hit the very people called upon to lead in an emergency. That is why for the first time, other than planning for the aftermath of a nuclear war, extraordinary procedures are being contemplated.

In the past, almost every imagined contingency associated with emergency preparedness has assumed civil and military assistance coming from the outside. One military officer involved in continuity planning calls it a "cavalry" mentality: that military assistance is requested or ordered after local civil authority has been exhausted.

"There might not be an outside," the officer says, asking that she not be named because she is speaking about sensitive matters.

In recognition of the equal vulnerability of military forces, the Pentagon has instituted unprecedented restrictions on off-base travel. Last Wednesday it restricted most overseas travel for 60 days, and then on Friday issued supplemental domestic guidance that essentially keeps all uniformed personnel on or near military bases. There are exceptions, including travel that is "mission-essential," the Pentagon says.

Mission essential in this regard applies to the maze of more than a dozen different secret assignments, most of them falling under three larger contingency plans:

CONPLAN 3400, or the military's plan for "homeland defense," if America itself is a battlefield.CONPLAN 3500, "defense support of civil authorities," where the military assists in an emergency short of armed attack on the nation.CONPLAN 3600, military operations in the National Capital Region and continuation of government, under which the most-secret plans to support continuity are nested.All of these plans are the responsibility of U.S. Northern Command (or NORTHCOM), the homeland defense military authority created after 9/11. Air Force General O'Shaughnessy is NORTHCOM's Colorado Springs-based commander.

On February 1, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper signed orders directing NORTHCOM to execute nationwide pandemic plans. Secretly, he signed Warning Orders (the WARNORD as it's called) alerting NORTHCOM and a host of east coast units to "prepare to deploy" in support of potential extraordinary missions.

Seven secret plans '' some highly compartmented '' exist to prepare for these extraordinary missions. Three are transportation related, just to move and support the White House and the federal government as it evacuates and operates from alternate sites. The first is called the Rescue & Evacuation of the Occupants of the Executive Mansion (or RESEM) plan, responsible for protecting President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and their families--whether that means moving them at the direction of the Secret Service or, in a catastrophe, digging them out of the rubble of the White House.

The second is called the Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan (or JEEP), and it organizes transportation for the Secretary of Defense and other national security leaders so that they can leave the Washington area. The Atlas Plan is a third, moving non-military leaders '' Congressional leadership, the Supreme Court and other important figures '' to their emergency relocation sites. Under Atlas, a still- secret bunker would be activated and cordoned, with government operations shifting to Maryland.

The three most compartmented contingencies '' Octagon, Freejack, and Zodiac '' call upon various military units in Washington DC, North Carolina and eastern Maryland to defend government operations if there is a total breakdown. The seventh plan '' codenamed Granite Shadow '' lays out the playbook for extraordinary domestic missions that involve weapons of mass destruction. (I disclosed the existence of this plan in 2005, and its associated "national mission force"--a force that is on alert at all times, even in peacetime, to respond to a terrorist attack or threat with the nuclear weapon.)

Most of these plans have been quietly activated during presidential inaugurals and State of the Union addresses, the centrality of the weapons of mass destruction scenario seen in the annual Capital Shield exercise in Washington. Last year's exercise posited a WMD attack on Metro Station. Military sources say that only the massive destruction caused by a nuclear device '' or the enormous loss of life that could be caused by a biological agent '' present catastrophic pressure great enough to justify movement into extra-Constitutional actions and extraordinary circumstances plans.

"WMD is such an important scenario," a former NORTHCOM commander told me, "not because it is the greatest risk, but because it stresses the system most severely."

According to another senior retired officer, who told me about Granite Shadow and is now working as a defense contractor, the national mission force goes out on its missions with "special authorities" pre-delegated by the president and the attorney general. These special authorities are needed because under regulations and the law, federal military forces can supplant civil authority or engage in law enforcement only under the strictest conditions.

When might the military's "emergency authority" be needed? Traditionally, it's thought of after a nuclear device goes off in an American city. But now, planners are looking at military response to urban violence as people seek protection and fight over food. And, according to one senior officer, in the contingency of the complete evacuation of Washington.

Under Defense department regulations, military commanders are authorized to take action on their own '' in extraordinary circumstances '' where "duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation." The conditions include "large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances" involving "significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property." The Joint Chiefs of Staff codified these rules in October 2018, reminding commanders that they could decide, on their own authority, to "engage temporarily" in military control in circumstances "where prior authorization by the President is impossible" or where local authorities "are unable to control the situation." A new Trump-era Pentagon directive calls it "extreme situations." In all cases, even where a military commander declares martial law, the directives say that civil rule has to be restored as soon as possible.

"In scenarios where one city or one region is devastated, that's a pretty straightforward process," the military planner told me. "But with coronavirus, where the effect is nationwide, we're in territory we've never been in before."

Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh attend the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives at the U.S. Capitol Building on February 5, 2019 in Washington, DC. Pool/GettyAn extended period of devolution

Continuity of government and protection of the presidency began in the Eisenhower administration with the possibility emerging that Washington could be obliterated in an atomic attack. The need to plan for a nuclear decision-maker to survive even a direct attack led to the building of bunkers and a maze of secret procedures and exceptions, many of which are still followed to this day. Congress was also folded in '' at least Congressional leadership '' to ensure that there would always be a Constitutional successor. And then the Supreme Court was added.

Before 9/11, continuity and emergency programs were broadened beyond nuclear war preparedness, particularly as hurricanes began to have such devastating effects on modern urban society. And because of the advent of pandemics, broadly beginning with the Avian Influenza, civil agencies responsible for national security, such as the Department of Health and Human Services, which is the lead agency to respond to coronavirus, were also brought into continuity protection.

Despite well-honed plans and constant testing over 30 years, the attacks of September 11, 2001 severely tested all aspects of continuity movement and communications. Many of the procedures written down on paper were either ignored or thrown out the window. As a result, continuity had a second coming, billions spent by the new Department of Homeland and the other national security agencies to ensure that the Washington leadership could communicate and move, a whole new system established to be ready if a terrorist attack came without warning. Bunkers, many shuttered at the end of the Cold War, were reopened and expanded. Befitting the panic at the time, and the atomic legacy, the most extraordinary planning scenario posited a terrorist attack that would involve an improvised nuclear or radiological dispersal device in a major American city.

The terrorist attack scenario dominated until 2006, when the disastrous government response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans shifted federal government preparedness to formally adopt an "all-hazards" system. Civil agencies, the 50 states and local communities '' particularly large cities '' all began to synchronize emergency preparedness with common protocols. U.S. Northern Command was created to harness military assistance in domestic disasters, it's three overarching contingency plans the product now of 15 years of trial and error.

Government at all levels now have extensive "continuity" programs to respond to man-made and natural disasters, a national response framework that has steadily grown and taken hold. This is the public world of emergency response, ranging from life-saving efforts to protect and restore critical infrastructure, to drills that practice the evacuation of key officials. It is a partnership created between federal government agencies and the States, carefully constructed to guard the rule of law.

In July 2016, Barack Obama signed the classified Presidential Policy Directive 40 on "National Continuity Policy," establishing "essential functions" that government agencies were tasked to protect and retain. At the highest level were the National Essential Functions, those that posit "the continued functioning" of government under the Constitution. In order to preserve Constitutional rule, agencies were ordered to have not just a line of succession but also one of "devolution," a duplicate chain of individuals secreted outside Washington available in a catastrophic emergency. Federal Continuity Directive 1, issued just days before Donald Trump became president, says that devolution has to establish "procedures to transfer statutory authority and responsibilities" to this secondary designated staff to sustain essential functions.

"Devolution may be temporary, or may endure for an extended period," the directive states. And it further directs that the devolution staff be located at "a geographically dispersed location unaffected by the incident." Except that in the case of coronavirus, there may be no such location. This places the plans for the extraordinary into completely uncharted territory, planners not just considering how devolution or martial law might work in a nationwide disaster but also how those earmarked to implement these very plans have to be sequestered and made ready, even while they are equally vulnerable.

NORTHCOM stresses in almost everything it produces for public consumption that it operates only in "support" of civil authorities, in response to state requests for assistance or with the consent of local authorities. Legally, the command says, the use of federal military forces in law enforcement can only take place if those forces are used to suppress "insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy." A second test also has to be met, that such disturbances "hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State," that is, that the public is deprived of its legal and constitutional protections. Local civil authorities must be "unable, fail, or refuse" to protect the civilian population for military forces to be called in, Pentagon directives make clear.

Hurricane Katrina forced the federal government to shift from a terrorism scenario to an "all-hazards" system. A family on their porch in the Treme area of New Orleans, which lies under several feet of water after Katrina hit on August 29, 2005. Rick Wilking/REUTERS Since Hurricane Katrina in 2006, no emergency has triggered any state to even request federal military aid under these procedures. Part of the reason, the senior officer involved in planning says, is that local police forces have themselves become more capable, acquiring military-grade equipment and training. And part of the reason is that the governors have worked together to strengthen the National Guard, which can enforce domestic law when it is mustered under state control.

But to give a sense of how sensitive the employment of military forces on American soil is, when the New York National Guard arrived in New Rochelle last week, even though they were operating under the control of the governor, Mayor Noam Bramson still found it necessary to assure the public that no one in military uniform would have any "policing function."

Local authorities around America are already expressing worries that they have insufficient equipment, particularly ventilators, to deal with a possible influx of coronavirus patients, the number of hospital beds fewer than the potential number of patients that could need them. And brawls have already broken out in stores where products are in short supply. The worst case is that shortages and violence spreads, that the federal military, isolated and kept healthy behind its own barricade, is called to take over.

Orders have already gone out that Secretary of Defense Esper and his deputy, David Norquist, remain physically separated, to guard against both of them becoming incapacitated. Other national security agencies are following suit, and the White House continuity specialists are readying evacuation should the virus sweep through the Executive Mansion.

The plans state that the government continues essential functions under all circumstances, even if that is with the devolved second string or under temporary military command. One of the "national essential functions", according to Federal Continuity Directive 1 is that the government "provid[e] leadership visible to the Nation and the world ... [while] maintaining the trust and confidence of the American people" The question is whether a faceless elite could ever provide that confidence, preserving government command but also adding to public panic. That could be a virus too.

William M. Arkin is the author of a half-dozen books including American Coup: How a Terrified Government is Destroying the Constitution. He is writing Ending Perpetual War for Simon & Schuster. His Twitter handle is @warkin

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 18:14

News

By Sara Dorn

March 21, 2020 | 10:59am

US doctors are reportedly eyeing vaping as a possible factor in the alarming number of hospitalizations among young adults diagnosed with COVID-19.

Medical experts began floating the theory last week after the US Centers for Disease Control reported that up to 20% of people hospitalized with the virus were between ages 20 and 44.

''When someone's lungs are exposed to flu or other infections the adverse effects of smoking or vaping are much more serious than among people who do not smoke or vape,'' Stanton Glantz, a professor and director of the Center for Tobacco Research Control & Education at University of California San Francisco, wrote in a blog post.

Glantz said vaping can hinder the nasal cavity's ability to ward off disease by damaging the microscopic hairs, or cilia, in the upper airway, he told CNN.

''Some of my [colleagues] have noted people under 30 ending up in hospitals and a couple were vapors,'' Glantz said, noting a link has not been confirmed.

In China, smokers were 14 times more likely to develop severe cases of COVID-19 than those who did not smoke, according to a February study published in the Chinese Medical Journal.

Glantz said it's not too late for smokers to help their lungs fight the virus.

''At a time when people are looking to reduce risk, it's very sensible to stop insulting your lungs,'' Glantz said.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 17:22

'''...Our government was giving away millions of acres of land'...not only did they give the land they built land grant collages with GOVERNMENT MONEY to teach them how to farm

NOT ONLY THAT

they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming

NOT ONLY THAT

they provided low interest rates in order to mechanize their farms

NOT ONLY THAT

TODAY these people are receiving millions of dollars not to farm and they are the very people telling the BLACK MAN that he needs to lift himself up by his own boot straps'...

this is what we are faced with!

THIS is the reality!

Now when we come to Washington in this campaign we are coming:

TO GET OUR CHECK!'' ~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

He was assassinated before he reached our country's capital.

(please click above picture to view video of this speech)

Lets celebrate Dr. Kings FULL dream

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 16:00

Amos Nelson Wilson (February 23, 1941[1] (or 1940[2]) '-- January 14, 1995[3][1]) was an African-American theoretical psychologist, social theorist, Pan-African thinker, scholar, author and a professor of psychology at the City University of New York.[1][2][4][6]

Early life and education [ edit ] Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1940[2] or 1941,[1] Wilson completed his undergraduate degree at the Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, mastered at The New School of Social Research, and attained a PhD degree from Fordham University in New York.[2][4] Wilson worked as a psychologist, social caseworker, supervising probation officer and as a training administrator in the New York City Department of Juvenile Justice. As an academic, Wilson also taught at City University of New York from 1981 to 1986 and at the College of New Rochelle from 1987 to 1995.[7][1][2][4][6]

Views on power and racism [ edit ] According to AALBC.com, "Wilson believed that the vast power differentials between Africans and non-Africans was the major social problem of the 21st century. He believed these power differentials, and not simply racist attitudes, was chiefly responsible for the existence of racism, and the continuing domination of people of African descent across the globe'--white people exercise racism because they have the power to do so."[8]

As a scholar of Africana studies, Wilson felt that the social, political and economic problems that Blacks faced, the world over, were unlike those of other ethnic groups; and thus, he argued that the concept of "equal education" ought to be abandoned in favor of a philosophy and approach appropriate to their own needs. Wilson argued that the function of education and intelligence was to solve the problems particular to a people and nation, and to secure that people and nation's biological survival. Any philosophy of education or approach which failed to do so was inadequate.[9][10][5]

The idea that we must necessarily arrive at a point greater than that reached by our ancestors could possibly be an illusion. The idea that somehow according to some great universal principle we are going to be in a better condition than our ancestors is an illusion which often results from not studying history and recognizing that progressions and regressions occur; that integrations and disintegrations occur in history.

[11]'--Amos Wilson, The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness [in] Cole (2000)[11]

Wilson further argued that the mythological notion of progress to which many Blacks subscribe, was a false one; that integration could only occur and persist, as a social-economic reality, so long as the U.S. and global economies continued to expand.[citation needed ] If such an economic situation were ever to reverse, or change for the worse, then the consequences which would follow could end up resulting in increased racial conflict; thus he urged Blacks to consider disintegration as a realistic possibility '-- to prepare for all hypothetical scenarios '-- with the understanding that integration was not guaranteed to last forever.

Wilson also believed that racism was a structurally and institutionally driven phenomenon derived from the inequities of power relations between groups, and could persist even if and when more overt expressions of it were no longer present.[citation needed ] Racism, then, could only be neutralized by transforming society (structurally) and the system of power relations.

Books [ edit ] The Developmental Psychology of the Black Child (1978)[12][4]Black-on-Black Violence: The Psychodynamics of Black Self-Annihilation in Service of White Domination (1990)[12][4]Understanding Black Adolescent Male Violence: Its Remediation and Prevention (1992)[4]Awakening the Natural Genius of Black Children (1992)[13][4]The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness: Eurocentric History, Psychiatry and the Politics of White Supremacy (1993)[12][4]Blueprint for Black Power: A Moral, Political and Economic Imperative for the Twenty-First Century (1998)[13][4]Afrikan-Centered Consciousness Versus the New World Order: Garveyism in the Age of Globalism (1999)The Developmental Psychology of the Black Child '-- Second Edition (2014)Issues of Manhood in Black and White: An Incisive Look at Masculinity and the Societal Definition of Afrikan Man (2016)References [ edit ] ^ a b c d e f g Atlanta Black Star, 5 Signs Showing You May Suffer From 'Mental Slavery' by Dr. Amos Wilson, by A Moore (March 21, 2014) [1] (Retrieved 29 March 2019) ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Jackson-Lowman, H., and Jamison, D.F., Honoring the scholarship of Amos Wilson (2013), The Journal of Pan African Studies, 6(2), 4-8 [in] Kiara Thorp and Andrea D. Lewis. "Amos Wilson 1940 - 1995" [in] Lewis, Andrea D., Taylor, Nicole A., Unsung Legacies of Educators and Events in African American Education (Chapter 12), Springer (2019), p. 75-79, ISBN 9783319901282. For year of birth (1940), see page 78:"Dr. Amos N. Wilson was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1940 (Jackson-Lowman & Jamison, 2013). Wilson attended Morehouse College and furthered his education at the New School for Social Research and Fordham University..."[2] ^ a b Liburd, Sean, Awaken the Mind: Communion with Sean Liburd, Xlibris Corporation (2008), p. 31, ISBN 9781453501948 [3] (Retrieved 29 March 2019) ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Review of Honoring the Scholarship of Amos Wilson by Jackson-Lowman, Huberta; Jamison, DeReef F. [in] The Journal of Pan African Studies (Online) [in] Online Research Library: Questia [4] (Retrieved 30 March 2019) ^ a b Amos N. Wilson, "African Centered Consciousness Vs. New World Order: Garveyism in the Age of Globalism" (1999) [in] Howard, Kamm (The Amos N. Wilson Institute), Awakening the Natural Genius in Black Children Workshop, The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.6, no.2 (July 2013), pp. 86-90 (PDF, pp. 4-8) [5] (Retrieved 30 March 2018) ^ a b Our Time Press, Dr. Amos Wilson: Why We Do The Things We Do, February 26, 2016 [6] ^ "Amos Wilson Conference Description" (PDF) . Journal of Pan African Studies. 6 (2): 1. July 2013. ^ The African American Literature Book Club, Amos N. Wilson (bio) [7] (Retrieved 30 March 2019) ^ Howard, Kamm (The Amos N. Wilson Institute), Awakening the Natural Genius in Black Children Workshop, The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.6, no.2 (July 2013), pp. 83-86, 88 (PDF, pp. 1-4, 6) ^ Wilson, Amos N., Awakening the natural genius in Black children., Afrikan World InfoSystems (1992), pp. 1-2, 6, ISBN 9781879164017 ^ a b Amos Wilson, "The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness: Eurocentric History, Psychiatry, and the Politics of White Supremacy", Afrikan World InfoSystems (1993), ISBN 9781879164024 [in] Cole, Harriette, How to Be: A Guide to Contemporary Living for African Americans, Simon & Schuster (2000), p.481, ISBN 9780684863085 ^ a b c Editors: Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck; Esposito, John L.; Muslims on the Americanization Path?, Oxford University Press (2000), p. 255, ISBN 9780198030928 [8] (Retrieved 29 March 2019) ^ a b Liburd, Sean, Awaken the Mind: Communion with Sean Liburd, Xlibris Corporation (2008), p. 168, ISBN 9781453501948 External links [ edit ] "Dr. Amos Wilson's Last Interview (1995)", African Blood Siblings.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 15:48

Theory of Technology Dominance Acronym TTD

Alternate name(s) Not applicable

Main dependent construct(s)/factor(s) TTD has two dependent factors:

Reliance - The extent to which and individual applies the intelligent decision aid and integrates the recommendations of that aid into his or her judgment.Dominance - The state of decision making where the intelligent decision aid, as opposed to its user, takes primary control of a decision making process. Main independent construct(s)/factor(s) TTD has four independent factors:

Task Experience - The level of experience a decision maker has regarding the completion of a task as well as the extent to which the decision maker has developed strategies for completing that particular task.Task Complexity - The extent to which the cognitive abilities of the decision maker are challenged with completing a certain task. (In psychology this is often termed Task Difficulty.)Decision Aid Familiarity - The extent to which the decision maker is comfortable with the intelligent decision aid based on prior experience and/or significant training with the aid (or similar aids).Cognitive Fit '' The extent to which the cognitive processes used with the decision aid to complete a task match the cognitive processes normally applied by the decision maker using the aid.Concise description of theory The Theory of Technology Dominance (TTD) posits that a decision maker may become reliant on an intelligent decision aid under two conditions:

The decision maker is low in task experience (see independent factors).The decision maker is high in all factors (task experience, task complexity, decision aid familiarity, and cognitive fit).According to TDD, reliance on an intelligent decision aid can create a long-term, de-skilling effect in the user as well as hinder that user's growth of knowledge and advancement in his or her domain. Furthermore, TDD states that a negative relationship exists between the user's expertise level and the risk of poor decision making when the expertise of the user and intelligent decision aid are mismatched. When the expertise of the user and the aid are matched, however, a positive relationship exists between reliance on the aid and improved decisions making.

Conceptually, TTD can be divided into three sections which are built on a total of eight testable propositions. The three sections are:

Section 1: Addresses the factors that determine the likelihood that a decision maker will rely on an intelligent decision aid.Section 2: Addresses the conditions under which a decision maker is vulnerable to being dominated by the intelligent decision aid.Section 3: Addresses the long-term impact of intelligent decision aid use on de-skilling domain experts and impeding epistemological evolution.The eight testable propositions are (Arnold & Sutton, 1998):

Section 1 - Factors influencing relianceProposition 1: ''When users have a low to moderate level of experience, there is a negative relationship between task experience and reliance on a decision aid."Proposition 2: ''There is a positive relationship between task complexity and reliance on a decision aid.''Proposition 3: ''When task experience and perceived task complexity are high, there is a positive relationship between decision aid familiarity and reliance on the decision aid.''Proposition 4: ''When task experience and perceived task complexity are high, there is a positive relationship between cognitive fit and reliance on the decision aid."Section 2 '' Conditions favorable for dominanceProposition 5: ''When the expertise of the user and intelligent decision aid are mismatched, there is a negative relationship between the user's expertise level and the risk of poor decision making."Proposition 6: ''When the expertise level of the user and intelligent decision aid are matched, there is a positive relationship between reliance on the aid and improved decisions making."Section 3 '' Long-term effectsProposition 7: ''There is a positive relationship between continued use of an intelligent decision aid and the de-skilling of auditors' abilities for the domain in which the aid is used."Proposition 8: ''There is negative relationship between the broad-based, long-term use of an intelligent decision aid in a given problem domain and the growth in knowledge and advancement of the domain.'' Diagram/schematic of theory

Recreated from Arnold and Sutton (1998)

Originating author(s) Vicky Arnold and Steve Sutton

Seminal articles Originating Article

Arnold, V., & Sutton, S.G. (1998). The theory of technology dominance: understanding the impact of intelligent decision aids on decision makers' judgments. Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research, 1, 175-194.Tests of the Theory

Masselli, J. J., Rickets, R. C., Arnold, V., & Sutton, S. G. (2002). The impact of embedded intelligent agents on tax-reporting decisions. Journal of the American Taxation Association, 24 (2), 60-78. - Tested 5th and 6th propositions of TTD.Noga, T., & Arnold, V. (2002). Do tax support systems affect the accuracy of tax compliance decisions? International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 3, 125-144. - Tested 5th and 6th propositions of TTD.Arnold, V., Collier, P. A., Leech, S. A., & Sutton, S. G. (2004). Impact of intelligent decision aids on expert and novice decision-makers' judgments. Accounting and Finance, 44, 1-26. - Tested 5th and 6th propositions of TTD.Hampton, C. (2005). Determinants of reliance: an empirical test of the theory of technology dominance. International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 6, 217-240. - Tested first four propositions of TTD.Dowling, C., Leech S.A., Maroney, R. (2006). The deskilling of auditors' abilities: An empirical test of the theory of technology dominance. 2nd Asia- Pacific Research Symposium on Accounting Information Systems. - Tested 7th proposition of TTDHunton, J., Arnold, V., & Reck, J.L. Decision aid reliance: a field study involving professional buy-side financial analysts. Contemporary Accounting Research, Forthcoming. '' Tested 2nd proposition of TTDOriginating area Information Systems

Level of analysis Individual

IS articles that use the theory Noga, T., & Arnold, V. (2002). Do tax support systems affect the accuracy of tax compliance decisions? International Journal of Accounting Information, 3, 125-144.Hampton, C. (2005). Determinants of reliance: an empirical test of the theory of technology dominance. International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 6, 217-240.Arnold, V., Clark, N., Collier, P. A., Leech, S. A., & Sutton, S. G. (2006). The differential use and effect of knowledge-base system explanations in novice and expert judgment systems. MIS Quarterly, 30 (1), 79-97.Mascha, M. F., & Smedly, G. (2007). Can computerized decision aids do "damage"? A case for tailoring feedback and task complexity based on task experience. International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 8, 73-91.Al-Natour, S., Benbasat, I., & Cenfetelli, R.T. (2008). The effects of process and outcome similarity on user's evaluations of decision aids. Decision Sciences, 39(2), 175-211.Links from this theory to other theories Psychology

Theory of Cognitive Fit (Vessey, 1991)Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 1988)Sociology

Innovation Diffusion Theory (Rogers, 1962)Information Systems

Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989)Model of PC Utilization (Thompson et al., 1991)Philosophy of Science/Rhetoric

Toulmin's Model of Argumentation (Toulmin, 1958)External links Presentation of TTD by one of the originating authors[[1]]

Original Contributor(s) Andrew Dill, University of Central FloridaPlease feel free to make modifications to this site. In order to do so, you must register. Return to Theories Used in IS ResearchMedia:Example.ogg

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 15:16

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 14:57

American politician

Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. (n(C) Burns; born October 8, 1941) is an American civil rights activist, Baptist minister, and politician. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as a shadow U.S. Senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997.

He is the founder of the organizations that merged to form Rainbow/PUSH. Former U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. is his eldest son. Jackson hosted Both Sides with Jesse Jackson on CNN from 1992 to 2000.

Early life and education Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, to Helen Burns (1924''2015), a 16-year-old high school student, and her 33-year-old married neighbor, Noah Louis Robinson (1908''1997). The family has some Cherokee roots.[1] Robinson was a former professional boxer who was an employee of a textile brokerage and a well-known figure in the black community.[2][3][4] One year after Jesse's birth, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, a post office maintenance worker who later adopted the boy.[2][3] Jesse was given his stepfather's name in the adoption, but as he grew up, he also maintained a close relationship with Robinson. He considered both men to be his fathers.[2][3]

As a young child, Jackson was taunted by other children about his out-of-wedlock birth, and has said these experiences helped motivate him to succeed.[2][3] Living under Jim Crow segregation laws, Jackson was taught to go to the back of the bus and use separate water fountains'--practices he accepted until the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955.[3] He attended the racially segregated Sterling High School in Greenville, where he was elected student class president, finished tenth in his class, and earned letters in baseball, football and basketball.[5]

Upon graduating from high school in 1959, he rejected a contract from a minor league professional baseball team so that he could attend the University of Illinois on a football scholarship.[4][6] After his second semester at that predominantly white school, Jackson transferred to North Carolina A&T, a historically black university in Greensboro, North Carolina. Accounts of the reasons for this transfer differ. Jackson has said that he changed schools because racial prejudice prevented him from playing quarterback and limited his participation on a competitive public-speaking team.[6][7]

Writing on ESPN.com in 2002, sociologist Harry Edwards noted that the University of Illinois had previously had a black quarterback, but also noted that black athletes attending traditionally white colleges during the 1950s and 1960s encountered a "combination of culture shock and discrimination".[7] Edwards also suggested that Jackson had left the University of Illinois in 1960 because he had been placed on academic probation,[7] but the school's president reported in 1987 that Jackson's 1960 freshman year transcript was clean, and said he would have been eligible to re-enroll at any time.[8]

At A&T, Jackson played quarterback and was elected student body president.[4] He became active in local civil rights protests against segregated libraries, theaters and restaurants.[9] He graduated with a B.S. in sociology in 1964, then attended the Chicago Theological Seminary on a scholarship.[3] He dropped out in 1966, three classes short of earning his master's degree, to focus full-time on the civil rights movement.[5][10] He was ordained a minister in 1968, and in 2000 was awarded a Master of Divinity Degree based on his previous credits earned plus his life experience and subsequent work.[10][11]

Civil rights activism The Greenville Eight On July 16, 1960, while home from college, Jackson joined seven other African Americans in a sit-in at the Greenville Public Library in Greenville, South Carolina, which only allowed white people. The group was arrested for "disorderly conduct". Jackson's pastor paid their bond, the Greenville News said. DeeDee Wright, another member of the group, later said they wanted to be arrested "so it could be a test case.'' The Greenville City Council closed both the main library and the branch black people used. The possibility of a lawsuit led to the reopening of both libraries September 19, also the day after the News printed a letter written by Wright.[12]

SCLC and Operation Breadbasket Jackson has been known for commanding public attention since he first started working for Martin Luther King Jr.[13] In 1965 he participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches organized by James Bevel, King and other civil rights leaders in Alabama.[3] Impressed by Jackson's drive and organizational abilities, King soon began giving Jackson a role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), though he was concerned about Jackson's apparent ambition and attention-seeking.[3][14] When Jackson returned from Selma, he was charged with establishing a frontline office for the SCLC in Chicago.[14]

In 1966 King and Bevel selected Jackson to head the Chicago branch of the SCLC's economic arm, Operation Breadbasket[14][15] and he was promoted to national director in 1967.[6] Operation Breadbasket had been started by the Atlanta leadership of the SCLC as a job placement agency for blacks.[16] Under Jackson's leadership, a key goal was to encourage massive boycotts by black consumers as a means to pressure white-owned businesses to hire blacks and to purchase goods and services from black-owned firms.[14][16]

T. R. M. Howard, a 1950s proponent of the consumer boycott tactic, soon became a major supporter of Jackson's efforts '' donating and raising funds, and introducing Jackson to prominent members of the black business community in Chicago.[14] Under Jackson's direction, Operation Breadbasket held popular weekly workshops on Chicago's South Side featuring white and black political and economic leaders,[15] and religious services complete with a jazz band and choir.[16]

Jackson became involved in SCLC leadership disputes following King's assassination on April 4, 1968. When King was shot, Jackson was in the parking lot one floor below.[3] Jackson told reporters he was the last person to speak to King, and that King died in his arms '' an account that several King aides disputed.[3] In the wake of King's death, Jackson worked on SCLC's Poor People's Crusade in Washington, D.C., and was credited with managing its 15-acre tent city '' but he began to increasingly clash with Ralph Abernathy, King's successor as chairman of the SCLC.[17][18] In 1969 The New York Times reported that several black leaders viewed Jackson as King's successor and that Jackson was one of the few black activists who was preaching racial reconciliation.

Jackson was also reportedly seeking coalition with whites in order to approach what were considered racial problems as economic and class problems. "When we change the race problem into a class fight between the haves and the have-nots, then we are going to have a new ball game", he said.[16] In the 21st century, some public school systems are working on an approach for affirmative action that deals with family income rather than race, recognizing that some minority members have been very successful. The Times also indicated that Jackson was being criticized as too involved with middle-class blacks, and for having an unattainable goal of racial unity.[16]

In the spring of 1971 Abernathy ordered Jackson to move the national office of Operation Breadbasket from Chicago to Atlanta and sought to place another person in charge of local Chicago activities, but Jackson refused to move.[15] He organized the October 1971 Black Expo in Chicago, a trade and business fair to promote black capitalism and grass roots political power.[19] The five-day event was attended by black businessmen from 40 states, as well as politicians such as Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes, and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Daley's presence was seen as a testament to the growing political and economic power of blacks.[19]

In December 1971 Jackson and Abernathy had a complete falling out, with the split described as part of a leadership struggle between Jackson, who had a national profile, and Abernathy, whose prominence from the Civil Rights Movement was beginning to wane.[15] The break began when Abernathy questioned the handling of receipts from the Black Expo, and then suspended Jackson as leader of Operation Breadbasket for not obtaining permission to form non-profit corporations.[15] Al Sharpton, then youth group leader of the SCLC, left the organization to protest Jackson's treatment and formed the National Youth Movement.[20] Jackson, his entire Breadbasket staff, and 30 of the 35 board members resigned from the SCLC and began planning a new organization.[21][22] Time magazine quoted Jackson as saying at that time that the traditional civil rights movement had lost its "offensive thrust."[22]

Operation PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition This section

needs expansion.

You can help by adding to it. ( October 2012 )People United to Save Humanity (Operation PUSH) officially began operations on December 25, 1971;[22] Jackson later changed the name to People United to Serve Humanity.[23] T. R. M. Howard was installed as a member of the board of directors and chair of the finance committee.[14] At its inception, Jackson planned to orient Operation PUSH toward politics and to pressure politicians to work to improve economic opportunities for blacks and poor people of all races.[22] SCLC officials reportedly felt the new organization would help black businesses more than it would help the poor.[22]

In 1978 Jackson called for a closer relationship between blacks and the Republican Party, telling the Party's National Committee that "Black people need the Republican Party to compete for us so we can have real alternatives ... The Republican Party needs black people if it is ever to compete for national office."[24]

In 1983 Jackson and Operation PUSH led a boycott against beer giant Anheuser-Busch, criticizing the company's level of minority employment in their distribution network. August Busch IV, Anheuser-Busch's CEO was introduced in 1996 to Yusef Jackson, Jesse's son, by Jackson family friend Ron Burkle. In 1998 Yusef and his brother Jonathan were chosen by Anheuser-Busch to head River North Sales, a Chicago beer distribution company, leading to controversy. "There is no causal connection between the boycott in 1983 and me meeting in the middle '90s and me buying this company in 1998," said Yusef.[25][26][27]

In 1984 Jackson organized the Rainbow Coalition and resigned his post as president of Operation PUSH in 1984 to run for president of the United States, though he remained involved as chairman of the board.[23] PUSH's activities were described in 1987 as conducting boycotts of business to induce them to provide more jobs and business to blacks and as running programs for housing, social services and voter registration.[23] The organization was funded by contributions from businesses and individuals.[23] In early 1987 the continued existence of Operation PUSH was imperiled by debt, a fact that Jackson's political opponents used during his race for the 1988 Democratic Party nomination.[23] In 1996 the Operation PUSH and Rainbow Coalition organizations were merged.

International activism Jackson's influence extended to international matters in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1983 he traveled to Syria to secure the release of a captured American pilot, Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, who was being held by the Syrian government. Goodman had been shot down over Lebanon while on a mission to bomb Syrian positions in that country. After Jackson made a dramatic personal appeal to Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Goodman was released. The Reagan administration was initially skeptical about Jackson's trip, but after Jackson secured Goodman's release, Reagan welcomed Jackson and Goodman to the White House on January 4, 1984.[28] This helped to boost Jackson's popularity as an American patriot and served as a springboard for his 1984 presidential run. In June 1984 Jackson negotiated the release of 22 Americans being held in Cuba after an invitation by Cuban president Fidel Castro.[29]

On the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Jackson made a trip to Iraq to plead with Saddam Hussein for the release of foreign nationals held there as a "human shield", securing the release of several British and 20 American individuals.[30][31][32]

In 1997 Jackson traveled to Kenya to meet with Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi as United States President Bill Clinton's special envoy for democracy to promote free and fair elections. In April 1999, during the Kosovo War, he traveled to Belgrade to negotiate the release of three U.S. POWs captured on the Macedonian border while patrolling with a UN peacekeeping unit. He met with then-Yugoslav president Slobodan MiloÅević, who later agreed to release the three men.[33]

His international efforts continued into the 2000s. On February 15, 2003, Jackson spoke in front of over an estimated one million people in Hyde Park, London at the culmination of the anti-war demonstration against the imminent invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and the United Kingdom. In November 2004 Jackson visited senior politicians and community activists in Northern Ireland in an effort to encourage better cross-community relations and rebuild the peace process and restore the governmental institutions of the Belfast Agreement.

In August 2005 Jackson traveled to Venezuela to meet Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez, following controversial remarks by televangelist Pat Robertson that implied that Chvez should be assassinated. Jackson condemned Robertson's remarks as immoral. After meeting with Chvez and addressing the Venezuelan Parliament, Jackson said there was no evidence that Venezuela posed a threat to the U.S. He also met representatives from the Venezuelan African and indigenous communities.[34]

In 2005 Jackson was enlisted as part of the United Kingdom's "Operation Black Vote", a campaign Simon Woolley ran to encourage more of Britain's ethnic minorities to vote in political elections ahead of the May 2005 General Election.[35]

In 2009 Jackson served as a speaker for The International Peace Foundation on the topic "Building a culture of peace and development in a globalized world".[36] He visited multiple locations in Malaysia, including the Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in Thailand, including NIST International School in Bangkok.[37]

Political activism During the 1980s Jackson achieved wide fame as a politician and a spokesman for civil rights issues. In 1980, for example, he mediated in a firefighters' strike.[3]

1984 presidential campaign On November 3, 1983, Jackson announced his campaign for President of the United States in the 1984 election,[38] becoming the second African American (after Shirley Chisholm) to mount a nationwide campaign for president.

In the Democratic Party primaries, Jackson, who had been written off by pundits as a fringe candidate with little chance at winning the nomination, surprised many when he took third place behind Senator Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale, who eventually won the nomination. Jackson garnered 3,282,431 primary votes, or 18.2 percent of the total, in 1984,[3] and won primaries and caucuses in Louisiana, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, and Mississippi.[39] More Virginia caucus-goers supported Jesse Jackson than any other candidate, but Walter Mondale won more Virginia delegates.[40]

In May 1988 Jackson complained that he had won 21% of the popular vote[41] but was awarded only 9% of the delegates. He afterwards stated that he had been handicapped by party rules. While Mondale (in the words of his aides) was determined to establish a precedent with his vice presidential candidate by picking a woman or visible minority, Jackson criticized the screening process as a "p.r. parade of personalities". He also mocked Mondale, saying that Hubert Humphrey was the "last significant politician out of the St. Paul''Minneapolis" area.[42]

Jackson was criticized in the early 1980s for referring to Jews as "Hymies" and New York City as "Hymietown" in remarks to a black Washington Post reporter.[3][43] ("Hymie" is a pejorative term for Jews.) He had mistakenly assumed the references would not be printed. Louis Farrakhan made the situation worse by issuing, in Jackson's presence, a public warning to Jews that "If you harm this brother [Jackson], it will be the last one you harm."[3][43] During a speech before national Jewish leaders in a Manchester, New Hampshire synagogue, Jackson publicly apologized to Jews for the pejorative remarks, but did not denounce Farrakhan's warning. A rift between Jackson and many in the Jewish community endured at least through the 1990s.[43]

Shortly after President Jimmy Carter fired U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young for meeting with Palestine Liberation Organization representatives, Jackson and other black leaders began publicly endorsing a Palestinian state, with Jackson calling Israel's prime minister a "terrorist" and soliciting Arab-American financial support.[44] Jackson has since apologized for some of these remarks, but they badly damaged his presidential campaign, as "Jackson was seen by many conservatives in the United States as hostile to Israel and far too close to Arab governments."[45]

According to a 1987 New York Times article, Jackson began attempting to improve his relationship with the Jewish community after 1984.[3] In 2000 he was invited to speak in support of Jewish Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman at the Democratic National Convention.[46]

On March 8, 2020, Jackson endorsed Jewish candidate Bernie Sanders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.[47]

1988 presidential campaign In 1988 Jackson again sought the Democratic presidential nomination. According to a November 1987 New York Times article, "Most political analysts give him little chance of being nominated '' partly because he is black, partly because of his unretrenched liberalism."[3] But his past successes made him a more credible candidate, and he was both better financed and better organized than in 1984. Jackson once again exceeded expectations as he more than doubled his previous results, prompting R.W. Apple of The New York Times to call 1988 "the Year of Jackson".[48]

In early 1988 Jackson organized a rally at the former American Motors assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, approximately two weeks after new owner Chrysler announced it would close the plant by the end of the year. In his speech he spoke out against Chrysler's decision: "We have to put the focus on Kenosha, Wisconsin, as the place, here and now, where we draw the line to end economic violence!" He compared the workers' fight to that of the 1965 Voting Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama. As a result, the UAW Local 72 union voted to endorse Jackson, even against UAW rules.[49]

After winning 55% of the vote in the Michigan Democratic caucus, Jackson was considered the front-runner for the nomination, as he surpassed all the other candidates in total number of pledged delegates. But Jackson's campaign suffered a significant setback less than two weeks after the UAW endorsement when he narrowly lost the Colorado primary to Michael Dukakis and was defeated handily the following day by Dukakis in the Wisconsin primary. Jackson's showing among white voters in Wisconsin was significantly better than in 1984, but was also noticeably lower than pre-primary polling had predicted. The back-to-back victories established Dukakis as the front-runner. He went on to win the party's nomination, but lost the general election in November.[50]

Jackson's campaign was also interrupted by allegations regarding his half-brother Noah Robinson Jr.'s criminal activity.[51] Jackson had to answer frequent questions about Noah, who was often called "the Billy Carter of the Jackson campaign".[52]

At the conclusion of the Democratic primary season, Jackson had captured 6.9 million votes and won 11 contests: Seven primaries (Alabama, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico and Virginia) and four caucuses (Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont).[53] Jackson also scored March victories in Alaska's caucuses and Texas's local conventions, despite losing the Texas primary.[54][55]

Campaign platform In both races Jackson ran on what many considered to be a very liberal platform. In 1987 The New York Times described him as "a classic liberal in the tradition of the New Deal and the Great Society".[3] Declaring that he wanted to create a "Rainbow Coalition" of various minority groups, including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Arab-Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, family farmers, the poor and working class, and homosexuals, as well as European American progressives who fit into none of those categories, Jackson ran on a platform that included:

Creating a Works Progress Administration-style program to rebuild America's infrastructure and provide jobs to all Americans,Re-prioritizing the War on Drugs to focus less on mandatory minimum sentences for drug users (which he views as racially biased) and more on harsher punishments for money-laundering bankers and others who are part of the "supply" end of "supply and demand"Reversing Reaganomics-inspired tax cuts for the richest ten percent of Americans and using the money to finance social welfare programsCutting the budget of the Department of Defense by as much as fifteen percent over the course of his administrationDeclaring Apartheid-era South Africa to be a rogue nationInstituting an immediate nuclear freeze and beginning disarmament negotiations with the Soviet UnionSupporting family farmers by reviving many of Roosevelt's New Deal''era farm programsCreating a single-payer system of universal health careRatifying the Equal Rights AmendmentIncreasing federal funding for lower-level public education and providing free community college to allApplying stricter enforcement of the Voting Rights Act andSupporting the formation of a Palestinian state.With the exception of a resolution to implement sanctions against South Africa for its apartheid policies, none of these positions made it into the party's platform in either 1984 or 1988.[citation needed ]

Stance on abortion Although Jackson was one of the most liberal members of the Democratic Party, his position on abortion was originally more in line with pro-life views. Less than a month after the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, Jackson began a PUSH campaign against the decision, calling abortion murder and declaring that Jesus and Moses might not have been born if abortion had been available in ancient times.[14] Jackson's strong rhetoric on abortion temporarily alienated one of his major supporters, T. R. M. Howard, a black physician who performed abortions.[14]

In 1975 Jackson endorsed a plan for a constitutional amendment banning abortion.[56] He also endorsed the Hyde Amendment, which bars the funding of abortions through the federal Medicaid program. In a 1977 National Right to Life Committee News report Jackson argued that the basis for Roe v. Wade '' the right to privacy '' had also been used to justify slavery and the treatment of slaves on the plantations. Jackson decried what he believed was the casual taking of life and the decline in society's values. But Jackson later adopted the view that women have the right to an abortion and that the government should not interfere.[57]

Later political activities 1990s Jackson ran for office as "shadow senator" for the District of Columbia when the position was created in 1991,[58] and served as such through 1997, when he did not run for reelection. This unpaid position was primarily a post to lobby for statehood for the District of Columbia.[59]

In the mid-1990s Jackson was approached about being the United States Ambassador to South Africa but declined the opportunity in favor of helping his son Jesse Jackson Jr. run for the United States House of Representatives.[60]

Jackson was initially critical of Bill Clinton's moderate, "Third Way" policies. According to journalist Peter Beinart, Clinton was "petrified about a primary challenge from" Jackson in the 1996 election.[61] But Jackson became a key ally in gaining African American support for Clinton and eventually became a close adviser and friend of the Clinton family.[60] His son Jesse Jackson Jr. was elected to the United States House of Representatives from Illinois.

On May 2, 1999, during the Kosovo war, three US soldiers who had been held captive were released as a result of talks with Jackson.[62] Jackson's negotiation was not sanctioned by the Clinton administration.[62]

On November 18, 1999, seven Decatur, Illinois high school students were expelled for two years after participating in a brawl at a football game. The incident was caught on home video and became a national media event when CNN ran pictures of the fight. After the students were expelled, Jackson argued that the expulsions were unfair and racially biased. He called on the school board to reverse its decision.[63]

2000s On January 20, 2001, Bill Clinton's final day in office, Clinton pardoned Congressman Mel Reynolds, John Bustamante, and Dorothy Rivers, all of whose pardons Jackson had requested. Jackson had also requested a pardon for his half-brother Noah Robinson, who had been convicted of murdering Leroy Barber and sentenced to life imprisonment, but Clinton did not pardon Robinson on the grounds that Robinson had already submitted three pardon appeals, all of which the Justice Department had denied.[64]

Jackson was a target of the 2002 white supremacist terror plot.[65]

In early 2005 Jackson visited the parents in the Terri Schiavo case; he supported their unsuccessful bid to keep her alive.[66]

In 2005 the Federal Election Commission ruled that Jackson and the Democratic National Committee had violated electoral law and levied on them a $200,000 fine.[67]

In March 2006 an African-American woman accused three white members of the Duke University men's lacrosse team of raping her. During the ensuing controversy, Jackson stated that his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition would pay for the rest of her college tuition regardless of the outcome of the case. The case against the three men was later thrown out and the players were declared innocent by the North Carolina Attorney General.[68]

Jackson took a key role in the scandal caused by comedic actor Michael Richards's racially charged comments in November 2006. Richards called Jackson a few days after the incident to apologize; Jackson accepted Richards's apology[69] and met with him publicly as a means of resolving the situation. Jackson also joined black leaders in a call for the elimination of the "N-word" throughout the entertainment industry.[70]

On June 23, 2007, Jackson was arrested in connection with a protest at a gun store in Riverdale, a poor suburb of Chicago, Illinois. Jackson and others were protesting due to allegations that the gun store had been selling firearms to local gang members and was contributing to the decay of the community. According to police reports, Jackson refused to stop blocking the front entrance of the store and let customers pass. He was charged with one count of criminal trespass to property.[71]

In March 2007 Jackson declared his support for then-Senator Barack Obama in the 2008 democratic primaries.[72] He later criticized Obama in 2007 for "acting like he's white" in response to the Jena 6 beating case.[73]

On July 6, 2008, during an interview with Fox News, a microphone picked up Jackson whispering to fellow guest Reed Tuckson:[74] "See, Barack's been, ahh, talking down to black people on this faith-based... I want to cut his nuts off."[75] Jackson was expressing his disappointment in Obama's Father's Day speech chastisement of black fathers.[76] Subsequent to his Fox News interview, Jackson apologized and reiterated his support for Obama.[75]

On November 4, 2008, Jackson attended the Obama victory rally in Chicago's Grant Park. In the moments before Obama spoke, Jackson was seen in tears.[77]

2010s In October 2010, Jackson attended WE Day event in Vancouver hosted by WE Charity.[78] In 2012, he commended Obama's 2012 decision to support gay marriage and compared the fight for same-sex marriage to the fight against slavery and the anti-miscegenation laws that once prevented interracial marriage.[79] He favored federal legislation extending marriage rights to gays.[79] In 2016, during the 2016 United States presidential election he endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.[80] In 2020, during the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, he endorsed Bernie Sanders to be the democratic nominee.[81]

Electoral history 1984 Democratic Party presidential primariesCandidateVotes%Walter Mondale6,952,91238.32Gary Hart6,504,84235.85Jesse Jackson3,282,43118.09John Glenn617,9093.41George McGovern334,8011.85Unpledged146,2120.81Lyndon LaRouche123,6490.68Reubin O'Donovan Askew52,7590.29Alan Cranston51,4370.28Ernest Hollings33,6840.191988 Democratic presidential primariesCandidateVotes%Michael Dukakis9,898,75042.47Jesse Jackson6,788,99129.13Al Gore3,185,80613.67Dick Gephardt1,399,0416.00Paul M. Simon1,082,9604.65Gary Hart415,7161.78Unpledged250,3071.07Bruce Babbitt77,7800.33Lyndon LaRouche70,9380.30David Duke45,2890.19James Traficant30,8790.13Douglas E. Applegate25,0680.11Shadow Senator from District of Columbia, 1990[82]CandidateVotes%Jesse Jackson (D)105,63346.80Florence Pendleton (D)58,45125.89Harry T. Alexander (I)13,9836.19Milton Francis (R)13,5386.00Joan Gillison (R)12,8455.69Keith M. Wilkerson (D.C. Statehood)4,5452.01Anthony W. Peacock (D.C. Statehood)4,2851.90John West (I)3,6211.60David L. Whitehead (I)3,3411.48Sam Manuel (Socialist Workers)2,7651.23Awards and recognition Ebony Magazine named Jackson to its "100 most influential black Americans" list in 1971.[17]

In 1979, Jackson received the Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged.[83]

In 1989, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.[84]

In 1991, Jackson received the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service.[85]

In 1999 he received the Golden Doves for Peace journalistic prize issued by the Italian Research Institute Archive Disarmo.[86]

Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest honor bestowed on civilians in August 2000.[87]

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Jackson on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[9]

In 2008, Jackson was presented with an Honorary Fellowship from Edge Hill University.

In an AP-AOL "Black Voices" poll in February 2006, Jackson was voted "the most important black leader".[88]

Jackson inherited the title of the High Prince of the Agni people of C´te d'Ivoire from Michael Jackson. In August 2009, he was crowned Prince C´te Nana by Amon N'Douffou V, King of Krindjabo, who rules more than a million Agni tribespeople.[89]

Personal life Jackson married Jacqueline Lavinia Brown (born 1944) on December 31, 1962,[90] and together they have five children: Santita (1963), Jesse Jr. (1965), Jonathan Luther (1966), Yusef DuBois (1970), and Jacqueline Lavinia (1975).[91]

Jackson's younger brother, Charles "Chuck" Jackson, was a singer with the vocal group The Independents and as a solo artist who issued two albums in the late 1970s. Along with his songwriting partner and fellow producer, Marvin Yancy, he was largely responsible for launching the career of Natalie Cole.[92]

On Memorial Day, May 25, 1987, Jesse was made a Master Mason on Sight by Grand Master Senter of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Illinois; thereby making him a Prince Hall Freemason.[93]

In 2001, it was revealed Jackson had an affair with a staffer, Karin Stanford, that resulted in the birth of a daughter Ashley in May 1999. According to CNN, in August 1999, the Rainbow Push Coalition had paid Stanford $15,000 in moving expenses and $21,000 in payment for contracting work. A promised advance of an additional $40,000 against future contracting work was rescinded once the affair became public.[94] This incident prompted Jackson to withdraw from activism for a short time.[95] Jackson was paying $4,000 a month in child support as of 2001.[96]

In November 2017, Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.[97]

See also "I Am '' Somebody" - a poem popularized by Jesse JacksonList of civil rights leadersList of Notable FreemasonsReferences ^ Blue Clark, Indian Tribes of Oklahoma: A Guide, University of Oklahoma Press (2012), p. 75 ^ a b c d Smothers, Ronald (January 31, 1997). "Noah L. Robinson, 88, Father of Jesse Jackson". The New York Times . Retrieved October 3, 2012 . ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Joyce Purnick and Michael Oreskes (November 29, 1987). "Jesse Jackson Aims for the Mainstream". The New York Times . Retrieved October 1, 2012 . ^ a b c "Topics: Jesse Jackson". History.com. A & E Television Networks . Retrieved October 3, 2012 . ^ a b Henderson, Ashyia, ed. (2001), "Jesse Jackson", Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 27, Gale Group , retrieved September 30, 2012 ^ a b c "Jesse Jackson". MSN Encarta. MSN. Archived from the original on November 1, 2009. CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link) October 31, 2009. ^ a b c Harry, Edwards (February 28, 2002). "The man who would be King in the Sports Arena". Espn.go.com . Retrieved October 1, 2012 . ^ "University says Jackson records show no blemish". Lawrence Journal-World. Lawrence, Kansas. December 31, 1987 . Retrieved October 1, 2012 . ^ a b Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. p. 168. ISBN 1-57392-963-8. ^ a b "Jackson to get a degree". The Telegraph-Herald. Dubuque, Iowa. June 1, 2000. p. 10A . Retrieved September 30, 2012 . ^ "Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. Receives Master's Degree From Chicago Theological Seminary". Findarticles.com. June 19, 2000. Archived from the original on July 10, 2012 . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ Wineka, Mark (October 23, 2018). "DeeDee Wright recalls the time when the 'Greenville Eight' were arrested, not celebrated". Salisbury Post . Retrieved November 12, 2018 . ^ Thomas, Evan (May 7, 1984). "Pride and Prejudice". Time . Retrieved October 6, 2012 . ^ a b c d e f g h Beito, David T.; Beito, Linda Royster (2009). Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. pp. 206''216. ISBN 9780252034206 . Retrieved October 6, 2012 . ^ a b c d e King, Seth G. (December 12, 1971). "Jackson Quits Post at S.C.L.C. In Policy Split With Abernathy". The New York Times . Retrieved October 5, 2012 . ^ a b c d e Hebers, John (June 2, 1969). "Operation Breadbasket Is Seeking Racial Solutions in Economic Problems" (PDF) . Retrieved October 5, 2012 . ^ a b "Rev. Jesse Jackson Chief B-CC Speaker". Daytona Beach Morning Journal. April 19, 1971 . Retrieved October 7, 2012 . ^ "Nation: Turmoil in Shantytown". Time. June 7, 1968 . Retrieved October 6, 2012 . ^ a b "Races: Black Expo in Chicago". Time magazine. October 11, 1971 . Retrieved October 5, 2012 . ^ Interview with Al Sharpton, David Shankbone, Wikinews, December 3, 2007. ^ "Politics: In Search of a Black Strategy". Time. December 20, 1971 . Retrieved October 5, 2012 . ^ a b c d e "Races: Jackson PUSHes On". Time magazine. January 3, 1972 . Retrieved October 5, 2012 . ^ a b c d e Oreskes, Michael (October 7, 1987). "Operation PUSH Clearing Debts, Leader Says". The New York Times . Retrieved October 5, 2012 . ^ "Nation: Wooing the Black Vote". Time. January 30, 1978. ^ "Jackson". Crain's Chicago Business. October 15, 2005. ^ "Jackson Contacts Cultivated Beer Deal". tribunedigital-chicagotribune. ^ Sachdev, Melissa Harris and Ameet. "Yusef Jackson: Beer boundaries didn't work". chicagotribune.com. ^ "Jesse Jackson's Mission to Damascus". Eightiesclub.tripod.com . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ Depalma, Anthony (July 13, 2010). "New York Times". Topics.nytimes.com . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ Terry, Don (April 15, 2009). "Jesse Jackson reunites with hostage he rescued 19 years ago". Frost Illustrated. Frost Inc. NNPA. Archived from the original on October 22, 2010 . Retrieved September 24, 2010 . ^ "The Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson". Frontline. Episode 1415. Boston. April 30, 1996. PBS. WGBH. Show #1415 transcript. ^ Wilson, Joseph (2005) [2004]. The politics of truth : inside the lies that put the White House on trial and betrayed my wife's CIA identity : a diplomat's memoir. Carroll & Graf Publishers. pp. 146''7. ISBN 978-0-7867-1551-0 . Retrieved September 24, 2010 . ^ "PBS Frontline chronology". Pbs.org . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ Wilpert, Gregory (August 28, 2005). "Jesse Jackson Says Venezuela No Threat, Praises Venezuelan Government Concerns". venezuelanalysis.com . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ "Operation Black Vote - Jesse Jackson tour kick starts!". Obv.org.uk . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ "International Peace Foundation - Previous speakers and artists". 2007 . Retrieved August 12, 2017 . ^ "2009-04-23: Bridges - Rev. Jesse Jackson". NIST International School. 2009 . Retrieved August 12, 2017 . ^ Jackson and White, p. 33. ^ "1984 Texas Jackson-for-President Campaign Collection: An Inventory of Records at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library". Lib.utexas.edu. April 21, 1984 . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ Beck, Melinda (April 16, 1984). "Keeping 'Em Corralled". Newsweek. ^ Williams, Juan (May 22, 1984). "Manatt, Jackson to Confer Again on Vote-Delegate Disparity". Washington Post. The primaries lasted through June 12, and the final percentage has been calculated as 18.09%. ^ Thomas, Evan. "Trying to Win the Peace", Time, July 2, 1984 ^ a b c Larry J. Sabato's Feeding Frenzy (July 21, 1998). "Jesse Jackson's 'Hymietown' Remark '' 1984". Washington Post . Retrieved May 6, 2010 . ^ Frum, David (2000). How We Got Here: The '70s. New York, New York: Basic Books. p. 273. ISBN 0-465-04195-7 . Retrieved October 6, 2012 . ^ Elliott, Justin (December 16, 2010) A White House campaign funded by ... Libya? Archived June 29, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, Salon.com ^ "Don't ask, don't tell". Salon. August 17, 2000. Archived from the original on January 25, 2003. ^ "Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson endorses Sanders". March 8, 2020. ^ R.W. Apple Jr. (April 29, 1988). "Jackson is seen as winning a solid place in history". The New York Times. ^ Dudley (1994) ^ Dionne, E. J. Jr. (April 6, 1988). "Dukakis Defeats Jackson Handily in Wisconsin Vote", The New York Times ^ An investigation into allegations that Robinson had ordered the murder of a former employee was begun in 1987. See, Gibson, Ray; Possley, Maurice (October 4, 1987). "Jackson's Half-brother Probed In Killing Of Former Employee". Chicago Tribune . Retrieved October 5, 2012 . Robinson was ultimately convicted on racketeering and drug conspiracy charges, and of being an accessory to the attempted murder of another employee. He was sentenced to life in prison. See, O'Connor, Matt (August 22, 1992). "Robinson To Spend Life In Prison For Drug, Conspiracy Convictions". Chicago Tribune . Retrieved October 5, 2012 . ^ "Shakedown" by Kenneth Timmerman ^ "Keep Hope Alive". Jesse Jackson, pages 234-235. ^ "Jackson and Dukakis Lead in Texas Voting". The New York Times. March 20, 1988 . Retrieved May 6, 2010 . ^ Spencer, Hal (March 12, 1988). "Jackson Edges Out Dukakis In Alaska". The New York Times . Retrieved May 6, 2010 . ^ "Christians Join Bishop's Ban on Abortion". UPI via The Milwaukee Journal. December 1, 1975. p. 4. ^ "Reprint of a Washington Post article from 1988". Swissnet.ai.mit.edu. May 21, 1988 . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ Robin Toner (July 6, 1990). "Jackson to Run For Lobby Post In Washington". The New York Times . Retrieved January 5, 2008 . ^ Richard L. Berke (March 27, 1991). "Behind-the-scenes role for a 'shadow senator ' ". The New York Times . Retrieved January 6, 2008 . ^ a b Berke, Richard L. (March 6, 1998). "Testing of the President: The Counselor; Once a Nemesis, Jackson Has Become the President's Spiritual Adviser". The New York Times . Retrieved April 25, 2008 . ^ Beinart, Peter (October 6, 2010) Obama's a Lock in 2012, The Daily Beast ^ a b SUSAN SACHS, CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: PRISONERS; Serbs Release 3 Captured U.S. Soldiers May 2, 1999 New York Times ^ "7 Students Charged in a Brawl That Divides Decatur, Ill". The New York Times. November 10, 1999. ^ Timmerman, Kenneth, "Shakedown, Exposing the Jesse Jackson Racket" ^ Haskell, Dave (July 26, 2002). "Jury convicts white supremacists". United Press International . Retrieved January 1, 2015 . ^ "Terri Schiavo's mom pleads: 'Give my child back ' ". CNN. March 30, 2005 . Retrieved May 6, 2010 . ^ "Democrats, Jackson fined $200,000 by FEC". tribunedigital-chicagotribune. ^ Beard, Aaron (April 11, 2007). "Prosecutors Drop Charges in Duke Case". The San Francisco Chronicle. Associated Press. Archived from the original on May 26, 2007 . Retrieved April 11, 2007 . ^ "Sharpton: Comedian's apology not enough - CNN.com". CNN . Retrieved May 6, 2010 . ^ "Black leaders: End N-word in entertainment". CNN. Archived from the original on November 28, 2006. ^ Graves, Emma (June 24, 2006). "Rev. Jesse Jackson Arrested During Anti-Gun Protest". CommonDreams.org. Archived from the original on June 29, 2011 . Retrieved January 11, 2011 . ^ Bellandi, Deanna (March 30, 2007). "Jesse Jackson backs Obama for 2008". NBC News . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ "Jesse Jackson: Obama needs to bring more attention to Jena 6". CNN.com. September 19, 2007 . Retrieved July 17, 2008 . ^ Jackson regrets vulgar Obama comment, Michael Calderone, Politico, July 10, 2008 ^ a b "Jackson apologizes for 'crude' Obama remarks". CNN.com. July 9, 2008 . Retrieved July 10, 2008 . ^ Bai, Matt (August 6, 2008). "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?". The New York Times. The New York Times Company . Retrieved November 21, 2008 . ^ Television, World (November 5, 2008). "World Television Studios". Worldtelevisionstudios.blogspot.com . Retrieved August 21, 2010 . ^ Darcy Wintony (October 15, 2010). "We Day brings rock-star cred to social activism". CTV News Channel (Canadian TV channel) . Retrieved February 25, 2020 . ^ a b Rev. Jesse Jackson likens gay marriage push to fight over slavery retrieved May 17, 2012 ^ Scott, Eugene (June 11, 2016). "Jesse Jackson endorses Hillary Clinton". CNN . Retrieved February 25, 2020 . ^ Annie Grayer; Devan Cole. "Jesse Jackson endorses Bernie Sanders for president". CNN . Retrieved March 8, 2020 . ^ Two candidates who won the highest number of vote take two shadow seats. ^ "National - Jefferson Awards Foundation". Archived from the original on November 24, 2010 . Retrieved August 5, 2013 . ^ "NAACP Spingarn Medal". Archived from the original on May 5, 2014. ^ archives-trim.un.org PDF Archived December 26, 2012, at the Wayback Machine ^ http://www.archiviodisarmo.it/images/pdf/list.pdf ^ Riechmann, Deb (August 3, 2000). "Clinton to Award Medals of Freedom". ABC News . Retrieved October 1, 2012 . ^ Sean Alfano (February 15, 2006). "Poll: Jesse Jackson, Rice Top Blacks". CBSNews.com . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ "Jesse Jackson Is Now African Royalty, Inherits Crown from Michael Jackson". August 14, 2009 . Retrieved August 23, 2009 . ^ Purnick, Joyce; Oreskes, Michael (November 29, 1987). "Jesse Jackson Aims for the Mainstream". The New York Times . Retrieved October 2, 2012 . ^ "Voices & Viewpoints: Jesse Jackson". Archived from the original on August 20, 2003 . Retrieved July 10, 2008 . CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link) ^ "About Chuck Jackson, Marvin Yancy". MTV . Retrieved September 1, 2013 . ^ "Famous Freemasons" . Retrieved October 3, 2012 . ;Proceedings of the 138th Communication of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Ohio F&AM. Columbus, Ohio: Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Ohio. 1987. p. 16. ;Gray, David (2012). The History of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Ohio F&AM 1971 '' 2011: The Fabric of Freemasonry. Columbus, Ohio: Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Ohio F&AM. p. 414. ISBN 978-0615632957. Archived from the original on March 6, 2012 . Retrieved November 19, 2019 . ^ "Operation PUSH documents financial ties with Jackson lover". CNN. February 1, 2001 . Retrieved May 6, 2010 . ^ "Jackson retreats". Salon.com. January 19, 2001. Archived from the original on February 13, 2009 . Retrieved January 16, 2011 . ^ "Mother wants Jesse Jackson to 'be a father' to illegitimate child". CNN.com. August 16, 2001 . Retrieved September 8, 2015 . ^ "Jesse Jackson diagnosed with Parkinson's disease". CNN. November 17, 2017 . Retrieved December 12, 2017 . Bibliography Dudley, K. (1994), The End of the Line, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-16908-1 .Jackson, Jesse L. Jr. (2001), A More Perfect Union: Advancing New American Rights, with Frank E. Watkins, New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, ISBN 1-56649-186-X .External links Interview with Jesse Jackson About South African-US Relations from the Dean Peter Krogh Foreign Affairs Digital ArchivesJesse Jackson on IMDbAppearances on C-SPANJesse Jackson - Keep Hope AliveKeep Hope Alive AffiliatesQuotes at BrainyQuoteUbben Lecture at DePauw University1984 DNC speech transcript and audio1988 DNC speech transcript and audio"As GOP Appears to Win Extension of Bush-Era Tax Cuts for Wealthy, Rev. Jesse Jackson Calls for 'War on Poverty ' " - video interview by Democracy Now!Articles and topics related to Jesse Jackson

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 14:56

The Rev. Jesse Jackson says he is willing to travel to Iraq to seek the release of hostages.

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(CNN) -- American civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Sunday that he has "had prayer" with the wife of Thomas Hamill, an American contractor abducted in Iraq, and promised his family he would try to win his freedom.

Jackson said he was also "reaching out" to the family of U.S. Army Pfc. Matt Maupin, a U.S. soldier who also was kidnapped in Iraq by insurgents, and had joined with Pope John Paul II in calling for the release of all hostages kidnapped in Iraq.

"If I knew who was holding them, I would appeal to them directly," Jackson said. "We've already begun to make some back-channel contacts to them."

He said he was willing to travel to Iraq to negotiate for the hostages, but only "if I know with whom to talk and know where to go."

Jackson said he was trying to contact the Arab-language satellite networks to broadcast his appeal.

"Suffice it to say, they watch CNN, they watch Al-Jazeera, and if your voices are heard, it gives us at least a reasonable penetration," he said.

But key on the list of contacts, he said, were Iraq's religious leaders.

"Each time we brought Americans home from hostile zones, the religious leaders played a significant role in making that appeal," said Jackson, referring to his earlier efforts to free hostages in international conflicts.

In 1984, Jackson successfully secured the release of a Navy pilot held in Syria. In 1991, he helped secure the release of 500 "international guests" held in Iraq and in 1999, he worked to convince Yugoslavia to release three U.S. soldiers held there during the Kosovo conflict.

Five people are known to be held by Iraqis in addition to Maupin and Hamill: a Dane, three Italians and an Arab from east Jerusalem.

A U.S. soldier and six civilian contractors are "unaccounted for," and two Germans are missing and presumed dead. An Italian who had been held was executed, and 43 hostages have been released.

Jackson also noted that the idea of a swap -- as the insurgents holding Maupin said in a videotape they wanted to do -- must be considered.

"The U.S. is holding a significant number of theirs," he said. "I think in a situation like this ... the issue of negotiation and swap must not be out of the picture," Jackson said.

Jackson further urged that any American negotiators should "refrain from name calling."

"I would certainly not try to incite them," he said. "One of the key features of negotiation is try to relieve their fears. One can be sensitive to the pain of the other without engaging and embracing their politics."

"Certainly if someone has all the odds in their favor, they have the hatchet in their hand, and your neck is over the fence, you do nothing to incite them," he added. "You appeal to their better judgment, you make humanitarian, moral appeal, not a military threat."

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 14:54

Andrew McCaskill is a Marketing Executive and Crisis Manager. McCaskill served as the Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications at Nielsen Holdings plc since July 18, 2014. McCaskill served as Senior Vice President in the Corporate Practice at Weber Shandwick NYC before joining Nielsen Holdings plc. While at Weber Shandwick, he worked as Global Strategy Leader for the ExxonMobil Mobil 1 brand and Getty Images. He also worked with Unilever. He has more than 15 years of experience, served as a Senior Vice President in the New York office of public relations firm, Weber Shandwick, where he led global communications strategy for numerous Fortune 500 companies and consumer brands.

@DrewMcCaskill

Andrew McCaskill is a Marketing Executive and Crisis Manager. McCaskill served as the Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications at Nielsen Holdings plc since July 18, 2014. McCaskill served as Senior Vice President in the Corporate Practice at Weber Shandwick NYC before joining Nielsen Holdings plc. While at Weber Shandwick, he worked as Global Strategy ['...]

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 14:18

Gwyneth Paltrow dies young in the movie ''Contagion'' (2011) when she returns to Minneapolis from a business trip to Hong Kong and Macau. About two days after she starts showing symptoms, she's foaming at the mouth and convulsing on the floor of her kitchen. She dies in the emergency room shortly after.

It's a scary scene that could have come straight out of a nightmare. The movie has seen a spike in rentals since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak . But how much of the movie is just that, a made-up hellish dream, and how much can happen, or is happening, with the new coronavirus in China ?

What the movie got right

As someone who studied infectious diseases for her PhD, I found some scenes in the movie cringey and some scenes refreshingly scientifically accurate. Even if they were just skimming the surface of the science, it was obvious that they took care to get it right. The scenes in which Kate Winslet's character discusses R0 (pronounced R nought) and fomites are some of them. R0 is the average number of new cases resulting from one case. Fomites are literally any object that can harbor a pathogen, like handrails, clothing and furniture. Fomites are how indirect transmission can happen between people compared to direct transmission through physical contact and body fluids.

The movie accurately portrays how diseases can get transmitted from person to person. In the beginning of the film and at a few other points later on, the viewer sees ''disease danger'' montages in which people are feeding each other, sneezing or coughing, touching the same objects or stumbling through public areas like markets and buses. Although the ominous music may be a little much, the moviemakers get it right that we do touch our faces thousands of times a day, and we often share spaces with many other people, increasing the chances that we exchange pathogens.

The filmmakers also capture the emotion of being in the center of an outbreak, especially in a scene with Matt Damon's character and his daughter. Damon is isolated after being exposed to the virus, MEV-1, and his daughter talks to him from the other side of a glass window.

What they got wrong

In ''Contagion,'' the first few people to die were young-looking people; we find out later that Paltrow's character was 34 years old, and the Asian man who was a waiter in the casino where Paltrow's character got infected also looked young and may have been in his twenties. The age of people who die from new pathogens is usually higher because they may have other health issues that make them more vulnerable.

This might be unique to the virus in the movie because of how dangerous the virus is supposed to be. The rate at which the virus spreads and how deadly it was are exaggerated compared to outbreaks humans have experienced in history. The virus in the movie killed 26 million people in the first month. The 1918 influenza pandemic that is often mentioned in the film killed millions of people, some estimate around 50 million . But that pandemic took place over about one year.

It might be an oversimplification to say that a virus can't be both highly transmissible and highly deadly, but in the movie it seems that this virus was at the extremes of both those variables. In the film, it seems that asymptomatic people can spread the virus but then are quickly dead after they start showing symptoms. Everything devolves very quickly. Pathogens that are very deadly to humans typically do not make it very far because they kill their victims too soon, like with Paltrow after a few days. Outbreaks like this will peter out after a few episodes of transmission from person to person after going too fast and too hard.

The movie also downplays how collaborative the effort to fight an outbreak would be. Experts are not likely to be working solo in the event of a major outbreak like this one, but that doesn't make for good filmmaking. In addition, quarantines are short-term not long-term solutions. It's somewhat unrealistic that governments impose highly restrictive quarantines for several months at a time. It's also unlikely that a vaccine could be developed that quickly .

At the end of the movie, with ominous music in the background again, we see a bat grab some fruit and drop it to the pigs below. We see the pig get sold and prepared by the chef that holds hands with Paltrow's character for a photo. And that is presumably how it all started. In real life, it would likely take several contacts between animals and humans before a virus becomes fully transmissible to humans. It's also unlikely that there was enough virus on Paltrow's character's hands to spread and infect other people.

Comparison with the new coronavirus

In ''Contagion,'' Jude Law's character, a blogger, spreads rumors about forsythia, an herbal treatment that he claims works to cure the virus. Though he seemed to recover from the virus after taking it, it's unproven and it could have been a coincidence that he recovered on his own. People still scramble to buy it, breaking out into fights at pharmacies in the film.

Recently, there have been reports of rumors about a cure for the Wuhan coronavirus , currently being called 2019-nCoV. The World Health Organization (WHO) says there are no current cures for it, although many companies and groups are working on vaccines .

In the movie, the panic and fear increased exponentially because official bodies did not make announcements and provide information about the outbreak for several weeks. The virus was spreading rapidly and killing about 25 percent of cases. The movie doesn't show anyone who gets symptoms recovering besides Law's character. Any symptom becomes a death knell.

With the current 2019-nCoV outbreak, the WHO and other official entities are providing information and updates regularly. There are currently a total of more than 24,000 cases , 494 deaths, and more than 1,000 people have recovered. The 1918 influenza infected about 500 million people, with a death rate of about 10 percent. (UPDATE: As of Feb. 9, there were 37,558 confirmed cases and 812 deaths, according to the WHO Situation Reports.)

''Contagion'' is a movie made for entertainment, and part of that is sparking emotion and fear that something like that could happen. The film's tagline is ''Nothing spreads like fear,'' and that is the main point of the feature. In many ways, it's an example of how everything could go terribly wrong if information is not openly shared, although we are experiencing too much information with 2019-nCoV . As one character says in the movie, ''Some get a disease and live, some get sicker and die.'' Hopefully, we'll never see anything like MEV-1.

For up-to-date information, check the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization .

Chia-Yi Hou has a PhD in infectious disease ecology. You can follow her on Twitter @chiayi_hou .

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 14:16

The new Stephen Soderbergh thriller ''Contagion'' presents a terrifying vision of a global pandemic: a virus that kills millions of people as scientists struggle to find a vaccine. Last week, in connection with the anniversary of the 2001 anthrax attacks, ScienceNOW, the online news site of Science magazine, hosted a discussion with two consultants on the film: Laurie Garrett, who has reported on infectious diseases for 30 years and recently wrote ''I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks,'' and W. Ian Lipkin, a neurologist and epidemiologist at Columbia University who has helped identify several new infectious agents.

Following are edited and re-ordered excerpts from the conversation. The entire chat can be found at news.sciencemag.org.

Tell us about the making of ''Contagion.'' What's an example of how you improved its scientific accuracy?

W. Ian Lipkin: We designed a plausible virus and showed an accurate laboratory and public-heath response scenario. I coached the actors on how to demonstrate symptoms of disease. The habitat-destruction scene at the end of the film is a powerful reminder of the zoonotic [animal-to-human] origin of many emerging infectious diseases.

Laurie Garrett: I was involved at the script level, and there were 30 '-- yes, 30 '-- drafts. In countless ways, from brainstorming on plots all the way down to very specific ways a scientist might phrase a comment, I had input, and offered critique.

About the virus you helped ''create'' for the movie: How probable would it be that something like that could happen naturally in the world today?

Lipkin: The majority of emerging and re-emerging infectious-disease threats arise in nature; nonetheless, synthetic biology is becoming an increasingly important field to monitor as costs go down and tools become more accessible.

Did you face any resistance when you tried to include actual science in the plot?

Lipkin: The ''Contagionists'' were committed to getting it right. There were only a few instances where I might have made other choices '-- however, none of the choices were poor choices.

How did you guys end up consulting for the movie?

Lipkin: Because Laurie and I are both photogenic.

Are we safer today than we were 10 years ago?

Garrett: Yes and no. We are better prepared for bioterrorism, or terrorism generally, because we are less naive, as Americans, and more vigilant. But most of the billions of dollars' worth of investments in preparedness have left us no closer to safety '-- mainly because [the World Health Organization] has a $1 billion deficit, CDC just lost $750 million in its budget in a single month, and local health departments are getting hacked right and left.

How great is the actual risk of a bioterrorist attack vs. something potentially more impactful over a large area, like a nuclear attack?

Garrett: You ask about balancing and weighing risks '-- radiation, biologicals, chemical, suicide bombers. I don't think it is actually possible to say which is more likely (or not likely), or which would be more devastating were it to occur. Risk assessment depends on intelligence, and all aspects of terrorism intel are still difficult to assess. In the end, I think ''preparedness'' is about infrastructure '-- what is in place, how well people are trained.

Would you say that the efforts made over the last 10 years have improved public knowledge about these threats? Or have they made people more fearful?

Garrett: I sympathize with your concern that ''Contagion'' will scare people. When we screened it at the Council on Foreign Relations, there was a lot of grabbing-the-Purell afterwards. But consider what most teens seem to love to watch: slasher monsters, vampire killers, gore and guts. Compared to that stuff, ''Contagion'' is mild. There is much more science in the movie than people seen dying or suffering.

Slasher monsters, vampire killers are not real. ''Contagion,'' being based on actual science, makes it truly scary.

Garrett: Fair enough. I personally think a movie like ''An Inconvenient Truth'' is scary as hell, because if Al Gore's analysis is even 20 percent correct, we are facing a terrifying future. Does that mean documentaries and realistic films that present frightening forecasts ought not be made? No. It means that they are terribly important.

In light of the ever-present bioterrorism threat, what are your feelings about whether or not the last known stocks of pathogens such as smallpox should be destroyed?

Garrett: It has always been the U.S. government position that the smallpox stockpiles should be saved, in case of an attack that might require seed stock for some pharma effort or comparative genotyping. In contrast, many countries have argued that the most likely '-- if not only likely '-- source of smallpox for terrorist use would be those very saved stockpiles. I have personally wrestled with this conundrum for years, and have gone back and forth.

What more should be done to prevent pandemics? Would you agree that poor disease surveillance in animals and bad animal-health-care capacities in Africa, Asia and other developing countries deserve much more investment?

Garrett: Recombination events are always at the top of our concerns '-- right after zoonosis. ''Contagion'' depicts both '-- quite accurately, I think. The real problem is a zoonotic event that then recombines, as constantly occurs with influenza.

Fear of vaccines is a massive problem, and you will see the Jude Law character in ''Contagion'' deal with that. There is more mercury in a single tuna sandwich than all vaccines an individual is likely to take in a lifetime combined.

Ian, how does your research intersect with biodefense?

Lipkin: We collect and analyze samples from wildlife and people in 40 countries, searching for insights into emerging infectious diseases. We also look at the ways in which prenatal and early-life infections contribute to health and disease. This film was a wonderful affirmation of our work.

Garrett: Ian is being a bit humble on this entire interaction here. He played a critical role in ''Contagion,'' as he does in disease detection every day. The producers and writer Scott Z. Burns spent time in his lab and modeled one of the characters (played by Elliot Gould) after him.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 13:33

The following excellent article by J.B. Shurk explains why the mainstream media has lost all credibility:

Whatever happens over the next few weeks with the Chinese virus, one thing is certain: nobody trusts the corporate press. Nobody.

These people are theabsolute bottom of the barrel in professional prestige, a collection oflow-I.Q. wannabe-celebrities, con artists, and Joseph Goebbelsclones.

Parents should wanttheir children to be free thinkers; no parent should have to suffer the painand humiliation of watching his children grow up to pimp themselves ontelevision for international conglomerates and hostile Chineseinterests.

Somewhere the parentsof Lawrence O'Donnell and Brian Stelter and Joe Scarborough are wishing theirsons would have had just the tiniest bit of dignity to take their whoring forthe Democrats and the Chinese Communist Party off camera and back to thestreets where it belongs.

Of course, thestreetwalkers would never have them; they actually work for a living.

MSNBC and CNN spendall day long yelling ''fire'' in one crowded theatre after another,except as soon as the people run out into the street, there they stand withbullhorns screaming, ''The street is on fire, too.

There's nowhere togo. You're all gonna die!'' Going through a nationaldisaster right now with the American media is like going through WWII with theGerman or Japanese media as our sole source of information.

If they had existedin December 1941, there is no doubt that MSNBC and CNN would be telling youngmen to give up immediately and return to their farms, while praising theefficiency of Japanese rule.

I can hear LawrenceO'Donnell right now criticizing the ugliness of American life and the beauty ofJapanese culture.

With his trademarkscowl, his most solemn advice to resilient patriots would be that they submitto their new masters so completely that they embrace seppuku disembowelment asthe ''honorable'' way to go.

Even Hitler had tofire a few shots at France before it completely surrendered. Rightnow, I get the feeling that all he'd have to do is call up 30 RockefellerPlaza, say ''achoo,'' and Rachel Maddow would be on air screaming thatthe only way for America to survive is to give Hitler everything he wantswithout delay.

Talk about a bunch ofpusillanimous fear-mongers. Two minutes in a foxhole with any ofthese anchors, and you'd risk everything to get up, find a clear patch of earthunencumbered by cable news personalities, and begin digging a new hole, evenwith a flurry of bullets whirring past all around you.

Fighting the Chinesevirus with the American media at our side is like surviving Bastogne with theSS Panzer Corps promising to keep us safe. If they're not the''enemy of the people,'' they have a roundabout way of provingotherwise.

Maybe they're notevil. Maybe they're not actively hoping for millions of Americandeaths or a total wipe-out of Americans' retirement savings.

Maybe LawrenceO'Donnell isn't trying to stoke enough outrage against the American Presidentthat another Democrat like John Wilkes Booth or communist like Lee HarveyOswald gets up the nerve to go full James Hodgkinson against the WhiteHouse.

I mean, it sure seemsas though O'Donnell spends his airtime trying to encourage violence against thesitting president, but it's also possible he's too dumb to understand theconsequences of his actions.

If he ever findshimself as a defendant, he's certainly building a strong case for mentalincompetence.

Mental incompetenceis contagious in the cable news industry. Unless I'm forgettingsomeone, there's only one person on the national stage who has spent a lifetimearguing against America's manufacturing dependence on China.

He ran an entirepresidential campaign based on closing the American border to illegal aliens,who lower American wages and strain the country's already strained socialsafety net.

He argued that NAFTAdestroyed towns across the country; that both parties betrayed our blue-collarworkers by moving manufacturing overseas; and that the United States was at theperpetual mercy of dictatorships like China's for its most precious nationalsecurity resources, including steel, pharmaceuticals, and electricalcomponents.

Along comes anational emergency that proves Donald Trump's warnings to America as prescientas Themistocles's warnings to Athens, and how do the American media treat thisrevelation?

They ignore fortyyears' worth of pleadings from the future president to rebuild what was oncethe world's most expansive and dominant industrial powerhouse and his repeateddesire as president to reclaim the manufacturing self-sufficiency that wouldhave protected America from the crisis extant today.

Instead, they blamethe one person who has been sounding the alarm while the American news mediaand feckless politicians slept, no doubt kept comfortable by the lucre providedthem by dictatorships like China's that now seek to hold ushostage.

Themistocles warnedAthens that the only way to survive Persian conquest was to build a world-classnavy before it was too late; the aristocrats of his time laughed and scornedhim, but it was Themistocles who saved Greece from Persian rule.

President Trump todaywarns America that the only way to survive Chinese conquest is to rebuildAmerica's manufacturing stronghold.

Like an exclamationpoint to four decades' worth of warnings, a Chinese virus has come onto ourland to prove how clear and vital the president's thinking has alwaysbeen.

And what do theAmerican news media learn from this experience?

That the man who haswarned us all along about the potential for this current crisis is somehowunfit to lead, while decrepit Joe Biden, who has spent his own lifetime eatingat the trough of China's largesse, is somehow prepared to guide the Americanship to safety in this battering storm.

Old Joe, the guy wholaughs at the thought of China being any type of threat to the United Statesany time the question is posed, is supposed to protect the United States from athreat he does not understand '-- a Chinese threat he has long been paid toignore.

Only a news mediaestablishment as corrupt and vacuous as ours would see the prognosticator asthe villain and the sleepy, corrupt career politician as thesavior.

Outside of the newsdens of dim-wittedness, the reality is clear: Joe Biden and China apologistslike him have always been the virus, while President Trump's policies to rebuildblue-collar America are the cure.

''Evil orstupid.'' That's the only question left to answer when it comesto America's corporate news cabal.

Right now I pictureJoe Scarborough smiling in feigned contemplation and asking, ''Why notboth?'' He'd have me there.

If their reaction to this current threat from the Chinese virus is any indication, ''evil'' and ''stupid'' together reach the mark. For some like O'Donnell, though, only ''treasonous'' squarely hits the bulls-eye.

Originally posted at American Thinker

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 12:40

The Trump administration was told in January that coronavirus was likely to become a pandemic. They refused to act for fear of spooking the markets, losing weeks of time to prepare that we won't get back.

washingtonpost.com/national-secur'...

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 12:16

T he current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.

At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact.

Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the pandemic dissipates '-- either on its own or because of these measures '-- short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable. How long, though, should measures like these be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?

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Vaccines or affordable treatments take many months (or even years) to develop and test properly. Given such timelines, the consequences of long-term lockdowns are entirely unknown.

The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don't know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.

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This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror '-- and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.

The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.

Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data '-- there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew '-- the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases '-- a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection '-- than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.

That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It's like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.

Could the Covid-19 case fatality rate be that low? No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes. In fact, such ''mild'' coronaviruses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter.

These ''mild'' coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, though the vast majority of them are not documented with precise testing. Instead, they are lost as noise among 60 million deaths from various causes every year.

Although successful surveillance systems have long existed for influenza, the disease is confirmed by a laboratory in a tiny minority of cases. In the U.S., for example, so far this season 1,073,976 specimens have been tested and 222,552 (20.7%) have tested positive for influenza. In the same period, the estimated number of influenza-like illnesses is between 36,000,000 and 51,000,000, with an estimated 22,000 to 55,000 flu deaths.

Note the uncertainty about influenza-like illness deaths: a 2.5-fold range, corresponding to tens of thousands of deaths. Every year, some of these deaths are due to influenza and some to other viruses, like common-cold coronaviruses.

In an autopsy series that tested for respiratory viruses in specimens from 57 elderly persons who died during the 2016 to 2017 influenza season, influenza viruses were detected in 18% of the specimens, while any kind of respiratory virus was found in 47%. In some people who die from viral respiratory pathogens, more than one virus is found upon autopsy and bacteria are often superimposed. A positive test for coronavirus does not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient's demise.

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population '-- a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis '-- and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from ''influenza-like illness.'' If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to ''influenza-like illness'' would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.

Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 '... along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?

The most valuable piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that's information we don't have.

In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work. School closures, for example, may reduce transmission rates. But they may also backfire if children socialize anyhow, if school closure leads children to spend more time with susceptible elderly family members, if children at home disrupt their parents ability to work, and more. School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.

This has been the perspective behind the different stance of the United Kingdom keeping schools open, at least until as I write this. In the absence of data on the real course of the epidemic, we don't know whether this perspective was brilliant or catastrophic.

Flattening the curve to avoid overwhelming the health system is conceptually sound '-- in theory. A visual that has become viral in media and social media shows how flattening the curve reduces the volume of the epidemic that is above the threshold of what the health system can handle at any moment.

Yet 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. That's another reason we need data about the exact level of the epidemic activity.

One of the bottom lines is that we don't know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.

In the most pessimistic scenario, which I do not espouse, if the new coronavirus infects 60% of the global population and 1% of the infected people die, that will translate into more than 40 million deaths globally, matching the 1918 influenza pandemic.

The vast majority of this hecatomb would be people with limited life expectancies. That's in contrast to 1918, when many young people died.

One can only hope that, much like in 1918, life will continue. Conversely, with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake.

If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.

John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Meta-Research Innovation Center.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 10:19

Donald Trump insisted that calling the coronavirus the 'kung flu' was neither wrong not racist at a press conference Wednesday.

The President's defense of the term came after a reporter challenged Trump about a White House staffer who reportedly called Covid-19 the 'kung flu' while chatting to an Asian reporter. Trump himself has repeatedly branded it the 'Chinese virus,' despite widespread criticism.

'I wonder who said that (kung flu)'...I think they probably would agree with it 100%. It comes from China,' Trump said.

And just moments earlier, the president insisted that calling the coronavirus the 'Chinese virus' was racist 'at all.'

When asked about whether he considers his terminology offensive, Trump responded : 'It's not racist at all. It comes from China. It's accurate.'

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''...As you know, China tried to say, at one point, that it was caused by American soldiers. That can't happen, it's not gonna happen as long as I'm president. It comes from China.'

Wednesday's comment was the second time in two days Trump defended his use of the phrase 'Chinese virus,' which some fear may cause animosity and instances of racism against Asian Americans. The World Health Organization officially named the disease caused by coronavirus Covid-19 last month in a bid to avoid stigmatizing Chinese people.

President Trump is asked why he keeps calling coronavirus ''Chinese virus,'' even after documented bias incidents against Chinese-AmericansTrump: ''Because it comes from China. It's not racist at all. It comes from China, that's why. I want to be accurate'' https://t.co/yMZlZ5gV1w pic.twitter.com/kXceP1tzgD

'-- CBS News (@CBSNews) March 18, 2020However, Trump has remained firm in his decision to avoid calling the virus by its proper name and on Tuesday said: 'China was putting out information, which was false, that our military gave this to them. That was false. And rather than having an argument, I said I had to call it where it came from. It did come from China. So I think it's a very accurate term.'

After Trump's initial statement, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Geng Shuang hit out at the president for his rhetoric.

More: World'Some US politicians have tried to stigmatize China '... which China strongly condemns. We urge the US to stop this despicable practice. We are very angry and strongly oppose it,' Shuang said.

The World Health Organization has also advised against terms linking the disease to China or the city of Wuhan '' where it was initially detected '' to avoid stigmatization or discrimination.

This racial tension has been mounting in the US as the pandemic worsens. In New York, a man assaulted a woman wearing a face mask and called her a 'diseased bitch,' according to CNN. Another man was filmed spraying a man down with Febreeze on a train.

The NYPD and the Hate Crime Task Force encourage the victim to report this incident to the police for a full investigation. https://t.co/4Qb4XHVj3Z

'-- NYPD Hate Crimes (@NYPDHateCrimes) February 5, 2020

A witness later said, 'I believe that this incident has immense potential in opening up the discussion of Asian American-directed racial tension that has been caused by the (coronavirus).'

In Los Angeles, a reportedly loudly began screaming that Chinese people are filthy and 'every disease ever came from China.'

Two Hmong travelers faced intense scrutiny when they tried to rent a motel room in Plymouth, Indiana by an employee who told them 'If you're from China, I need to know'...And anyone from China, I am told, has to be picked up and quarantined for two weeks.'

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 10:03

116 cases of COVID-19 put South Africa into the medium-low category for Coronavirus. The South African Government is not taking any chances and President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a national state of disaster effective today. So far no death was associated with the outbreak of coronavirus in South Africa.

The regulations, which form part of the Disaster Management Act, were signed off by Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma on Tuesday and published on Wednesday. MSC Cruises has offered the South African government a ship to assist with services relating to the coronavirus.

Tourism, an important industry for the Republic of South Africa most likely is now coming to a stillstand like in most countries in the world

Here are the most important sections of the regulations published earlier on the South Africa News 24 channel.

1) Duty of ministers

Each government department has its own role to play as set out in the regulations. For example, the minister of health can procure the services of retired health professionals, non-governmental organizations or employees of the Expanded Public Works Programme to assist him in combating Covid-19.

Amid panic buying and necessities flying off the shelves, the minister of trade and industry is to maintain the supply of goods and services, as well as fair pricing on these necessities.

All ministers, within their mandate, are permitted to take ''any other steps'' to alleviate the effects of Covid-19, the regulations say.

National organs of state must also make available personnel to be used in emergency services.

National, provincial and local institutions must also make available resources, above and beyond funding, to implement these regulations but without affecting their service delivery.

2) Punishable offenses

The regulations also place preventative responsibility on South Africans, criminalizing certain conduct that could hinder these efforts.

It is illegal for a person to hide the fact that they or anyone else are infected with Covid-19, and this could be punishable with a fine or imprisonment.

It is also illegal for anyone to intentionally spread fake news about Covid-19, those infected with the virus or government efforts to address the virus.

A person who intentionally exposes someone else to Covid-19 could also be charged with assault, attempted murder or murder.

3) No refusals

Anyone who tests positive for Covid-19 is suspected of having Covid-19 or who has been in contact with someone who is infected with the virus may not refuse to be admitted for a medical examination or into a medical facility. They also cannot refuse treatment or quarantine in a bid to prevent the spread of the virus.

A warrant in this regard can be issued by a magistrate.

4) Liquor restrictions

Premises selling liquor such as taverns, restaurants or clubs, are to be closed immediately, the regulations say, unless they accommodate no more than 50 people at a time if space and hygienic conditions are provided.

No special or events liquor licenses will be considered during this time either, and premises selling liquor must be closed by 18:00 on weekdays and Saturdays, and 13:00 on Sundays.

5) Implementation of regulations

The regulations governing the national state of disaster comes into effect when they are published in the Government Gazette. This means that from Wednesday measures talked about by the government to address the deadly Covid-19, was implemented.

South Africa is a country on the southernmost tip of the African continent, marked by several distinct ecosystems. Inland safari destination Kruger National Park is populated by big game. The Western Cape offers beaches, lush Winelands around Stellenbosch and Paarl, craggy cliffs at the Cape of Good Hope, forest and lagoons along the Garden Route, and the city of Cape Town, beneath flat-topped Table Mountain.

What is a national State of Disaster in South Africa?

The 2002 Disaster Management Act facilitates co-ordination, mitigation and recovery following a disaster, defined as a ''natural or human-caused occurrence that causes disease, damage to property infrastructure or the environment or disruption of the life of a community''.

In a national disaster, Section 26 of the act makes the national executive ''primarily responsible'' for coordinating measures for mitigation, prevention and recovery and rehabilitation from disaster.

Cabinet ministers may use existing legislation to deal with the disaster; health, immigration, transportation, and other legislation allow ministerial directives.

But regulations, which are the responsibility of the co-operative governance minister, can provide for a range of further measures. However, crucially, the Disaster Management Act releases money and resources from vehicles to emergency personnel for the effort to deal with a declared disaster.

How is the State of Disaster declared in South Africa?

In terms of Section 27 of the Disaster Management Act, it's the co-operative governance minister.

The president under Section 4(1) establishes, in the case of a national disaster declaration, an intergovernmental committee on disaster management to co-ordinate efforts. The president chairs this committee.

Section 27(2) allows the issuing of regulations that not only provide relief to affected persons but also for the control in the affected areas of the movement of people and goods, the provision, use or control of emergency accommodation and the sale of alcohol.

A national State of Disaster lasts three months. However, the co-operative governance minister may cut it short at any time. A national State of Disaster may be extended one month at a time.

What is the State of Emergency in South Africa?

In short, civil liberties, with exceptions like the rights to dignity and life, are suspended for anything from 21 days to three months, and possibly longer.

Unlike the apartheid decades, Section 37 of the Constitution and the 1997 State of Emergency Act provide a crucial supervisory role for Parliament. And the courts are constitutionally empowered to decide whether a State of Emergency or regulations are valid.

Meanwhile, Parliament is constitutionally prohibited from passing laws ''indemnifying the state, or any person, in respect of any unlawful act'', as Section 37 of the Constitution also sets out the rights of detained persons, including being able to contact an adult relative or friend and be visited by medical and legal practitioners of the detainee's choice.

How is the State of Emergency put in place in South Africa?

Section 37 of the Constitution allows a State of Emergency to be declared only when

''(a) the life of the nation is threatened by war, invasion, general insurrection, disorder, natural disaster or other public emergencies; and

''(b) the declaration is necessary to restore peace and order.''

In terms of the 1997 State of Emergency Act, the president makes this declaration. Parliament is informed of this and also of any regulations the president signed to empower any structure or person to perform duties, and also impose penalties.

Importantly, Parliament has to agree to those regulations in terms of Section 3(2) of the State of Emergency Act, which states Parliament may ''disapprove'' of any such regulations, while also making recommendations to the president.

In terms of Section 37(2) of the Constitution, 21 days is how long a State of Emergency may last '' unless Parliament extends it, to a maximum of three months.

A simple majority of MPs is needed for this, but if there should be another extension of the State of Emergency, a parliamentary majority of 60% is required. And there must be a public debate.

Pretoria in South Africa is also the Headquarters for the African Tourism Board (ATB) eTurboNews is a strategic partner for ATB.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 09:58

The chairman of Arizona's Asian Chamber of Commerce didn't see much downside to attending a small dinner at a local restaurant to bolster the business and bring together other leaders to discuss how to help Asian-American eateries devastated by the coronavirus.

That was, at least, until he posted about it on Instagram. The feedback was swift from people who were appalled that Ryan Winkle would promote a gathering '-- even a small one '-- as COVID-19 raged and entire cities were urged to self-isolate.

''I started getting some messages saying, 'Hey, why are you trying to spread the virus?' I was like, 'It's a small event, and everyone had washed their hands, and they had sanitizer on the tables,''' Winkle said of the dinner held Saturday in Mesa, Arizona. ''My thinking is always about the economics. Imagine when all these businesses shut down. That's a whole different problem.''

''Quarantine shaming'' '-- calling out those not abiding by social distancing rules '-- is part of a new and startling reality for Americans who must navigate a world of rapidly evolving social norms in the age of COVID-19. As schools close and shelter-in-place orders sweep across the U.S., the divide between those who are stringently practicing self-isolation and those who are still trying to go about some semblance of a normal life has never been more clear. Complicating matters: What was socially acceptable even 48 hours ago may now be taboo, as government officials race to contain the virus with ever-expanding circles of social isolation.

''The time matrix seems to be shifting. I've never known several days to go by so slowly and watching the collective conscience move more and more in one direction day by day,'' said Paula Flakser, who lost her bartending job when California's Mammoth Mountain ski resort closed this week.

For those who must go to work, the divide is widening too.

Full Coverage: Virus OutbreakSteve Diehl, who is considered an essential employee at his job at a warehouse near Chicago, wears a mask to work because a family member has a compromised immune system. He's terrified of catching the new coronavirus or transmitting it to his loved one at home.

Diehl posted a sign at the warehouse entrance asking people to put on masks that were provided ''to protect immuno-compromised family,'' but several co-workers didn't wear them, he said. One of them coughed into his hand while standing by Diehl's desk '-- and then began to touch things on his desk with the same hand.

''That angered me greatly,'' said Diehl, who posted a photo of himself in a mask on Twitter. ''And when I made a comment about it, they shrugged it off.''

Others who are trying to juggle working from home while caring for kids who are also home are making smaller and more mundane choices that nevertheless bring shocked responses '-- or even rebukes '-- from co-workers, friends and even family. Is it OK to run out for a coffee? Can you allow your children to go the playground? What about sending kids to day care centers, which remain the only lifeline in many states that have closed schools?

Flakser, the woman who lost her bartending job, said she was upset by the hundreds of people who flocked to her tiny hometown of Bishop, California, from Los Angeles and other large cities to vacation the minute schools shut down. The 42-year-old climber posted angry messages about the crowds on Facebook and was quoted in an online climbing magazine, Thundercling.

So many people descended on a climbing spot called Happy Boulders over the weekend that lines of people were walking into the narrow canyon. The routes to reach the top mean dozens of people were grabbing the same handholds in the rock again and again, potentially spreading germs, she said.

''When people from urban areas are escaping, they're escaping to vulnerable areas that have incredibly limited medical resources '-- and it felt pretty entitled and selfish,'' she said in a phone interview. ''It feels like a lot of first-world privilege knocking at our door.''

By Wednesday, the crowds had abated '-- possibly because of the article and social media posts '-- but ''this weekend will be the true barometer,'' Flakser said.

Her concerns echo those who slammed St. Patrick's Day revelers who flooded bars in Chicago and New Orleans and those who called out college students who've been thronging to beaches for spring break. An Instagram video of hundreds of partiers packed onto a ''booze cruise'' in the Bahamas drew comments calling for a boycott of the company that organized it.

Some of the strong online reaction to these crowd-size violations likely stem from the fact that authorities would be hard-pressed to enforce the new rules and are relying on a social compact to keep everyone safe. In Oregon, for example, restaurants that continue to offer dine-in service would face only a low-level misdemeanor '-- and social shaming is much more effective.

Jeff Carreras, owner of Tracey's Original Irish Channel Bar in New Orleans, said he's faced similar scathing criticism over the crowds that gathered outside his bar Saturday. People on Facebook accused him of raking in money while disregarding growing warnings about the dangers of crowds during the outbreak of COVID-19.

One poster, Claire Hassig, said on the bar's page that her 70-year-old mother had to walk by to get to her car and was mobbed by ''drunken idiots with zero respect for social distancing or her safety.''

Carreras said he kept the crowd inside below its 250 capacity and didn't set up the usual outside bar '-- but crowds formed anyway. It was the bar's idea to have police break them up when his staff couldn't do it, he said.

''There's no way I would entice, encourage the public to come out and spread a virus that's as bad as it is,'' he said. ''We did everything we were asked to do.''

Those appalled by the behavior of some of their fellow Americans have welcomed a crackdown this week from many state and local governments that are adding daily to lists of closures and bans.

Bars in a popular part of Portland, Oregon were busy on Friday and Saturday nights but are now dark after Gov. Kate Brown banned all dine-in service at food establishments and bars statewide.

Alec Bhurke, who wrote an angry post on Facebook about the weekend crowds, said most people likely just need that kind of guidance from authorities to recognize the seriousness of the crisis.

''People don't understand ... the implications of what even a single day does to the body count (from the virus) at this stage,'' he said Wednesday. ''But people should know better '-- and they should do better.''

Winkle, for his part, has re-examined his approach to social distancing since the weekend event. It helps that Mesa instituted a ban on dine-in serve at restaurants and bars on Tuesday.

''I get it, and I get where they're coming from,'' he said. ''I definitely took it to heart and thought maybe it's time to start slowing things down.''

____

Associated Press writers Kevin McGill in New Orleans and Terry Tang in Phoenix contributed to this report.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 09:25

Amazon faces a rash of strikes and protests at sites across Europe as warehouse workers lash out over what they say are gruelling labor conditions, minimal protection and the risk of infection after several employees tested positive for coronavirus.

The outrage in Italy, Spain and France '-- among the countries worst-hit by the virus '-- is testing the e-commerce giant's ability to keep operating its labor-intensive warehouses amid surging demand and radical containment measures.

Like other tech giants, Amazon has ordered office staff to work from home and abide by social distancing rules rolled out in many countries. But at the vast warehouses where the company processes orders for shipment, known as fulfilment centers, workers are still expected to show up and in many cases work overtime to meet exploding demand '-- including in Italy, which is currently the outbreak's global epicenter and where millions of people are under orders to remain home.

''This is crazy," said Gianpaolo Meloni, a worker at a fulfilment center in Castel San Giovanni, in northern Italy. "I can't walk in the streets because the police will stop me if I don't have a proper reason. Why do I have to go into the fulfilment center and work surrounded by thousands of people?''

In a statement to POLITICO detailing its coronavirus response, an Amazon spokesperson said the firm had increased cleaning at all facilities, canceled non-critical meetings and introduced social distancing measures including removing or spacing out furniture at warehouses and staggering employees' breaks, in addition to encouraging them to wash their hands. The firm has also pledged to give employees who are diagnosed with coronavirus or placed in quarantine up to two weeks of pay.

''This company is using our health to make a big fortune" '-- Agnieszka Mr"z, packer in Amazon's warehouse in PoznaÅ, Poland

''As demand continues to increase, we are working to ensure we can continue to deliver to the most impacted customers while keeping our people safe," the statement read. ''We also have a process in place so that employees who are unable to work overtime for personal reasons are able to speak with managers and map out a schedule that works for them."

But such measures are far from being enough for many Amazon workers. Under financial pressure, many say they have no choice but to keep working, and they are outraged that the company has kept operating warehouses in Italy and Spain even after employees in those locations tested positive for the virus.

In Italy, the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) has organized a strike at the warehouse in Castel San Giovanni and announced a ''state of agitation'' in other facilities in Piedmont and Passo Corese, near Rome. In France, 200-300 workers protested outside their warehouse in Saran, a city south of Paris, demanding Amazon close it down.

Meanwhile, Spanish union Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO) has lodged an official complaint to labor authorities about Amazon's response to the crisis, and in Poland unionized workers '-- who are actually serving the German market '-- voiced outrage over their working conditions.

''People are afraid,'' said Agnieszka Mr"z, a packer in Amazon's warehouse in PoznaÅ in western Poland and an activist at Inicjatywa Pracownicza (the Workers' Initiative), a trade union. ''This company is using our health to make a big fortune."

'We are giving our lives'The growing outrage in Europe underscores a paradox for Amazon, whose share price has so far held up better than other Silicon Valley giants during the crisis: The virus is a direct risk to the health of thousands of warehouse workers, but demand is off the charts.

To keep up with the surge, the company has said it would hire 100,000 additional workers in the U.S., and will no longer take in non-essential goods from third-party sellers, who account for about a third of the total offerings on the site.

But for the workers and unions in Europe, bringing in more people will only compound the risk of transmission, and put them at greater risk. The very nature of the job, they argue '-- criss-crossing other workers in a race to grab and stack packages and meet numerical productivity targets '-- goes against the principle of social distancing.

''If we have to wash our hands additionally, workers will be afraid to do it in fear that they will not meet their targets,'' said Mr"z.

Workers in Poland, where Amazon does not operate a web shop, are particularly aggrieved as they have yet to benefit from the hourly wage increases that Amazon has rolled out in other countries (of $2 in the U.S., £2 in the U.K. and '‚¬2). Amazon says it is negotiating a salary increase with Polish union representatives.

Workers on temporary contracts may be more willing to ignore health warnings | Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images

Mr"z '-- one of 11,000 workers from the villages surrounding Amazon's PoznaÅ warehouse to hitch a bus ride to work each day '-- says Polish workers like her earn 20 zlotys (around '‚¬4.40) per hour before tax, far below what their colleagues in the eurozone are earning.

''Polish people are coming from their villages to send boxes to Germany. We are giving our lives and our health to bring more profit to [Amazon boss] Jeff Bezos,'' she added.

For Meloni in Italy, the need to meet targets is particularly intense for workers on temporary contracts, known internally as "green badges" because of the color of their identifying badges. Such workers are more likely to overlook health warnings to keep their jobs.

''It's very easy to find green badges running around, or not doing the work safely. When green badges have a temperature, they ignore it because they need to work,'' he said.

Mick Rix, national officer at British trade union GMB, echoed those concerns, saying that the physical demands of work in fulfilment centers could make them more vulnerable to infection. ''Amazon employees have no options whatsoever. They do this or they go work elsewhere,'' he said.

''Amazon workers are on the front lines of this crisis'' '-- Christy Hoffmann, general secretary of UNI Global Union

So far, the company has avoided stricter regulation in the European Union while sticking by its policy of not negotiating with unions on work conditions. But as the tide of union outrage, protests and strikes grows higher, the firm could be pushed into a corner.

''Amazon workers are on the front lines of this crisis,'' Christy Hoffmann, the general secretary of Switzerland-based UNI Global Union, said in a statement that also demanded that Amazon provide protective gear to its workers. ''Amazon needs to negotiate with unions to ensure worker safety and smoothly functioning supply chains."

In France, where the loudest protests have broken out, the government has signalled it wants Amazon to change its practices. The pressure Amazon puts on its employees is ''unacceptable and we'll let Amazon know,'' Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told France Inter.

Louise Guillot contributed reporting.

This article is part of POLITICO 's premium Tech policy coverage: Pro Technology. Our expert journalism and suite of policy intelligence tools allow you to seamlessly search, track and understand the developments and stakeholders shaping EU Tech policy and driving decisions impacting your industry. Email pro@politico.eu with the code 'TECH' for a complimentary trial.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 09:11

NEW YORK (AP) '-- In a world suffering a pandemic, cash is no longer king.

A growing number of businesses and individuals worldwide have stopped using banknotes in fear that physical currency, handled by tens of thousands of people over their useful life, could be a vector for the spreading coronavirus.

Public officials and health experts have said that the risk of transferring the virus person-to-person through the use of banknotes is small. But that has not stopped businesses from refusing to accept currency and some countries from urging their citizens to stop using banknotes altogether.

Open Books, a non-profit bookstore in Chicago, sent an email to customers last week asking individuals not to use cash. A chain of diners in Washington State has also stopped accepting cash. And delivery services like Grubhub, Door Dash, and others have instituted ''no contact'' deliveries, and have either stopped offering cash as a payment option or are actively discouraging it.

Experts say cash does carry a risk of transmitting the virus, but the risk from cash so far is small compared with other transmission routes. A scientific paper published early in the outbreak found the virus can live on cardboard for up to 24 hours and up to three days on plastic and stainless steel. The researchers, however, did not test whether it can live on banknote paper.

The presence of live virus particles on banknotes does not mean they are a health hazard, public health experts said. Virus particles are unlikely to return to the air, or aerosolize, once on a surface.

''It's not impossible that there might be traces of virus on dollar bills but if you wash your hands it should provide adequate protections, you shouldn't need anything else,'' said Julie Fischer, a professor at the Center for Global Health Science and Society at Georgetown University, on C-SPAN.

Other devices used to pay for items are just as likely to be vectors for disease transfer. Credit and debit cards are made of plastic and metal. ATMs are touched by hundreds of human hands a day. And there have been studies that show smartphones are heavily contaminated with bacteria because of their constant use.

Even the Federal Reserve has taken efforts to make sure the money supply is not contaminated. Banknotes that circulated in Europe and Asia are being quarantined for seven to 10 days as a ''precautionary measure,'' according to a Federal Reserve spokesperson.

While businesses are discouraging cash usage, there have been reports of customers making large withdrawals from ATMs in several parts of the country. Some banks have had to order additional cash from the Fed or keep ATMs stocked at higher levels to allow larger customer withdrawals.

Banknote avoidance is not just happening in the U.S. In South Korea, which has been more successful in stemming the outbreak, the country's central bank took all banknotes out of circulation for two weeks or, in some cases, burned paper money.

The National Bank of Poland said Thursday on Twitter that ''Polish banknotes are subjected to a quarantine'' and are therefore safe to use in cash transactions. The bank did not respond to a request sent Friday for more details about how that works. But a business daily, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, described how commercial banks send the banknotes to the National Bank of Poland, which holds them two weeks and disinfects them at temperatures of at least 150 degrees Celsius (300 Fahrenheit). After such operations, ''clean'' banknotes go back into circulation.

In Hungary, the central bank said that it is withdrawing billions of forints from circulation daily for two weeks, then ''resting'' them for a period of time that is believed to coincide with the virus' survival time.

Iran is suffering the worst outbreak of the virus in the Middle East. Using cash there is common, but in recent weeks many people have avoided it and banks have announced that they will not accept cash from customers. Iranians often have multiple debit cards but cash is widely used in small-scale transactions, like buying bread in bakeries or leaving a tip. Many people have started even being careful in how they hand over debit cards, as contactless payment methods haven't caught on there.

_____

Christopher Rugaber in Washington, D.C, and Nassar Karimi, in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report. Vanessa Gera contributed to this report from Warsaw, Poland.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 08:29

MILAN/BERLIN (Reuters) - Mobile carriers are sharing data with the health authorities in Italy, Germany and Austria, helping to fight coronavirus by monitoring whether people are complying with curbs on movement while at the same time respecting Europe's privacy laws.

FILE PHOTO: A woman wearing a protective mask uses her mobile phone, as a coronavirus outbreak continues to grow in northern Italy, in Turin, Italy, February 27, 2020. REUTERS/Massimo Pinca/File Photo

The data, which are anonymous and aggregated, make it possible to map concentrations and movements of customers in 'hot zones' where COVID-19 has taken hold.

That is less invasive than the approach taken by countries like China, Taiwan and South Korea, which use smartphone location readings to trace the contacts of individuals who have tested positive or to enforce quarantine orders.

In Germany, where schools and restaurants are closing and people have been told to work at home if they can, the data donated by Deutsche Telekom offer insights into whether people are complying, health czar Lothar Wieler said.

''If people remain as mobile as they were until a week ago, it will be difficult to contain the virus,'' Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute, said on Wednesday.

Germany is entering the epidemic's exponential phase, Wieler added, warning that without progress in reducing person-to-person contacts, as many as 10 million people could be infected in two or three months.

However, privacy advocates are sceptical about whether sharing customer data is useful or proportionate, even in a time of crisis. One said that, if people know their phones are being tracked, they will just leave them at home.

''I strongly doubt the value of sharing such customer information,'' said opposition Greens lawmaker Tabea Roessner.

ITALY, AUSTRIA In Italy, mobile carriers Telecom Italia, Vodafone and WindTre have offered authorities aggregated data to monitor people's movements.

The Lombardy region is using the data to see how many people are observing a strict lockdown. Movements exceeding 300-500 metres (yards) are down by around 60% since Feb. 21, when the first case was discovered in the Codogno area, the data show.

''Wherever technically possible, and legally permissible, Vodafone will be willing to assist governments in developing insights based on large, anonymised datasets,'' CEO Nick Read said.

Austria imposed a regional lockdown after coronavirus spread among ski tourists in Tyrol who, as they headed home, have spread the infection across central and northern Europe.

A1 Telekom Austria Group, the country's largest mobile phone company, is sharing results from a motion analysis application developed by Invenium, a spin-off from the Graz University of Technology that it has backed.

The tool is compliant with EU privacy rulebook the General Data Protection Regulation, which restricts the processing of sensitive personal data without its owner's explicit consent.

Invenium analyses how flows of people affect traffic congestion or how busy a tourist site will get, said co-founder Michael Cik, but its technology is equally applicable to assessing the effectiveness of measures to reduce social contact or movement that seek to contain an epidemic.

Austrian campaigner Max Schrems, who has fought a series of legal battles over Facebook's privacy practices, had his doubts.

FILE PHOTO: A man takes a picture of a coronavirus warning sign with his mobile phone at the closed main entrance to the administration headquarters of the district of Heinsberg, Germany, February 26, 2020. The sign reads "Due to a confirmed coronavirus case the administrative building of the district of Heinsberg remains closed on Wednesday". REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay/File Photo''As long as the data is properly anonymized this is clearly legal,'' he told Reuters.

''But to be honest, in Austria you just have to look out of the window to see that people stay home.''

(This story corrects paragraph 12 to show Austria imposed a regional lockdown; fixes company name in paragraph 13.)

Writing by Douglas Busvine; Additional reporting by Nadine Schimroszik and Paul Sandle; Editing by Gareth Jones and David Goodman

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 08:11

After watching the outbreak of COVID-19 for the past two months, I've followed the pace of the infection, its severity, and how our world is tackling the virus. While we should be concerned and diligent, the situation has dramatically elevated to a mob-like fear spreading faster than COVID-19 itself. When 13% of Americans believe they are currently infected with COVID-19 (mathematically impossible), full-on panic is blocking our ability to think clearly and determine how to deploy our resources to stop this virus. Over three-fourths of Americans are scared of what we are doing to our society through law and hysteria, not of infection or spreading COVID-19 to those most vulnerable.

The following article is a systematic overview of COVID-19 driven by data from medical professionals and academic articles that will help you understand what is going on (sources include CDC, WHO, NIH, NHS, University of Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, NEJM, JAMA, and several others). I'm quite experienced at understanding virality, how things grow, and data. In my vocation, I'm most known for popularizing the ''growth hacking movement'' in Silicon Valley that specializes in driving rapid and viral adoption of technology products. Data is data. Our focus here isn't treatments but numbers. You don't need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn't say. Numbers are universal.

I hope you walk away with a more informed perspective on how you can help and fight back against the hysteria that is driving our country into a dark place. You can help us focus our scarce resources on those who are most vulnerable, who need our help.

Note: The following graphs and numbers are as of mid-March 2020. Things are moving quickly, so I update this article twice a day. Most graphs are as of March 20th, 2020.

Best,

Aaron Ginn

Table of ContentsTotal cases are the wrong metricTime lapsing new cases gives us perspectiveOn a per-capita basis, we shouldn't be panickingCOVID-19 is spreadingWatch the Bell CurveA low probability of catching COVID-19Common transmission modesCOVID-19 is likely to burn off in the summerChildren and Teens aren't at riskStrong, but unknown viral effectWhat about asymptomatic spread?93% of people who think they are positive aren't1% of cases will be severeDeclining fatality rateSo what should we do?Start with basic hygieneMore dataOpen schoolsOpen up public spacesSupport business and productivityPeople fear what the government will do, not infectionExpand medical capacityDon't let them forget it and voteA critical question to ask yourself when you first look at a data set is, ''What is our metric for success?''.

Let's start at the top. How is it possible that more than 20% of Americans believe they will catch COVID-19? Here's how. Vanity metrics '-- a single data point with no context. Wouldn't this picture scare you?

Look at all of those large red scary circles!

These images come from the now infamous John Hopkins COVID-19 tracking map. What started as a data transparency effort has now molded into an unintentional tool for hysteria and panic.

An important question to ask yourself is what do these bubbles actually mean? Each bubble represents the total number of COVID-19 cases per country. The situation looks serious, yet we know that this virus is over four months old, so how many of these cases are active?

Immediately, we now see that just under half of those terrifying red bubbles aren't relevant or actionable. The total number of cases isn't illustrative of what we should do now. This is a single vanity data point with no context; it isn't information or knowledge. To know how to respond, we need more numbers to tell a story and to paint the full picture. As a metaphor, the daily revenue of a business doesn't tell you a whole lot about profitability, capital structure, or overhead. The same goes for the total number of cases. The data isn't actionable. We need to look at ratios and percentages to tell us what to do next '-- conversion rate, growth rate, and severity.

Breaking down each country by the date of the first infection helps us track the growth and impact of the virus. We can see how total cases are growing against a consistent time scale.

Here are new cases time lapsed by country and date of first 100 total cases.

Here is a better picture of US confirmed case daily growth.

The United States is tracking with other European nations at doubling every three days or so. As we measure and test more Americans, this will continue to grow. Our time-lapse growth is lower than China, but not as good as South Korea, Japan, Singapore, or Taiwan. All are considered models of how to beat COVID-19. The United States is performing average, not great, compared to the other modern countries by this metric.

Still, there is a massive blindspot with this type of graph. None of these charts are weighted on a per-capita basis. It treats every country as a single entity, as we will see this fails to tell us what is going on in several aspects.

Every country has a different population size which skews aggregate and cumulative case comparisons. By controlling for population, you can properly weigh the number of cases in the context of the local population size. Viruses don't acknowledge our human borders. The US population is 5.5X greater than Italy, 6X larger than South Korea, and 25% the size of China. Comparing the US total number of cases in absolute terms is rather silly.

Rank ordering based on the total number of cases shows that the US on a per-capita basis is significantly lower than the top six nations by case volume. On a 1 million citizen per-capita basis, the US moves to above mid-pack of all countries and rising, with similar case volume as Singapore (385 cases), Cyprus (75 cases), and United Kingdom(3,983 cases). This is data as of March 20th, 2020.

But total cases even on a per-capita basis will always be a losing metric. The denominator (total population) is more or less fixed. We aren't having babies at the pace of viral growth. Per-capita won't explain how fast the virus is moving and if it is truly ''exponential''.

Growth rates are tricky to track over time. Smaller numbers are easy to move than larger numbers. As an example, GDP growth of 3% for the US means billions of dollars while 3% for Bermuda means millions. Generally, growth rates decline over time, but the nominal increase may still be significant. This holds true of daily confirmed case increases. Daily growth rates declined over time across all countries regardless of particular policy solutions, such as shutting the borders or social distancing.

The daily growth data across the world is a little noisy. Weighing daily growth of confirmed cases by a relative daily growth factor cleans up the picture, more than 1 is increasing and below 1 is declining. For all of March, the world has hovered around 1.1. This translates to an average daily growth rate of 10%, with ups and downs on a daily basis. This isn't great, but it is good news as COVID-19 most likely isn't increasing in virality. The growth rate of the growth rate is approximately 10%; however, the data is quite noisy. With inconsistent country-to-country reporting and what qualifies as a confirmed case, the more likely explanation is that we are increasing our measurement, but the virus hasn't increased in viral capability. Recommended containment and prevention strategies are still quite effective at stopping the spread.

Cases globally are increasing (it is a virus after all!), but beware of believing metrics designed to intentionally scare like ''cases doubling''. These are typically small numbers over small numbers and sliced on a per-country basis. Globally, COVID-19's growth rate is rather steady. Remember, viruses ignore our national boundaries.

Viruses though don't grow infinitely forever and forever. As with most things in nature, viruses follow a common pattern '-- a bell curve.

As COVID-19 spreads and declines (which it will decline despite what the media tells you), every country will follow a similar pattern. The following is a more detailed graph of S. Korea's successful defeat of COVID-19 compared also to China with thousands of more cases and deaths. It is a bell curve:

Here is a more detailed graph of S. Korea graphed against the total number of cases.

Here is a graph from Italy showing a bell curve in symptom onset and number of cases, which may point to the beginning of the end for Italy '--

JAMA '-- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/coronavirus-alertBell curves is the dominant trait of outbreaks. A virus doesn't grow linearly forever. It accelerates, plateaus, and then declines. Whether it is environmental or our own efforts, viruses accelerate and quickly decline. This fact of nature is represented in Farr's law. CDC's of ''bend the curve'' or ''flatten the curve'' reflects this natural reality.

It is important to note that in both scenarios, the total number of COVID-19 cases will be similar. ''Flattening the curve'''s focus is a shock to the healthcare system which can increase fatalities due to capacity constraints. In the long-term, it isn't infection prevention. Unfortunately, ''flattening the curve'' doesn't include other downsides and costs of execution.

Both the CDC and WHO are optimizing virality and healthcare utilization, while ignoring the economic shock to our system. Both organizations assume you are going to get infected, eventually, and it won't be that bad.

The World Health Organization (''WHO'') released a study on how China responded to COVID-19. Currently, this study is one of the most exhaustive pieces published on how the virus spreads.

The results of their research show that COVID-19 doesn't spread as easily as we first thought or the media had us believe (remember people abandoned their dogs out of fear of getting infected). According to their report if you come in contact with someone who tests positive for COVID-19 you have a 1''5% chance of catching it as well. The variability is large because the infection is based on the type of contact and how long.

The majority of viral infections come from prolonged exposures in confined spaces with other infected individuals. Person-to-person and surface contact is by far the most common cause. From the WHO report, ''When a cluster of several infected people occurred in China, it was most often (78''85%) caused by an infection within the family by droplets and other carriers of infection in close contact with an infected person.

From the CDC's study on transmission in China and Princess Cruise outbreak -

A growing body of evidence indicates that COVID-19 transmission is facilitated in confined settings; for example, a large cluster (634 confirmed cases) of COVID-19 secondary infections occurred aboard a cruise ship in Japan, representing about one fifth of the persons aboard who were tested for the virus. This finding indicates the high transmissibility of COVID-19 in enclosed spaces

Dr. Paul Auwaerter, the Clinical Director for the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine echoes this finding,

''If you have a COVID-19 patient in your household, your risk of developing the infection is about 10%'....If you were casually exposed to the virus in the workplace (e.g., you were not locked up in conference room for six hours with someone who was infected [like a hospital]), your chance of infection is about 0.5%''

According to Dr. Auwaerter, these transmission rates are very similar to the seasonal flu.

Air-based transmission or untraceable community spread is very unlikely. According to WHO's COVID-19 lead Maria Van Kerkhove, true community based spreading is very rare. The data from China shows that community-based spread was only a very small handful of cases. ''This virus is not circulating in the community, even in the highest incidence areas across China,'' Van Kerkhove said.

''Transmission by fine aerosols in the air over long distances is not one of the main causes of spread. Most of the 2,055 infected hospital workers were either infected at home or in the early phase of the outbreak in Wuhan when hospital safeguards were not raised yet,'' she said.

True community spread involves transmission where people get infected in public spaces and there is no way to trace back the source of infection. WHO believes that is not what the Chinese data shows. If community spread was super common, it wouldn't be possible to reduce the new cases through ''social distancing''.

''We have never seen before a respiratory pathogen that's capable of community transmission but at the same time which can also be contained with the right measures. If this was an influenza epidemic, we would have expected to see widespread community transmission across the globe by now and efforts to slow it down or contain it would not be feasible,'' said Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of WHO.

An author of a working paper from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University said, ''The current scientific consensus is that most transmission via respiratory secretions happens in the form of large respiratory droplets '... rather than small aerosols. Droplets, fortunately, are heavy enough that they don't travel very far and instead fall from the air after traveling only a few feet.''

The media was put into a frenzy when the above authors released their study on COVID-19's ability to survive in the air. The study did find the virus could survive in the air for a couple of hours; however, this study was designed as academic exercise rather than a real-world test. This study put COVID-19 into a spray bottle to ''mist'' it into the air. I don't know anyone who coughs in mist form and it is unclear if the viral load was large enough to infect another individual As one doctor, who wants to remain anonymous, told me, ''Corona doesn't have wings''.

To summarize, China, Singapore, and South Korea's containment efforts worked because community-based and airborne transmission aren't common. The most common form of transmission is person-to-person or surface-based.

COVID-19's ability to live for a long period of time is limited on most surfaces and it is quite easy to kill with typical household cleaners, just like the normal flu.

COVID-19 be detected on copper after 4 hours and 24 hours on cardboard.COVID-19 survived best on plastic and stainless steel, remaining viable for up to 72 hoursCOVID-19 is very vulnerable to UV light and heat.Presence doesn't mean infectious. The viral concentration falls significantly over time. The virus showed a half-life of about 0.8 hours on copper, 3.46 hours on cardboard, 5.6 hours on steel and 6.8 hours on plastic.

According to Dylan Morris, one of the authors, ''We do not know how much virus is actually needed to infect a human being with high probability, nor how easily the virus is transferred from the cardboard to one's hand when touching a package''

According to Dr. Auwaerter, ''It's thought that this virus can survive on surfaces such as hands, hard surfaces, and fabrics. Preliminary data indicates up to 72 hours on hard surfaces like steel and plastic, and up to 12 hours on fabric.''

Due to COVID-19's sensitivity to UV light and heat (just like the normal influenza virus), it is very likely that it will ''burn off'' as humidity increases and temperatures rise.

Released on March 10th, one study mapped COVID-19 virality capability by high temperature and high humidity. It found that both significantly reduced the ability of the virus to spread from person-to-person. From the study,

''This result is consistent with the fact that the high temperature and high humidity significantly reduce the transmission of influenza. It indicates that the arrival of summer and rainy season in the northern hemisphere can effectively reduce the transmission of the COVID-19.''

The University of Maryland mapped severe COVID-19 outbreaks with local weather patterns around the world, from the US to China. They found that the virus thrives in a certain temperature and humidity channel. ''The researchers found that all cities experiencing significant outbreaks of COVID-19 have very similar winter climates with an average temperature of 41 to 52 degrees Fahrenheit, an average humidity level of 47% to 79% with a narrow east-west distribution along the same 30''50 N'' latitude'', said the University of Maryland.

''Based on what we have documented so far, it appears that the virus has a harder time spreading between people in warmer, tropical climates,'' said study leader Mohammad Sajadi, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine in the UMSOM, physician-scientist at the Institute of Human Virology and a member of GVN.

In the image below, the zone at risk for a significant community spread in the near-term includes land areas within the green bands.

It's already well established that the young aren't particularly vulnerable. In fact, there isn't a single death reported below the age of 10 in the world and most children who test positive don't show symptoms. As well, infection rates are lower for individuals below the age of 19, which is similar to SARS and MERS (COVID-19's sister viruses).

According to the WHO's COVID-19 mission in China, only 8.1% of cases were 20-somethings, 1.2% were teens, and 0.9% were 9 or younger. As of the study date February 20th, 78% of the cases reported were ages 30 to 69. The WHO hypothesizes this is for a biological reason and isn't related to lifestyle or exposure.

''Even when we looked at households, we did not find a single example of a child bringing the infection into the household and transmitting to the parents. It was the other way around. And the children tend to have a mild disease,'' said Van Kerkhove.

According to a WSJ article, children have a near-zero chance of becoming ill. They are more likely to get normal flu than COVID-19.

A World Health Organization report on China concluded that cases of Covid-19 in children were ''relatively rare and mild.'' Among cases in people under age 19, only 2.5% developed severe disease while 0.2% developed critical disease. Among nearly 6,300 Covid-19 cases reported by the Korea Centers for Disease Control & Prevention on March 8, there were no reported deaths in anyone under 30. Only 0.7% of infections were in children under 9 and 4.6% of cases were in those ages 10 to 19 years oldOnly 2% of the patients in a review of nearly 45,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases in China were children, and there were no reported deaths in children under 10, according to a study published in JAMA last month. (In contrast, there have been 136 pediatric deaths from influenza in the U.S. this flu season.)About 8% of cases were in people in their 20s. Those 10 to 19 years old accounted for 1% of cases and those under 10 also accounted for only 1%.However even if children and teens are not suffering severe symptoms themselves, they may ''shed'' large amounts of virus and may do so for many days, says James Campbell, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Children had a virus in their secretions for six to 22 days or an average of 12 days. ''Shedding virus doesn't always mean you're able to transmit the virus'', he notes. It is still important to consider that prolonged shedding of high viral loads from children is still a risky combination within the home since the majority of transmission occurs within a home-like confined environment.

While the true viral capacity is unknown at this moment, it is theorized that COVID-19 is more than the seasonal flu but less than other viruses. The average number of people to which a single infected person will transmit the virus, or Ro, range from as low as 1.5 to a high of 3.0

Newer analysis suggests that this viral rate is declining. According to Nobel Laureate and biophysicist Michael Levitt, the infection rate is declining -

''Every coronavirus patient in China infected on average 2.2 people a day '-- spelling exponential growth that can only lead to disaster. But then it started dropping, and the number of new daily infections is now close to zero.'' He compared it to interest rates again: ''even if the interest rate keeps dropping, you still make money. The sum you invested does not lessen, it just grows more slowly. When discussing diseases, it frightens people a lot because they keep hearing about new cases every day. But the fact that the infection rate is slowing down means the end of the pandemic is near.''

The majority of cases see symptoms within a few days, not two weeks as originally believed.

On true asymptomatic spread, the data is still unclear but increasingly unlikely. Two studies point to a low infection rate from pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. One study said 10% of infections come from people who don't show symptoms, yet. Another WHO study reported 1.2% of confirmed cases were truly asymptomatic. Several studies confirming asymptotic spread have ended up disproven. It is important to note there is a difference between ''never showing symptoms'' and ''pre-symptomatic'' and the media is promoting an unproven narrative. Almost all people end up in the latter camp within five days, almost never the former. It is very unlikely for individuals with COVID-19 to never show symptoms. WHO and CDC claim that asymptomatic spread isn't a concern and quite rare.

Iceland is leading the global in testing its entire population of ~300,000 for asymptomatic spread, not just those that show symptoms. They randomly tested 1,800 citizens who don't show symptoms and, as far as they knew, were not exposed to positive individuals. Of this sample, only 19 tested positive for COVID-19, or 1.1% of the sample.

Obviously, this type of viral spread is the most concerning; however based on the level of media attention and the global size of positive infections, it seems more probable we keep looking for a COVID-19 viral trait that doesn't exist.

Another way of looking at virality and asymptotic spread is the number of flight attendants, airport staff, or pilots that have tested positive for COVID-19. Out of the thousands of flights since November 2019, only a handful of airport and airline staff have tested positive (such as AA pilot, some BA staff, and several TSA employees).

Outside of medical and hospital staff, these individuals are in greatest contact with infected persons in confined spaces. Despite having no protective gear and most likely these people were asymptomatic, airline and airport staff aren't likely to catch COVID-19 compared to the rest of the population. Those employed in the travel sector are infected at a lower rate than the general population or healthcare workers.

''We still believe, looking at the data, that the force of infection here, the major driver, is people who are symptomatic, unwell, and transmitting to others along the human-to-human route,'' Dr. Mike Ryan of WHO Emergencies Program.

If the symptoms are so close to other less fatal coronaviruses, what is the positivity rate of those tested?

Looking at the success in S. Korea and Singapore, the important tool in our war chest is measurement. If we are concerned about the general non-infected population, what is the probability those who show symptoms actually test positive? What is the chance that the cough from your neighbor is COVID-19? This ''conversion rate'' will show whether or not you have a cold (another coronavirus) or heading to isolation for two weeks. Global data shows that ~95% of people who are tested aren't positive. The positivity rate varies by country.

UK: 7,132 concluded tests, of which 13 positive (0.2% positivity rate).UK: 48,492 tests, of which 1,950 (4.0% positivity rate)Italy: 9,462 tests, of which 470 positive (at least 5.0% positivity rate).Italy: 3,300 tests, of which 99 positive (3.0% positivity rate)Iceland: 3,787 tests, of which 218 positive (5.7% positive rate)France: 762 tests, of which 17 positive, 179 awaiting results (at least 2.2% positivity rate).Austria: 321 tests, of which 2 positive, awaiting results: unknown (at least 0.6% positivity rate).South Korea: 66,652 tests with 1766 positives 25,568 awaiting results (4.3% positivity rate).United States: 445 concluded tests, of which 14 positive (3.1% positivity rate).In the US, drive-thru testing facilities are being deployed around the nation. Gov. Cuomo of NY released initial data from their drive-thru testing. Out of the 600~ that was tested in a single day, ~7% were positive. Tested individuals actively show symptoms and present a doctor's note. This result is similar to public tracking on US nationwide positivity rate.

University of Oxford's Our World in Data attempts to track public reporting on individuals tested vs positive cases of COVID-19. For the US, it estimates 14.25% of those tested are positive.

Last week, the US was significantly behind in testing, near the bottom of all countries worldwide. As of March 20th, a week later, the US is much closer to other G8 and European countries, but there is a long way to go.

Based on the initial results and the results from other countries, the total number of positive COVID-19 cases will increase as testing increases, but the fatality rate will continue to fall and the severity case mix will fall.

In general, the size of the US population infected with COVID-19 will be much smaller than originally estimated as most symptomatic individuals aren't positive. 93% '-- 99% have other conditions.

Globally, the US has a long way to go to catch up in testing. As testing expands, the total number of cases will increase, but the mild to severe case ratio will decline dramatically.

Looking at the whole funnel from top to bottom, ~1% of everyone who is tested for COVID-19 with the US will have a severe case that will require a hospital visit or long-term admission.

Globally, 80''85% of all cases are mild. These will not require a hospital visit and home-based treatment/ no treatment is effective.

As of mid-March, the US has a significantly lower case severity rate than other countries. Our current severe caseload is similar to South Korea. This data has been spotty in the past; however, lower severity is reflected in the US COVID-19 fatality rates (addressed later).

Early reports from CDC, suggest that 12% of COVID-19 cases need some form of hospitalization, which is lower than the projected severity rate of 20%, with 80% being mild cases.

For context, this year's flu season has led to at least 17 million medical visits and 370,000 hospitalizations (0.1%) out of 30''50 million infections. Recalling that only comparing aggregate total cases isn't helpful, breaking down active cases on a per-capita basis paints a different picture on severity. This is data as of March 20th, 2020.

As the US continues to expand testing, the case fatality rate will decline over the next few weeks. There is little doubt that serious and fatal cases of COVID-19 are being properly recorded. What is unclear is the total size of mild cases. WHO originally estimated a case fatality rate of 4% at the beginning of the outbreak but revised estimates downward 2.3% '-- 3% for all age groups. CDC estimates 0.5% '-- 3%, however stresses that closer to 1% is more probable. Dr. Paul Auwaerter estimated 0.5% '-- 2%, leaning towards the lower end. A paper released on March 19th analyzed a wider data set from China and lowered the fatality rate to 1.4%. This won't be clear for the US until we see the broader population that is positive but with mild cases. With little doubt, the fatality rate and severity rate will decline as more people are tested and more mild cases are counted.

Higher fatality rates in China, Iran, and Italy are more likely associated with a sudden shock to the healthcare system unable to address demands and doesn't accurately reflect viral fatality rates. As COVID-19 spread throughout China, the fatality rate drastically fell outside of Hubei. This was attributed to the outbreak slowing spreading to several provinces with low infection rates.

John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Meta-Research Innovation Center recently wrote about fatality rates and how our current instrumentation is leading to faulty policy solutions:

''The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.

Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data '-- there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew '-- the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases '-- a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection '-- than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty'...''

''Reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.''

Looking at the US fatality, the fatality rate is drastically declining as the number of cases increases, halving every four or five days. The fatality rate will eventually level off and plateau as the US case-mix becomes apparent.

4.06% March 8 (22 deaths of 541 cases)3.69% March 9 (26 of 704)3.01% March 10 (30 of 994)2.95% March 11 (38 of 1,295)2.52% March 12 (42 of 1,695)2.27% March 13 (49 of 2,247)1.93% March 14 (57 of 2,954)1.84% March 15 (68 of 3,680)1.90% March 16 (86 of 4,503)1.76% March 17 (109 of 6,196)1.66% March 18 (150 of 9,003)1.51% March 19th (208 of 13,789)1.32% March 20th (256 of 19,383)Source: Worldometers.info

Mapped against other countries, our fatality rate and case-mix are following a similar pattern to South Korea which is a good sign, a supposed model of how to manage COVID-19.

Here are deaths weighted by the total number of cases as of March 20th, 2020. Ranked by the total number of cases, our death rate is closer to South Korea's than Spain's or Italy's.

The initial higher fatality rate for the US is trending much lower than originally estimated. A study of about half deaths within the US (154 of 264), almost all fit a similar demographic profile as the other global ~11,000 fatalities.

Another analysis by Nature, comparing the fatality rate (since revised down) and infectious rate of COVID-19 to other illnesses. COVID-19 is now within range of its other sisters of less potent coronaviruses.

As the global health community continues to gather and report data, the claim that ''COVID-19 isn't just like the flu'' (though still severe) is looking less credible as fatality rates continue to decline and measuring of mild cases increases.

It is important to consider case-mix when looking at fatality rates. The fatality rate is significantly higher for patients with an underlying condition.

The fatality rates by underling condition mimics the rise in the average fatality rate with those with underlying conditions who get the seasonal flu.

Pneumonia and influenza: 1.53% '-- 1.93%Chronic lower respiratory disease: 1.48% '-- 1.93%All respiratory causes: 3.04% '-- 4.14%Heart disease: 3.21% '-- 4.4%Cancer: 0.68% '-- 1.05%Diabetes: 0.26% '-- 0.39%For all underlying conditions: 10.17% '-- 13.67%.Comparing case-mix across countries with a wide range of fatality (China and Italy) and those with low fatality rates (S. Korea) reveals a stark difference in age; therefore, underlying conditions also vary significantly across countries. These two factors contribute the most to a country's fatality rate.

Source: Goldman SachsDivided by most at risk and low risk, Italy had significantly more cases of high at-risk patients than Germany or Korea

Source: https://medium.com/@andreasbackhausab/coronavirus-why-its-so-deadly-in-italy-c4200a15a7bfBased on an initial CDC study of 2,449 COVID-19 cases (almost half of current US cases have missing demographic data), the United States case-mix looks more like S. Korea and Germany rather than China or Italy. Approximately 69% of COVID-19 cases are in the lower at-risk population of under 65, while 31% are older than 65 higher risk population. This suggests the US will experience a declining fatality rate; however, the US has over 100 million adults with underlying and chronic illnesses that will negatively impact our fatality rate.

An older population skew within the infected population explains most of the disparity in fatality rates between high and low countries. According to a study of the fatalities of COVID-19 cases in Italy, 99% of all deaths had an underlying pathology. Only 0.8% had no underlying condition.

Most of those infected in Italy were over the age of 60, but the median age of a fatality was 80. All of Italy's fatality under the age of 40 were males with serious pre-existing medical conditions.

This doesn't factor in a wide variance in healthcare capacity, such as hospital beds per 1,000 citizens which could affect health outcomes; however, this doesn't seem to be highly correlated with fatality rates at this moment.

S. Korea '-- 11.5Germany '-- 8.3China '-- 4.2Italy '-- 3.4United States '-- 2.9Singapore '-- 2.4The first rule of medicine is to do no harm.

Local governments and politicians are inflicting massive harm and disruption with little evidence to support their draconian edicts. Every local government is in a mimetic race to one-up each other in authoritarian city ordinances to show us who has more ''abundance of caution''. Politicians are competing, not on more evidence or more COVID-19 cures but more caution. As unemployment rises and families feel unbearably burdened already, they feel pressure to ''fix'' the situation they created with even more radical and ''creative'' policy solutions. This only creates more problems and an even larger snowball effect. The first place to start is to stop killing the patient and focus on what works.

Start with basic hygieneThe most effective means to reduce spread is basic hygiene. Most American's don't wash their hands enough and aren't aware of how to actually wash your hands. Masks aren't particularly effective if you touch your eyes with infected hands. Ask businesses and public places to freely distribute disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer to the customers and patrons. If you get sick or feel sick, stay home. These are basic rules for preventing illness that doesn't require trillions of dollars.

More dataThe best examples of defeating COVID-19 requires lots of data. We are very behind in measuring our population and the impact of the virus but this has turned a corner the last few days. The swift change in direction should be applauded. Private companies are quickly developing and deploying tests, much faster than CDC could ever imagine. The inclusion of private businesses in developing solutions is creative and admirable. Data will calm nerves and allow us to utilize more evidence in our strategy. Once we have proper measurement implemented (the ability to test hundreds every day in a given metro), let's add even more data into that funnel '-- reopen public life.

Open schoolsClosing schools is counterproductive. The economic cost for closing schools in the U.S. for four weeks could cost between $10 and $47 billion dollars (0.1''0.3% of GDP) and lead to a reduction of 6% to 19% in key health care personnel.

CDC's guidance on closing schools specifically for COVID-19 -

Available modeling data indicate that early, short to medium closures do not impact the epi curve of COVID-19 or available health care measures (e.g., hospitalizations). There may be some impact of much longer closures (8 weeks, 20 weeks) further into community spread, but that modeling also shows that other mitigation efforts (e.g., handwashing, home isolation) have more impact on both spread of disease and health care measures. In other countries, those places who closed school (e.g., Hong Kong) have not had more success in reducing spread than those that did not (e.g., Singapore).

Based on transmission evidence children are more likely to catch COVID-19 in the home than at school. As well, they are more likely to expose older vulnerable adults as multi-generational homes are more common. As well, the school provides a single point of testing a large population for a possible infection in the home to prevent community spread.

Open up public spacesWith such little evidence of prolific community spread and our guiding healthcare institutions reporting the same results, shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses. The data is overwhelming at this point that community-based spread and airborne transmission is not a threat. We don't have significant examples of spreading through restaurants or gyms. When you consider the environment COVID-19 prefers, isolating every family in their home is a perfect situation for infection and transmission among other family members. Evidence from South Korea and Singapore shows that it is completely possible and preferred to continue on with life while making accommodations that are data-driven, such as social distancing and regular temperature checks.

Support business and productivityThe data shows that the overwhelming majority of the working population will not be personally impacted, both individually or their children. This is an unnecessary burden that is distracting resources and energy away from those who need it the most. By preventing Americans from being productive and specializing at what they do best (their vocation), we are pulling resources towards unproductive tasks and damaging the economy. We will need money for this fight.

At this rate, we will spend more money on ''shelter-in-place'' than if we completely rebuilt our acute care and emergency capacity.

Source: https://www.macrobond.com/posts/blog-central-banks-go-big-covi-19-market-crash-crisis/Americans won't have the freedom to go help those who get sick, volunteer their time at a hospital, or give generously to a charity. Instead, big government came barrelling in like a bull in a china shop claiming they could solve COVID-19. The same government that continued to not test incoming passengers from Europe and who couldn't manufacture enough test kits with two months' notice.

Let Americans be free to be a part of the solution, calling us to a higher civic duty to help those most in need and protect the vulnerable. Not sitting in isolation like losers.

People fear what the government will do, not an infectionRampant hoarding and a volatile stock market aren't being driven by COVID-19. An overwhelming majority of American's don't believe they will be infected. Rather hoarding behavior strongly demonstrates an irrational hysteria, from purchasing infective household masks to buying toilet paper in the troves. This fear is being driven by government action, fearing what the government will do next. In South Korea, most citizens didn't fear infection but the government and public shaming. By presenting a consistent and clear plan that is targeted and specific to those who need the most help will reduce the volatility and hysteria. A sign the logic behind these government actions aren't widely accepted, nor believed as rational by the American people is the existence itself of the volatility and hysteria. Over three-fourths of Americans are scared not of COVID-19 but what it is doing to our society.

In CDC's worst-case scenario, CDC expects more than 150''200 million infections within the US. This estimate is hundreds of times bigger than China's infection rate (30% of our population compared to 0.006% in China). Does that really sound plausible to you? China has a sub-par healthcare system, attempted to suppress the news about COVID-19 early on, a lack of transparency, an authoritarian government, and millions of Chinese traveling for the Lunar Festival at the height of the outbreak. In the US, we have a significant lead time, several therapies proving successful, transparency, a top tier healthcare system, a democratic government, and media providing ample accountability.

Infection isn't our primary risk at this point.

Expand medical capacityCOVID-19 is a significant medical threat that needs to be tackled, both finding a cure and limiting spread; however, some would argue that a country's authoritarian response to COVID-19 helped stop the spread. Probably not. In South Korea and Taiwan, I can go to the gym and eat at a restaurant which is more than I can say about San Francisco and New York, despite a significantly lower caseload on a per-capita basis.

None of the countries the global health authorities admire for their approach issued ''shelter-in-place'' orders, rather they used data, measurement,and promoted common sense self-hygiene.

Does stopping air travel have a greater impact than closing all restaurants? Does closing schools reduce the infection rate by 10%? Not one policymaker has offered evidence of any of these approaches. Typically, the argument given is ''out of an abundance of caution''. I didn't know there was such a law. Let's be frank, these acts are emotionally driven by fear, not evidence-based thinking in the process of destroying people's lives overnight. While all of these decisions are made by elites isolated in their castles of power and ego, the shock is utterly devastating Main Street.

A friend who runs a guy will run out of cash in a few weeks. A friend who is a pastor let go of half of his staff as donations fell by 60%. A waitress at my favorite breakfast place told me her family will have no income in a few days as they force the closure of restaurants. While political elites twiddle their thumbs with models and projections based on faulty assumptions, people's lives are being destroyed with Marxian vigor. The best compromise elites can come up with is $2,000.

Does it make more sense for us to pay a tax to expand medical capacity quickly or pay the cost to our whole nation of a recession? Take the example of closing schools which will easily cost our economy $50 billion. For that single unanimous totalitarian act, we could have built 50 hospitals with 500+ beds per hospital.

Eliminate arcane certificate of need and expand acute medical capacity to support possible higher healthcare utilization this season.

Don't let them forget it and voteThese days are precarious as Governors float the idea of martial law for not following ''social distancing'', as well as they liked while they violate those same rules on national TV. Remember this tone is for a virus that has impacted 0.004% of our population. Imagine if this was a truly existential threat to our Republic.

The COVID-19 hysteria is pushing aside our protections as individual citizens and permanently harming our free, tolerant, open civil society. Data is data. Facts are facts. We should be focused on resolving COVID-19 with continued testing, measuring, and be vigilant about protecting those with underlying conditions and the elderly from exposure. We are blessed in one way, there is an election in November. Never forget what happened and vote.

You may ask yourself. Who is this guy? Who is this author? I'm a nobody. That is also the point. The average American feels utterly powerless right now. I'm an individual American who sees his community and loved ones being decimated without given a choice, without empathy, and while the media cheers on with high ratings.

When this is all over, look for massive confirmation bias and pyrrhic celebration by elites. There will be vain cheering in the halls of power as Main Street sits in pieces. Expect no apology, that would be political suicide. Rather, expect to be given a Jedi mind trick of ''I'm the government and I helped.''

The health of the State will be even stronger with more Americans dependent on welfare, another trillion stimulus filled with pork for powerful friends, and a bailout for companies that charged us $200 change fees for nearly a decade. Washington DC will be fine. New York will still have all of the money in the world. Our communities will be left with nothing but a shadow of the longest bull market in the history of our country.

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 07:46

Imagine an Internet where the law required every message sent to be read by government-approved scanning software. Companies that handle such messages wouldn't be allowed to securely encrypt them, or they'd lose legal protections that allow them to operate.

Stop the Graham-Blumenthal Attack on Encryption

That's what the Senate Judiciary Committee has proposed and hopes to pass into law. The so-called EARN IT bill, sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), will strip Section 230 protections away from any website that doesn't follow a list of ''best practices,'' meaning those sites can be sued into bankruptcy. The ''best practices'' list will be created by a government commission, headed by Attorney General Barr, who has made it very clear he would like to ban encryption, and guarantee law enforcement ''legal access'' to any digital message.

The EARN IT bill had its first hearing today, and its supporters' strategy is clear. Because they didn't put the word ''encryption'' in the bill, they're going to insist it doesn't affect encryption.

''This bill says nothing about encryption,'' co-sponsor Sen. Blumenthal said at today's hearing. ''Have you found a word in this bill about encryption?'' he asked one witness.

It's true that the bill's authors avoided using that word. But they did propose legislation that enables an all-out assault on encryption. It would create a 19-person commission that's completely controlled by the Attorney General and law enforcement agencies. And, at the hearing, a Vice-President at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) made it clear [PDF] what he wants the best practices to be. NCMEC believes online services should be made to screen their messages for material that NCMEC considers abusive; use screening technology approved by NCMEC and law enforcement; report what they find in the messages to NCMEC; and be held legally responsible for the content of messages sent by others.

You can't have an Internet where messages are screened en masse, and also have end-to-end encryption any more than you can create backdoors that can only be used by the good guys. The two are mutually exclusive. Concepts like ''client-side scanning'' aren't a clever route around this; such scanning is just another way to break end-to-end encryption. Either the message remains private to everyone but its recipients, or it's available to others.

The 19-person draft commission isn't any better than the 15-person commission envisioned in an early draft of the bill. It's completely dominated by law enforcement and allied groups like NCMEC. Not only will those groups have a majority of votes on the commission, but the bill gives Attorney General Barr the power to veto or approve the list of best practices. Even if other commission members do disagree with law enforcement, Barr's veto power will put him in a position to strongarm them.

The Commission won't be a body that seriously considers policy; it will be a vehicle for creating a law enforcement wish list. Barr has made clear, over and over again, that breaking encryption is at the top of that wish list. Once it's broken, authoritarian regimes around the world will rejoice, as they have the ability to add their own types of mandatory scanning, not just for child sexual abuse material but for self-expression that those governments want to suppress.

The privacy and security of all users will suffer if U.S. law enforcement is able to achieve its dream of breaking encryption. Senators should reject the EARN IT bill.

Stop the Graham-Blumenthal Attack on Encryption

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 07:26

The Sanders campaign appeared on the brink of a commanding lead in the Democratic race. But a series of fateful decisions and internal divisions have left him all but vanquished.

Senator Bernie Sanders and important members of his inner circle made a string of fateful decisions that left him ill positioned to win over skeptical Democrats. Credit... Erin Schaff/The New York Times March 21, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET In mid-January, a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders's pollster offered a stark prognosis for the campaign: Mr. Sanders was on track to finish strong in the first three nominating states, but Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s powerful support from older African-Americans could make him a resilient foe in South Carolina and beyond.

The pollster, Ben Tulchin, in a meeting with campaign aides, recommended a new offensive to influence older black voters, according to three people briefed on his presentation. The data showed two clear vulnerabilities for Mr. Biden: his past support for overhauling Social Security, and his authorship of a punitive criminal justice law in the 1990s.

But the suggestion met with resistance. Some senior advisers argued that it wasn't worth diverting resources from Iowa and New Hampshire, people familiar with the campaign's deliberations said. Others pressed Mr. Tulchin on what kind of message, exactly, would make voters rethink their support for the most loyal ally of the first black president.

Crucially, both Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, consistently expressed reservations about going negative on Mr. Biden, preferring to stick with the left-wing policy message they have been pressing for 40 years.

The warnings about Mr. Biden proved prescient: Two months later, Mr. Sanders is now all but vanquished in the Democratic presidential race, after Mr. Biden resurrected his campaign in South Carolina and built an overwhelming coalition of black voters and white moderates on Super Tuesday.

While Mr. Sanders has not ended his bid, he has fallen far behind Mr. Biden in the delegate count and has taken to trumpeting his success in the battle of ideas rather than arguing that he still has a path to the nomination.

In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate's abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events '-- most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign.

Mr. Sanders had been ''on the brink of winning,'' Mr. Tulchin argued, ''until the most unprecedented event in the history of presidential primaries occurred.''

But interviews with more than three dozen Sanders aides, elected officials, activists and other people who worked with his campaign revealed a more extensive picture of his reversal of political fortune. Though Mr. Sanders climbed to a position of seeming dominance by mid-February, he and his inner circle also made a series of fateful decisions that left him ill positioned to win over skeptical Democrats '-- and sorely vulnerable to an opponent with Mr. Biden's strengths.

Mr. Sanders proved unable to expand his base well beyond the left or to win over African-Americans in meaningful numbers. He failed to heed warnings from traditional party leaders, and even from within his campaign, about the need to modulate his message and unify Democrats. He allowed internal arguments to fester within his campaign, an ungainly operation that fragmented into factions beneath the only two real decision makers '-- Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane.

Though outwardly amiable, Mr. Sanders's inner circle fractured between some long-serving counselors and relative newcomers, like Faiz Shakir, his campaign manager. Mr. Shakir and others regarded pleas from Mr. Tulchin and another pugilistic aide, David Sirota, to go on the attack against Mr. Biden as both futile and annoyingly predictable, while Mr. Shakir's internal critics saw him as exceedingly territorial.

There were also serious operational mistakes: In South Carolina, the campaign effectively deputized a former Ohio state senator and loyal surrogate, Nina Turner, to direct strategy, rather than empowering a political strategist to run the pivotal early state. In private conversations, Mr. Sanders often touted his support from some younger African-Americans, seemingly missing the bigger picture.

And for all of Mr. Tulchin's alarm in January about South Carolina, on the eve of the primary he was reassuring Mr. Sanders that a public poll showing him down over 20 percentage points in the state was ''an outlier for good reason.''

In an email sent to Mr. Sanders and a group of senior aides, Mr. Tulchin reminded the senator that their internal polling had him trailing Mr. Biden by only four points. Two days later, the former vice president would win South Carolina by nearly 30 points.

Perhaps the most significant factor, as with every presidential campaign, was the candidate himself, and the stubborn ideological and stylistic consistency that both endeared Mr. Sanders to his supporters and limited his ability to build a majority coalition larger than his own progressive movement.

Mr. Sanders's campaign declined to comment for this article.

It was Mr. Sanders's persistent lashing of the ''political establishment'' that concerned Representative Peter Welch, a liberal Democrat and fellow Vermonter who was one of just a few members of Congress to endorse Mr. Sanders's campaign.

Mr. Welch said he had reached out to the campaign last month to implore Mr. Sanders to ease up on that rhetoric, which Mr. Welch believed sounded exclusionary to ordinary people backing other candidates. After all, Mr. Welch said, there were ''a lot of voters who are just everyday voters, who decided to vote for other Democrats.''

An Inner Circle DividedIt was late January when Zephyr Teachout, a liberal law professor allied with Mr. Sanders, wrote a column in The Guardian alleging that Mr. Biden had ''a big corruption problem.'' Mr. Sirota, the Sanders aide, who is known for his voluble and combative online persona, quickly blasted out her column to his large email list. A new phase of conflict between Mr. Sanders and Mr. Biden seemed to be underway.

But Mr. Sanders put a stop to it. ''It is absolutely not my view that Joe is corrupt in any way,'' Mr. Sanders told CBS News.

In private, Mr. Sanders's campaign went further, according to two people familiar with the internal turmoil. As punishment for stirring the controversy, Mr. Sirota, who is based in Colorado, was barred from traveling for the campaign outside of visits to its Washington headquarters.

The conflict over Ms. Teachout's column was part of a long-running debate within the Sanders campaign about what approach to take with Mr. Biden. A small group of advisers '-- including Mr. Tulchin, Ms. Turner and Mr. Sirota '-- regularly pleaded with Mr. Sanders to attack the former vice president.

But Mr. Sanders resisted, giving speech after speech scorching unnamed establishment Democrats but declining to pursue Mr. Biden directly. He ruled out several lines of attack against the former vice president because they touched on Mr. Biden's role in the Obama administration, which Democratic primary voters revere.

Mr. Shakir and a second senior aide, Ari Rabin-Havt, took Mr. Sanders's side and repeatedly reminded other campaign officials that Mr. Sanders was the ultimate decision maker on the campaign. In conversations with associates, both men agreed that it might make sense to criticize Mr. Biden in a sharper way. But they said Mr. Sanders could not be persuaded to do so: He and Jane liked the Bidens personally, and their word was final.

The fissures within the campaign leadership extended beyond how to deal with Mr. Biden.

In January, efforts by Ms. Turner and others to direct some campaign resources into Super Tuesday states fizzled against opposition from Mr. Shakir and others. Mr. Shakir was adamant that Mr. Sanders's path to the nomination ran principally through Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and the California primary on Super Tuesday.

There was also a running argument within the campaign about how to handle Senator Elizabeth Warren, with some advisers viewing her as a serious threat that needed to be quashed and others, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mr. Sanders's most important endorser, urging the campaign to seek conciliation.

The dispute erupted publicly in January, when CNN reported that Mr. Sanders had told Ms. Warren in 2018 that he did not believe a woman could defeat President Trump, an assertion Mr. Sanders denied.

Mr. Shakir escalated the conflict, daring Ms. Warren on TV to call the report a ''lie.'' Jeff Weaver, a top Sanders adviser, took a different approach in his own TV appearance, suggesting there had been a misunderstanding '-- a step he told associates was aimed at calming things down.

But Ms. Warren stood by the account, and a clash between her and Mr. Sanders consumed the Democratic debate in Iowa. It would linger over both of them for the remainder of the race.

Revolutionary to a FaultDespite the divisions within his campaign, Mr. Sanders cut a winning path through the first few states to vote, culminating with a landslide victory in Nevada on Feb. 22. In his speech that night, Mr. Sanders sounded a unifying note, focusing on his ''multigenerational, multiracial coalition.''

Encountering a pair of reporters in a Las Vegas hotel that evening, Mr. Tulchin '-- strolling to dinner with Mr. Weaver '-- crowed that Mr. Sanders had delivered a speech worthy of the general election. Mr. Weaver was more subdued, noting that the primary fight was not over.

The speech turned out to be a blip between Mr. Sanders's anti-establishment diatribes. And there was little aides could do to steer him in a different direction: The chief speechwriter on the Sanders campaign was Mr. Sanders.

For months, his political advisers and outside allies had quietly mulled a shift in tone '-- the possibility that Mr. Sanders might take even modest steps to show skeptical Democrats that he could unify the party.

But he has always been disdainful of the art of politics and had to be nudged into wooing even friendly Democratic leaders. As Ms. Warren relentlessly courted Ms. Ocasio-Cortez last fall, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's advisers had to prod Mr. Sanders's aides into having him call her '-- a conversation that eventually led to her endorsing him.

Pushing Mr. Sanders to reach out to ''establishment Democrats'' whom he regularly taunted was even tougher '-- despite the best efforts of even some of his staunchest supporters on the left. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly urged the campaign to broaden Mr. Sanders's message and seek out new allies, outside his familiar base. (In a statement, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez denied any ''tension or major disagreements'' with Mr. Sanders.)

RoseAnn DeMoro, the former leader of the nurses union who was one of Mr. Sanders's most ferocious surrogates in 2016, and the actor John Cusack, another ally, both pressed the campaign to refocus Mr. Sanders's pitch on a general-election audience, people familiar with their entreaties said.

Mr. Sanders was not interested in moving in that direction. Some advisers, who endured the divisive 2016 campaign, believed that it was only after seizing a dominant advantage that Mr. Sanders could attempt to make peace with a Democratic establishment that remained intensely wary of him.

Arriving in Charleston, S.C., ahead of the Feb. 29 state primary, Mr. Weaver said the campaign had not yet sought a working relationship with figures like the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi because they wanted first to demonstrate the full sweep of their coalition on Super Tuesday three days later. He reached for a Civil War analogy to explain the muscle-flexing strategy. Abraham Lincoln did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation, Mr. Weaver said, until after Union troops had routed the Confederacy at the bloody battle of Antietam.

In the weeks before Super Tuesday, Mr. Sanders had indeed refused to yield to critics who were searching for gestures of accommodation. In Nevada, leaders of the powerful Culinary Workers Union Local 226, were frustrated that Mr. Sanders did not speak out more forcefully when his supporters heaped abuse on predominantly female union leaders over their opposition to ''Medicare for all.''

As Culinary officials were deluged with vitriol, including graphic and misogynistic messages, Mr. Sanders placed a phone call to the union's secretary-treasurer, Geoconda Arg¼ello-Kline, but they never connected.

''Our feeling was that Senator Sanders should have said something earlier and should have been stronger about it,'' said Bethany Khan, a political strategist for the union.

And then there was Cuba: In February, Democratic officials in Florida reached out to propose convening some conversations between Mr. Sanders and Latino leaders in South Florida, many of whom were nervous about his rhetoric on socialism and revolution. The Sanders campaign showed tentative interest, people familiar with the conversations said.

Then, the day after the Nevada caucuses, CBS aired a ''60 Minutes'' interview in which Mr. Sanders stood by his past praise for certain policies of Fidel Castro's government. Democrats across Florida, including prominent members of Congress, erupted in dismay.

Mr. Sanders stood his ground, including in a televised debate. And he made no attempt at private damage control: None of the lawmakers who rebuked him in public heard from Mr. Sanders or his senior aides.

His campaign eventually dispatched emissaries, including the actress and activist Cynthia Nixon, to meet quietly with Latino groups in Orlando after Super Tuesday, but they could not assure local Democrats that Mr. Sanders would change course before Florida's March 17 primary.

''It may be authentic to Bernie, but it does not work in Florida,'' said Alex Barrio, a Democratic activist in Florida who attended the meeting. ''It's conceding Florida in a monumental way.''

By the time Florida voted, however, the race was all but over.

Mr. Sanders's campaign, like much of the political world, had not anticipated Mr. Biden's roaring comeback after South Carolina's Feb. 29 primary. Indeed, until then, Mr. Sanders's campaign was expecting to win seven or eight of the 14 states voting on Super Tuesday and seize a solid delegate lead over the rest of the Democratic field.

So confident was Mr. Sanders that he would vanquish Mr. Biden that he spent valuable days trying to force two other candidates out of the race by campaigning in Minnesota and Massachusetts, the home states of Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Warren. He won neither.

Mr. Sanders had suddenly become a spectator in the campaign, powerless to stop a tectonic shift against him by the party's moderate wing. Ms. Klobuchar called Mr. Sanders before announcing her endorsement of Mr. Biden, while Mr. Sanders and Mr. Buttigieg did not speak.

After being routed across the country, Mr. Sanders knew who to blame in an appearance on ABC's ''This Week.''

''What the establishment wanted was to make sure that people coalesced around Biden and try to defeat me,'' Mr. Sanders said. ''So that's not surprising.''

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 07:05

éæ'‰ç‹ @ yulikao19871021

11h Replying to

@jenniferatntd It means that they actually lost 8M people during Jan, considering you said that it takes a month to cancel the mobile subscription...its about 100x the official infected numbers....and it might also coincide with that 99% of people didn't get out of the new built hospitals...

View conversation · JS @ jarot9804

11h Replying to

@yulikao19871021 @jenniferatntd Thats it. Play with percentages. It still is unbelievable

View conversation · Tim @ AbesMullet

11h Replying to

@jenniferatntd I heard a theory that everyone was indoors and using WiFi and wasn't on 4G or 5G during this time. Thoughts?

View conversation · Ben Zhang @ Benz8324

11h Replying to

@AbesMullet @jenniferatntd That has to do with data volume, nothing to do with the user#.

View conversation · jo 🷠@ jojosemilla

11h Replying to

@jenniferatntd Some hints maybe...

twitter.com/kiss486/status'... View conversation · Elitecounter @ Elitecounter1

11h Replying to

@jenniferatntd Is China Mobile the only cell phone company in China?

View conversation · Spoon89 🇺🇸 🇲🇽 @ Spoon891

11h Replying to

@Elitecounter1 @jenniferatntd There are 3 major providers in China: China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.

View conversation · Jay Nayak @ jaynayak12

11h Replying to

@jenniferatntd And there are 3 major mobile service providers in China.. imagine the actual figures of death related to Coronavirus..CCPVirus is the deadliest

View conversation · 5DfreeHK🷠@ TShum5

8h Replying to

@jenniferatntd in

#China, mobile is more important and useful than cash. e-wallet can buy every daily thing but cash can't. So many mobile disappeared in Jan and Feb, i guess those are dead.

#ChinaLiesPeopleDie #ChinaVirus View conversation ·

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 00:05

A slate of former intelligence chiefs penned an op-ed in The Washington Post on Friday panning President Trump for removing several officials from his administration, saying the development is being overshadowed by the coronavirus outbreak.

The piece, written by nine top former intelligence officials, sought to underscore the threat the removals pose to institutions that are designed to protect the country from foreign and domestic attacks, warning that the country is being put at risk as it dedicates its efforts to battle COVID-19.

"[A]s we collectively fight this deadly disease, the intelligence institutions that help protect us all from current and future threats are also under attack from an insidious enemy: domestic politics. We cannot let the covid-19 pandemic be a cover for the deeply destructive path being pursued by the Trump administration," the former officials wrote.

"Even amid public health concerns, we cannot be distracted from how deeply destructive these removals are to our nation's safety."

Among the more prominent authors are former Directors of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who left his post last month, John Brennan and James Clapper as well as former CIA Director Michael Hayden.

Several of the authors had public or reportedly private clashes with Trump, largely over his governing style and foreign policies.

The former officials criticized the firing of Russell Travers, a longtime intelligence professional who was dismissed from his position as acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) on Wednesday night. The authors praised Travers as "the epitome of what we strive for in national security."

The authors warned that the departed officials will be replaced by those "who will undoubtedly know less and who will be more beholden to the intelligence community's politicized leadership," a move they said could undermine the nonpartisan advice the president is supposed to receive from the intelligence community.

"These unceremonious removals send a damaging message across the intelligence community. Every current officer sees that speaking truth to power in this administration is an immediate career-killer. Every young recruit will conclude that joining the intelligence community is little different from signing up for any other politicized element of the federal bureaucracy," they wrote.

The authors called on Congress to beef up its oversight of the White House to protect the intelligence community from "destructive" removals.

"[T]he gutting of the intelligence community's experienced professionals is not reform. It is politicization, pure and simple. It is destructive of our nation's ideals, and it puts us all at risk," they wrote. "Congress must reinvigorate the strictest of oversight to preserve what is left of the country's prized, apolitical intelligence community."

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Sat, 21 Mar 2020 00:02

Emerging evidence strongly suggests a research collaboration between a North Carolina scientist and two Wuhan, Chinese microbiologists is the smoking gun in the creation and release of the COVID-19 superbug. A coronavirus synthesized in two laboratories on opposite sides of the world into a chimera viral monstrosity, optimized for infectious spread and with a lethality 20 times that of the common influenza.My initial research on the COVID-19 outbreak led nearly immediately to the work of Dr. Ralph Baric. A microbiologist and chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina who had raised the eyebrows and the ire of the immunological community in 2015 by undertaking an unauthorized ''gain of function'' study for the synthesis of a supercharged SARS coronavirus. Work strictly forbidden by both the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization. Both Baric's hubris in ignoring a CDC/WHO contravention against gain of function studies and his clear disregard for the consequences of his activities immediately captured instinctual attention as someone whose activities bore closer inspection for potential connection to the Wuhan crisis that is now a global pathogen gaining momentum with each passing day.

All that was missing was a direct connection between Baric's maverick killer coronavirus research and the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan at the (Wuhan Institute for Science and Technology) that serves as China's only bioweapons research facility, located in the very city where the COVID-19 pandemic began.

If only I'd read the finest of fine print sooner. Buried in the minutiae of Baric's published study documents, two barely credited collaborators in the gain of function coronavirus study: Doctors Xing-Yi Ge and Zhengli-Li. Microbiology and immunology researchers working at Wuhan Institute for Science and Technology, undertaking precisely the same gain of function study for a newly augmented coronavirus. A respiratory superbug with a particularly infectious surface protein array (SHC014) and the innards of a pneumococcal killer. The precursor to COVID-19.

But first, more background.

In 2015 Dr. Baric's researchers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill raised the ire of some in the infectious disease community when they contravened a ban on particularly hazardous ''Gain of Function'' laboratory studies successfully engineering a virus that combined the highly adaptable SHC014 surface protein array with common SARS, producing a potential pandemic supervirus that proved fatal across species lines, infecting human lung cells and killing mice in laboratory trials. The CDC had banned all gain of function testing on American soil in October of 2013, but eventually issued a ruling allowing North Carolina virologist, Dr. Ralph Baric to continue his work because his study had predated the ban by a matter of weeks.

The creation of such a new, non-natural risk to human health triggered bioethics backlash and criticism from around the world, with several elite virologists and infectious disease specialists slamming Dr. Baric's work as potentially catastrophic, irresponsible and an unnecessary risk, given that previous studies of past outbreaks had already confirmed the near seamless transitory capacity of the SHC014 protein array in humans. Baric's work also demonstrated once again the ease with which existing viral pathogens can be lab altered and optimized, both for maximum infection potential and lethality in humans.

Contrary to public understanding, coronavirus refers not to a specific infection like the present outbreak originating in Wuhan, China, but to a broad spectrum of viruses with similar ''coronal'' surface protein features that allow them to bind to and infect human cells without first incubating and mutating in a second or third host species. The SHC014 corona protein is native to the Horseshoe Bat, a prevalent bat species in China that are both captured and sold live, butchered and cooked or fried whole as crunchy street food fare in markets across China. (I've eaten them.)

Because of their unique adaptability and highly mutagenic nature, direct crossover viruses like coronavirus are of particular human health risk and are responsible for some of the most virulent outbreaks in history, including Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan and Marburg, (similar and similarly deadly hemorrhagic fever filoviruses also originating in bats but with direct demonstrated infectious capacity in both simians and humans) as well as SARS, and MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome. Patient Zero as the first recorded case of Ebola was a vacationing Frenchman who camped near Mt. Elgon in Kenya in 1980 and is believed to have ventured inside nearby Kitum Cave, home to a colony of African fruit bats potentially numbering in the millions. The man died horribly only days later, hemorrhaging to death as his organs liquefied and 'bled out.'

Bat viruses are very often, potential slate wipers in humans. And it is that lethality that has made these airborne superbugs intriguing fare for researchers often willing to take ungodly risks in the name of science. And potential profit. Far more troublingly, it also endows these pathogens with effective layers of plausible deniability for bioweapons research, development and deployment, cloaked in statistical relevance of an Asian petri dish where cross-species disease leaping is generational fact.

Translation: If you were going to commit bioweapons genocide against the human race, releasing an engineered bat-originated, cross-species superbug in a Chinese city would be close to the perfect crime. Ease of replication. Plausible deniability. And you'd need a scanning electron microscope and the wherewithal to use it to ever deduce the forensic truth.

One can very easily imagine a materials for play scenario that went something like this:

Dr. Baric is given his original bat virus feeder stock from the plentiful populations of Horseshoe bat colonies near Wuhan which are natural carriers of coronaviruses like the common cold. After successfully harvesting and modifying hosted common coronavirus with the SHC014 protein array, Dr. Baric negotiates a transfer of the newly augmented virus back to the Wuhan BSL-4 laboratory as compensation for parallel study. Chinese researchers immediately go to work on further modifications, including for reasons unknown, the incorporation of HIV genetic markers, creating a virus that prefers the much stronger furin catalyst protein bond cleavage site, a bond 1,000 times stronger than the ACE2 protein bond of typical SARS coronavirus. Not a mutation, but a scientific augmentation for a clearly weaponized designer pathogen.

And in early December, the world is witness to the first case of COVID-19. A coronavirus with the SHC014 protein array, known to be housed at the Wuhan BSL-4 lab, roughly 700 feet from the ''seafood market'' that was initially blamed as the site origin of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak that is now sweeping the world.

Related

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 23:54

Joseph Maguire, John Brennan (interim), Michael Leiter, Matthew G. Olsen, Nicholas Rasmussen, Andrew Liepman (acting and deputy) and Geoffrey O'Connell (principal deputy) are former directors of the National Counterterrorism Center. Michael V. Hayden is former director of the CIA and former principal deputy director of national intelligence. James Clapper was director of national intelligence.

The United States '-- and the world '-- faces a historic threat to its health, well-being and economy. The global covid-19 pandemic challenges all of us: the public, cities, states and, of course, the federal government. But as we collectively fight this deadly disease, the intelligence institutions that help protect us all from current and future threats are also under attack from an insidious enemy: domestic politics. We cannot let the covid-19 pandemic be a cover for the deeply destructive path being pursued by the Trump administration.

The most recent illustration of this unprecedented attack is the continuing dismissal of career intelligence professionals '-- officers who have ably served both Republican and Democratic administrations regardless of their personal political stripe. Specifically, the unceremonious removal this week of the leadership of the National Counterterrorism Center. The NCTC, though not as recognized an entity as its intelligence community counterparts such as the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency, is one of the crown-jewel creations of the United States' post-9/11 reforms.

Created to ''connect the dots'' and coordinate U.S. counterterrorism operational planning, the NCTC brings together representatives from across the federal government to maintain critical watch lists, monitor threats in real time and make sure that the disparate elements of the massive federal bureaucracy respond in a coordinated fashion. In short: Since 9/11, the NCTC has helped do for counterterrorism what the U.S. government is now trying to piece together against its new viral threat.

Although we were heartened to see President Trump nominate an experienced Special Operations officer to serve as the next Senate-confirmed director of the NCTC, we are deeply dismayed '-- and perplexed '-- as to why he would simultaneously gut the center's leadership of critical institutional knowledge. The NCTC's just-dismissed acting director, Russell Travers, began his career as an Army intelligence officer more than 40 years ago. He stood up the NCTC's predecessor organization while the embers of Ground Zero still smoldered. He built the terrorism watch list from a set of index cards into the envy of countries around the world (and, it should be noted, as the model for the president's own aspirational watch list to screen travelers to the United States for threats other than terrorism). Travers and his deputy, a career National Security Agency officer, were the epitome of what we strive for in national security: nonpartisan experts who serve the president and the American people with no regard to personal politics.

Now both are gone, to be replaced by as-yet-unnamed acting heads who will undoubtedly know less and who will be more beholden to the intelligence community's politicized leadership. The next acting heads might or might not be gone themselves in a matter of months if the president's nominee is ultimately confirmed. In the meantime, who manages the critical security tasks, including watch-listing and ensuring that the government-wide counterterrorism structure remains well integrated?

Even amid public health concerns, we cannot be distracted from how deeply destructive these removals are to our nation's safety. To be clear: This is not just about protecting a few senior officers. These unceremonious removals send a damaging message across the intelligence community. Every current officer sees that speaking truth to power in this administration is an immediate career-killer. Every young recruit will conclude that joining the intelligence community is little different from signing up for any other politicized element of the federal bureaucracy. Countless more talented young Americans will decide that federal service, indeed public service, is not a worthy calling.

We do not suggest that post-9/11 reforms should be etched in stone. All healthy institutions should evolve with changing circumstances, and the NCTC as well as the rest of government must adapt as circumstances change. But the gutting of the intelligence community's experienced professionals is not reform. It is politicization, pure and simple. It is destructive of our nation's ideals, and it puts us all at risk.

Congress must reinvigorate the strictest of oversight to preserve what is left of the country's prized, apolitical intelligence community. Post-9/11 reforms happened for a critical reason: The U.S. bureaucracy wasn't prepared for a new era of threats. Indeed, the NCTC is a model of how the government should work in close coordination and with unity of effort in response to a crisis. It provides critical lessons for today's challenge. The administration's continued politicization of intelligence pulls the nation further from this goal, making us more vulnerable to the next national security threat regardless from where it emanates.

Read more:

David Ignatius: The Trump administration adds to its purge of professionals

The Post's View: Trump puts an unqualified loyalist in charge of national intelligence

The Post's View: The job is essential to U.S. security. Trump's nominee is not qualified.

John D. Negroponte and Edward M. Wittenstein: Trump plays a dangerous game in weakening the top intelligence job

Max Boot: Trump appoints a partisan propagandist to run the intelligence community

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 23:51

Teva will donate 6 Million tablets through wholesalers to hospitals by March 31, and more than 10 Million within a month TEL AVIV, Israel & PARSIPPANY, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE and TASE: TEVA) announced today the immediate donation of more than 6 million doses of hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets through wholesalers to hospitals across the U.S. to meet the urgent demand for the medicine as an investigational target to treat COVID-19. The company is also looking at additional ways to address the global need.

''We are committed to helping to supply as many tablets as possible as demand for this treatment accelerates at no cost,'' said Brendan O'Grady, Teva Executive Vice President, North America Commercial. ''Immediately upon learning of the potential benefit of hyroxychloroquine, Teva began to assess supply and to urgently acquire additional ingredients to make more product while arranging for all of what we had to be distributed immediately.''

Additional production of hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets is also being assessed and subsequently ramped up with materials that are being sent to Teva from our ingredient supplier. Teva will ship 6 Million tablets through wholesalers to hospitals by March 31, and more than 10 Million within a month.

Hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets manufactured by Teva are approved by U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of malaria, lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis. Although the product is not currently approved for use in the treatment of COVID-19, it is currently under investigation for efficacy against the coronavirus and has been requested by US government officials to be made available for use immediately. The Company is also reviewing supply of both hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine globally to determine whether there are additional supply and access opportunities for patients.

Teva is also actively looking across its expansive range of products to determine if the company can help to provide any other products that may be relevant in addressing acute and substantial need during the COVID-19 crisis.

ABOUT TEVA

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE and TASE: TEVA) has been developing and producing medicines to improve people's lives for more than a century. We are a global leader in generic and specialty medicines with a portfolio consisting of over 3,500 products in nearly every therapeutic area. Around 200 million people around the world take a Teva medicine every day, and are served by one of the largest and most complex supply chains in the pharmaceutical industry. Along with our established presence in generics, we have significant innovative research and operations supporting our growing portfolio of specialty and biopharmaceutical products. Learn more at www.tevapharm.com.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENT

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 which are based on management's current beliefs and expectations and are subject to substantial risks and uncertainties, both known and unknown, that could cause our future results, performance or achievements to differ significantly from that expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences are discussed in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the first, second and third quarter of 2019 and in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, including in the sections captioned ''Risk Factors.'' Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made, and we assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements or other information contained herein, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. You are cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 23:49

President Donald Trump directed the FDA to cut the red tape to fast-track a few drugs proven around the world to treat the Wuhan coronavirus.

Trump told the media that the administration ''slashed red tape to develop vaccines and therapies as fast as it can possibly be done, long before anybody else was even thinking about doing this.''

From The Wall Street Journal:

''Nothing will stand in our way as we pursue any avenue to find what best works against this horrible virus,'' Mr. Trump told reporters at a Thursday White House news conference.Mr. Trump listed drugs used for other purposes that he said might be able to be used in treating the coronavirus.''If things don't go as planned, it's not going to kill anybody,'' he said.Mr. Trump specifically touted drug company Gilead Sciences Inc., and pointed to several drugs, including Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine.

Trump mentioned hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil), an old malaria drug, and treatment for autoimmune disorders.

A study conducted in Marseilles, France, had ''encouraging early results'' with the drug against coronavirus.

FDA Commissioner Dr. Syephen Hahn said that ''a doctor could ask'' for an experimental drug that is available. The FDA has ''criteria for that and speedy approval.''

How about the government not bring back that red tape? Unfortunately, patients do not have access to drugs because everything has to go through the government.

Let's look at Olfert Landt, who owns a small-Berlin company:

Founder of a small Berlin-based company, the ponytailed 54-year-old first raced to help German researchers come up with a diagnostic test and then spurred his company to produce and ship more than 1.4 million tests by the end of February for the World Health Organization.''My wife and I have been working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, ever since,'' Landt said by phone about 1 a.m. Friday, Berlin time. ''Our days are full.''By contrast, over the same critical period, U.S. efforts to distribute tests ground nearly to a halt, and the country's inability to produce them left public health officials with limited means to determine where and how fast the virus was spreading. From mid-January until Feb. 28, fewer than 4,000 tests from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were used out of more 160,000 produced.

Landt said that the U.S. has at least ten companies that could have done what his company did to combat the virus. In other words, the U.S. should embrace the private companies to help in these situations.

Also, why not all the time?

The coronavirus has spread through the U.S. for weeks. Yet, the FDA only approved Roche and Thermo Fisher last week to produce tests.

You guys know I have numerous health issues, mainly three autoimmune disorders. If there is a drug out there could help me combat the disorders you better believe I'd try them out under my doctor's supervision.

One more thing from the press conference: Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams also encouraged young people to donate blood:

''One donation can save up to three lives. Blood centers are opening now and in need of your donation,'' Adams said.He continued: ''Blood donation is safe and blood centers are taking extra precautions including spacing beds 6 feet apart and disinfecting surfaces between between patients and temperature checking staffs and encouraging donors making appointments ahead of time so we can space them out.''

CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 23:47

'):""},t.getDefinedParams=function(n,e){return e.filter(function(e){return n[e]}).reduce(function(e,t){return g(e,function(e,t,n){t in e?Object.defineProperty(e,t,{value:n,enumerable:!0,configurable:!0,writable:!0}):e[t]=n;return e}({},t,n[t]))},{})},t.isValidMediaTypes=function(e){var t=["banner","native","video"];if(!Object.keys(e).every(function(e){return s()(t,e)}))return!1;if(e.video&&e.video.context)return s()(["instream","outstream","adpod"],e.video.context);return!0},t.getBidderRequest=function(e,t,n){return c()(e,function(e){return 0t[n]?-1:0}};var r=n(3),i=n(115),o=n.n(i),a=n(12),c=n.n(a),u=n(11),s=n.n(u),d=n(116),f=n.n(d);n.d(t,"deepAccess",function(){return f.a});var l=n(117);function p(e){return function(e){if(Array.isArray(e)){for(var t=0,n=new Array(e.length);t\n ')):""}function ce(e,t,n){return null==t?n:Y(t)?t:X(t)?t.toString():void _.logWarn("Unsuported type for param: "+e+" required type: String")}function ue(e,t,n){return n.indexOf(e)===t}function se(e,t){return e.concat(t)}function de(e){return Object.keys(e)}function fe(e,t){return e[t]}var le=be("timeToRespond",function(e,t){return t=e.length?(this._t=void 0,i(1)):i(0,"keys"==t?n:"values"==t?e[n]:[n,e[n]])},"values"),o.Arguments=o.Array,r("keys"),r("values"),r("entries")},101:function(e,t,n){"use strict";var r=n(102),i=n(73);e.exports=n(104)("Set",function(t){return function(e){return t(this,0>>0,o=0;if(t)n=t;else{for(;o=b.syncsPerBidder?a.logWarn('Number of user syncs exceeded for "'.concat(t,'"')):d.canBidderRegisterSync(e,t)?(f[e].push([t,n]),(r=p)[i=t]?r[i]+=1:r[i]=1,void(p=r)):a.logWarn('Bidder "'.concat(t,'" not permitted to register their "').concat(e,'" userSync pixels.')):a.logWarn("Bidder is required for registering sync"):a.logWarn('User sync type "'.concat(e,'" not supported'));var r,i},d.syncUsers=function(){var e=0Object(y.timestamp)()},s=function(e){return e&&(e.status&&!S()([O.BID_STATUS.RENDERED],e.status)||!e.status)};function w(e,r,t){var i=2i&&(r=!1)),!r}),r&&e.run(),r}function g(e,t){void 0===e[t]?e[t]=1:e[t]++}p(e)||(x.logWarn("queueing auction due to limited endpoint capacity"),H.push(e))}return{addBidReceived:function(e){f=f.concat(e)},addNoBid:function(e){l=l.concat(e)},executeCallback:T,callBids:function(){b=G,t=Date.now();var e=P.makeBidRequests(y,t,p,m,s);x.logInfo("Bids Requested for Auction with id: ".concat(p),e),e.lengthe.getTimeout()+B.b.getConfig("timeoutBuffer")&&e.executeCallback(!0)}function Q(e,t){var n=e.getBidRequests(),r=U()(n,function(e){return e.bidderCode===t.bidderCode});!function(t,e){var n;if(t.bidderCode&&(0t.max?e:t},{max:0}),g=0,b=v()(e.buckets,function(e){if(n>p.max*r){var t=e.precision;void 0===t&&(t=y),i=(e.max*r).toFixed(t)}else{if(n=t.length?{value:void 0,done:!0}:(e=r(t,n),this._i+=e.length,{value:e,done:!1})})},63:function(e,t,r){function i(){}var o=r(29),a=r(94),c=r(64),u=r(51)("IE_PROTO"),s="prototype",d=function(){var e,t=r(56)("iframe"),n=c.length;for(t.style.display="none",r(97).appendChild(t),t.src="javascript:",(e=t.contentWindow.document).open(),e.write("WorldXie Huanchi/Xinhua via REUTERS

Comments March 20, 2020 12:44 PM ET Font Size:

Taiwan is blaming the World Health Organization's relationship with China for its failure to act on early warnings of human-to-human transmission of coronavirus.

Taiwanese health officials alerted WHO of the infectivity of coronavirus in late December 2019, but the organization failed to report the claims to other countries, according to a Financial Times report.

Weeks after receiving Taiwan's warning, on Jan. 14, WHO repeated China's claim that coronavirus was not contagious among humans. (RELATED: FLASHBACK Jan. 14: WHO Tells Everyone Don't Worry Because China Says Coronavirus Isn't Contagious)

Taiwan reported its concerns to a WHO framework called the International Health Regulations on Dec. 31, 2019. The IHR framework is intended to be an exchange of epidemic data between 196 countries.

''While the IHR's internal website provides a platform for all countries to share information on the epidemic and their response, none of the information shared by our country's [Centers for Disease Control] is being put up there,'' Taiwanese Vice President Chen Chien-Jen told the Financial Times.

''The WHO could not obtain first-hand information to study and judge whether there was human-to-human transmission of COVID-10. This led it to announce human-to-human transmission with a delay, and an opportunity to raise the alert level both in China and the wider world was lost,'' Chen added.

WHO declined to comment on Taiwan's accusation, telling the Financial Times it holds ''frank and open discussions on sometimes sensitive issues'' with countries and in order to maintain trust it needs to ''respect the confidentiality of such communications.''

Taipei metro staff in the MRT station monitor the temperatures of passengers with a thermal scanner on March 19, 2020 in Taipei, Taiwan. Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong have had more successful approaches in battling the pandemic given their experience with SARS in 2003. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images )

Taiwan has had a model response to the coronavirus crisis. Despite being situated just 140 miles off the Chinese coast, Taiwan has had only 135 confirmed cases of the virus and two deaths, according to John Hopkins University.

However, Taiwan has become largely locked out of international institutions as communist China's influence around the world has grown.

Taiwan was excluded from an emergency committee convened by the WHO on Jan. 21 to determine whether the coronavirus outbreak would grow into an international crisis due to Chinese pressure to keep Taiwan from participating in international organizations, according to a report by Foreign Policy.

China and Taiwan, known officially the Republic of China, officially claim mainland China as a part of their respective territories. And under China's communist government, under its ''One China Principle,'' officially claims Taiwan as part of its territory.

The long-running dispute between the two nations began at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when Chinese Nationalist leader Chaing Kai-Shek fled to Taiwan, opening the door for Chinese communists to wrest control of the mainland.

WHO did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation's request for comment.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 15:01

Adrenochrome is a chemical compound with the molecular formula C9H9NO3 produced by the oxidation of adrenaline (epinephrine). The derivative carbazochrome is a hemostatic medication. Despite a similarity in chemical names, it is unrelated to chrome or chromium.

AdrenochromeNamesIUPAC name3-Hydroxy-1-methyl-2,3-dihydro-1H-indole-5,6-dione

Other namesAdraxone; Pink adrenaline

IdentifiersChemSpiderECHA InfoCard 100.000.176InChI=1S/C9H9NO3/c1-10-4-9(13)5-2-7(11)8(12)3-6(5)10/h2-3,9,13H,4H2,1H3

YKey: RPHLQSHHTJORHI-UHFFFAOYSA-N

Y InChI=1/C9H9NO3/c1-10-4-9(13)5-2-7(11)8(12)3-6(5)10/h2-3,9,13H,4H2,1H3

Key: RPHLQSHHTJORHI-UHFFFAOYAD

O=C1\C=C2/C(=C\C1=O)N(CC2O)C

PropertiesC 9H 9N O 3Molar mass 179.175 g·mol''1 Density3.264 g/cm3Boiling point 115''120 °C (239''248 °F; 388''393 K) (decomposes)Except where otherwise noted, data are given for materials in their

standard state (at 25 °C [77 °F], 100 kPa).

N verify (what is Y N ?)Infobox referencesChemistry Edit In vivo, adrenochrome is synthesized by the oxidation of epinephrine. In vitro, silver oxide (Ag2O) is used as an oxidizing agent.[1] Its presence is detected in solution by a pink color. The color turns brown upon polymerization.

Effect on the brain Edit Several small-scale studies (involving 15 or fewer test subjects) conducted in the 1950s and 1960s reported that adrenochrome triggered psychotic reactions such as thought disorder, derealization, and euphoria.[2] Researchers Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond claimed that adrenochrome is a neurotoxic, psychotomimetic substance and may play a role in schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.[3] In what they called the "adrenochrome hypothesis",[4] they speculated that megadoses of vitamin C and niacin could cure schizophrenia by reducing brain adrenochrome.[5][6] While the treatment of schizophrenia with such potent anti-oxidants is highly contested in literature, and adrenochrome is not currently believed to have any psychedelic properties,[7] a number of recently published papers consider Hoffer's paper a landmark contribution to the notion that impairment of what's now termed the anti-oxidant defense system (AODS) seems to play a role in schizophrenia.[8]

Legal status Edit Adrenochrome is unscheduled by the Controlled Substances Act in the United States. It is not an approved drug product by the Food and Drug Administration, and if produced as a dietary supplement it must comply with Good manufacturing practice.[9]

In popular culture Edit Author Hunter S. Thompson mentioned adrenochrome in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The adrenochrome scene also appears in the novel's film adaptation. In the DVD commentary, director Terry Gilliam admits that his and Thompson's portrayal is a fictional exaggeration. In fact, Gilliam insists that the drug is entirely fictional and seems unaware of the existence of a substance with even a similar name. Hunter S. Thompson also mentions adrenochrome in his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. In the footnotes in chapter April, page 140 he says, "It was sometime after midnight in a ratty hotel room and my memory of the conversation is haze, due to massive ingestion of booze, fatback, and forty cc's of adrenochrome."The harvesting of an adrenal gland from a live victim to obtain adrenochrome for drug abuse is a plot feature in the first episode "Whom the Gods would Destroy", of Series 1 of the British TV series Lewis (2008).[10]In Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, "drencrom" (presumably the Nadsat term for adrenochrome) is listed as one of the potential drugs that can be added to Moloko Plus (milk laced with a drug of the consumer's choice) at the Korova Milk Bar.In Fear The Walking Dead season 3 episode 14, "During the show, Nick and Troy took a very strange drug. It was described as an actual human brain stem that contained chemicals from the adrenal gland."[11]Adrenochrome is also featured in a variety of conspiracy theories, such as QAnon and Pizzagate.[12]References Edit ^ MacCarthy, Chim, Ind. Paris 55,435(1946) ^ Smythies J (March 2002). "The adrenochrome hypothesis of schizophrenia revisited". Neurotoxicity Research. 4 (2): 147''50. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.688.3796 . doi:10.1080/10298420290015827. PMID 12829415. ^ Hoffer A, Osmond H, Smithies J (January 1954). "Schizophrenia; a new approach. II. Result of a year's research". The Journal of Mental Science. 100 (418): 29''45. doi:10.1192/bjp.100.418.29. PMID 13152519. ^ Hoffer A (1999). "The Adrenochrome Hypothesis and Psychiatry". The Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. 14 (1): 49''62. ^ Hoffer A, Osmond H (1967). The Hallucinogens. Academic Press. ISBN 978-1-4832-6169-0. ^ Hoffer A (1994). "Schizophrenia: An Evolutionary Defense Against Severe Stress" (PDF) . Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. 9 (4): 205''221. ^ "The controversy that these reports created just sort of died away, and the adrenochrome family has never been accepted as being psychedelic. No one in the scientific community today is looking in and about the area, and at present this is considered as an interesting historical footnote." As seen at: Shulgin A, Shulgin A (1991). "#157 (TMA)". PiHKAL - A Chemical Love Story. Transform Press. ^ Yao JK, Reddy R (October 2011). "Oxidative stress in schizophrenia: pathogenetic and therapeutic implications". Antioxidants & Redox Signaling. 15 (7): 1999''2002. doi:10.1089/ars.2010.3646. PMC 3159103 . PMID 21194354. ^ "Compound summary for adrenochrome". National Center for Biotechnology Information, PubChem Database . Retrieved 2020-01-22 . ^ "Inspector Lewis Series Synopsis". Archived from the original on 2008-06-26. ^ Stephanie Dube Dwilson (October 9, 2017). " ' Fear the Walking Dead': Was Nick's Adrenal Brain Stem Drug Real?". Heavy.com. ^ Alex Nichols (June 6, 2019). "Slender Man for Boomers". The Outline. Retrieved 16 March 2020. External links Edit Adrenochrome Commentary at erowid.orgAdrenochrome deposits resulting from the use of epinephrine-containing eye drops used to treat glaucoma from the Iowa Eye Atlas (searched for diagnosis = adrenochrome)

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 09:18

The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are asking Facebook, Google and other tech giants to give them greater access to Americans' smartphone location data in order to help them combat the spread of the coronavirus, according to four people at companies involved in the discussions who are not authorized to speak about them publicly.

Federal health officials say they could use anonymous, aggregated user data collected by the tech companies to map the spread of the virus '-- a practice known as "syndromic surveillance" '-- and prevent further infections. They could also use the data to see whether people were practicing "social distancing."

Some sources stressed that the effort would be anonymized and that government would not have access to specific individuals' locations. They noted that users would be required to opt-in to the effort.

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Get breaking news and insider analysis on the rapidly changing world of media and technology right to your inbox.

The federal effort, first reported by The Washington Post, will force the tech giants to weigh their commitments to user privacy against their desire to help combat a disease that has cost thousands of human lives and upended the global economy.

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

The government officials have held at least two calls in recent days with representatives from the companies, the sources said. Those officials are "very serious" about making this happen, a person at one of the tech companies said.

Similar and more aggressive surveillance practices have already been put to use in China, South Korea and Israel. The moves have set off alarm bells among privacy advocates who fear what the government may do with users' data.

Download the NBC News app for full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

Facebook already provides health researchers and nongovernmental organizations in some countries with anonymized data to help disease prevention efforts. Laura McGorman, policy lead of Facebook's "Data for Good" program, said a similar effort could be used "to understand and help combat the spread of the virus."

But other sources warned that providing the government with greater access to anonymized location data now could lead to the erosion of individual privacy down the line, especially if the government starts to ask for non-anonymized data.

Representatives from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco all took part in the call with White House and federal health officials. Spokespeople for the companies declined to comment on the discussions.

Dylan Byers Dylan Byers is a senior media reporter for NBC News based in Los Angeles.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 09:15

It Begins: CDC Asks Tech Giants Twitter, Google, Facebook for Location of US Citizens '-- Will Track Whether Americans Are Practicing Proper ''Social Distancing'' by Jim Hoft March 19, 2020 CDC headquarters, Atlanta, Georgia, photo via CDC

This should scare the hell out of every freedom-loving American.

The CDC is asking tech giants for access to Americans' cellphone locations. That way the government can track the location of every American and see whether Americans are properly practicing ''social distancing.''This sounds like a futuristic nightmare in realtime.

The Roanoke Tea Party reported on this.

NBC News reported:

The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are asking Facebook, Google and other tech giants to give them greater access to Americans' smartphone location data in order to help them combat the spread of the coronavirus, according to four people at companies involved in the discussions who are not authorized to speak about them publicly.

Federal health officials say they could use anonymous, aggregated user data collected by the tech companies to map the spread of the virus '-- a practice known as ''syndromic surveillance'' '-- and prevent further infections. They could also use the data to see whether people were practicing ''social distancing.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 09:02

Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images

A new poll shows 55 percent of Americans approve of President Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic despite continued failures and a steady stream of misinformation from the White House podium.

According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday, approval of Trump's COVID-19 response is up from 43 percent last week to 55 percent now, while 43 percent disapprove.

ABC's report chalks the improvement up to the shift in ''tone'' that many in the media have observed and praised, but which Trump himself says never happened because he always took the crisis seriously '-- even though he actually spent weeks dismissing and downplaying the crisis.

But those weeks of manifest abdication could be helping Trump now by lowering expectations. As the report notes, there has also been a marked shift in approach from the resident of the Oval Office, who has taken to briefing the public on a daily basis flanked by his White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Those briefings give Trump an opportunity to praise his own response, and to make claims in real-time that later prove to be false '-- such as the promised national website to facilitate testing. Just yesterday, Trump spent a large chunk of his briefing touting treatments he claimed had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but which have, in fact, not.

Trump's numbers also could be buoyed by the expectation that cash relief is on the way, as the White House has already expressed a willingness to push through more than a trillion dollars in economic aid to individuals and businesses, and Trump has already signed a bipartisan $8.3 coronavirus response bill.

But the crisis response continues to be dogged by inadequate testing and looming shortages of medical equipment and capacity that could quickly become devastating, and Trump continues to evade responsibility for the federal government's role in the response. On Thursday, he told reporters that the federal government isn't a ''shipping clerk'' when asked about getting medical supplies to the states.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:59

Welsh singer made statement on Instagram saying she was held captive for several days

Duffy told fans that while recovery 'took time', she is 'OK and safe now'.Photograph: Linda Nylind/The GuardianAimee Duffy, the Welsh pop singer known as Duffy who retreated from the public eye following her hugely successful debut album Rockferry, has said she was drugged, held captive and raped by an unidentified person.

In a statement on her official Instagram account she said: ''The truth is, and please trust me I am OK and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days. Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There's no light way to say it. But I can tell you in the last decade, the thousands and thousands of days I committed to wanting to feel the sunshine in my heart again, the sun does now shine.''

View this post on Instagram

You can only imagine the amount of times I thought about writing this. The way I would write it, how I would feel thereafter. Well, not entirely sure why now is the right time, and what it is that feels exciting and liberating for me to talk. I cannot explain it. Many of you wonder what happened to me, where did I disappear to and why. A journalist contacted me, he found a way to reach me and I told him everything this past summer. He was kind and it felt so amazing to finally speak. The truth is, and please trust me I am ok and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days. Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There's no light way to say it. But I can tell you in the last decade, the thousands and thousands of days I committed to wanting to feel the sunshine in my heart again, the sun does now shine. You wonder why I did not choose to use my voice to express my pain? I did not want to show the world the sadness in my eyes. I asked myself, how can I sing from the heart if it is broken? And slowly it unbroke. In the following weeks I will be posting a spoken interview. If you have any questions I would like to answer them, in the spoken interview, if I can. I have a sacred love and sincere appreciation for your kindness over the years. You have been friends. I want to thank you for that x Duffy Please respect this is a gentle move for me to make, for myself, and I do not want any intrusion to my family. Please support me to make this a positive experience.

A post shared by @ duffy on Feb 25, 2020 at 10:12am PST

She does not detail when the attack happened, but said she came to the decision to reveal the attack after a journalist had contacted her: ''He was kind and it felt so amazing to finally speak '... In the following weeks I will be posting a spoken interview. If you have any questions I would like to answer them, in the spoken interview, if I can.''

Duffy, 35, adds: ''You wonder why I did not choose to use my voice to express my pain? I did not want to show the world the sadness in my eyes. I asked myself, how can I sing from the heart if it is broken? And slowly it unbroke.'' She pleaded for support, and for no intrusion into her family life.

With a vintage pop sound that matched contemporaries like Amy Winehouse and Adele, Duffy's 2008 debut album Rockferry was sensationally successful. Powered by the chart-topping single Mercy and the ballad Warwick Avenue which peaked at No 3, it became the UK's biggest selling album that year, and won her three Brit awards. It eventually sold over 9m copies worldwide, and was a hit in the US, reaching the top five and winning a Grammy.

She released a less successful follow-up, Endlessly, in 2010. She has only released one song since then, Whole Lot of Love, which featured on the soundtrack to 2015 Tom Hardy gangster film Legend. She appeared in the film as nightclub singer Timi Yuro.

In 2013, she told Esquire magazine: ''I took a step back. I thought: I'm going to slow all this right down '... It all got so complex, such responsibility. I was serenading people to sleep, not running Nasa. Suddenly I was a product, an enterprise, a businesswoman. But mostly I wanted to be human.''

In 2014, her producer Bernard Butler said: ''She went off the rails and it all went pear-shaped for her '... But I always had quite a lot of sympathy for her, because she was young, from this tiny village in Wales, and she was just hurled into the fire.''

In a 2011 interview with Marie Claire she noted how her musical heroes were victims of tragedy. ''Where I want to be and where I think I'll be [in 20 years] are very different things. The way history would have it is that I would end up in some form of tragic event. The people that I've loved '' Dusty, Marvin, Edith Piaf '' they didn't always have happy stories. That's the way history would have it '... I take every day as it comes. You're at the mercy of life.''

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:56

Hanks continues to self-isolate, while actor Daniel Dae Kim, who has Covid-19, takes aim at anti-Asian racism

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson in 2018.Photograph: Val(C)rie Macon/AFP via Getty ImagesTom Hanks and his wife, the actor and singer Rita Wilson, are ''not great'' but ''feeling better every day'', according to his sister, Sandra. The couple are in self-isolation after being discharged from a Queensland hospital following almost a week's stay.

Sandra Hanks Benoiton told People: ''Tom and Rita are doing very well and continue to recover. Their recovery is very much on course for healthy adults with this virus. They are feeling better each day.''

Earlier this week, Hanks posted an update saying the symptoms were ''much the same '... no fever but the blahs. Folding the laundry and doing the dishes leads to a nap on the couch.''

Idris Elba also tested positive for the disease earlier this week. On Thursday, actor Daniel Dae Kim, who is also suffering from coronavirus, took aim at the racism that has affected some people of Asian background since the outbreak, with Trump repeatedly calling it the ''Chinese virus''.

''Please, please stop the prejudice and senseless violence against Asian people,'' Kim said. ''Randomly beating elderly, sometimes homeless, Asian Americans is cowardly, heartbreaking and inexcusable. Yes, I'm Asian, and yes I have coronavirus, but I did not get it from China. I got it in America. In New York City.

''And despite what some political leaders want to call it, I don't consider the place where it's from as important as the people who are sick and dying.''

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Source: Lobsters

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:53

I n a study that looked at user's data collected by web browsers, Microsoft Edge and the Yandex browser bagged the lowest privacy rating. While Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari landed in the middle, Brave Browser was ranked the highest.

Doug Leith, a computer scientist from Trinity College Dublin, looked at browsers for how they sent data to the backend servers. He examined the unique identifiers, as well as information related to typed URLs, which can be used to track down users.

Microsoft Edge and Yandex both sent identifiers tied to the device hardware. The unique identifiers, which can be used to link apps on the device, remained the same despite re-installing the browsers. Edge sends the information about the device to a Microsoft server located at self.events.data.microsoft.com.

Browsers sending data back to the servers are not harmful; in fact, it's a common practice. However, it becomes dangerous when the same information can be used to de-anonymize a user. In this case, the unique identifiers can be used to track IP addresses over time.

Another big problem with Edge is the search autocomplete ''functionality that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete.'' Leith claims that one cannot disable this Microsft Edge behavior; however, this particular feature can be turned off.

A Microsoft representative told Ars Technica that Edge collects diagnostic data to improve the product upon the user's content. This data collection can be turned off in the browser settings.

The study discovered that the autocomplete feature that can transmit data to backend servers was on by default in all the studied browsers except Brave. However, all of them allowed users to turn it off.

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Source: News | Euronews RSS

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:47

Finland

By

Luke Hurst • last updated: 20/03/2020 - 12:04 Finland has been named the world's happiest country for the third year in a row, maintaining the Nordic grip on the World Happiness Report's top spots.

The rankings are based on polling which looks at six variables: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption.

Since its launch in 2012, just four countries have taken the top spot: Denmark in 2012, 2013 and 2016, Switzerland in 2015, Norway in 2017, and Finland in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

The report is released by the UN's Sustainable Development Solutions Network, using data from the Gallup World Poll.

The ten happiest countries in 2020 according to the report are:FinlandDenmarkSwitzerlandIcelandNorwayThe NetherlandsSwedenNew ZealandAustriaLuxembourgThe secret to happinessSince 2013 the five Nordic countries '' Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland '' have all been in the top ten of the annual list. So what are they doing right?

According to the report, the happiest countries tend to have high levels of variables that support well-being. These include income, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, and freedom.

This year's survey also took a closer look at environmental factors in determining a person's state of happiness, with data on pollution levels, climate and temperatures taken into account.

And it also takes in the effects of inequality, and how social environments can help mitigate the effects of inequality.

It suggests one secret to Nordic happiness is the Nordic welfare state, which allows for relatively generous benefits, and regulation of the work market to avoid exploitation.

Studies also show the quality of government and public institutions are important for national a satisfaction, with Nordic countries occupying top spots in this area.

Furthermore the relatively high income levels couples with well-functioning democracies means a higher sense of autonomy and freedom in these nations, while social cohesion has also been found to be a strong indicator of happiness within a country.

The ten least happy:IndiaMalawiYemenBotswanaTanzaniaCentral African RepublicRwandaZimbabweSouth SudanAfghanistan

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Source: Naked Security - Sophos

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:47

Welcome to Hong Kong, traveler, and to the mandatory, Disney MagicBand-esque tracking wristband we're about to slap onto your potentially infectious arm.

The city-state had already been requiring arrivals from mainland China to self-isolate at home for 14 days. But as the area undergoes a COVID-19 resurgence, mostly brought in by travelers coming from European, US and Asian countries, it's now enforcing the quarantine on all incoming travelers, with the wristbands helping to ensure that they adhere to movement restrictions.

The government announced on Monday that starting at midnight on Thursday (19 March), it was planning to put all arriving passengers under a two-week quarantine and medical surveillance.

On Wednesday evening, Government Chief Information Officer Victor Lam told reporters at the airport that the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data had been consulted about the technology and had assured everybody that it won't threaten people's privacy.

CIO Lam:

The app will not capture, directly, the location. It will only capture the changes in location, especially the telecommunication signals around the confinee, to ensure that he's staying at home.

Hong Kong confirmed 16 new cases of coronavirus on Thursday, bringing the city's total to 208, according to the South China Morning Post. The new cases '' 11 men and five women, aged 19 to 51 '' had traveled to Europe, Britain and/or Canada. Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, said that of the 57 new cases Hong Kong recorded in the past two weeks, 50 were travelers from overseas.

Declan Chan, a Hong Kong resident who returned from Zurich on Tuesday and who was required to put on one of the wristbands at the airport, told CNBC that it felt ''a bit weird'' because of ''privacy reasons,'' but that he understood why it had to be done.

I was just expecting we'd have to fill out a form. I didn't realize there would be a wristband.

The form Chan filled out suggested that passengers had the option of sharing their location data with the government either via messaging platforms, like WeChat and WhatsApp, or by agreeing to wear the electronic wristband. The government must have rethought that either/or option, given that Chan soon learned that the messaging apps weren't actually an option and that all passengers must wear the wristbands.

Chan told CNBC that he was instructed to walk around the corners of his house once he got home, so that the technology could precisely track his geofence: i.e., the coordinates of the living space where he'd remain under quarantine.

The wristbands pair with a smartphone, and they aren't easy to remove. The government says that it won't directly capture location '' only the changes in location, ''especially the telecommunication and communication signals around the confinee to ensure that he (or she) is staying at home.''

If the wristband is broken or the smartphone is disconnected or taken away from the confinee's geofence, an alert will be sent to the Department of Health and Police.

And just to make sure that people haven't somehow subverted the technology location tracking, the government has a backup plan: surprise calls. From the government's press release:

The staff at the communication centres set up by the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer will check the location of people under quarantine from time to time and make surprise video calls to ensure that they are staying at their dwelling places.

CNBC got hold of a handout now being to passengers. It threatens fines or imprisonment for those who mess with the quarantines:

A person who contravenes or knowingly gives false information to Department of Health is liable on conviction to a $5000 HKD (USD $644) fine and to imprisonment for 6 months.

Chan doesn't feel like he's being needlessly surveilled. In fact, he finds it comforting to be in a place where the government is taking the pandemic seriously, unlike, say, places where government allows people to flock to Florida beaches, hug each other in evangelical church meetings (''This Bible school is open because we're raising up revivalists, not pansies.''), or stand shoulder to shoulder as they watch Disneyworld fireworks or cram into a bar to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

Chan:

It's quite safe to be in Hong Kong where the situation of the virus is now in control.

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Source: Mediagazer

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:46

Mediagazer presents the day's must-read media news on a single page.

The media business is in tumult: from the production side tothe distribution side, new technologies are upending the industry.Keeping up with these changes is time-consuming, as essential media coverageis scattered across numerous web sites at any given moment.

Mediagazer simplifies this task by organizing the key coverage in one place.We've combined sophisticated automated aggregation technologies withdirect editorial input from knowledgeable human editorsto present the one indispensable narrative of an industry in transition.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:40

Today in news of double standards...

While Zero Hedge remains banned from Twitter for suggesting that a Chinese level-4 biolab experimenting with bat coronavirus (which is 96% genetically identical to COVID-19) - located roughly 900 feet from the Wuhan wet-market widely considered as 'ground zero' for the new disease - may have had something to do with the global outbreak the novel coronavirus, Elon Musk has been free to spread as much dangerous misinformation and just general dickishness about the virus as he wants.

Over the last couple of weeks, we have documented Musk publicly stating that the panic over the virus was "dumb" and then doubling down on that statement. We've watched him downplay the impact of the worst global pandemic in nearly a century to his workers. We have also watched him humiliate himself in a public feud with Alameda County over whether or not he should be allowed to keep his Fremont factory open and producing vehicles while the rest of California is now on lockdown.

Last night on Twitter, Musk took it one step further, incorrectly asserting not only that children are "essentially immune" from the coronavirus, but also prognosticating that there would be "probably close to zero new cases in the U.S." by the end of April.

Contrast these statements with a recent New York Times article pointing out a study of over 2,000 children with the virus in China, which notes that babies were "especially vulnerable" to developing a severe infection. Additionally, many experts have predicted that the virus will continue to spread well into the summer, with some suggesting that it could even come back for a "Round 2" during the fall season (similar to what the Spanish Flu did).

And so both of Musk's statements are complete nonsense and despite Twitter's renewed efforts to remove disinformation regarding the virus from its platform, Musk still has an account and has not faced a suspension as a result of these statements.

Ryan Mac at Buzzfeed apparently asked Twitter about what appears to be their stunning double standard for Musk. He said that Twitter told him Musk's Tweet "does not violate its new policies around coronavirus misinformation" and that "Twitter declined to explain the rationale behind its decision.":

Twitter says this tweet from @elonmusk saying that children are ''essentially immune'' from coronavirus does not violate its new policies around coronavirus misinformation. Children, who at times do not show symptoms of COVID-19, are not immune and can be carriers of the virus. https://t.co/1lxeL2J0xU

'-- Ryan Mac 🃠(@RMac18) March 19, 2020

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Source: Featured Stories

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:37

'''Spanish Flu' is a product of a historical and more prejudiced era.''Wikipedia is debating whether to rename the Spanish Flu to the ''1918 Influenza Pandemic,'' a clear reaction to the Chinese Virus/Coronavirus argument.

President Trump has recently taken to referring to the coronavirus outbreak, also known as Covid-19, as the ''Chinese Virus,'' and has been accused of racism and xenophobia for doing so.

A common response to the leftists accusing him of bigotry is to point out that the Spanish Flu is the most common name for the flu outbreak that took place after the end of the First World War '' so, of course, this is being retconned.

On the Talk page for the ''Spanish Flu'' Wikipedia article, there is a raging debate going on as to whether to rename the page to the ''1918 Influenza Pandemic.''

A scientific study has found that had China acted sooner to combat the spread of their coronavirus, then the spread could have been almost entirely avoided, and it would not have become a global pandemic.

Some commentors claimed that the name ''Spanish Flu'' is racist, just as ''Chinese Flu'' is racist, with others swearing that they definitely hadn't referred to the pandemic as the ''Spanish Flu'' before, honest, and one who even claimed that it was a ''right wing conspiracy theory'' that people knew the name change was due to the coronavirus:

''It is well established today that this flu was neither originated nor particularly spread in Spain. Furthermore, it is also well established that naming pandemias after regions is misleading (from a mechanistic point of view) and also stigmatizing. Why not having then the official name 1918 flu as the primary article name which other names redirect to?''''The other context I see is that the term 'Spanish flu' is a product of a historical and more prejudiced era trying to apply blame to a culture. The Spanish''American War was just before this and there was still American intent to blame Spanish for anything bad.''''1918-19 flu pandemic is a well-used and well-recognised term, very possibly the most-used and the most-recognised term. I suspect Spanish flu could actually be the less well-known name in the UK; maybe I'm an exception but I don't think I heard the term 'Spanish flu' for a long time after I knew about the event.''''Not that it matters, but I actually knew this in passing as the 1918 pandemic; I only became aware that it was also called the Spanish flu recently (during the current COVID-19 pandemic).''''Support, for the same reason we should consider renaming towns/rivers with prejudicial names.''''It is simply irresponsible to call this the stigmatic name when alternatives exist and are overwhelmingly used by reliable sources. We should also include a 'Right wing conspiracy theory' section that addresses the debunked claim being repeated here that the name is only being changed because of COVID-19. I can find us some sources that identify the origin of this conspiracy theory as a bad faith attempt to mask the sinophobia of the Trump administration by comparing it to terms that have been defunct for decades.''READ MORE: FBI Uses Coronavirus to Shut Down Online Public Records Operation

Many other Wikipedia editors knew exactly what was going on however, and fought back:

''As Wikieditors are trying to literally change the history in this encyclopedia to prevent (or they hope to prevent) contemporaries from calling the current crisis the ''Wuhan'' or ''China coronavirus'' epidemic. An encyclopedia is no place for this retconning nonsense. Shame on you, and on what you've done in the coronavirus article.''I have heard this term a couple of times in my life, all of which were in the last week. Every other time this phenomenon has been referred to it is under the title 'Spanish Flu.' The concept that this terminology that dates to a century ago is somehow inadequate is a farce being pushed by people who are interested mostly in politics, not in medicine, history, or medical history.''''I'm sure you haven't actually met someone who has a stigmatized view of Spanish people because a virus is colloquially named after it, as many viruses are.''''This would be a totally pointless move, the pandemic is widely known as the Spanish flu, the only reason this is being proposed is because of modern political controversies, which are totally irrelevant to Wikipedia.''''We wouldn't be here if Wuhan coronavirus wasn't in the title of the original name of the article everyone's reading these days. Changing this article title at this time is dangerous to the entire Wikipedia project: how far will the newspeak project go?''''Why the sudden interest in moving this now? The only reason I can see for the timing is that it is support the Chinese Communist Party propaganda. The World Health Organisation went along with renaming the Wuhan Coronavirus COVID-19 because the People's Republic of China is one of their major donors. Is wikipedia also bought and paid for?''It's not just Wikipedia that is guilty of this. Leftists and Democrats across the board are attempting to rename the Spanish Flu in a thinly veiled attack at President Trump.

A memo from the Joe Biden campaign referred to the Spanish Flu as ''the 1918 flu pandemic,'' a New York Times columnist said it wasn't ''fair or accurate to call the 1918 pandemic the Spanish Flu,'' and a Washington Examiner reporter said calling it the Spanish Flu was ''racist and foreshadowed American nativism,'' to give just a few examples.

Biden team memo:

''We held elections during the Civil War, the 1918 flu pandemic, and World War II. We are confident that we can meet that same challenge today and continue to uphold the core functions and values of our democracy.'' (2/)

'-- Ed O'Keefe (@edokeefe) March 17, 2020

It wasn't fair or accurate to call the 1918 pandemic the Spanish flu, but that's what it's now called (except in Spain, where it's "the 1918 flu pandemic"). But a deliberate effort to rename Covid-19 as the "Chinese virus" strikes me as an exercise in xenophobia and scapegoating. https://t.co/PDWgUE8NFX

'-- Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) March 17, 2020

"Nobody calls" it the "Spanish flu" anymore, says verified smart guy David Frum.

Except for '... @davidfrum. pic.twitter.com/vhQkCknQgS

'-- Matt Wolking (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@MattWolking) March 17, 2020

You know in many ways, calling it the ''Spanish flu'' was racist and foreshadowed American nativism

'-- Joe Gabriel Simonson (@SaysSimonson) March 9, 2020

Kind quick reminder: viruses have no nationality.

'-- UNESCO (@UNESCO) March 17, 2020

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio also said in a press conference on Tuesday that the coronavirus is ''one part the Great Recession, one part the Great Depression, one part the 1918 flu epidemic.''

The memory-hole efforts by the left will likely only increase in the coming weeks.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:36

Skip to contentDespite Lilly's lack of concern, the coronavirus is wreaking havoc on the worldActress Evangeline Lilly of ''Ant-Man'' fame is being slammed this week after she belittled the coronavirus as nothing more than a ''respiratory'' flu and refused to self isolate, saying that she values her ''freedom.''

Lilly took to Instagram earlier this week to post a photo of her morning cup of tea and to boast that she had just dropped her children off at their activities despite calls for American families to stay home due to the pandemic.

''Just dropped my kids off at gymnastics camp. They all washed their hands before going in. They are playing and laughing. #businessasusual,'' wrote Lilly, 40.

Lilly immediately started receiving backlash for her post, but she was quick to defend herself, telling one fan that though she is living with her sick father, she is prioritizing the freedom to live her life over everything else.

Brian Wilson dissects novel coronavirus 2019 as both an international health pandemic and a social switch to trigger mass panic worldwide while medical tyranny is established on its global platform.

''I am living with my father at the moment, who has stage four lukemia [sic]. I am also immune compromised at the moment. I have two young kids,'' Lilly wrote. ''Some people value their lives over freedom, some people value freedom over their lives. We all make our choices. With love and respect. EL.''

In another comment, Lilly downplayed the virus as simply a ''respiratory flu'' and questioned the way the U.S. government has responded to it.

''I'm having those conversations daily with people in my inner circle and am always considering and reconsidering my position,'' the former ''Lost'' star wrote. ''Where we are right now feels a lot too close to Marshall Law for my comfort already, all in the name of a respiratory flu. It's unnerving.''

''I think we all need to slow down, take a breath and look at the facts we are being presented with,'' Lilly added in another comment. ''They do not add up to the all-out, global lockdown, control, pandemonia and insanity we are experiencing. I hope that people will find their peace and sanity where you are soon. Sending you loving prayers.''

The actress also appeared to float a conspiracy theory about the timing of this pandemic, writing simply, ''There's something every election year.''

Despite Lilly's lack of concern, the coronavirus is wreaking havoc on the world, with John Hopkins University saying that the number of cases worldwide has surpassed 200,000. Governments all over the world have been urging people to stay home and self-isolate in the hopes of getting the virus under control.

Lilly really should have kept her opinions on this pandemic to herself, because now she's exposed herself to the world as a total moron. More celebrities should take note of this and realize that they might want to think twice before they open their mouths to discuss someone in politics or in the news.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:20

Several readers have written The Fact Checker, saying they were confused by dueling opinion articles that appeared in The Washington Post concerning the National Security Council office highlighted in Biden's tweet.

On March 13, The Post published an article by Beth Cameron, a former Obama administration official, titled ''I ran the White House pandemic office. Trump closed it.'' She argued that ''eliminating the office," which she headed from September 2016 to March 2017, "has contributed to the federal government's sluggish domestic response'' to the coronavirus pandemic.

Three days later, The Post published an article by Tim Morrison, a former Trump administration official, titled ''No, the White House didn't 'dissolve' its pandemic response office. I was there.'' He countered that office, which he oversaw for about a year starting in July 2018, was folded into another one to streamline a bloated organization and ''the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.''

Rearranging organizational charts and bureaucratic intrigue is part of the lifeblood of official Washington, but it can have meaningful consequences for Americans. The government works effectively when the right people are in the right place to make decisions '-- and the Trump administration's stumbling response to the coronavirus suggests the government is not working as effectively as it could.

Asked at a congressional hearing on March 11 whether it was a mistake to eliminate the office, Anthony S. Fauci, who runs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, diplomatically said: ''I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as a mistake. I would say we worked very well with that office. It would be nice if the office was still there.''

Can one office really make a difference? At a news conference on March 13, President Trump dismissed this as a ''nasty'' question. Let's explore.

The Facts

The National Security Council staff is supposed to help the president coordinate the government response to international crises and homeland security issues, by identifying emerging problems and making sure Cabinet agencies and other departments are working cooperatively.

After Barack Obama became president in 2009, he eliminated the White House Health and Security Office, which worked on international health issues. But after grappling with the 2014 Ebola epidemic, Obama in 2016 established a Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the NSC. A directorate has its own staff, and it is headed by someone who generally reports to the national security adviser.

The structure survived during the early part of Trump's presidency, when the office was headed by Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer. But, after John Bolton became Trump's third national security adviser, he decided the organizational chart was a mess and led to too many conflicts. He also thought the staff was too large, having swollen to 430 people, including staffers in the pipeline.

Bolton fired Tom Bossert, the homeland security adviser, realigning the post to report directly to him. He eliminated a number of deputy national security advisers so there was just one. And he folded the global health directorate into a new one that focused on counterproliferation and biodefense. Ziemer departed for the U.S. Agency for International Development, though a former administration official said he was due to leave the NSC anyway. His staff, whom Ziemer had called ''the dream team,'' remained in place.

Bolton thought there was obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense, the former official said, saying the epidemiology of a biological health emergency is very similar to a bioterrorism attack. Morrison, who headed the combined office beginning in July 2018, was named a deputy assistant to the president and thus had more bureaucratic clout than Ziemer, who was only a senior director.

Each directorate is housed in its own ''vault,'' so to speak, so classified information can be left on a person's desk overnight. ''Having those people in the same vault means that they don't have to walk out of the office, walk down the hall, knock on the door to have someone let them in,'' another former administration official said, allowing for easier communication among staff members. A number of major projects that had been stalled in bureaucratic fights, such as a National Biodefense Strategy, finally were completed after the reorganization.

''I did not feel a change'' in focus, said a third former administration official, who had worked under Ziemer at the NSC. Bolton ''was very dedicated to the issues we had been working on.''

As far as we can determine, the four positions that made up the old unit still are filled within the nonproliferation directorate. Morrison worked closely with Bolton and could get things quickly to his attention; he eventually moved to a different position and then left the government.

''During the summer of 2018, NSC merged three directorates into one to reduce the seam between those preparing for biological threats whether they are man-made or naturally occurring,'' said NSC spokesman John Ullyot. ''No director-level positions were eliminated during this process, and the organization retained its subject matter expertise under a different organizational structure.'' He added that under Bolton's replacement, Robert C. O'Brien, ''no NSC biodefense director positions were eliminated under right-sizing.''

Critics say the changes were shortsighted in the long run. Ron Klain, the Ebola ''czar'' appointed by Obama and a Biden campaign adviser, said biodefense and pandemic prevention require different skill sets and expertise. He said the move was akin to terminating the fire department chief and putting the firefighters in the police department. ''The next time you have a fire, they will send a police car with a couple of firefighters in the back,'' he said.

''A pandemic is an odd policy challenge because it straddles a lot of other things,'' said Jeremy Konyndyk, who served in the Obama administration, citing global health, diplomacy, domestic health policy, border and travel controls, foreign aid and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive materials threats. ''But it is always a subordinate priority in any of those other streams, which leads to a fragmented and disconnected policy process.''

''During the Ebola operation, we really struggled with initially a lot of kind of bifurcation within the national security staff, between the international side and the domestic side, between the health people and the disaster people,'' Konyndyk said. ''And so the different elements of that Ebola response didn't roll up together into a coherent whole until Ron Klain was appointed as the Ebola czar.''

''I accept the proposition that it is hard to know whether things would have been different if the right structure had been place,'' Klain said. ''But without the right structure, there was zero chance it was going to work.''

One key issue during such reorganizations is whether policy expertise is maintained. Anthony Ruggiero, the current senior director for weapons of mass destruction and biodefense, has a background mostly in North Korea policy, for instance.

Luciano Boro, the previous director for medical and biodefense preparedness, is a practicing medical doctor and has an extensive background in medical health preparedness.

Boro left the NSC in March 2019 and in recent months has co-written a series of farsighted articles on how to prepare for the pandemic. ''Act now to prevent an American epidemic,'' which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 28, warned there would be a shortage of tests unless the private sector was involved. The White House would not confirm the name of Boro's replacement.

Without the right expertise, an official may not know the right questions '-- the hard questions '-- to ask of their counterparts in other agencies, who are often subject matter experts themselves.

''The NSC doesn't make policy but it does (and must) make sure that the Department-level policymakers are focused on the right questions and understanding the landscape beyond just their own agencies' perspectives,'' Konyndyk said. ''In this case the questions were pretty obvious and straightforward to anyone with outbreak experience: could a Wuhan-like outbreak happen here (Yes), are we ready for that (No), what are agencies doing to prepare the country for that contingency while working to avert it (not much, as it has turned out).''

The Biden campaign defended his tweet. A campaign official noted the first recommendation of a bipartisan report that was issued in November 2019:

''The U.S. government should re-establish a directorate for global health security and biodefense on the National Security Council (NSC) staff and should name a senior-level leader in charge of coordinating U.S. efforts to anticipate, prevent, and respond to biological crises. These actions will ensure that the necessary leadership, authority, and accountability is in place to protect the United States from a deadly and costly health security emergency'....It remains unclear who would be in charge at the White House in the case of a grave pandemic threat or cross-border biological crisis, whether natural, accidental, or deliberate.''

Indeed, Trump initially on Jan. 29 named Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar as chair of a coronavirus task force, with a coordinating role played by the NSC. A month later, Vice President Pence took charge.

One former administration official dismissed the debate over the NSC office as a relic of another type of presidency. ''There isn't any organizational chart in the U.S. government that makes any difference in the Trump administration,'' the official said. '' Trump is more likely to say to Jared [Kushner], 'What do you think we should do?' That's the big problem.''

The Pinocchio Test

One can see the dueling narratives here, neither entirely incorrect. The office '-- as set up by Obama '-- was folded into another office. Thus, one could claim the office was eliminated. But the staff slots did not disappear and at least initially the key mission of team remained a priority. So one can also claim nothing changed and thus Biden's criticism is overstated.

The question that cannot be answered '-- at least perhaps until a congressionally mandated commission examines the U.S. preparation for this crisis '-- is whether a separate directorate would have had more clout to bring the issue immediately to the president's attention. That might have helped buy time to stem the spread of the disease by focusing the full attention of government on the emerging problem. (One example: China refused to let American experts into Wuhan '-- a discussion kept at the agency level. But early presidential pressure might have swayed Beijing to cooperate.)

For that reason, we will leave this unrated.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:06

A self-interested strategy will not help the U.S. fight the coronavirus outbreak.

7:00 AM ET Contributing writer at The Atlantic

Gary Hershorn / GettyThe National Security Strategy that President Donald Trump published during his first year in office describes an ''America First foreign policy in action.'' In an introductory message, the president declares, ''We are prioritizing the interests of our citizens and protecting our sovereign rights as a nation.'' He insists that '''America First' is not America alone.'' His national security adviser and chief economic adviser at the time assured the public, ''America will not lead from behind. This administration will restore confidence in American leadership as we serve the American people.''

While there have been reasons previously to question the approach, the coronavirus has posed the first real international crisis of Trump's presidency. And judged from the administration's actions, America First foreign policy in action isn't restoring confidence in American leadership, and it isn't serving the American people particularly well.

David Frum: No empathy, only anger

Rather than lead a cooperative international response, Trump has sought to blame the outbreak on China and then on Europe. America's NATO allies were given no advance warning of the travel ban on their countries. A virtual meeting of the G-7 came at French President Emmanuel Macron's instigation, not at Trump's, even though the United States is chairing that group of the world's leading economies. China's leaders are gleefully running up their score in the great power competition by being generous where we are stingy.

Diplomatically, we're not even doing the easy stuff, like broadcasting solidarity with other countries struggling with COVID-19 outbreaks or congratulating countries that appear to have broken the back of their epidemic. We don't appear to have concern that poor countries with weak public-health systems might eventually bear the brunt of the pandemic. We seem only to resent Chinese philanthropists for sending medical supplies to us, rather than thanking them for providing much-needed assistance.

In addition to the systemic damage to America's soft power, the president's smug unilateralism has encouraged others to act just as selfishly. The European Commission is prohibiting export of coronavirus-related medicines and equipment to preserve them for EU use. India, where many of the world's generic drugs are made, is prohibiting export both of medicines and of their constituent ingredients. Even the countries of Europe's Schengen Area, which permits passport-free travel, are shutting their national borders in response to the pandemic. Rather than a coordinated international response that forestalls panic by sharing information and assistance, the United States has led a stampede to narrow national responses. And everyone in the world will be less safe for it.

The battle-weary architects of the post''World War II order understood that international cooperation is a way of creating strategic depth'--which is to say, it increases the distance between the heart of a country and the external forces that might threaten it. Collaboration gives early warning of problems before they become exorbitantly dangerous and expensive to address. The American presidents who bolstered institutions such as NATO, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization understood that behaving in altruistic ways would create a reservoir of goodwill for when the United States needed to ask friends to help in hard times. That's what people all over the world understood when they declared, after the 9/11 attacks, that ''we are all Americans now.'' But a cooperative international order creates more than a feeling of fellowship; it also allows national contributions to accumulate into resource levels that none of our nations could reach unilaterally. Cooperation is cost-effective, even if we wish others contributed more.

Aaron E. Carroll and Ashish Jha: This is how we beat the coronavirus

The Federal Reserve has just showed how international leadership is done, coordinating efforts with the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and the Swiss National Bank to cut interest rates and establish swap lines that assure dollar liquidity. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell's actions reassured markets to the extent that this was possible under current circumstances. But the Fed acts independently on its mandate; it didn't need White House leadership.

What could the United States be doing'--and what should we be doing'--to recoup our diplomatic losses and restore the international system our forebears worked so hard to create? First, we could express empathy for COVID-19 victims, and share some good humor at the aggravations. People all over the world watch American news, so Trump should try to model safe behavior, as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made a point of doing. Trump missed a chance to be publicly tested. A conversation with his doctor out in the open might have answered questions that lots of people who haven't seen a doctor or can't get a test likely have.

Instead of imposing travel bans, we should be working with other countries to test travelers at the point of origin'--the airport they're departing from'--and not permit anyone to board flights with symptoms. We should be offering medical supplies and expertise to countries where sick travelers are stranded.

Lizzie O'Leary: The modern supply chain is snapping

Trump should be burning up the phone lines with his fellow leaders, asking how their societies are doing, asking what's working for them, making notes of things they need that the United States could help organize provision of. He should be tweeting appreciation for the international institutions and nongovernmental organizations that work on these issues, and raising money for them. He should be celebrating those on the front lines of fighting the pandemic, in the United States and beyond.

America has dominated the international order for the past seven decades because, although it has been self-interested, it has not been solely self-interested. America First strips away the goodness of America's international engagement, leaving only the self-interest. Being different and better than that has made us safer and more prosperous. Trump's foreign policy during this pandemic is revealing the high cost of America alone.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Kori Schake is a contributing writer at

The Atlantic and leads the foreign and defense policy program at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 07:33

We're tracking the latest on the coronavirus outbreak and the global response. Sign up here for our daily newsletter on what you need to know.

More than 99% of Italy's coronavirus fatalities were people who suffered from previous medical conditions, according to a study by the country's national health authority.

After deaths from the virus reached more than 2,500, with a 150% increase in the past week, health authorities have been combing through data to provide clues to help combat the spread of the disease.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte's government is evaluating whether to extend a nationwide lockdown beyond the beginning of April, daily La Stampa reported Wednesday. Italy has more than 31,500 confirmed cases of the illness.

Italy Coronavirus DeathsBy prior illnesses (%)

Source: ISS Italy National Health Institute, March 17 sample

The new study could provide insight into why Italy's death rate, at about 8% of total infected people, is higher than in other countries.

The Rome-based institute has examined medical records of about 18% of the country's coronavirus fatalities, finding that just three victims, or 0.8% of the total, had no previous pathology. Almost half of the victims suffered from at least three prior illnesses and about a fourth had either one or two previous conditions.

More than 75% had high blood pressure, about 35% had diabetes and a third suffered from heart disease.

Threat to the ElderlyThe median age of the infected is 63 but most of those who die are older

The average age of those who've died from the virus in Italy is 79.5. As of March 17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease. All of Italy's victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions.

While data released Tuesday point to a slowdown in the increase of cases, with a 12.6% rise, a separate study shows Italy could be underestimating the real number of cases by testing only patients presenting symptoms.

According to the GIMBE Foundation, about 100,000 Italians have contracted the virus, daily Il Sole 24 Ore reported. That would bring back the country's death rate closer to the global average of about 2%.

'-- With assistance by Karl Maier, and Alessandro Speciale

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:23

Former aides to high-ranking Democratic politicians are joining a so-called "coronavirus war room" in order to attack President Trump's response to the pandemic.

Protect Our Care -- a nonprofit tied to liberal dark money groups -- announced the war room on Thursday, with the group's leader accusing Trump of exacerbating the pandemic. Heading the war room is Zac Petkanas, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Sarah Chase, a former research associate for the presidential campaign of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is joining the team as well.

Patrick Devlin, former Communications Director for Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., will serve as an adviser to the war room as well. War rooms are generally set up within political organizations to provide rapid response to the media cycle.

LATEST ANTI-TRUMP AD PASSES TWITTER SCRUTINY AS DARK MONEY TARGETS PANDEMIC RESPONSE

''This team has a wealth of know-how, experience and expertise and with the coronavirus crisis, which has been exacerbated by President Trump's failure to prepare, we need the best in the business working on advocacy efforts to hold President Trump accountable for his failure to lead,'' said Brad Woodhouse, Protect Our Care's executive director.

Protect Our Care has been tied to "dark money" organizations like Arabella Advisors, which backs other groups attacking the president over the coronavirus response.

Specifically, it houses the New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund, both of which support another Democrat-aligned group -- American Bridge -- that's been preparing an ad hitting Trump on the coronavirus.

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Pacronym is planning to spend $5 million on ads attacking Trump's response to the pandemic. That PAC is affiliated with the New Venture Fund and Acronym, whose board includes former Obama adviser David Plouffe. The ads will target five swing states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona) and run on major digital platforms like Facebook.

PAC TIED TO EX-OBAMA AIDE SET TO HAMMER TRUMP OVER CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE

Protect our Care, which has been described as a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, has also been running an ad against Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., reportedly tying his opposition to ObamaCare to the coronavirus.

On Thursday, Twitter declined to flag another ad attacking Trump's coronavirus response.

CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE

The Trump campaign alleges that the ad replayed Trump saying the coronavirus was Democrats' latest "hoax" without supplying the proper context. Twitter reportedly refused the campaign's request to flag the ad as "manipulated media," indicating it met the site's guidelines.

"Fellow Americans," a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, ran the ad but it's unclear where the group originated. Its website is relatively sparse and vaguely refers to opposing political division in the United States.

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:12

Air traffic decreased by 4.3 per cent in February

For all of its obvious negative aspects, the new coronavirus has one notable perk '' with the number of people avoiding travel amongst other things, the virus is inadvertently contributing towards reducing the effects of the climate emergency.

Many events have had to be altered or changed for this new, temporary way of life '' several international conferences and meetings have been made virtual (the UN Climate Change committee announced that it won't hold any physical meetings for the foreseeable future in an attempt to tackle the impacts of the virus), but whilst it's worth noting that climate change may be positively affected, people's lives are being put majorly on hold. Will this be what's needed to trigger serious policy change? Will there be a long term impact on climate change as many prepare to start implementing themselves back into the world again?

Ed Conway of The Times wrote in a recent article that ''if you were a young, hardline environmentalist looking for the ultimate weapon against climate change, you could hardly design anything better than coronavirus.

''Unlike most other such diseases, it kills mostly the old who, let's face it, are more likely to be climate sceptics. It spares the young. Most of all, it stymies the forces that have been generating greenhouse gases for decades.''

Although a little extreme, Conway has a point '' the fact is that, right now, this virus could see some of the largest decreases in climate emissions seen in a long time, far surpassing any current governmental policy on the issue. Supposedly, analysts claim that this will be the first significant fall in emissions since the 2008-09 financial crisis, with occasions like these being an incredibly effective way of stopping climate change due to its changing of attitudes, physically stopping people from partaking in activities that are detrimental to the planet and, as Conway rather bluntly put it, removing some of those that are most likely to be sceptical of the whole idea.

Transport became the most polluting UK sector in 2018, and is set to be the element of our activity that is impacted the most during the pandemic as people self isolate. During this time, they won't be using nearly as much road transport as they would otherwise which, according to the Office for National Statistics, increased by 29 per cent from 1990 to 2018. This could perhaps culminate in a timely reconsideration on the ban on diesel and petrol vehicles in London, which is set to be by 2040, with a subsequent goal for the UK to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

According to The Washington Post, ''Experts say that greenhouse gas emissions in China, the world's largest current contributor to climate change, are down 25 per cent in recent weeks as the country conducted a massive societal intervention to stop the spread of the virus. Air pollution is also down, due to decreased driving and less coal burning.'' This extends to air travel, with The Guardian claiming that ''global air traffic decreased by 4.3 per cent in February with cancellations of tens of thousands of flights to affected areas.'' The impact of the virus on the climate is overwhelmingly positive when it comes to the restriction of travel.

COVID19 is currently slowing climate change due to its impact on people's longstanding activities and habits that are detrimental to the earth. More clearly needs to be done once the virus has peaked and people start t0 fall back into the same harmful behaviours. Yes, everything is on hold right now, but maybe this is the event that we all needed to inspire real long term change.

Related stories recommended by this writer:' You can now get paid £3,500 to get infected with coronavirus

' These are all the dumb af coronavirus conspiracy theories, created by idiots

' Gyms are a hotbed for coronavirus, so I guess I won't be going anymore

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Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:12

Charles Lieber

REUTERS/Katherine Taylor By Robert F. ServiceFeb. 4, 2020 , 12:45 PM

Among the ongoing mysteries surrounding last week's arrest of Harvard University nanoscientist Charles Lieber is the precise nature of the research program Lieber was conducting in his cooperation with Chinese researchers.

Lieber was arrested on 28 January on charges of making false statements to U.S. law enforcement officials and federal funding agencies about a collaboration he forged with researchers in China. He was released two days later on a $1 million bond. An affidavit outlining the charges against Lieber notes that in January 2013, he signed an agreement between Harvard and Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China. According to the affidavit, ''The stated purpose of the agreement, which had a five-year effective term, was to 'carry out advanced research and development of nanowire-based lithium ion batteries with high performance for electric vehicles.'''

Officials at WUT have not responded to requests for comment on their agreement with Lieber. But it outlines just the kind of high-tech work that U.S. prosecutors involved in efforts to investigate Chinese attempts to acquire advanced technology from U.S.-based researchers say they are concerned about. They allege that the Chinese government has used such collaborations to improperly take advantage of the federally funded research enterprise, and gain an edge in economic and military advances.

In Lieber's case, however, the battery angle poses a puzzle. That's because a search of the titles of Lieber's more than 400 papers and more than 75 U.S. and Chinese patents reveals no mentions of ''battery,'' ''batteries,'' ''vehicle,'' or ''vehicles.'' (According to Lieber's CV, through 2019 he has co-authored 412 research papers and has 65 awarded and pending U.S. patents. The website of the Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration indicates that Lieber has been awarded 11 Chinese patents.)

In fact, one U.S. nanoscientist and former student of Lieber's says: ''I have never seen Charlie working on batteries or nanowire batteries.'' (The scientist asked that their name not be used because of the sensitivity surrounding Lieber's case.)

Lieber joined Harvard in 1991. Early on he pioneered a variety of techniques for growing nanowires from the bottom up in a chemical flask. Researchers have long been able to etch large chunks of semiconductors, metals, and other materials to make wirelike structures. But this top-down approach typically requires the use of expensive clean room facilities, the sorts used by computer chip''makers. Lieber's strategy opened the door to making pristine nanostructures with simple and inexpensive chemical techniques. He went on to show that he could use these nanowires to serve as transistors, complex logic circuits, data storage devices, and even sensors.

More recently, Lieber's Harvard lab has shifted gears to integrate nanowires with biology. In 2017, for example, he reported creating soft, flexible 3D nanowire mesh that could be injected into the brains or retina of animals, unfurl and wrap around neurons, and eavesdrop on the electrical communication between cells.

Other research groups have adopted Lieber's nanowire growth methods to fabricate nanomaterials useful in making batteries. But that's never been the focus of Lieber's research. Which begs the question of why his supposed collaboration in Wuhan was focused on a line of research outside of his specialty.

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Thu, 19 Mar 2020 15:20

A couple wipes their hands with hand sanitizer as they walk to be screened for the new coronavirus on Wednesday in Huntsville, Ala. | Dan Busey/The Decatur Daily via AP

Altitude is a column by POLITICO founding editor John Harris, offering weekly perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.

Probably for most of us, the coronavirus crisis will soon enough'--Six months? A year?'--recede in our minds and come to seem like a hallucinatory moment. Maybe it will be like a hurricane that forced everyone to rush inland and then only glanced the coast.

Or maybe it will be like a hurricane that really does hit. Even then, human nature being what it is, most people will clean up and move on.

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Yet no matter how the coronavirus pandemic passes, or how quickly, there is likely in these strange housebound weeks a new political epoch being born.

There are two large reasons to believe the political echo of this crisis will last much longer than the crisis itself.

The first is that many of the people whose expectations and routines are most dramatically upended by the pandemic are students. The interruption, and in some cases irreplaceable loss, of important experiences in their education, as campuses empty and untold events are canceled, will likely shape their consciousness in more lasting ways than for the rest of us.

Like most catastrophes, the pandemic's malign consequences will fall most heavily on the underprivileged. Unlike most catastrophes, its costs are also being paid heavily by some segments of the most privileged. Those college seniors whose spring terms and graduation ceremonies are suddenly deleted include many people who are future leaders of the public and private sectors. No, it's not the end of the world for them. But it's a piercing loss even so'--one being paid more for the benefit of older, less healthy people than for pure self-protection.

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More profoundly, the dynamics of the coronavirus moment likely will resemble the dynamics of other great public policy issues shadowing the next generation. In particular, the global pandemic and the harsh choices it imposes offer'--in highly concentrated fashion in coming months'--much the same choices that responses to global climate change will impose in coming decades.

Like the coronavirus emergency, climate change is a problem whose dimensions are largely the province of scientific experts'--employing complex data models aimed at illuminating future trends that the average citizen can understand in broad concept but not in detail. The essential question: Do you trust these experts, or not?

Like the coronavirus, climate change is a problem for which remedies are not solely the province of experts but are primarily the realm of community values. These remedies involve tangible and immediate costs for benefits that are abstract and imponderable.

In the case of coronavirus, for instance, the shutdown of the economy required by enforcing social distancing imposes costs that are immediate and quite likely already in your midst'--layoffs of someone you know, uncertainty about future income, concern for a favorite neighborhood business about to go under. As to the benefits, meanwhile, no one knows'--certainly not now, maybe not ever. Perhaps the massive response won't really be effective and a public health catastrophe unfolds anyway. Or maybe the response in retrospect will seem overblown.

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In the case of climate change, the tension between immediate certain consequences'--whether paying a carbon tax or substantially altering consumption habits'--for diffuse and distant benefits is more acute. The rewards for the deep and comprehensive changes needed to replace a carbon-fueled economy and halt the warming of the planet will be enjoyed'--one hopes'--primarily by people not yet born.

Finally, of course, coronavirus is like climate change in the sense that it is impervious to national borders.

One way to gauge the power of these currents'--crisis fueled by frightening science'--is by watching the change in President Donald Trump. There is no way to know for certain what the coronavirus means for his reelection. But already it is evident what it has meant for Trumpism. It has sent it hurtling into retreat.

Trumpism as an idea is about promoting and protecting American sovereignty and singularity. In some contexts, even Trump foes might agree it's an attractive concept: Well might we wish to seal our borders from the virus. But the only way this would be effective would be if the United States had years ago opted to adjourn from the modern interconnected global economy. Yes, the coronavirus first presented itself in China. How many people were surprised to learn only in the past few weeks that nearly all U.S. antibiotics also come from China.

Trumpism as a style is defined not just by boasting and bluster; his triumphalism depends on projecting certitude. The president early on acted as if he could indeed create reality by proclamation, when he assured the public that U.S. infections would soon be down to zero.

Only in recent days, as the possibility of widespread domestic disease mounts, has Trump acknowledged imprecision'--the fragmentary nature of our understanding of how far the virus has spread, how effective efforts to blunt its impact will be, or when these efforts will be deemed sufficient.

One way to appreciate the murkiness of our circumstances'--and the moral implications of this murkiness'--is to view them through the eyes of young people.

No need to overstate things. Missing spring semester is not the same as dodging sniper fire in Kabul, nor the same as being laid off from your job handling bags at O'Hare.

But nor should one understate things. Suppose baseball has been your consuming passion since age 6 and now at 22 you are expecting one last idyll as team captain. Now that season will never happen. Maybe you were planning to spend the semester in Peru and are now scrambling to see if you can find a flight home. Planes and restaurants will fill up again. In all likelihood that semester abroad is gone for good. Psych 101 perhaps can be taken remotely; the exhilarating 1 a.m. conversation in the dorm lounge will not be.

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Out of curiosity, I read various college and university presidents' letters announcing the closure of their campuses. Most were filled with the same kind of bromides as your workplace or mine offered about caring first and foremost for the health and etc., etc., of our community. One letter, by Williams College president Maud Mandel, stuck out for its candor: ''A healthy person could reasonably choose to stay and accept the personal risk of catching COVID-19, but the decision would unacceptably increase the chance of contagion for others.''

Indeed, that 21-year-old might plausibly calculate, even if he or she gets sick the chances are, not for everybody but for most, that it would be a miserable few days rather than life-threatening illness. Those institutions closed less to protect their campus communities than to protect the broader society.

The coronavirus pandemic does not remotely have the cataclysmic shock and violence of 9/11. For many people, however, the virus' actual day-in, day-out impact will be more pervasive. 9-11 was followed by a period, which turned out to be short-lived, of national connection and goodwill. Trump, who has made mockery and castigation of opponents his signature, surely did not conjure fuzzy feelings from many quarters with his appeal at the White House on Wednesday that, ''We are all in this together.''

Yet the pandemic has a logic that transcends politics and personal feeling. Never mind how one feels about Trump. Never mind how we feel about one another. The reality of a dangerous virus is that we are all in this together.