Like was said earlier. Very little follow-up with the vast majority that got sick, were "Confirmed Cases", but stayed home, did not get admitted to hospitals and were therefore never tested again to be declared "recovered".
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CORONA Main Coronavirus thread
- Thread starter Heliobas Disciple
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There is SOME evidence from other countries that shows it begins to die out / burn out after 70-90 days but until we see solid evidence of that, that is why I show my chart extending at whatever the current recent day-over-day rate...until it doesn't.
Same thing that happened to us in 2014-2015 with Ebola. In typical Doomer Doug fashion, at the time, you were pretty sure the whole continent of Africa was toast, if not the rest of the world. And then as my graphs began to show...nope, wasn't going to happen and didn't happen. And here we are today...chasing this new gremlin in a similar fashion except more up close and personal.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Fri, 05/01/2020 - 06:40
Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,
The Fed poisons everything, and I mean everything. From markets, the economy, and I will even go as far as politics. Sounds far fetched? Let me make my case below. But as much as the Fed poisons everything, this crisis here again reveals a larger issue: The system is completely broken, it can’t sustain itself without the Fed’s ever more monumental interventions.
These interventions are absolutely necessary or the system collapses under its own broken facade. And this conflict, a Fed poisoning the economy’s growth prospects on the one hand, and its needed presence and actions to keep the broken system afloat on the other, has the economy and society on a mission to circle a perpetual drain.
So how does the Fed poison everything?
Let’s start with the Fed actual process of working towards its stated mission: Full employment and price stability.
How does it do that? Well, for the last 20 years mainly by extremely low interest rates and balance sheet expansion sprinkled with an enormous amount of jawboning. The principle effect: Asset price inflation.
It’s not a side effect, it’s the true mission. The Fed has been managing the economy via asset prices even though Jay Powell again insisted on saying the Fed is not targeting asset prices.
This is a lie. And I can prove it with one chart. Cumulative $NYAD, the flow into stocks versus M1 money supply:
It was not until the Fed flooded markets with cheap money creating the housing bubble that the $NYAD equation changed dramatically, and it was not until the GFC that the Fed went full hog wild on M1 money supply that $NYAD went full vertical alongside of M1. TINA! There is no alternative. Forcing money into equities to manage the economy with a rising stock market.
And guess what? They just saved the $NYAD trend again by going vertical on M1 in a fashion never seen before. All this despite $SPX clearly breaking its long term trend. So yes the Fed is targeting asset prices and Powell is lying when he says the Fed isn’t.
And the entire market knows this. Wall Street knows this. Why? Because the market is a follow the Fed machine long trained to jump back into equities at any sign of Fed action jawboning and promises. It’s no accident that “don’t fight the Fed” is popular mantra. It’s the very proof that market participants know that the Fed is in effect targeting asset prices. Just look at the past year and a half:
And of course this has been going on for years, whenever markets get into trouble here comes the Fed or other central banks with interventions and markets rally, here a long term with M1 money supply thrown in:
Recklessly widening the wealth inequality equation in the process. What happens when you have a slow growth recovery for 10 years and all the wealth benefits going disproportionally to the top 1% who own most of the assets that are targeted while real wage growth stagnates? For one you have a sizable portion of society that doesn’t have a pot to piss in, behind in bills, struggling to pay rent, little to no savings or retirement, taking on multiple low paying jobs with no benefits while real estate prices keep rising as the wealthy keep squeezing people out of neighborhoods. What? You think it’s a coincidence that people have to commute farther and farther to their jobs because they can’t afford housing in the areas where they work? Check San Francisco and Silicon Valley housing prices and commute stories. It’s a horror story.
And so what happens when we have a crisis such as this? Millions needing help immediately, food banks lined up with thousands in line waiting for help and food. A population not able to sustain itself for lack of savings and resources exposing the structural weakness of our broken system. After a 10 year recovery with 3.5% unemployment people should be well off. They are not. Far from it.
And the Fed knows wealth inequality is a huge problem. Powell said so himself in 2019:
Outside the Fed’s purview. Really? No. Why? Because the Fed keeps insisting on bailing out Wall Street.
And the cost is huge. Don’t think for a second that the political polarization we’ve seen over the past 20 years is an accident. It’s the natural consequence of anger within the larger population that feels left behind, is economically struggling and is being squeezed out and forced into 2 jobs, debt loads, and a general sense of angst. The perfect breeding ground for radicalization, populism and apathy at the same time.
And this anger only gets stirred further now as it’s clear who is again being saved by the Fed. Markets:
We may now have the 30M new unemployed people but market damage has once again been contained. Why? To minimize the economic damage so the Fed’s rationale.
The end results: With inequality is skyrocketing even further as millions are unemployed and many more are losing incomes while the shareholders and executives and those with larger retirement funds can take solace that the damage to them is minimized. No one can with a straight face claim that the trillions in Fed balance sheet expansion have not greatly contributed to the Nasdaq’s move to green and back above the February 2020 lows making shareholders not only whole but back in profit for the year despite the largest economic crisis of our lifetimes:
Perversion in print. But don’t expect any sign of a guilt conscience on the side of the Fed. Expect hypocrisy. Wealth inequality is bad, but it’s not in our purview even though we drive it with our policies. But the Fed can afford hypocrisy. It’s not challenged. By anyone. Not by Congress which benefits from the license to do nothing implicitly provided by the Fed bailing everyone out all the time. Who needs to implement change when the Fed always comes to the rescue? Nobody big gets to fail.
The Fed can’t be challenged by the population, a population that has no say in the Fed’s role, has no right to elect or fire its leadership, heck, largely doesn’t even know what the Fed does.
Nor is the Fed challenged by the press who never presses the Fed on its failings of broken promises, their inability to normalize their balance sheet, their role in driving inequality nor their role in driving ungodly debt levels in society.
Where do you think record debt comes from? Cheap money of course, the very cheap money the Fed has provided. Oh but the debt is bad. Here another pretend handwringing from Jay Powell:
These words were uttered just last November when the deficit was projected to be $1 trillion. Now that the deficit will be nearly $4trillion instead this year due to the crisis he now says it’s not the time not to worry about the debt and deficit.
When, exactly, is the time?
Intellectual bankruptcy:
And never mind being held to account for moving the goalposts as past predictions and promises continue to be broken. The Financial-Industrial Complex Keeps Moving the Goalposts Dan Nathan called it this morning:
Daddy Fed is always there to keep the pain away giving cover and license to make no changes. The Fed in its arrogance is not copping to its role, part and responsibility of this vicious cycle it has created.
Instead we have to recognize the Fed will not stop at anything. There is no voice that says this is enough, or too much or it’s creating distortions.
Yesterday markets closed at 138% market cap vs GDP:
In the past large recessions brought market valuations down as bubbles deflated, and despite the pain with high unemployment wealth inequality was reduced. Not now, the Fed is blowing another bubble and is expanding wealth inequality. And the problem has not gone unnoticed. Via Bloomberg:
What’s happening now is a repeat attempt of the 2009 crisis. All wealth benefits again go toward the top 1% who control all wealth, all the land and all the power and employees will be left to hold the bag again.
And so here we are. $NDX higher than the February lows, only 7% from all time highs. $SPX 9% down year to date. None of it has anything to do with fundamentals. Not a thing.
As Citi said yesterday:
And that’s exactly right, but Jay Powell doesn’t care. He went full fiat yesterday. This is not a time to worry about debt or deficits he said. Fine, burn the house down while you’re trying to save it.
But we need to pay attention to all this, the Fed is the biggest market force at the moment and they are creating again the biggest market bubble known to man. And they were very clear in what they were saying yesterday:
Translated:
For when does anyone think we will go back to full employment? Bond traders have now priced in zero rates until 2024. We will also have multi trillion deficits for years to come. And who will benefit from all this? The bottom 90%? We’ve seen this movie before and it’s brought us to where we are now.
And not to go political, but be clear: Doesn’t matter who gets elected in November from a deficit perspective, they will all run huge deficits. It’s basically setting us up for slow growth which means we will never get back to full employment which means we will have zero rates forever. The cycle of doom here, it’s unfathomable.
No, the Fed poisons everything. Markets, the economy, even politics. Its actions have a wide spread impact on society, but because the cycle has become so vicious and debt and wealth inequality so prevalent ever more interventions are required to keep the system afloat. So the Fed is employing the same measures it did before but on a grander scale.
Now imagine if the Fed didn’t intervene with trillions of dollars. What would happen? Markets would collapse, debt would be crushingly unsustainable and the system would collapse. And then what? Have you forgotten the 1929 example already? Wealth inequality would shrink, a new economic order would emerge, the middle class would grow as opposed to shrink and have higher incomes as they would have more bargaining power, a New Deal. Sounds good? No, the financial industrial complex doesn’t want that, it’s a big club:
min George Carlin
No, perhaps the truth is much more sinister than that.
And that is:
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marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Fri, 05/01/2020 - 03:10
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Germany is considering handing out “coronavirus immunity cards” to its citizens that would allow those who have developed antibodies to COVID-19 to have more freedom than the as-yet uninfected.
Health Minister Jens Spahn said that the cards could make life easier “in many places” for Germans who could prove they were immune.
Critics reacted to the proposal by likening it to the darkest chapter in Germany’s history.
Others suggested that the ID card would incentivize people to get infected so they could enjoy greater freedom of movement.
The same principle as the “immunity card” could also apply to any future vaccine, with those who refuse to to take the shot not allowed to travel.
The state of North Rhine-Westphalia is already trialing a digital immunity card that would have users link their COVID-19 test result to an app, providing authorities with a database they could check to see if a person is immune.
Blacknarwhal
Let's Go Brandon!
I must have missed that.
So then, what's figured here is that the missing two million in that figure aren't dead at all, but recovered?
Which would put the recovery rate at three million out of 3.3 million who got it?
That would mean this bug has a mortality rate in the sub-whole-number percentage range, no?
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Fri, 05/01/2020 - 02:00
Authored by Jörg Guido Hülsmann via The Mises Institute,
After WWI, the distinguished British economist Edwin Cannan was asked, somewhat reproachfully, what he did during the terrible war years. He replied: “I protested.” The present article is a similar protest against the current lockdown policies put into place in most countries of the Western world to confront the current coronavirus pandemic.
Here in France, where I live and work, President Macron announced on Thursday, March 12, that all schools and universities would be shut down on the following Monday. On that Monday, then, he appeared on TV again and announced that the entire population would be confined starting the very next day. The only exceptions would be “necessary” activities, especially medical services, energy production, security, and food production and distribution. This policy response was apparently coordinated with other European governments. Italy, Germany, and Spain have applied essentially the same measures.
I think that these policies are understandable and well intentioned. Like many other commentators, I also think that they are wrongheaded, harmful, and potentially disastrous. An old French proverb says that the way to hell is plastered with good intentions. Unfortunately, it seems as though the present policies are no exception.
My protest concerns the basic ideas that have motivated these policies. They were clearly enunciated by President Macron in his TV address of March 12. Here he made three claims that I found most intriguing.
- The first one was that his government was going to apply drastic measures to “save lives” because the country was “at war” with the COVID-19 virus. He repeatedly used the phrase “we are at war” (nous sommes en guerre) throughout his talk.
- Secondly, he insisted right at the very beginning that it was imperative to heed the advice of “the experts.” Monsieur Macron literally said that we all should have to listen to and follow the advice of the people “who know”—meaning who know the problem and who know how best to deal with it.
- His third major point was that this emergency situation had revealed how important it was to enjoy a state-run system of public healthcare. How lucky are we to have such a system and to be able to rely on it, now, in the heat of the war against the virus! Unsurprisingly, the president insinuated that this system would be reinforced in the future.
I do not have any epidemiological knowledge or expertise. But I do have some acquaintance with questions of social organisation, and I am also intimately familiar with scientific research and with the organisation of scientific research.
My protest does not concern the medical assessment of the COVID-19 virus and its propagation. It concerns the public policies designed to confront this problem.
As far as I can see, these policies are based on one extraordinary claim and two fundamental errors. I will discuss them in turn.
An Extraordinary Claim
The extraordinary claim is that wartime measures such as confinement and shutdowns of commercial activity are justified by the objective of “saving lives” that are at risk because of the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic.
Over here in Europe, we have heard American presidents use such expressions since the 1960s, as in “the war on poverty” or the “war on drugs” or “the war on terrorism” or more recently “the war on climate change.” Odd language of this sort seemed to be one of America’s many eccentricities. It also did not escape our notice that none of these would-be wars have ever been won. Despite the great sums of money that the US government has spent to fight them, despite the new state institutions that were put in place, and despite the great and growing infringements on the economic and civil liberties of ordinary Americans, the problems themselves never went away. Quite the opposite; they were perpetuated and aggravated.
Most of the European governments have now joined ranks with the Americans and consider that they, too, are at war—with a virus. It is therefore appropriate to insist that this is metaphorical language. A war is a military conflict designed to protect the state—and thus of the very institution that is commonly held to guarantee the lives and liberties of the citizens—against malicious attack from an outside power, usually another state. In a war, the very existence of the state is under attack. Clearly, this is not so in the present case.
Moreover, there can be no war with a virus, simply because a virus does not act. At most, therefore, the word “war” can be used here metaphorically. It then serves as a cover and justification of infringements of the very civil and economic liberties that the state is supposed to protect.
Now, in the traditional conception, the state is supposed to protect and promote the common good. Protecting the lives of the citizens might therefore, arguably, justify massive state interventions. But then the very first question should be: How many lives are at stake? Government epidemiologists, in their most dire estimates—whose factual basis is still not solidly established—have considered that about 10 percent of the infected persons might be in need of hospital care and that a large part of those would die. It was also already known by mid-March that this mortal threat in the great majority of cases concerned very old people, the average COVID-19 victim being around eighty years of age.
The claim that wartime measures, which threaten the economic livelihood of the great majority of the population and also the lives of the poorest and most fragile people of the world economy—a point on which I will say more below—are in order to save the lives of a few, most of whom are close to death anyway, is an extraordinary claim, to say the least.
Without going into any detail, let me just highlight that this contention squarely contradicts the abortion policies that Western governments have applied since the 1970s. There, the reasoning was exactly the other way around. The personal liberty and comfort of the women who wished to abort their children was given priority over the right to lives of these yet unborn children. According to World Health Organization (WHO) figures, each and every year, some 40–50 million babies are aborted worldwide. In 2018 alone, more than 224,000 babies have been aborted in France. However serious the current COVID-19 pandemic may yet become, it will remain a small fraction of these casualties. Not only have governments neglected to “save lives” when it comes to abortions. They have in point of fact condoned and funded the killing of human beings on a massive scale.
They still do so now. Here in France, all hospital services have been run down to free up capacity for the treatment of COVID-19 victims—all except one. Abortion services run unabated and have recently been reinforced by the legal obligation for hospital staff to provide abortions (previously it was possible for individual doctors to refuse this out of personal conviction).
The pretention that drastic policies are justified in order to “save lives” also flies into face of past policy in other areas. In the past, too, it would have been possible to “save lives” by allocating a greater chunk of the government’s budget to state-run hospitals, by further reducing speed limits on highways, by increasing foreign aid to countries on the brink of starvation, by outlawing smoking, etc. To be sure, I do not wish to make a case for such policies. My point is that it has never been the sole or highest goal of government policy to “save lives” or to extend them as much as possible. In fact, such a policy would be utterly absurd and impractical, as I will explain further below.
It is difficult to avoid the impression that the “war to save lives” is a farce. The truth seems to be that the COVID-19 crisis has been used to extend the powers of the state. The government obtains the power to control and paralyse all other human concerns in the name of prolonging the lives of a select few. Never has this principle been admitted in a free country. Few tyrannies have managed to extend their power this far.
The current beneficiaries of these new powers are the elder citizens and a few others. But make no mistake. It is likely that their destinies only serve as a pretext to justify the creation of new and unheard-of powers for the state. Once these new powers are firmly established, there is no reason why the elderly should remain especially dear to those in power. It must be feared that the very opposite will be the case.
Now, in order to avoid any misunderstanding, I do not claim that the present French government seeks to grab power over life-and-death decisions, or dictatorial powers to introduce socialism through the backdoor under the cover of COVID-19. In fact, I cannot imagine that Monsieur Macron and his government are driven by sinister motivations. I think they have the best of all intentions. But the point here is precisely that there is a difference between doing good and wishing to do good.
A Grave Error: Rule by Experts
So far, I have commented on a political issue. But there are also matters of fact. And this brings me to the two aforementioned errors.
The first fundamental error is to hold that is that the experts know and all the rest of us should trust them and do as they tell us.
The truth is that even the most brilliant academics and practitioners have in-depth knowledge only in a very narrow field; that they have no particular expertise when it comes to devising new practical solutions; and that their professional biases are likely to induce them into various errors when it comes to solving large-scale social problems such as the current pandemic. This is patent in my own discipline, economics, but not really different in other academic fields.
Let me explain this in some more detail.
The kind of knowledge that can be acquired by scientific research is just a preliminary to action. Research gathers facts and yields partial knowledge of causal connections. Economics tells us, for example, that the size of the money stock is positively related to the level of unit prices. But this is not the whole picture. Other causes come into play as well. Real-world decision-making cannot just rely on facts and other bits of partial knowledge. It must weigh the influence of a multitude of circumstances, not all of which are well known, and not all of which are directly related to the problem at stake. It must come to balanced conclusions, sometimes under rapidly changing circumstances.
In this respect, the typical expert is no expert at all. How many laureates of the Nobel Prize in economics have earned any significant money by investing their savings? How many virologists or epidemiologists have established and operated a privately run clinic or laboratory? I would never trust a colleague who had the folly to volunteer to direct a central planning board. I do not trust an epidemiologist who has the temerity to parade as a COVID-19 czar. I do not believe a government that tells me that it somehow knows “the experts” who know best how to protect and run an entire country.
Furthermore, consider that scientific knowledge is, at best, a state of the art. The precious thing about science is not to be seen in the results, which are hardly ever final. What is crucial is the scientific process, which is a competitive process based on disagreements about the validity and relevance of different research hypotheses. This process is especially important when it comes to new problems—such as a new virus which spreads in unheard-of ways and has unheard-of effects. It is precisely in such circumstances, when the stakes are high, that the impartial confrontation and competitive exploration of different points of view is of paramount importance. Research czars and central planners are here of no use at all. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
A government which bets the house on one horse and hands the management of a pandemic over to a single person or institution achieves, at best, only one thing: that all citizens receive the same treatment. But it thereby slows down the very process which leads to the discovery of the best treatments, and which makes these treatments rapidly available to the greatest number of patients.
Part 1 of 2
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2
It is also important to keep in mind that academics—and this includes epidemiologists just as much as economists and lawyers—are typically government employees and that this colours their approach to any practical problem. They are likely to think that serious problems, especially large-scale problems touching most or all citizens, should be solved by state intervention. Many of them are in fact incapable of imagining anything else.
This problem is reinforced through a nefarious selection bias. Indeed, those academics who opt for an administrative or political career, and who make it into the higher ranks of the civil service, cannot fail to be convinced that state action is suitable and necessary to solve the most important problems. Otherwise they would hardly have chosen such careers, and it would also be virtually out of the question that for them to end up in leadership positions. A good example among many others is the current WHO director Tedros Adhanom, who I understand is a former member of a communist organisation. The point is not that a WHO director should have no political opinions or that Dr. Adhanom is an evil or incompetent person. The point is that it is unsurprising that men like him occupy leadership positions in state-run organisations, and that the approach he envisions to deal with a pandemic is likely to be coloured by his personal political preconceptions, not only by medical information and good intentions.
Another Momentous Error: Neglect of Economics
Along with such selection bias comes a peculiar ignorance in regard to the functioning of complex social orders. This brings me to the second fundamental error that vitiates the COVID-19 policies. It consists in thinking that civil and economic liberties are some sort of a consumers’ good—maybe even a luxury good—that can only be allowed and enjoyed in good times. When the going gets tough, the government needs to take over and all others should step back—into confinement if necessary.
This error is typical for people who have spent too much time among politicians and in public administrations. The truth is that civil and economic liberty is the most powerful vehicle to confront virtually any problem. (The notable exception is that liberty does not help to consolidate political power.) And the reverse side of the same truth is that governments typically fail whenever they set out to solve social problems, even very ordinary problems. Think of state-run education or housing projects. I will return to this point further below.
Because of the mechanics of the political process, governments are liable to overreact to any problem that is big enough to make it into the news and to become an issue for voters. Governments will then typically zoom in on this one problem. In their perception, it becomes the most important of all problems that humanity has to solve. If such a government has no clue about economics, it is liable to propose one-plan technical solutions that completely neglect the social and political dimension of what it means to solve a problem. In the present case, the “experts” have blithely proposed to shut down the entire economy because this is what “works.”
Now, I do not contest that shutdowns are effective in slowing down the transmission speed of a pandemic. I have no opinion at all on the most suitable way to deal with pandemics or other problems of virology or medicine. But as an economist I know the crucial importance of the fact that there is never ever only one single goal in human life. There is always a great and diverse array of objectives that each of us pursues. The practical problem for each person is to strike the right balance, most notably to act in the right temporal sequence. Translated to the level of the economy as a whole, the problem is to allocate the right amounts of time and material resources to the different objectives.
For most people, protecting their own lives and the lives of their families has a very high importance. But irrespective of how important this objective is, in practice it cannot be perfectly achieved. To protect my life, I need food. Thus, I need to work. Thus, I need to expose myself to all kinds of risks that are associated with leaving the safe space of my house and encountering nature and other humans. In short, human lives cannot be perfectly protected, even by those who are ready to subordinate everything else to doing so. It is a practical impossibility. When it comes to protecting lives, the only question is: how much am I willing to risk my life and the lives of those who depend on me? And it more than often turns out that by risking much one protects best. What holds true for the eternal life of one’s soul also holds true for the mundane material life down here on earth: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt 16:25).
Now, most people do not actually cherish the preservation of their lives, or the extension of their life spans, as the single highest goals. Smokers, meat eaters, drinkers prefer a shorter, more joyful life, to a longer life of abstinence.
Policemen, soldiers, and many citizens are more than often driven by the love of their country and by a love of justice. They would rather die than live under slavery or tyranny. Priests would risk their lives rather than forsake their commitment. A believer in Christ would rather risk death than apostasy. Sailors risk their own lives to provide for their families. Medical doctors and nurses are willing to risk their lives to help patients with infectious diseases. Rugby players and racecar drivers risk their lives not only for the glory of winning, but also for the excitement and satisfaction that comes with performing well under danger. Many young men and women gladly trade the excitement of dance for the risk of catching COVID-19.
All of these people, in one way or another, make material contributions to the livelihood of all others. Smokers and drinkers ultimately pay for their consumption, not with money (which serves them only as a tool for exchange with others), but with the goods and services that they themselves provide to others. If they could not indulge in their consumption, their motivation to help others would diminish or vanish altogether. If policemen, soldiers, sailors, and nurses did not have a relatively low risk-aversion, their services would be provided only at much higher cost, and possibly not at all.
The preferences and activities of all market participants are interdependent. In the market order, each one helps all others in pursuing their goals, even if these goals may ultimately contradict his own. The meat eater might be a mechanic who repairs the cars of vegetarians, or an accountant who does the bookkeeping for a vegetarian NGO. The soldier also protects pacifists. Among the pacifists may be farmers who grow the food consumed by soldiers, etc.
It is impossible to disentangle all of these connections, and it is not necessary. The point is that in a market economy the factors determining the production of any economic good are not just technical. Through exchange, through the division of labour, all production processes are interrelated. The effectiveness of doctors and nurses and their assistants does not only depend on the people who directly supply them with the materials that they need. Indirectly, it also depends on the activities of all other producers who do not have the slightest thing to do with medical services in hospitals. Even in an emergency situation, it is therefore necessary to respect the needs and priorities of these others. Locking them away, locking them down, far from facilitating the operation of hospitals, will eventually come to haunt the latter as well when supply chains wither and consumer staples start lacking.
Now one might contend that such consequences only obtain in the longer run and that a government confronted with an emergency situation needs to neglect long-run issues and focus on the short-run emergency. This sounds reasonable, which is why governments have appealed to arguments of this sort with great regularity in other areas, most notably to justify expansionary macroeconomic policies, which also trade off the present against the future.
But the reasoning is flawed in the present case. The root of the error is to consider the COVID-19 virus an immediate threat to human lives whereas the lockdown policies are not. But this is not the case. How many people have committed suicide because the lockdown measures have driven them to depression and insanity? How many did not receive life-saving treatments because hospital beds and staff were restricted to COVID-19 victims? How many have become victims at home because of the lockdown-induced aggression of their spouses? How many have lost their jobs, their companies, their wealth, and will be driven to suicide and aggression in the months to come? How many people in the poorest countries of the world economy are now driven to starvation because households and firms in the developed world have cut back demand for their products?
The inevitable conclusion is that, even in the short run, lockdown policies are costing the lives of many people who would not otherwise have died. In the short and in the long run, the current lockdown policy does not serve to “save lives,” but to save the lives of some people at the expense of the lives of others.
Conclusion
The lockdown policies are understandable as a panic reaction of political leaders who want to do the right thing and who have to make decisions with incomplete information. But upon reflection—and certainly in hindsight—they are not good policy. The lockdowns of the past month have not been conducive to the common good. Although they have saved the lives of many people, they have also endangered—and are still endangering—the lives and livelihoods of many others. They have created a new and dangerous political precedent. They have reinforced the political regime uncertainty—to use Robert Higgs’s felicitous phrase—that bears on the choices of individuals, families, communities, and firms in the years to come.
The right thing to do now is to abandon these policies swiftly and entirely. The citizens of free countries are able to protect themselves. They can act individually and collectively. They cannot act well when they are locked down. They will greet any honest and competent advice on what they can and should do, upon which they will proceed responsibly, whether alone or in coordination with others.
The greatest danger right now is in the perpetuation of the ill-conceived lockdowns, most notably under the pretext of “managing the transition” or other spurious justifications. Is it really necessary to walk through the endless list of management failures of government agents? Is it necessary to remind ourselves that people who have no skin in the game are irresponsible in the true sense of the word? These would-be managers should have stayed out of the picture from the very beginning. Instead, so far, they have managed to get everybody else out of the picture. If they are allowed to go on, they might very well turn the present calamity—big as it is—into a true disaster.
The historical precedent that comes to mind is the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, too, the free world was confronted with a painful recession, when the implosion of the stock market bubble entailed a deflationary meltdown of the financialised economy, along with massive unemployment. This recession, dire as it was, could have remained short, as all the previous recessions in the US and elsewhere had been. Instead it was turned into a multiyear depression, thanks to folly of FDR and his government, who had the pretention of managing the recovery with government spending, nationalisations, and price controls.
It is not too late. It is never too late to recognise an honest error and correct a wrong course of action. Let us hope that President Macron, President Trump, and all other people of goodwill may rapidly come to their senses.
It is also important to keep in mind that academics—and this includes epidemiologists just as much as economists and lawyers—are typically government employees and that this colours their approach to any practical problem. They are likely to think that serious problems, especially large-scale problems touching most or all citizens, should be solved by state intervention. Many of them are in fact incapable of imagining anything else.
This problem is reinforced through a nefarious selection bias. Indeed, those academics who opt for an administrative or political career, and who make it into the higher ranks of the civil service, cannot fail to be convinced that state action is suitable and necessary to solve the most important problems. Otherwise they would hardly have chosen such careers, and it would also be virtually out of the question that for them to end up in leadership positions. A good example among many others is the current WHO director Tedros Adhanom, who I understand is a former member of a communist organisation. The point is not that a WHO director should have no political opinions or that Dr. Adhanom is an evil or incompetent person. The point is that it is unsurprising that men like him occupy leadership positions in state-run organisations, and that the approach he envisions to deal with a pandemic is likely to be coloured by his personal political preconceptions, not only by medical information and good intentions.
Another Momentous Error: Neglect of Economics
Along with such selection bias comes a peculiar ignorance in regard to the functioning of complex social orders. This brings me to the second fundamental error that vitiates the COVID-19 policies. It consists in thinking that civil and economic liberties are some sort of a consumers’ good—maybe even a luxury good—that can only be allowed and enjoyed in good times. When the going gets tough, the government needs to take over and all others should step back—into confinement if necessary.
This error is typical for people who have spent too much time among politicians and in public administrations. The truth is that civil and economic liberty is the most powerful vehicle to confront virtually any problem. (The notable exception is that liberty does not help to consolidate political power.) And the reverse side of the same truth is that governments typically fail whenever they set out to solve social problems, even very ordinary problems. Think of state-run education or housing projects. I will return to this point further below.
Because of the mechanics of the political process, governments are liable to overreact to any problem that is big enough to make it into the news and to become an issue for voters. Governments will then typically zoom in on this one problem. In their perception, it becomes the most important of all problems that humanity has to solve. If such a government has no clue about economics, it is liable to propose one-plan technical solutions that completely neglect the social and political dimension of what it means to solve a problem. In the present case, the “experts” have blithely proposed to shut down the entire economy because this is what “works.”
Now, I do not contest that shutdowns are effective in slowing down the transmission speed of a pandemic. I have no opinion at all on the most suitable way to deal with pandemics or other problems of virology or medicine. But as an economist I know the crucial importance of the fact that there is never ever only one single goal in human life. There is always a great and diverse array of objectives that each of us pursues. The practical problem for each person is to strike the right balance, most notably to act in the right temporal sequence. Translated to the level of the economy as a whole, the problem is to allocate the right amounts of time and material resources to the different objectives.
For most people, protecting their own lives and the lives of their families has a very high importance. But irrespective of how important this objective is, in practice it cannot be perfectly achieved. To protect my life, I need food. Thus, I need to work. Thus, I need to expose myself to all kinds of risks that are associated with leaving the safe space of my house and encountering nature and other humans. In short, human lives cannot be perfectly protected, even by those who are ready to subordinate everything else to doing so. It is a practical impossibility. When it comes to protecting lives, the only question is: how much am I willing to risk my life and the lives of those who depend on me? And it more than often turns out that by risking much one protects best. What holds true for the eternal life of one’s soul also holds true for the mundane material life down here on earth: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt 16:25).
Now, most people do not actually cherish the preservation of their lives, or the extension of their life spans, as the single highest goals. Smokers, meat eaters, drinkers prefer a shorter, more joyful life, to a longer life of abstinence.
Policemen, soldiers, and many citizens are more than often driven by the love of their country and by a love of justice. They would rather die than live under slavery or tyranny. Priests would risk their lives rather than forsake their commitment. A believer in Christ would rather risk death than apostasy. Sailors risk their own lives to provide for their families. Medical doctors and nurses are willing to risk their lives to help patients with infectious diseases. Rugby players and racecar drivers risk their lives not only for the glory of winning, but also for the excitement and satisfaction that comes with performing well under danger. Many young men and women gladly trade the excitement of dance for the risk of catching COVID-19.
All of these people, in one way or another, make material contributions to the livelihood of all others. Smokers and drinkers ultimately pay for their consumption, not with money (which serves them only as a tool for exchange with others), but with the goods and services that they themselves provide to others. If they could not indulge in their consumption, their motivation to help others would diminish or vanish altogether. If policemen, soldiers, sailors, and nurses did not have a relatively low risk-aversion, their services would be provided only at much higher cost, and possibly not at all.
The preferences and activities of all market participants are interdependent. In the market order, each one helps all others in pursuing their goals, even if these goals may ultimately contradict his own. The meat eater might be a mechanic who repairs the cars of vegetarians, or an accountant who does the bookkeeping for a vegetarian NGO. The soldier also protects pacifists. Among the pacifists may be farmers who grow the food consumed by soldiers, etc.
It is impossible to disentangle all of these connections, and it is not necessary. The point is that in a market economy the factors determining the production of any economic good are not just technical. Through exchange, through the division of labour, all production processes are interrelated. The effectiveness of doctors and nurses and their assistants does not only depend on the people who directly supply them with the materials that they need. Indirectly, it also depends on the activities of all other producers who do not have the slightest thing to do with medical services in hospitals. Even in an emergency situation, it is therefore necessary to respect the needs and priorities of these others. Locking them away, locking them down, far from facilitating the operation of hospitals, will eventually come to haunt the latter as well when supply chains wither and consumer staples start lacking.
Now one might contend that such consequences only obtain in the longer run and that a government confronted with an emergency situation needs to neglect long-run issues and focus on the short-run emergency. This sounds reasonable, which is why governments have appealed to arguments of this sort with great regularity in other areas, most notably to justify expansionary macroeconomic policies, which also trade off the present against the future.
But the reasoning is flawed in the present case. The root of the error is to consider the COVID-19 virus an immediate threat to human lives whereas the lockdown policies are not. But this is not the case. How many people have committed suicide because the lockdown measures have driven them to depression and insanity? How many did not receive life-saving treatments because hospital beds and staff were restricted to COVID-19 victims? How many have become victims at home because of the lockdown-induced aggression of their spouses? How many have lost their jobs, their companies, their wealth, and will be driven to suicide and aggression in the months to come? How many people in the poorest countries of the world economy are now driven to starvation because households and firms in the developed world have cut back demand for their products?
The inevitable conclusion is that, even in the short run, lockdown policies are costing the lives of many people who would not otherwise have died. In the short and in the long run, the current lockdown policy does not serve to “save lives,” but to save the lives of some people at the expense of the lives of others.
Conclusion
The lockdown policies are understandable as a panic reaction of political leaders who want to do the right thing and who have to make decisions with incomplete information. But upon reflection—and certainly in hindsight—they are not good policy. The lockdowns of the past month have not been conducive to the common good. Although they have saved the lives of many people, they have also endangered—and are still endangering—the lives and livelihoods of many others. They have created a new and dangerous political precedent. They have reinforced the political regime uncertainty—to use Robert Higgs’s felicitous phrase—that bears on the choices of individuals, families, communities, and firms in the years to come.
The right thing to do now is to abandon these policies swiftly and entirely. The citizens of free countries are able to protect themselves. They can act individually and collectively. They cannot act well when they are locked down. They will greet any honest and competent advice on what they can and should do, upon which they will proceed responsibly, whether alone or in coordination with others.
The greatest danger right now is in the perpetuation of the ill-conceived lockdowns, most notably under the pretext of “managing the transition” or other spurious justifications. Is it really necessary to walk through the endless list of management failures of government agents? Is it necessary to remind ourselves that people who have no skin in the game are irresponsible in the true sense of the word? These would-be managers should have stayed out of the picture from the very beginning. Instead, so far, they have managed to get everybody else out of the picture. If they are allowed to go on, they might very well turn the present calamity—big as it is—into a true disaster.
The historical precedent that comes to mind is the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, too, the free world was confronted with a painful recession, when the implosion of the stock market bubble entailed a deflationary meltdown of the financialised economy, along with massive unemployment. This recession, dire as it was, could have remained short, as all the previous recessions in the US and elsewhere had been. Instead it was turned into a multiyear depression, thanks to folly of FDR and his government, who had the pretention of managing the recovery with government spending, nationalisations, and price controls.
It is not too late. It is never too late to recognise an honest error and correct a wrong course of action. Let us hope that President Macron, President Trump, and all other people of goodwill may rapidly come to their senses.
Bps1691
Veteran Member
Sorry, but my post which you responded to are world wide numbers! as can be seen below. I'm not sure what you are trying to say.
Here is what I posted-
If you look at them the 1 million recovered is world wide as the other two show the world values, not the USA values.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Brazil's Neighbors Close Borders As Latin America's Biggest COVID-19 "Hot Spot" Reopens
Thu, 04/30/2020 - 20:00
Brazil hasn't even confirmed 100k cases of COVID-19. Yet, government officials across South American fear the largest country on the Continent, which shares a land border with every country in South American except 2 (Ecuador and Chile), has already become one of the world's most dangerous hot spots.
Even some epidemiologists in the US have warned that, if left unchecked, Brazil's outbreak could jeopardize the rest of the hemisphere and destroy all of the hard work accomplished by lockdowns and other extreme social distancing measures. Yesterday, Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro insisted there was nothing he could do to stop or mitigate the outbreak - despite all obvious evidence to the contrary.
Though governors in nearly all of Brazil's 26 provinces imposed some level of restrictions, across the country, businesses are reopening and people are returning to work as states like Santa Catarina and Mato Grosso do Sul have dialed back restrictions on malls, gyms and churches. Most Brazilians appear to be more or less returning to their regular way of life. Demand is up at gas stations across the country. Government tracking data have shown that people are getting out more, even in places like Sao Paolo - where most restrictions remain in place.
As we noted, on Tuesday, Brazil reported its highest single-day death toll since the pandemic hit the country in late February. In 24 hours, Brazil recorded 474 fatalities. On Wednesday, another 449 people died. Still, the number of confirmed cases has nearly doubled to 78,162 in the last week, while deaths have climbed to ~5,500. Experts say insufficient testing has hidden what were probably much higher numbers.
But despite fears that the virus has penetrated much further into Brazilian society than the data suggest, roughly 10% of Brazil’s malls have reopened in the past couple of weeks. And in some places, Brazilians rushed in by the thousands to shop. One photo drew the attention of law enforcement as the tightly packed crowds created ideal conditions for the virus to spread.
In Sao Paulo, the epicenter of Brazil's outbreak, quarantine restrictions are slated to stay in effect until May 11. But mobile phone data shows the so-called "isolation rate" - a critical figure used by officials to evaluate the virus response - has fallen to less than 50% over the past few days, well below the 70% level authorities believe is necessary to halt the spread of disease. And more and more, reporters are relaying stories of public health hospitals in Amazonas - a sparsely populated jungle region in the middle of the Amazon rain forest - as well as in Ceara, Rio de Janeiro and Para.
Source: Bloomberg
The flow of people, local media reported health authorities are probing a mall in the southern city of Blumenau after local media showed crowds packing in for the reopening.
And that only scratches the surface of the chaotic scenes unfolding across the country. Since there's no coordination happening from above, there's no consensus on how states should return to business as usual.
Reopened Retailers and factories say in corporate filings seen by Bloomberg that they are following local regulations and taking measures to ensure the safety and health of employees and clients.
Given Brazil's massive population and economic heft, whether the country manages to reopen without triggering a Wuhan-level outbreak - something that remains a big "if" - will be a critical issue for the country's neighbors, and possibly even for Mexico and the US. It's possible that a roaring, out-of-control outbreak in Brazil could sweep all the way across the continent then northward to slam the southern US just as life is returning back to normal.
In a reflection of the massive gulf between the 'official' death toll and the reality on the ground, deaths from the outbreak have piled up so fast in the Amazon rainforest’s biggest city that the main cemetery is burying five coffins at a time in collective graves, according to the SCMP.
The mayor’s office said the city’s funeral system was collapsing and running out of coffins. Undertakers are burying coffins one on top of the other. Though the city of Manaus stopped the practice after relatives complained.
Brazil's neighbors are already taking steps - some are taking drastic steps - to stop Brazilians from spreading the virus.
In Argentina, the big worry is truck traffic from Brazil.
Uruguay had a recent incident where several Brazilian workers crossed the border to help build a cement plant. Four ended up testing positive.
Colombia is worried about the long-term impact on public health and its economy.
Authorities in Colombia are also worried, said Julian Fernandez Nino, an epidemiologist at National University in Bogota.
Even Bolsonaro's biggest regional ally, Bolivia, is closing its border.
That's definitely not a good look for Bolsonaro.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
The Unseen Costs Of Government-Forced Lockdowns
Thu, 04/30/2020 - 19:40
Authored by Elizabeth Wilson via The Mises Institute,
[Author's note: This is my modified version of Frédéric Bastiat's great work "That Which is Seen, and that Which is Not Seen," as applied to the current COVID-19 panic and the resulting 2020 Great Lockdown.]
Have you ever witnessed the anger of the business owner, Sally B., when her careless government reduces her revenue by 60 percent due to a lockdown?
If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation: "It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and why should we care that businesses are being closed or struggling?"
Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economic and political institutions.
Suppose the business makes just enough during this lockdown to keep the doors open and staff employed. You would assume that little has changed, and perhaps the health, economic and social impact was worth the government shutdown—I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. Employees and customers come and go and the rest of the world praises the government for their benevolence. All this is that which is seen.
But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that no real harm or loss will come if businesses are forced to close or some happen to lose their livelihood, so that a virus may circulate less and therefore fewer people may die, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."
It is not seen that as our business owner has spent a significant part of her life savings and her time investing in her business, and now she no longer has an income or is able to reinvest profit into her business. It is not seen that if she had not been stifled by the bureaucratic shutdown, she would, perhaps, have replaced some broken equipment or added to her down payment for a larger home so that she could foster more children, or hired additional staff. In short, she would have invested, spent, or employed this revenue in some way which this lockdown has prevented—in fact has eliminated as options.
Let us take a view of industry in general, as affected by this circumstance. The government shut down businesses so that a virus might kill less people: this is that which is seen. If businesses had not been shut down, the commercial equipment manufacturer (and connected industries) would have seen an increase in revenue or more children could have been helped in foster care or an unemployed person could have had a job - that which is not seen.
And if that which is not seen is taken into consideration, it will be understood that a shutdown of “nonessential” businesses directly impacts the essential ones and impacts many other lives now and for years to come—with the potential that shutting them down might have had no impact on the deaths from the virus at all.
So then we arrive at this unexpected conclusion:
What will you say, Mr Governor? What will you say, disciples of good Dr. Fauci, who has modeled how many lives might be saved if businesses are forced to remain closed and all trade unnaturally restricted, but says little related to the economic/social/health harm? What say you my neighbors, the Public, who praise the government shutdown for saving lives while not ever considering the logic of shutting down one business over another or that more lives may be lost to the economic crisis than the virus crisis.
Now Sally B. is not so callous as to not care about the safety and health of her neighbors and therefore demand that her revenue be restored at the cost of lives lost. In fact it is precisely because she cares about the safety and health of her neighbors that she wants the potential health crisis to not turn into an even worse economic crisis. The seen benefit of potential lives saved cannot be correlated to the real unseen costs of lost revenues and jobs. These unseen costs are being sacrificially thrown on the altar of Models without any direct benefit to the health or safety of the public.
I say, if one business remains open does that equate with a life lost? No, there can be no connection made. What if 75 percent of the businesses are closed by the state? Does that mean a 75 percent decrease in lives lost? Fifty percent? Five percent? Again, a correlation cannot be made. And further, why can a bureaucrat—in the name of public health—choose to allow the liquor stores to remain open but keep the public parks closed?
I am sorry to disturb you with these unpopular facts, but as I continue to see the state forcing our marketplaces to remain closed for weeks to come, I beg politicians and bureaucrats to take into account that which is not seen, and place it alongside that which is seen. And giving as much weight and importance to the lives hurt or lost to the virus to those lives hurt and lost to the shutdown and its repercussions.
The reader must take care to remember that Sally B.’s story is just one of many, the long-term implications of which are currently unseen and unknown. Although currently her story is not tragic, the compounding unseen effects might be just as tragic as a virus, as rates of suicide, domestic abuse, poverty, substance abuse, etc., continue to increase the longer that businesses are barred from operating.
Therefore, if you will only go to the root of all the arguments which are adduced in its favor, all you will find will be the paraphrase of this often repeated statement:
Macgyver
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Italian Region Discovers 1,200 Coronavirus Cases Before 'Patient One'
An analysis of Lombardy has found the area had as many as 1,200 cases of Wuhan coronavirus before "patient one" was identified in February.
www.breitbart.com
Italian Region Now Thinks it Already Had 1,200 Coronavirus Cases Before ‘Patient One’ Was Even Detected
80
Chris Tomlinson1 May 202032
2:34
An analysis of the Italian region of Lombardy has found that the area had as many as 1,200 cases of Wuhan coronavirus before the official “patient one” was identified in February.
The first positively identified case was thought to have occurred on February 21st, but research claims that the first case actually occurred nearly a month before on January 26th. On that day, Milan alone had at least 46 cases out of the total of 543 across all of Lombardy, on what is being labelled “Day Zero”.
The first cases in Lombardy would have occurred just four days after the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus is thought to have originated, went into lockdown, Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera reports.
The first positive tests of Chinese tourists in Italy did not come until January 29th and flights from China were not halted until the day after that.
The data from the analysis comes from various patients across the region which noted that their symptoms had taken place well before the first official case was announced with nine reporting symptoms on February 12, 13th, and 14th, ten on February 18th, and 35 on February 20th.
The analysis echoes previous claims by Dr Pietro Poidomani from the town of Cividate al Piano, which is also located in Lombardy, who said he had seen patients with the symptoms of the virus even earlier on January 7th.
Poidomani said that patients showed the same interstitial thickening of the lungs, which has become a common symptom in Wuhan coronavirus cases.
While Italy remains one of the hardest hit in Europe by coronavirus in terms of both infections and deaths, the number of new infections has decreased in recent weeks.
Last week the country saw recoveries from the disease outpace new infections for the first time, giving some hope that the government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte will begin easing lockdown measures.
Populist Senator Matteo Salvini has been a firm advocate for the reopening of the country and reiterated his position this week, saying: “After 47 days of imprisonment, we can say on behalf of millions of Italians, ‘basta’ [enough]. Let us out, let us earn, let us work, let us make a life again.”
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Thu, 04/30/2020 - 19:00
Authored by Rachel Alexander via Stream.org,
Yes, COVID-19 kills people. But so does a collapsed economy. Finally, states are beginning to let more businesses open. But there’s a problem. A big one, that could keep crucial businesses closed.
Georgia allowed some businesses to open on Friday. Several other states will do that on May 1.
But some businesses might not open even when they can. Why? Because an employee or customer might get COVID-19 and sue them.
As long as someone might get sick, businesses might get sued. As long they’re sued, they could lose. They could face and lose dozens or hundreds of law suits. They could lose tens of millions of dollars. That would put the small and medium-sized business under. Why risk it? Why not wait?
A Warning
Lawsuits have already been filed against businesses over COVID-19. Cruise lines were the first businesses to get hit with suits. They’ve already lost almost a billion dollars worth of business. They won’t be sailing for at least another three months. With all the suits they might lose a lot more. (Suits against them have been hard to win in the past, but who knows how the pandemic will change the courts?)
Other businesses look at them as a warning. Small businesses that can’t afford lawyers are going to be very worried.
Some industries require close human contact. They include hotels, hair salons, daycares, gyms and restaurants. How are they going to achieve social distancing? They can’t guarantee employees or customers will always be safe. A wrongful death lawsuit was filed against Walmart over the death of an employee.
Some of the businesses that were allowed to open in Georgia aren’t doing so. Others are opening with numerous restrictions.
Businesses Shouldn’t be Liable
What’s the answer, then?
Protect businesses from being sued. More people are proposing this. President Trump said on Tuesday that he wants to shield businesses from liability. For example, he is going to order meat processing facilities to stay open, and will sign an executive order shielding them from lawsuits.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several business groups are asking Congress to set a federal standard that limits liability for employers who follow CDC guidelines. White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow says reopened businesses shouldn’t be liable for coronavirus infections. Lawsuits may put them out of business. A writer at National Review urges state legislatures and Congress to pass laws shielding them. Both see that America needs businesses opening as fast as they can.
Some states are already working on this. The House and Senate in Utah passed a bill last Thursday to protect businesses. It would make business owners “immune from civil liability for damages or an injury” when someone has been exposed to COVID-19 while on the premises doing something associated with the business.
A law enacted in March in New York protects health care facilities and volunteer organizations from both civil and criminal liability due to COVID-19. While it shields businesses from negligence, they will still be liable for willful misconduct, recklessly or intentionally inflicting harm.
Protecting Themselves
Businesses can already protect themselves in some ways. But they also remain vulnerable. Employees who contract COVID-19 at work can file a worker’s compensation claim, which removes their right to sue. And they will have to prove they contracted the illness at work, which will not be easy. However, a handful of states have shifted the burden to the employer when it comes to essential employees. The states’ laws presume that the employee caught COVID-19 at work. However, a judge in Illinois issued a temporary restraining order against the rule after business groups filed lawsuits opposing it.
Businesses can also protect themselves to some extent by following the CDC guidelines. Only healthcare facilities are required to follow the guidelines, but businesses would be wise to. A court will take that into consideration when deciding a lawsuit. That means using social distancing, providing hand sanitizer, separating sick employees and possibly providing face masks.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is allowing employers — for the time being — to take the temperatures of on-site employees, even though this constitutes a medical exam. Businesses should also follow workplace guidelines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. One lawyer recommends that businesses have employees sign a waiver making them aware of potential COVID-19 exposure.
Of course, there is always a risk. Businesses with immunity might shirk their responsibility to take precautions against the virus. But so far it appears from media reports that the businesses reopening are taking great precautions. They should not be punished. The country needs them open. A sensible law should protect them.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Thu, 04/30/2020 - 17:40
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
In the first week of February I published an article titled 'The Lies We Are Being Told About The Coronavirus'. I focused primarily on the disinformation coming out of China, and for those with short memories there was a flood of it being spread on various web forums by what I believe was a army of paid disinformation agents.
The lies seemed to revolve around keeping the rest of the world passive to the potential threat by promoting a set of assumptions:
1) The disinfo suppressed the information on human-to-human spread and the level of infections, suggesting that the virus was not very transmissible or that it “only infects Asians” (anyone who actually believed this nonsense at the time was truly gullible).
2) The disinfo suppressed the actual number of deaths in China to minimize the response time of people in other countries. The assumption was “it's nothing, why worry”. Well, as we now know, there is no way China has only suffered 4600 deaths. All the evidence leaked by health officials on the ground in China suggested a much higher number of deaths, but the disinfo was enough to keep many people from taking the threat seriously.
3) The disinfo hid the source of the virus, claiming it came from an animal/food market in Wuhan even though many of the initial patients infected by the coronavirus never had any contact with the market. This was openly admitted by scientists within China as far back as January. Remember the "bat soup" rumors? All lies. And perhaps not coincidentally, the only Level 4 Biohazard lab in Asia, which studies specifically in SARS-like viruses, is right down the road from that same market.
4) The disinformation was not only coming from China. The World Health Organization consistently tried to downplay the spread of the virus, refusing to call it a pandemic for months even though it fit all their criteria. They also lavished China with praise, taking all data the Chinese government reported as if it were verified fact and defended China against any and all detractors.
5) The level of disinformation coming from US government sources, the White House and social media companies was almost enough to match China's lies. The US government and the WHO have been working closely with social media corporations to disrupt any analysis that runs contrary to the Chinese narrative as well as the WHO narrative.
While Donald Trump and the DoD are suddenly interested in the possibility that Covid-19 is a bioweapon (something that those of us in the alternative media tried to report months ago), at the end of January Trump was also offering China praise, saying that their data was accurate and everything was “under control”.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was in the media saying :
Fauci would later go on to change his tune completely, calling for strict government controls of social behavior in order to stop the spread of the virus.
The CDC and the mainstream media actively attempted to obstruct any information that might suggest the coronavirus was made in a lab, even though in 2017 experts in bio-safety warned that the lab in Wuhan might eventually cause a dangerous virus to “escape” due to lax standards. Slapped together studies based on a long list of assumptions (such as the false assumption that any bioweapon would be engineered to kill a maximum number of people) were designed to "debunk" the theory, but only served to raise more questions as people began to wonder why certain "experts" and journalists were so intent on dismissing the bioweapon issue so out of hand based.
6) In the meantime, the most egregious disinformation in the US centered on the economy. Trump's economic adviser Larry Kudlow claimed on February 4th that the damage to the US economy from the virus would be 'minimal'. With over 26 million people now added to the unemployment rolls, millions of small business owners desperate for bailout money, GDP in freefall, manufacturing in freefall and supply chains strained to the breaking point, I think it's safe to say Larry Kudlow is either a complete moron or he was dutifully reading from a propaganda script that was given to him.
As I noted in February:
The downplaying of the economic danger in particular, the lies all over the web about N95 masks not working, the claims that buying food and supplies is “panic behavior” akin to hoarding, a few months ago everything seemed designed to convince the public to NOT prepare for this event. And it was not just China and the WHO behind it; it was also our own government, the White House and the mainstream media.
Now, there is still ample debate about how deadly Covid-19 really is. Is it really “no worse than the flu”? I have seen data which suggests that there are many more infected people than initially believed which would diminish the death rate.
I have also seen data which suggests that deaths from the virus are being under-reported, just like they were in China.
I say it is foolish to rush to conclusions until the virus actually runs the same course and infects hundreds of millions of people as the flu does annually. I will also say that I have never heard of hospitals and morgues being overwhelmed by the flu in modern times like they have been overwhelmed by the coronavirus, but this debate is a distraction from the real issue – It DOES NOT MATTER how deadly the virus is, what matters is that the current government response is unacceptable regardless.
The false dichotomy being constructed right now is that you either believe the virus is a horrible killer plague and that martial law is necessary to stop it, or, you believe the entire pandemic is somehow “staged” and that the whole thing is a hoax, making martial law unnecessary.
The truth is more likely somewhere in-between.
The virus is a moderate threat, it is most likely a chimera with SARS-like qualities, it is indeed killing many people but it is certainly not the Black Plague (a friend of mine just lost someone in their mid-40's with no previous conditions; it is still smart to take precautions), and even if it was it would not matter because government tyranny and economic lockdown do not solve the problem, they only make the situation much worse.
Now that the Chinese propaganda campaign is falling apart as the data continues to contradict what they initially reported, I have to point out, as mentioned above, that China did not do all this alone. It had the help of the UN, the mainstream media and yes, even the CDC and the White House. Without all these entities working together to suppress information on the threat and its source, the public would have had far more time to prepare. And most of all, if governments including our own had restricted travel from China a month sooner when it was clear that human-to-human transmission of the virus was a reality, then the pandemic may have never happened in the first place.
Yet, they did not. Why?
Why was the threat downplayed and ignored? Why was travel from China kept open for weeks after the pandemic began killing thousands? Why did everyone including Trump defend China initially, only to now accuse them of at the very least negligence, and at worst biowarfare?
I have a theory, of course. I outlined the problem in great detail the in my article 'How Viral Pandemic Serves The Globalist Agenda', published in January. This article stemmed from another article I wrote in 2014 during the Ebola event which predicted everything that is now happening today. And, this month I published an analysis on open globalists admissions on how they plan to use the pandemic to promote one world cashless society and medical tyranny in my article 'Waves Of Mutilation: Medical Tyranny And The Cashless Society'.
The narrative has shifted into blaming China for everything, and they are certainly guilty of many crimes, but they are only partly responsible for the disaster. China as a whole is not the prime beneficiary of the crisis. In fact, they are suffering economic collapse like most others nations. But, the globalists within China, the globalists within the WHO, the globalists within the US including those in Trump's cabinet, they all benefit greatly. And this is where many people simply can't wrap their heads around the scenario.
They can accept the idea of a Chinese conspiracy, or a UN conspiracy, or even a Trump conspiracy, but the idea that there are elites within all these countries and the White House working together? Well that's just “crazy”, right?
I'm sorry to say that this is the reality.
The US and Canada poured millions of dollars into the experiments at the Wuhan lab and the funding was greenlit by none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci in 2015. Trump's cabinet is stacked with global elites and people like Dr. Fauci that are intimately associated with the WHO. Fauci continues to defend the WHO. Trump initially praised the Chinese response in January. The WHO has been aggressively defending the Chinese handling of the outbreak and has thoroughly praised their response, which has included using tracking apps and QR codes to watch their citizens 24/7 and implement medical totalitarianism. This same medical totalitarianism was suggested during Event 201, the “simulation” of a coronavirus pandemic funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum which was held only TWO MONTHS before the real thing happened. This is the same medical totalitarianism that Bill Gates and others like MIT are promoting as a solution today.
The globalists have consistently called for a shift into a cashless society and a technocratic surveillance culture. Is it not convenient that these are the solutions being consistently offered in the face of the pandemic?
If you examine the chain of events, the amount of give and take between China, the WHO, and other governments including the US government and the fact that the globalists are about to get everything they want from this catastrophe, I do not think it is outlandish to suggest that perhaps this virus was unleashed deliberately and that globalists in multiple nations are working together to achieve a specific outcome.
With the US blaming China and the Chinese blaming the US, the truth is being lost in the fog of propaganda. The truth being that BOTH sides and the WHO made this pandemic possible, and that the elites on ALL sides have something to gain. The end game they desire is global governance, a one world digital currency system and a rationale for full spectrum surveillance of the citizenry. The pandemic allows them to have all of this, unless the people take action to fight back and disrupt their plans.
Some people will call this “wild speculation” or “conspiracy theory”, but these people are either ignorant of the facts. The evidence is substantial. I have outlined it over and over again the past few months. Luckily, I do see a growing to counter the globalist script. Hopefully, we have the time and tenacity to stop them from getting what they want.
Understand, however, that this crisis will not stop until the globalists are unseated. The current "wave" of the virus is only the first. Expect wave after wave of infections, and wave after wave of lockdowns by complicit government officials. And when COVID-19 doesn't scare people anymore, all the elites have to do is release ANOTHER virus with varied effects. To stop the lockdowns and to stop the pandemic we have to stop the globalists. We have to go to the root of the threat.
Macgyver
Has No Life - Lives on TB
The Elephant In The Room Keeping Businesses From ReopeningZerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
Thu, 04/30/2020 - 19:00
Authored by Rachel Alexander via Stream.org,
Yes, COVID-19 kills people. But so does a collapsed economy. Finally, states are beginning to let more businesses open. But there’s a problem. A big one, that could keep crucial businesses closed.
Georgia allowed some businesses to open on Friday. Several other states will do that on May 1.
But some businesses might not open even when they can. Why? Because an employee or customer might get COVID-19 and sue them.
No way to ever prove it came from a certain place and time.
So lawsuits should be thrown out either way.
Nancy in OK
Senior Member
It was less than 2 weeks ago that they said the results were not good and then all of a sudden now it is showing good results. Of course at $1000 a pill, it should.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Is This The Post-COVID-19 World? Cashiers Work Inside Plastic Tents At Supermarket
Fri, 05/01/2020 - 17:40
In early April, we noted how one supermarket in Philadelphia took sanitizing to an entirely new level by dunking shopping carts into large vats of disinfectants to give customers the peace of mind that they won't contract the deadly virus. In post-corona times, social distancing will forever change how businesses operate and how people interact in an economy.
Take, for example, another supermarket in Philadelphia has installed "tent-like plastic enclosures" around cashier booths to keep essential workers safe while interacting with customers at checkout lines, the New York Post reported.
Grocery store cashier inside plastic tent h/t the New York Post
Alexander Tavares, 19, posted a video of his evolving working conditions in the pandemic that has since gone viral on social media. The video shows several of the transparent square tents that cover the working space of a cashier booth to shield them from bodily fluids discharged from customers.
https://players.brightcove.net/c8d498ac-5bba-445e-b596-04345e910cd2 .32 min
Last month we showed a shocking simulation of how a single-cough from a COVID-19 carrier releases an aerosol cloud of the virus that can be easily be sucked into the respiratory tract of others in the vicinity.
.
The Posts said the supermarket decided to take precautionary measures in protecting its employees after a report detailed how industry workers were dying from the virus.
Supermarkets across the country have imposed new measures to protect employees and customers. Many stores are now requiring anyone in the facility to wear a mask. And, of course, we don't know why anyone would currently step inside a closed area with a bunch of people in a pandemic, while one can easily order food online.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Fri, 05/01/2020 - 17:20
Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
Many Americans have been absolutely shocked by the meat shortages that have started to happen around the nation, but what most of them don’t realize is that the worst is yet to come. More workers keep getting sick, more processing plants keep getting shut down, and Time Magazine is now warning that the meat shortages “could last for months”. And even if meat is available at your local grocery store, you may be limited to one or two of a particular item on each trip. For those not familiar with the concept, this is what is known as “rationing”.
And even though President Trump just issued an executive order that “encourages” meat processing facilities to stay open, it actually won’t do very much at all to alter our current trajectory, and I will explain why below.
But first, let’s talk about where things currently stand. According to USA Today, the number of cattle, hogs and sheep being slaughtered is way, way down compared to last year…
And as the number of meat processing facilities closing down due to the COVID-19 pandemic has surged, the decline in meat production has accelerated…
If production continues to stay at such a low level, we are going to run into major supply chain headaches very rapidly.
After all, do you plan to eat 42 percent less meat this year?
I certainly do not.
In recent days, there was hope that President Trump’s new executive order would bring a quick end to the meat shortages. When I first heard about this executive order, I assumed that it would force all of the meat processing facilities to reopen and would shield the owners from any lawsuits. But it turns out that this executive order doesn’t actually do either of those things…
Sadly, it appears that this executive order isn’t really going to do much good at all.
Big meat processing corporations are going to be quite afraid to reopen facilities as long as the threat of lawsuits looms large. I can promise you that there are already lawyers circling like vultures, and they are going to try to squeeze millions of dollars out of these large companies.
So when will the threat of lawsuits finally go away?
Well, it won’t just be “weeks”, and “a few months” might be overly optimistic.
In our overly litigious society, reopening facilities and exposing your employees to the virus while a pandemic is still raging is basically the equivalent of begging for a class action lawsuit.
Unless President Trump or Congress steps up and takes bold action, nothing is going to change.
And if nothing changes, Tyson Foods is warning that “millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the food chain”…
And with supplies getting really tight, we are already starting to see prices go into the stratosphere.
In fact, Zero Hedge is reporting that the price of wholesale beef has already risen a whopping 62 percent since February…
Eventually, it is likely that we will get to a point where many Americans are forced to cut back on their consumption of meat because they simply can’t afford as much of it anymore.
I hope that you did what you could to get prepared in advance, because it appears that these shortages may be quite painful. If you can believe it, McDonald’s has already implemented a system of “controlled allocation” for their restaurants…
Did you ever imagine that we would see a day when McDonald’s would be worried about potentially running out of meat?
Well, it is actually happening, and supplies are only going to get tighter in the months ahead.
Sadly, farmers are having to euthanize millions of chickens, pigs and cattle because meat processing facilities won’t take them while they are shut down.
So the truth is that there should be plenty of meat to go around, but fear of COVID-19 has caused a total breakdown of the supply chain.
What is happening is truly a tragedy, and hopefully our politicians will step forward and take dramatic action before things get even worse.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
34K chickens die in farm fires in North Carolina, Virginia
Investigators think up to 34,000 chickens were killed during two separate poultry farm fires in North Carolina and Virginia within a day of each other.
www.nbc12.com
34K chickens die in farm fires in North Carolina, Virginia
A poultry house at a Rockingham County farm burned to the ground on Friday afternoon, killing tens of thousands of chickens inside. (Source: WHSV)
By Associated Press | January 27, 2020 at 8:55 AM EST - Updated January 27 at 7:49 PM
FULKS RUN, Va. (AP) - Investigators think up to 34,000 chickens were killed during two separate poultry farm fires in North Carolina and Virginia within a day of each other.
Rockingham County Fire and Rescue officials say a fire in Fulks Run, Virginia, killed an estimated 24,000 chickens on Friday.
Firefighters contained the barn blaze, but the structure was destroyed.
The Forbush Volunteer Fire chief says approximately 10,000 chickens were killed at a poultry house in North Carolina just one day prior.
Crews responding to the Yadkinville farm on Thursday discovered fire spreading near the feed silos.
The fires appear to be unrelated and no workers were injured in either.
Yes, just recently China was doing a "new trial" of the Remdesivir, and supposedly with this second wave they did not have enough ill people to give it a good trial. China accused of obstructing COVID-19 cure research by shutting down promising Gilead trial
Another one, which says it doesn't work and than changes the story???
First trial for potential Covid-19 drug shows it has no effect
WHO draft put online states remdesivir does not benefit severe coronavirus patients
Coronavirus latest: at a glance
Sarah Boseley Health editor
Thu 23 Apr 2020 15.35 EDTLast modified on Thu 30 Apr 2020 11.32 EDT
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The antiviral medication remdesivir. The WHO said a document on the drug’s efficacy in treating the novel coronavirus still awaited peer review. Photograph: Reuters
Remdesivir, a drug thought to be one of the best prospects for treating Covid-19, failed to have any effect in the first full trial, it has been revealed.
The drug is in short supply globally because of the excitement it has generated. It is one of the drugs Donald Trump claimed was “promising”.
In a “gold standard” trial of 237 patients, some of whom received remdesivir while others did not, the drug did not work.
News of the failure was posted on a World Health Organization clinical trials database, but later removed. A WHO spokesman said it had been uploaded too soon by accident.
“A draft document was provided by the authors to WHO and inadvertently posted on the website and taken down as soon as the mistake was noticed. The manuscript is undergoing peer review and we are waiting for a final version before WHO comments,” said Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesperson.
The drug, made by the US company Gilead Sciences, is an antiviral that was trialled in Ebola, but which failed to show benefits in Africa.
In the race for drugs that might work against Covid-19, many doctors have given remdesivir to patients on “compassionate grounds” without waiting for trials. Because of the interest in it, the world’s biggest trial of possible treatments for Covid-19 at Oxford has not been able to include it, because researchers could not obtain supplies.
Remdesivir was stopped early in 18 (11.6%) patients because of adverse effects, compared with 4 (5.1%) in the control group.” There were no details in the short report of the side effects.
The trial of the drug in China, on patients with severe Covid-19 symptoms, may give some doctors pause. Gilead, however, claimed there were still signs that it could be useful, possibly in patients with milder versions of disease.
In the trial, 158 patients were randomly assigned to be given remdesivir, while 79 others had standard care with a placebo instead. There was no difference between the groups with respect to recovery time. Just under 14% of those on remdesivir died, compared with nearly 13% of those not taking the treatment.
“In this study of hospitalised adult patients with severe Covid-19, [which] was terminated prematurely, remdesivir was not associated with clinical or virological benefits,” said the report on the WHO website.
The report added: “
Just a week ago, it emerged that researchers in Chicago were excited by the results of a Gilead-run trial of remdesivir in 125 patients. Nearly all those people were discharged within a week, according to STAT News, which follows the pharmaceutical industry. However, there was no placebo group, which meant researchers could not be sure that it was the drug that made the difference, and not something else.
Remdesivir is one of a handful of drugs that have been enthusiastically backed by doctors and politicians as potential cures for Covid-19. There has also been a rush to give patients hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic version of the antimalarial chloroquine. That has led to shortages for people who need to take it for lupus, a disease that affects the immune system.
Scientists who want to see proper trials conducted are likely to point to the remdesivir trial failure as strong evidence of the dangers of giving out even tested drugs on compassionate grounds for a disease that is so novel.
• This article was amended on 30 April 2020. An earlier version said that the remdesivir trial had been stopped early because of side-effects. Although some patients were taken off the drug because of side-effects, it was stopped early because they did not recruit enough patients.
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naturallysweet
Has No Life - Lives on TB
No, the global cfl us still 7% . Which is a very whole number.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Premiering
Newsweek Bombshell: Covid-19 Virus Lab-Made? Fauci Connected?
•Premiere in progress. Started 13 minutes ago
Peak Prosperity
One of the more acutely-asked questions since the covid-19 pandemic broke out has been: Is the virus man-made? Debate on the matter has been wild and furious.
After much investigation, Chris is now chiming in on the heels of an explosive Newsweek report. Newsweek reveals that as recently as last year, the US funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 'gain of function' research on bat coronaviruses. The source of that funding? The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, headed by.....(drumroll please)....Dr Anthony Fauci, lead medical expert for American's Covid-19 task force.
Now, this doesn't mean the virus was lab-engineered as a bio-weapon. But it does suggest a naturally-occuring bat virus could have been artificially accelerated along certain vectors. Of course, this raises an awfully lot of urgent and important questions.
So far, Fauci has not commented on the Newsweek report. But we will be keeping close tabs on developments from here
LINKS FROM THIS VIDEO: Bombshell https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-bac... Gain of Function https://osp.od.nih.gov/biotechnology/... NPR super weak refuting https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsand... Jurassic Park – full 44 second clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRNX6... Jurassic park – never stopped to think if they should 10 second clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY-pU... Infectious clone technology https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
Doomer Doug
TB Fanatic
Ebola is a close contact with precious bodily fluids. Once that fool was infected, stayed in the Dallas apartment with the family, and nobody got sick, I knew it was no big deal for the usa. Africa, well it turned endemic, is now permanently entrenched and they can't get rid of it now.
As we are all aware of, we are one plane ride from Africa away from ebola, or plague, or corona chan getting to the usa. Besides, Africa is having serious issues with corona chan, in terms of food riots and chaos. I think the secondary, non medical impacts on a place like africa may be what causes the most death. The first scene on BlackHawk Down at the food riot comes to mind.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Surgeon General Doubles Down: Masks Increase Virus Risk
Surgeon General Jerome Adams Tuesday doubled down on his advice against healthy people wearing face masks to protect themselves from coronavirus, saying that wearing one improperly can "actually increase your risk" of getting the disease.
www.newsmax.com
Surgeon General Doubles Down: Masks Increase Virus Risk
U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams speaks to members of the press on the White House ground March 20, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
By Sandy Fitzgerald | Tuesday, 31 March 2020 08:48 AM
Surgeon General Jerome Adams Tuesday doubled down on his advice against healthy people wearing face masks to protect themselves from coronavirus, saying that wearing one improperly can "actually increase your risk" of getting the disease.
"What the World Health Organization and the CDC have reaffirmed in the last few days is that they do not recommend the general public wear masks," Adams told Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "There was a study in 2015 looking at medical students. And medical students wearing surgical masks touch their faces on average 23 times. We know a major way that you can get respiratory diseases like coronavirus is by touching a surface and then touching your face."
Masks also can give the wearer a "false sense of security" and can encourage people to be too close to each other, said Adams, and further, there are still mask shortages nationwide.
People who are sick should wear masks, said Adams, but acknowledged that if healthy people feel better by wearing a mask, "by all means, wear it" but they should not touch their faces.
He also insisted the general public should not wear medical-style N95 masks, because they must be fitted properly to avoid infection.
"There may be a day where we change our recommendation, particularly for areas that have large spread going on, about wearing cotton masks but again the data is not there yet," said Adams.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Cops face off with protesters at California’s Capitol as they demand end to stay-at-home order
MAY 01, 2020 11:01 AM, UPDATED 52 MINUTES AGO
Video on site 1:57
Watch CHP efforts to disperse 'Re-Open California' protesters from Capitol grounds
California Highway Patrol officers officers attempt to disperse people demonstrating against Gov. Gavin Newsom's coronavirus stay-at-home order at the California Capitol on Friday, May 1, 2020. The CHP did not issue a permit for the protest. BY RENÉE C. BYER | PAUL KITAGAKI JR.
In the most intense protest yet against California’s stay-at-home order, demonstrators crowded the west steps of the Capitol on Friday and scuffled with California Highway Patrol officers who had ordered them to disperse. At least three protesters were detained during the demonstration, which lasted about three hours.
The protest by several hundred people – some holding American flags and signs calling for the economy to reopen – quickly escalated after CHP officers ordered them around 1 p.m. to leave the steps of the landmark downtown Sacramento building or face arrest. Some demonstrators got within a few inches of officers’ faces, screaming that their rights to assemble were being violated and calling officers “traitors” for defending the government’s orders to restrict gatherings at schools, businesses and churches.
Few wore masks.
The protest was in direct violation of both Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus and a week-old CHP ban on protests on state property. Nonetheless, CHP officers initially allowed throngs of demonstrators to enter the Capitol grounds.
The crowd included members of Freedom Angels, a group opposed to the state’s vaccination laws, and people carrying signs in support of President Donald Trump.
The demonstration started peacefully. By noon, at least 500 cars, trucks, motorcycles, RVs and vans were circling the Capitol, honking horns, waving flags — American flags, banners for Trump and the Gadsden flag that reads “Don’t Tread on Me” — in a procession so clogged it was taking nearly an hour to circle the complex.
At least 400 people were gathered together on the steps and lawn, and dozens of CHP officers formed a line as the crowd chanted “U.S.A.” and edged toward them. Just before 12:30 p.m., the CHP’s Capitol Protection Service, some in face masks, ordered the demonstrators to disperse from the steps of the building or face arrest, citing health and safety codes.
The situation began to escalate after the order was given. A handful of protesters broke through a line of CHP officers guarding the Capitol. Officers formed a line and were able to move the hostile crowd away from the building. Some in the crowd chanted “remember your oath” to officers. One woman could be heard yelling “traitors” to officers. Another shouted into a megaphone, “President Trump, we need you.”
It wasn’t immediately clear why the CHP officers, after allowing the demonstrators onto the grounds, then decided they had to leave. Officials with the CHP’s Capitol detail couldn’t be immediately reached for comment; a spokesman at the agency’s state headquarters deferred questions to the unit’s information officer.
Small, isolated scuffles broke out among protesters, who were yelling at officers “our house” and “open up.” They began demanding cops to abandon their post and “remember your oath.” The crowds refused to budge from the front of the building and officers at 12:45 p.m. removed their batons, locked arms across the building to L Street, forming a line to block protesters from entering the building.
At least three people who tried to cross police lines were pulled away and detained. Several other people were pulled from the crowd as well. at 12:55 p.m., the order was given for officers to move on protests, pushing them away from the building.
“Please comply with our orders,” the officer said, telling protesters they weren’t trying to impede their First Amendment rights.
Within the span of 20 minutes, officers in riot gear – wearing heavy-duty helmets with shields and face masks beneath, as well as protective vests and leggings – used long batons to push the crowd 25 feet from the portico.
Watch live video at site 39:22 min
CHP officers were able to move the crowd 25 feet away from the building. An officer on the west steps told the crowd, “Please comply with our orders,” and said law enforcement did not intend to impede their First Amendment rights.
At 2:24 p.m., officers flanking the protesters on three sides issued their “final warning” on moving away from the building and began to push the crowd back. The crowd started booing, with one chanting into a megaphone, “We have a right to assemble,” but they slowly moved back, one step at a time.
Within about a half hour, around half of the protesters had been pushed off the Capitol grounds to the sidewalk on 10th Street. Many began leaving the demonstration altogether as a group of CHP officers stood shoulder-to-shoulder by the giant planters near the sidewalk.
At the same time, CHP officers could be seen escorting a handful of detainees away, including Heidi Munoz Gleisner, a familiar figure at the Capitol for her participation in anti-vaccination demonstrations.
Although the protest was scheduled to begin at noon, dozens of people were on the Capitol grounds before 10 a.m. Port-a-potties were set up on the sidewalk and a truck was mounted with large speakers blaring country songs and other music. Steel fencing was set up around the entrance to the steps, but pathways to the steps were left open and people were moving about freely.
PERMIT NOT ISSUED
CHP and police were everywhere on the Capitol grounds, some riding bikes, others on horseback. Due to the heavy traffic downtown, Sacramento Regional Transit said it may reroute several bus routes that cross the area.
Promoted online by websites advocating an end to the governor’s March 19 stay-at-home order, the demonstration was one of several planned for Friday in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Huntington Beach, Ventura and San Diego by groups advocating for a return to work and school.
Watch video on site. 30:11 min
The protests came on May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, which traditionally celebrates laborers and the working class. Such demonstrations in the Bay Area were not on foot, but in parades of cars. Also, workers from Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart and Walmart, among others, were striking in some spots around the nation over the lack of protections on the job and sick pay during the pandemic.
There were also separately planned rent strikes from tenants rights groups and community nonprofits in cities including New York and Los Angeles, calling for leaders to cancel rent during the crisis.
Video on site 1:06 min
Scenes from ‘Re-Open California' demonstration at Capitol
Hundreds of protesters encircled the California Capitol in Sacramento in cars and on foot Friday, May 1, 2020, to protest against Gov. Gavin Newsom's stay-at-home order to slow the spread of the coronavirus. BY PAUL KITAGAKI JR. | RENÉE C. BYER
A similar protest took place at the Capitol on April 20 with the blessing of the CHP, which issued a permit and handled set-up logistics despite the ban on large gatherings by the governor and regional law enforcement agencies.
But following questions about why the permit was issued for the protest, which featured about 500 demonstrators circling the Capitol in vehicles and cramming together near the west steps to listen to speakers, the CHP announced it would no longer issue such permits.
“Permits are issued to provide safe environments for demonstrators to express their views,” the CHP said in a statement following the governor’s assertion that he believed the protest was to be held from cars in a convoy. “In this case, the permit for the convoy was issued with the understanding that the protest would be conducted in a manner consistent with the state’s public health guidance.
“That is not what occurred, and CHP will take this experience into account when considering permits for this or any other group.”
The agency added that “effective immediately the California Highway Patrol will deny any permit requests for events or activities at all state facilities, to include the State Capitol, until public health officials have determined it is safe to gather again.”
Part 1 of 2
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2
That policy generated a federal civil rights lawsuit against the governor and the CHP, as well as criticism from constitutional scholars who said it went too far.
The CHP never specified how it planned to handle the protest, which originally was billed as one featuring vehicles circling the Capitol but later included plans for a march and calls for demonstrators to board buses to the Capitol.
Instead, the agency merely said Thursday night it was “unable to approve permits” for the demonstration and “will have resources available to take the appropriate action as necessary.”
SEVERAL CALIFORNIA GROUPS CALL FOR PROTESTS
There were several Facebook groups calling for protests around California on Friday. The largest of them, “Reopen California,” has an upside-down American flag as its background image on its page and 131,000 members.
The group featured live feeds Friday from protestors at the capitol as well as at protests in Southern California.On the page’s “about” section is a link to a website, Ineedtogotowork.com, which contained a single page and a form where people could sign up for alerts. The page presented statistics that attempted to show COVID-19 deaths as being inconsequential.
“We are a non-political group of citizens who believe our rights are being violated by the Coronavirus “Shelter In” Process,” the site says. “We want to go back to work in order to support our lives and the lives of our families.
“We think it’s time to get back to work California, for those who do not fall into the High Risk category. It’s my body and should be my choice to work. All work is essential and Shelter In should be a choice that every American Citizen should make on their own.”
Elsewhere around the country, similar protests have been criticized for being organized by secretive political organizations. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said the “Operation Gridlock” protests at the capitol last month were organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, which has received backing in the past from the DeVos Family’s Amway empire. Betsy DeVos is Trump’s education secretary.“
“I also would just say, I think it is this group is funded in large part by the DeVos family and I think it’s really inappropriate for a sitting member of the United States president’s cabinet to be waging political tax on any governor, but obviously on me here at home,” Whitmer told reporters last month. “I think that they should disavow it and encourage people to stay home and be safe.”
While no official group has claimed to be behind California’s protests, they have received some legal support from the conservative Center for American Liberty, whose lawyers sued the Newsom administration this week for no longer issuing protest permits at the Capitol.
“At a time when Californians are rightfully questioning the duration and extent of the stay at home orders, which are unevenly enforced and which have resulted in other Constitutional challenges, Governor Newsom has reacted to citizen protests not by addressing widespread concern, but simply by shutting down protest at the Capitol altogether, making no reasonable accommodations for this fundamental function in a free society,” Center for American Liberty CEO Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement.
Video on site 0:45 min
Hear CHP order dispersal of stay-at-home order protesters at California state Capitol
Protesters were at the state Capitol in Sacramento, California, on May 1, 2020 to demand an end to Governor Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home shutdown order during the COVID-19 pandemic. California Highway Patrol officers ordered a dispersal. BY ALYSSA HODENFIELD | SAM STANTON | JASON SHOULTZ
‘WE’RE RESPONSIBLE ADULTS’
Stefanie Fetzer of San Clemente, left home at midnight to ride one of two chartered buses for the event.
Fetzer was at the Capitol for the previous protest and said she was the one who got a permit for that event from CHP, a move that shocked her.
“I thought I’d won the lottery,” she said as she stood on the Capitol west steps a few feet from eight CHP officers watching from the steps.
“I think its time for us to send a message to Gov. Newsom that he needs to roll back this shutdown,” she said. “We’ve gotten to the point where the economy’s going to suffer, I have friends facing homelessness, business lost that will never recover.”
“People are suffering, I read something yesterday that the suicide hotline had seen an 1,800 percent increase in calls. So we know poverty kills. It’s time for us to weigh both factors now, it’s time for us to get back to work.”
Fetzer said her husband, a software developer, is hurting because of the slowed economy and that a friend who owns a now-shuttered hair salon is suffering because of the $5,000 a month rent.
“He can’t pay the rent with no haircuts, so he’s looking at shutting down,” she said as her 8-year-old son, Jerry, stood nearby.
Fetzer emphasized that the protesters are being responsible.
“We’re not advocating for people to go out and lick other people,” she said. “We’re responsible adults. We can interact and be safe.”
NEWSOM SAYS DEMONSTRATE ‘SAFELY’
At his noon press conference, Newsom said he would defer to the CHP on crowd control, but said he welcomes protest as long as it is done with social distancing. He encouraged protesters to take precautions to protect themselves and others, including wearing masks.
“I’m passionate about participatory democracy,” he said. “All I ask is, just do it safely.”
He said he would tell the protesters this: “You don’t want to contract this disease. This disease doesn’t know if you’re a protester, a Democrat, a Republican ... so protect yourself, protect your family... your friends, your neighbors, people that you’re protesting with. That’s all I would say to them, and thank them for their expression of free speech.”
Newsom says he is now preparing to significantly loosen his stay at home order to reopen some businesses “within many days” rather than weeks. But that timeline could be pushed back if large groups of people congregate and spread the virus.
Although 91 people died in the last 24 hours in California, he said hospitalizations and ICU admissions are stable.
“We can screw all that up, we can set all that back by making bad decisions,” he said. “We could start to see a spread again, and so that’s the only thing that will set us back.”
A mixture of signs denouncing the stay-at-home order blended with signs lauding President Donald Trump and demanding Newsom’s impeachment. Many demonstrators wore red-white-and-blue outfits and carried American flags.
Kristine Cardozo, an ayurvedic health practitioner, stood on the steps wearing her blue medical scrubs, a stethoscope around her neck and no mask or gloves.
Cardozo said she drove up Thursday from Burbank for the protest because the shutdown has hurt her ability to see patients, much less touch them as part of her work, and that she does not believe the coronavirus crisis is as dire as some have described.
“Health care workers have to feed their families, too, and all across the country they’re being furloughed out of hospitals,” she said. “Nobody’s coming in and these people are coming home having to get on unemployment as well.”
Wisti Quenneville, 56, a self-employed hairdresser and fitness coach who lives in Danville lost both jobs, and state unemployment insurance hasn’t filled the financial gap, she said. She said the stay-at-home order initially made sense, especially because of the epidemics unfolding in places like Italy and New York City.
Her frustration in recent weeks is that her work might not return for weeks or even months under Newsom’s incremental plan to reopen.
“We did it. Now let’s gently insert ourselves to the old world,” she said Friday, across the street from the main protest.
If a surge in infections or deaths followed a reopening now, she said she’d “be happy to shut back down.” Friday’s protest at the Capitol was the first demonstration she’d ever joined and overall she was surprised by how peaceful it was — until police filed out of the building and began moving protesters back.
“It was like the freaking hunger games,” she said.
Andrew Smith attended with his 3-year-old daughter, Riley Jo, to “have our voices heard.”
“You can point to data all you want,” said Smith, who said it didn’t matter millions of people were at risk of getting sick or dying. “You still can’t take away civil liberties.
“It’s simple. If you’re afraid of it stay home.”
That policy generated a federal civil rights lawsuit against the governor and the CHP, as well as criticism from constitutional scholars who said it went too far.
The CHP never specified how it planned to handle the protest, which originally was billed as one featuring vehicles circling the Capitol but later included plans for a march and calls for demonstrators to board buses to the Capitol.
Instead, the agency merely said Thursday night it was “unable to approve permits” for the demonstration and “will have resources available to take the appropriate action as necessary.”
SEVERAL CALIFORNIA GROUPS CALL FOR PROTESTS
There were several Facebook groups calling for protests around California on Friday. The largest of them, “Reopen California,” has an upside-down American flag as its background image on its page and 131,000 members.
The group featured live feeds Friday from protestors at the capitol as well as at protests in Southern California.On the page’s “about” section is a link to a website, Ineedtogotowork.com, which contained a single page and a form where people could sign up for alerts. The page presented statistics that attempted to show COVID-19 deaths as being inconsequential.
“We are a non-political group of citizens who believe our rights are being violated by the Coronavirus “Shelter In” Process,” the site says. “We want to go back to work in order to support our lives and the lives of our families.
“We think it’s time to get back to work California, for those who do not fall into the High Risk category. It’s my body and should be my choice to work. All work is essential and Shelter In should be a choice that every American Citizen should make on their own.”
Elsewhere around the country, similar protests have been criticized for being organized by secretive political organizations. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said the “Operation Gridlock” protests at the capitol last month were organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, which has received backing in the past from the DeVos Family’s Amway empire. Betsy DeVos is Trump’s education secretary.“
“I also would just say, I think it is this group is funded in large part by the DeVos family and I think it’s really inappropriate for a sitting member of the United States president’s cabinet to be waging political tax on any governor, but obviously on me here at home,” Whitmer told reporters last month. “I think that they should disavow it and encourage people to stay home and be safe.”
While no official group has claimed to be behind California’s protests, they have received some legal support from the conservative Center for American Liberty, whose lawyers sued the Newsom administration this week for no longer issuing protest permits at the Capitol.
“At a time when Californians are rightfully questioning the duration and extent of the stay at home orders, which are unevenly enforced and which have resulted in other Constitutional challenges, Governor Newsom has reacted to citizen protests not by addressing widespread concern, but simply by shutting down protest at the Capitol altogether, making no reasonable accommodations for this fundamental function in a free society,” Center for American Liberty CEO Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement.
Video on site 0:45 min
Hear CHP order dispersal of stay-at-home order protesters at California state Capitol
Protesters were at the state Capitol in Sacramento, California, on May 1, 2020 to demand an end to Governor Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home shutdown order during the COVID-19 pandemic. California Highway Patrol officers ordered a dispersal. BY ALYSSA HODENFIELD | SAM STANTON | JASON SHOULTZ
‘WE’RE RESPONSIBLE ADULTS’
Stefanie Fetzer of San Clemente, left home at midnight to ride one of two chartered buses for the event.
Fetzer was at the Capitol for the previous protest and said she was the one who got a permit for that event from CHP, a move that shocked her.
“I thought I’d won the lottery,” she said as she stood on the Capitol west steps a few feet from eight CHP officers watching from the steps.
“I think its time for us to send a message to Gov. Newsom that he needs to roll back this shutdown,” she said. “We’ve gotten to the point where the economy’s going to suffer, I have friends facing homelessness, business lost that will never recover.”
“People are suffering, I read something yesterday that the suicide hotline had seen an 1,800 percent increase in calls. So we know poverty kills. It’s time for us to weigh both factors now, it’s time for us to get back to work.”
Fetzer said her husband, a software developer, is hurting because of the slowed economy and that a friend who owns a now-shuttered hair salon is suffering because of the $5,000 a month rent.
“He can’t pay the rent with no haircuts, so he’s looking at shutting down,” she said as her 8-year-old son, Jerry, stood nearby.
Fetzer emphasized that the protesters are being responsible.
“We’re not advocating for people to go out and lick other people,” she said. “We’re responsible adults. We can interact and be safe.”
NEWSOM SAYS DEMONSTRATE ‘SAFELY’
At his noon press conference, Newsom said he would defer to the CHP on crowd control, but said he welcomes protest as long as it is done with social distancing. He encouraged protesters to take precautions to protect themselves and others, including wearing masks.
“I’m passionate about participatory democracy,” he said. “All I ask is, just do it safely.”
He said he would tell the protesters this: “You don’t want to contract this disease. This disease doesn’t know if you’re a protester, a Democrat, a Republican ... so protect yourself, protect your family... your friends, your neighbors, people that you’re protesting with. That’s all I would say to them, and thank them for their expression of free speech.”
Newsom says he is now preparing to significantly loosen his stay at home order to reopen some businesses “within many days” rather than weeks. But that timeline could be pushed back if large groups of people congregate and spread the virus.
Although 91 people died in the last 24 hours in California, he said hospitalizations and ICU admissions are stable.
“We can screw all that up, we can set all that back by making bad decisions,” he said. “We could start to see a spread again, and so that’s the only thing that will set us back.”
A mixture of signs denouncing the stay-at-home order blended with signs lauding President Donald Trump and demanding Newsom’s impeachment. Many demonstrators wore red-white-and-blue outfits and carried American flags.
Kristine Cardozo, an ayurvedic health practitioner, stood on the steps wearing her blue medical scrubs, a stethoscope around her neck and no mask or gloves.
Cardozo said she drove up Thursday from Burbank for the protest because the shutdown has hurt her ability to see patients, much less touch them as part of her work, and that she does not believe the coronavirus crisis is as dire as some have described.
“Health care workers have to feed their families, too, and all across the country they’re being furloughed out of hospitals,” she said. “Nobody’s coming in and these people are coming home having to get on unemployment as well.”
Wisti Quenneville, 56, a self-employed hairdresser and fitness coach who lives in Danville lost both jobs, and state unemployment insurance hasn’t filled the financial gap, she said. She said the stay-at-home order initially made sense, especially because of the epidemics unfolding in places like Italy and New York City.
Her frustration in recent weeks is that her work might not return for weeks or even months under Newsom’s incremental plan to reopen.
“We did it. Now let’s gently insert ourselves to the old world,” she said Friday, across the street from the main protest.
If a surge in infections or deaths followed a reopening now, she said she’d “be happy to shut back down.” Friday’s protest at the Capitol was the first demonstration she’d ever joined and overall she was surprised by how peaceful it was — until police filed out of the building and began moving protesters back.
“It was like the freaking hunger games,” she said.
Andrew Smith attended with his 3-year-old daughter, Riley Jo, to “have our voices heard.”
“You can point to data all you want,” said Smith, who said it didn’t matter millions of people were at risk of getting sick or dying. “You still can’t take away civil liberties.
“It’s simple. If you’re afraid of it stay home.”
psychgirl
Has No Life - Lives on TB
My husband just lost his job today, due to this scourge, this nasty sh##% that we call covid19.
His management team called today. They can’t reopen and the numbers are too bad.
We might “be done”. I’m in no mood for any of this shit.
This, will happen, all across America.
I’m crying too hard for ANY consolememt or discussion.
If I, all by myself, could personally strangle each and every Chinese epidemiology person right now I would.
Hands freaking down.
His management team called today. They can’t reopen and the numbers are too bad.
We might “be done”. I’m in no mood for any of this shit.
This, will happen, all across America.
I’m crying too hard for ANY consolememt or discussion.
If I, all by myself, could personally strangle each and every Chinese epidemiology person right now I would.
Hands freaking down.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Reopening California: Huge crowd gathers in Sacramento, SF, SoCal to demand Gov. Newsom lift COVID-19 restriction
Thousands could be seen at the state capitol, standing together and not wearing masks or face coverings. They cheered and waved American flags as speakers chanted through megaphones.
abc7news.com
Reopening California: Huge crowd gathers in Sacramento, SF, SoCal to demand Gov. Newsom lift COVID-19 restriction
Video on site 1:20 min
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Protesters frustrated with ongoing shelter-in-place restrictions in California due to the novel coronavirus pandemic are gathering in at least 11 cities around the state to give Gov. Gavin Newsom a piece of their mind.
Starting at noon Friday, hundreds of people gathered outside the State Capitol in Sacramento. Many of them could be seen standing closely together, not wearing masks or face coverings. They cheered and waved American flags as speakers chanted through megaphones.
Another such protest was planned at San Francisco City Hall. The group was planning to create a "gridlock loop" of cars on the streets surrounding City Hall and to have a walking protest out front.
Despite their urges to reopen California as quickly as possible, organizers seem to at least acknowledge there's a health risk (not to mention a violation of the law) in gathering a bunch of people together in close proximity. The group's website instructs protesters to stand at least six feet apart from each other, per CDC guidelines.
The group also urges attendees to create poster board signs with a "variety of verbiage." (Suggestions include "FREEDOM WE THE PEOPLE," "OPEN OUR CHURCHES," "The shutdown is killing us" and "Practice Media Distancing.") Not sure what to chant? They have suggestions for that, too: "Open our state now" and "Back to school."
Gov. Newsom has repeatedly said he's feeling the pressure to reopen the state more quickly, but is leaning on scientific data to decide on timing. "Politics will not drive our decision making. Protests will not drive our decision making. Political pressure will not drive our decision making," the governor said.
Red, white and blue attire is preferred, but not required.
Protesters were also planning to gather in San Diego and Los Angeles, all at the same time as Gov. Newsom's daily noon briefing on novel coronavirus.
"The rights of people are being suspended and the constitution trampled on and that's the biggest problem we have at this time," says Vivienne Reign who is a business owner helping to organize the Sacramento rally Friday.
While some of the local "Reopen California" Facebook groups have thousands of members, opposition to the rallies is also high on social media. Christopher Martin writes, "Too early, too soon. STAY HOME."
"There's always going to be those that are a little selfish and think about themselves first," says San Francisco resident Eric Westcott.
"All of us at some point in the day end up going out a little bit selfish to overdo that because not only are you at risk you are putting others at risk," says Neeharika Vinod.
Gov. Newsom has repeatedly said he's feeling the pressure to reopen the state more quickly, but is leaning on scientific data to decide on timing.
"Politics will not drive our decision making. Protests will not drive our decision making. Political pressure will not drive our decision making," said Gov. Newsom. "The science, data and public health will drive our decision making."
marsh
On TB every waking moment
I am so sorry, pschgirl. My son in law also lost his job recently. I will add you, your hubby and family to my prayers. I hope he can find another position soon.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Gov. Gavin Newsom says California may be 'days, not weeks' from further reopening
"We're getting very close to making very meaningful augmentations to that stay-at-home order. We said 'weeks, not months' about four or five days ago. I want to say 'many days, not weeks.' As long as we continue to be prudent and thoughtful in certain modifications, I think we'll be making some...
abc7news.com
Gov. Gavin Newsom says California may be 'days, not weeks' from further reopening
Video at site of Newsom's comments: 2:24 min
"We're getting very close to making very meaningful augmentations to that stay-at-home order. We said 'weeks, not months' about four or five days ago. I want to say 'many days, not weeks.' As long as we continue to be prudent and thoughtful in certain modifications, I think we'll be making some announcements."
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Gov. Gavin Newsom's daily briefing Friday came amid multiple protests of his handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic and his slow rollback of shelter-in-place restrictions.
At least 11 protests were planned around the state at the same time demanding Newsom lift restrictions on businesses and shelter-in-place orders. Essential workers around the state, like some at Amazon, Whole Foods, and Target, are also holding May Day strikes to demand safer working conditions and hazard pay.
With that in mind, Newsom opened his press conference by thanking essential workers across all sectors and underlining the state's efforts to secure more protective equipment for them.
He also hinted that more restrictions may be lifted sooner than previously indicated.
"We're getting very close to making very meaningful augmentations to that stay-at-home order. We said 'weeks, not months' about four or five days ago. I want to say 'many days, not weeks.' As long as we continue to be prudent and thoughtful in certain modifications, I think we'll be making some announcements."
Newsom said he believed "we're getting very, very close" to lifting restrictions on more businesses, including the retail, hospitality and restaurant sectors. The governor said he'd elaborate on those changes next week.
"The only thing that's going to hold us back is the spread of this virus. And the only thing that is assured to advance the spread of the virus is thousands of people congregating together, not practicing social distancing or physical distancing."
As Newsom said those words, hundreds were gathered at the State Capitol in protest, many of them standing closely together and lacking protective gear.
"This disease doesn't know if you're a protester, a Democrat, a Republican, if you support the election of one candidate, or the ouster of another. It just knows one thing, and that is its host," said Newsom.
"No one wants to use the word patience, so I won't use that word," he said. "We're all impatient and we're deeply anxious and deeply desirous to start to turn the page and turn the corner. ... The data is starting to give us more confidence."
The data Newsom referred to includes the number of hospitalizations and "persons under investigation" as potential COVID-19 cases. Newsom said ICU hospitalizations were flat over the last 24 hours, overall coronavirus hospitalizations dropped by 2% and persons under investigation dropped a significant 13.9%.
But Friday also marked two less optimistic milestones; the number of coronavirus-related deaths in California topped 2,000 and the total number of positive cases surpassed 50,000.
Gov. Newsom has repeatedly said he's feeling the pressure to reopen the state more quickly, but is leaning on scientific data to decide on timing.
"Politics will not drive our decision making. Protests will not drive our decision making. Political pressure will not drive our decision making," he said earlier this week. "The science, data and public health will drive our decision making."
Last edited:
psychgirl
Has No Life - Lives on TB
You know what ?
This means SO much.
I just can’t... I don’t even know anymore.
Thank you.
Ragnarok
On and On, South of Heaven
This is huge thread drift so this will be my only reply.
My saying "bullshit" that there is a "spectrum" of genders is like saying "lightning is BS"...
That's rich.
I've done my research. A miniscule percentage may be born with extra chromosomes BUT, either the male or female is ALWAYS dominant. Until you can show me a human that is asexual...
Yes... It is bullshit!
Ragnarok
On and On, South of Heaven
US germ warfare lab creates test for pre-infectious Covid-19 carriers
Exclusive: test has potential to be ‘a gamechanger’ in attempts to curb spread of coronavirus
Giles Tremlett
Fri 1 May 2020 11.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 1 May 2020 11.02 EDT
A transmission electron microscope image showing Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. The new test looks at the body’s immune response to infection. Photograph: Alamy
Scientists working for the US military have designed a new Covid-19 test that could potentially identify carriers before they become infectious and spread the disease, the Guardian has learned.
In what could be a significant breakthrough, project coordinators hope the blood-based test will be able to detect the virus’s presence as early as 24 hours after infection – before people show symptoms and several days before a carrier is considered capable of spreading it to other people. That is also around four days before current tests can detect the virus.
The test has emerged from a project set up by the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) aimed at rapid diagnosis of germ or chemical warfare poisoning. It was hurriedly repurposed when the pandemic broke out and the new test is expected to be put forward for emergency use approval (EUA) by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) within a week.
“The concept fills a diagnostic gap worldwide,” the head of Darpa’s biological technologies office, Dr Brad Ringeisen, told the Guardian, since it should also fill in testing gaps at later stages of the infection. If given FDA approval, he said, it had the potential to be “absolutely a gamechanger”.
While pre-infectious detection would improve the efficiency of test-and-trace programmes as governments worldwide relax lockdowns, Darpa cautioned that it must wait until after FDA approval is given and the test can be put into practise for evidence of exactly how early it can pick up the virus.
“The goal of research is to develop and validate an early host blood response diagnostic test for Covid,” Prof Stuart Sealfon, who leads the research team at Mount Sinai hospital in New York, said in an email.
He said the testing approach, which looks at the body’s response as it fights Covid-19, should produce earlier results than current nose-swab tests that hunt for the virus itself. “Because the immune response to infection develops immediately after infection, a Covid signature is expected to provide more sensitive Covid infection diagnosis earlier,” he told the Guardian.
The research behind the development of the tests will eventually be made public, with the collaborating teams from medical schools at Mount Sinai, Duke University and Princeton expected to publish online, allowing scientists around the world to trial similar methods.
If EUA is granted, the test should start being rolled out in the US in the second half of May. Approval is not guaranteed, but Darpa scientists are enthusiastic about the potential impact as governments loosen lockdowns amid worries about controlling potential second-wave outbreaks.
“We are all extremely excited. We want to roll this test out as quickly as we can, but at the same time share with others who might want to implement in their own countries,” said Dr Eric Van Gieson, who set up Darpa’s epigenetic characterization and observation (Echo) programme last year to diagnose biological warfare victims, and has redirected it to focus on Covid-19. Epigenetics looks at a set of controls on genes that can respond to the environment.
Hope that the test might pick up carriers before they become infectious is based on previous research into other viruses, though Sealfon said this remained “unknown” for Covid-19.
“We have evidence that diagnosis happens in the first 24 hours for influenza and an adenovirus,” Van Gieson said. “We are still in the midst of proving that with Covid-19. That said, we should know very soon after EUA.” He sees potential for the US to carry out up to a million tests a day, starting with 100,000 daily in May.
The test would up up the possibility of isolating pre-infectious cases and closing down transmission chains. It could also dramatically reduce quarantine periods for people exposed to Covid-19 spreaders, allowing them to go back to work within days. “It could have exceptional demand,” said Chris Linthwaite, the chief executive of Fluidigm, a California life-sciences technology company that is part of the project, who believes frequent testing can help manage workforces as they return to offices, warehouses and factories.
The UK government announced plans two weeks ago to restart a contact-tracing programme that was abandoned early in the outbreak. Britain’s stated target was 100,000 tests a day by the end of April. France announced on Tuesday that it would test 700,000 people a week, including those without symptoms.
Other countries such as South Korea, Australia and New Zealand already have efficient tracing systems, but they would be boosted if carriers could be detected early.
Darpa experts also see potential to improve protocols for protecting health care workers and others in high-risk jobs, as well as those in relatively self-contained or isolated communities such as care homes and prisons or onboard ships.
The test uses the same polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machines used for checking nasal swabs from people suspected of having the virus. “It’s a simple tweak,” said Van Gieson. “The infrastructure is already there.”
Limitations on use are similar to those already faced by countries such as Britain and depend on PCR capacity, stocks of chemical reagents and logistics. Results can take an hour, or longer if samples must be sent away to laboratories.
Like the viral test, the new blood test hunts for a type of molecule called RNA. In this case it is messenger RNA (mRNA). “Target mRNA is part of the immune response to viral infection,” Sealfon said. “mRNA expression levels really do adjust due to the presence of Covid-19. Understanding the immune response is key to fighting Covid-19.”
Covid-19 is thought to incubate for about five days, at which stage people are assumed to become infectious. That is also when the virus can be detected by current nose swab tests. “They do the job, they just don’t tell you someone is sick until maybe four days after this [new test],” said Von Gieson.
The research shows accuracy levels above 95%. “This is something that will need to be constantly monitored as it will inevitably change up or down,” Van Gieson said.
Blood samples are harder to collect than nose swabs, but may be more reliable. Swab testing can be difficult because it requires taking a sample from deep inside the nose.
“It can throw up a lot of false negatives,” said Prof Lawrence Young of Warwick University, adding that recent studies showing low reliability were probably due to poor swab sampling. “I’ve been very concerned by pictures on the television of drive-in testing. Something you could measure reliably in blood could be a good thing.”
Like all researchers contacted by the Guardian, however, he was unwilling to comment further until the Mount Sinai-led team published its research. Most were concerned about potential problems with accuracy and practicality. Blood collection is a potential limitation, since drive-in centres are not usually equipped to do this. One millilitre of blood – a fifth of a teaspoon – is needed.
The research team is expected to publish the mRNA sequence, allowing others to create the so-called “primer” required. A similar approach was taken when the genetic sequence of the virus itself was released by China in January, allowing tests to be developed rapidly in South Korea and elsewhere.
===
US germ warfare research leads to new early Covid-19 test
Exclusive: test has potential to identify carriers before they become infectiouswww.theguardian.com
.
Boy... Reading that the military is involved with this sure makes me nervous...
marsh
On TB every waking moment
U.S. essential workers hold May Day strike, demand time off, hazard pay
Employees of Amazon, Whole Foods, Target, Fedex and other companies will walk off the job or call out sick on International Workers' Day in cities across the U.S.
abc7news.com
By Christopher Weber
Friday, May 1, 2020 11:58AM
Video at site 2:05 min
Essential workers will strike nationwide on May Day to demand safer conditions during the coronavirus outbreak, while other groups plan rallies against tight stay-at-home orders they say are crippling the U.S. economy.
Organizers say employees of Amazon, Whole Foods, Target, Fedex and other companies have become the unexpected frontline workers of the pandemic. Employees will walk off the job or call out sick Friday on International Workers' Day in cities across the U.S. to demand unpaid time off work, hazard pay, sick leave, protective gear and cleaning supplies.
They say flawed policies by employers caused some of their co-workers to contract COVID-19.
"For these reasons, we are engaging in a mass sickout and exercising our right to refuse unsafe work conditions," according to a statement by Whole Foods workers.
Demonstrations are planned in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and other cities. Protesters are asking consumers not to cross picket lines or use those companies' services for the day in solidarity.
Meanwhile nurses will take to the streets outside more than 130 hospitals in 13 states to protest a lack of personal protective equipment and the punishments they endure when they speak out about the problem. More than 60 nurses across the country have died of COVID-19, according to organizers.
"Nurses signed up to care for their patient. They did not sign up to sacrifice their lives on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic," said Bonnie Castillo with National Nurses United.
Across the country, workers who interact with the public - nurses, grocery store workers and delivery drivers among them - have taken action in recent weeks to protect themselves. Rolling job actions have popped up across the limping economy, including by Pittsburgh sanitation workers who walked off their jobs and fast-food employees in California who left restaurants to perform socially distant protests in their cars.
In response to planned protests by its workers, Amazon said in a statement: "While we respect people's right to express themselves, we object to the irresponsible actions of labor groups in spreading misinformation and making false claims about Amazon during this unprecedented health and economic crisis. We have gone to extreme measures to understand and address this pandemic."
Amazon said it has spent more than $800 million on COVID19 safety measures including masks, hand sanitizer, gloves and installing hand-washing stations at warehouses.
Walmart is conducting daily temperature checks and is providing masks and gloves to store and warehouse workers, the company said.
Pro-labor protesters who typically take to the streets on May 1 hope to get some of the attention back from recent headline-grabbing demonstrations demanding states loosen shelter-in-place orders and "reopen."
In Michigan, hundreds of protesters swarmed the Capitol on Thursday to denounce the state's stay-home order and business restrictions. They hoisted signs that said, "Shut down the lockdown" and "No work no freedom."
Similar protests occurred last month in Sacramento against Gov. Gavin Newsom's orders that people remain at home except for essential activities. Additional similar rallies have been happening across California and the nation, with more planned Friday.
The organization Freedom Angels said it will demonstrate at the California Capitol while a group calling itself We Have Rights will rally in Los Angeles and other Southern California cities. A protest in Huntington Beach will likely focus on Newsom's decision to close beaches in Orange County after thousands clustered on the sand last weekend.
Similarly, "MAGA May Day" car rallies by supporters of President Donald Trump will be protesting pandemic lockdown measures in locations including LA, Chicago, and Long Island, New York. Organizers concede the coronavirus threat is "very real."
"However, America cannot destroy the lives and dreams of the majority to protect a few. The cure cannot be more dangerous than the disease. We risk losing who we are as a nation by completely shutting down the country and the economy," said a statement on the MAGA May Day website.
In Los Angeles, anti-lockdown protesters will be met by counter-demonstrators who say opposition to stay-at-home orders is anti-science.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
San Francisco attorney files several lawsuits against Gov. Newsom's shelter-in-place order
'THE GOVERNOR IS OVERREACHING': A San Francisco Civil Rights attorney has filed several lawsuits calling into question Governor Gavin Newsom's stay-at-home rules when it comes to small businesses, beaches, and places of worship. She also emphasized that Newsom "has chosen to limit protests to...
abc7news.com
By Melanie Woodrow
Thursday, April 30, 2020 7:13PM
Video at site 2:03 min
A well-known San Francisco Civil Rights attorney has filed several lawsuits calling into question Governor Gavin Newsom's stay-at-home rules.
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- A well-known San Francisco Civil Rights attorney has filed several lawsuits calling into question Governor Gavin Newsom's stay-at-home rules.
Civil Rights Attorney Harmeet Dhillon says in the last couple of weeks she's filed six lawsuits against the governor.
"The governor is overreaching on a number of grounds," said Dhillon.
In part the lawsuits center around protests.
"The governor has chosen to limit protests to zero in this state which is outrageous and absurd," said Dhillon.
When it comes to small businesses - "No appeal process, no selection criteria," she explained.
What about the closure of houses of worship?
"Going to church to worship communally is a first amendment-protected activity and while it does not sustain the level of protection as protests, petitions, the press, other forms of speech, it is protected under the constitution and we believe it is unconstitutional for the governor to impose restrictions on worship that are broader than necessary to achieve the government's interests," said Dhillon.
And now, possibly state beaches -
"Today's Orange County beach shutdown is almost certain to yield legal action," said Dhillon.
Governor Newsom announced today beaches in Orange County will be closed.
"The application of these rules has to happen at the local level but when it doesn't and the enforcement can't we want to be supportive and provide guidance," said the Governor during a press conference.
Before the Governor made his official announcement, Humbolt County's Sheriff announced his opposition on social media, writing he believes it violates constitutional rights and would not enforce it.
Later he said in a statement, "I'm grateful the governor didn't move forward with a plan that would have unnecessarily and arbitrarily restricted access to our coastline."
Dhillon said she expects a lawsuit based on the beach closures, but wouldn't say whether or not she'll be the attorney who files it.
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Ragnarok
On and On, South of Heaven
Because every country that has tried to come out of lockdown like China and Germany has seen a resurgence...
I am sure expecting one if people start mingling together, again?
I'm not too sure the person who wrote that question is even paying attention...
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marsh
On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.facebook.com/Pamelaanfhiorbhanrigh/videos/3210576142299549/
41:09 min
Video of the Sacramento protest today.
41:09 min
Video of the Sacramento protest today.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
D.C. May Not Reopen For Two To Three Months | The Daily Wire
MAY 1ST, 2020
D.C. May Not Reopen For Two To Three Months
By Ashe SchowDailyWire.com
It may be awhile longer before Washington, D.C. residents can return to their normal lives.
Government officials in the district held a virtual town hall on Wednesday, where Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt, director of the D.C. Department of Health, explained in a slide show two plans for reopening the nation’s capital: The “most-stringent” and “less-stringent.”
The most-stringent plan, considered the worst-case scenario, would keep D.C. residents in their homes and businesses shuttered for at least another three months, NBC Washington reported. The least-stringent plan, described as a best-case scenario, would still keep the city closed for another two months. Both plans involve a phased reopening.
D.C.’s current stay-at-home order is in place until at least May 15. Nesbitt, according to NBC, said the city needed more data before making any decisions about reopening.
The news comes as states across the country begin to look into reopening their economies, even as the novel coronavirus continues to spread. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) came under fire for becoming the first in the nation to reopen parts of the state’s economy one week ago. Kemp allowed certain businesses such as hair salons and barbershops to reopen on April 24, with customers arriving at some businesses as early as 6:30 a.m., The Daily Wire previously reported. One salon, Studio 151, posted stringent policies to protect customers and staff, including waiting in vehicles until a staff member comes to get them for their appointment and taking temperatures at the door.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) had also outlined an ambitious timeline for reopening the state, yet Colleyville, Texas, still couldn’t wait. The city reopened on April 24 with social distancing guidelines. Colleyville, too, was met with a backlash from people who think it is too soon to reopen, The Daily Wire reported. Of course, those who said the city was reopening too soon included people who never lost their jobs during the coronavirus shutdown.
One county in California has also reopened, even as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) laid out a 4-stage plan to reopen the state. That plan will take months to get to the point where gyms and beauty salons can reopen. The four stages are, according to ABC7:
Stage 1: “Safety and Preparedness”
- Making essential workforce environment as safe as possible
- Non-essential manufacturing (toys, furniture, clothing, etc.)
- Schools
- Childcare facilities
- Retail businesses for curbside pick-up
- Offices where working remotely isn’t possible, but can be modified to make the environment safer for employees
- Hair salons
- Nail salons
- Gyms
- Movie theaters
- Sporting events without live audiences
- In-person religious services (churches and weddings)
- Concert venues
- Convention centers
- Sporting events with live audiences
Ragnarok
On and On, South of Heaven
Yes, just recently China was doing a "new trial" of the Remdesivir, and supposedly with this second wave they did not have enough ill people to give it a good trial. China accused of obstructing COVID-19 cure research by shutting down promising Gilead trial
Another one, which says it doesn't work and than changes the story???
First trial for potential Covid-19 drug shows it has no effect
WHO draft put online states remdesivir does not benefit severe coronavirus patients
Coronavirus latest: at a glance
Sarah Boseley Health editor
Thu 23 Apr 2020 15.35 EDTLast modified on Thu 30 Apr 2020 11.32 EDT
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The antiviral medication remdesivir. The WHO said a document on the drug’s efficacy in treating the novel coronavirus still awaited peer review. Photograph: Reuters
Remdesivir, a drug thought to be one of the best prospects for treating Covid-19, failed to have any effect in the first full trial, it has been revealed.
The drug is in short supply globally because of the excitement it has generated. It is one of the drugs Donald Trump claimed was “promising”.
In a “gold standard” trial of 237 patients, some of whom received remdesivir while others did not, the drug did not work.
News of the failure was posted on a World Health Organization clinical trials database, but later removed. A WHO spokesman said it had been uploaded too soon by accident.
“A draft document was provided by the authors to WHO and inadvertently posted on the website and taken down as soon as the mistake was noticed. The manuscript is undergoing peer review and we are waiting for a final version before WHO comments,” said Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesperson.
The drug, made by the US company Gilead Sciences, is an antiviral that was trialled in Ebola, but which failed to show benefits in Africa.
In the race for drugs that might work against Covid-19, many doctors have given remdesivir to patients on “compassionate grounds” without waiting for trials. Because of the interest in it, the world’s biggest trial of possible treatments for Covid-19 at Oxford has not been able to include it, because researchers could not obtain supplies.
Remdesivir was stopped early in 18 (11.6%) patients because of adverse effects, compared with 4 (5.1%) in the control group.” There were no details in the short report of the side effects.
The trial of the drug in China, on patients with severe Covid-19 symptoms, may give some doctors pause. Gilead, however, claimed there were still signs that it could be useful, possibly in patients with milder versions of disease.
In the trial, 158 patients were randomly assigned to be given remdesivir, while 79 others had standard care with a placebo instead. There was no difference between the groups with respect to recovery time. Just under 14% of those on remdesivir died, compared with nearly 13% of those not taking the treatment.
“In this study of hospitalised adult patients with severe Covid-19, [which] was terminated prematurely, remdesivir was not associated with clinical or virological benefits,” said the report on the WHO website.
The report added: “
Just a week ago, it emerged that researchers in Chicago were excited by the results of a Gilead-run trial of remdesivir in 125 patients. Nearly all those people were discharged within a week, according to STAT News, which follows the pharmaceutical industry. However, there was no placebo group, which meant researchers could not be sure that it was the drug that made the difference, and not something else.
Remdesivir is one of a handful of drugs that have been enthusiastically backed by doctors and politicians as potential cures for Covid-19. There has also been a rush to give patients hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic version of the antimalarial chloroquine. That has led to shortages for people who need to take it for lupus, a disease that affects the immune system.
Scientists who want to see proper trials conducted are likely to point to the remdesivir trial failure as strong evidence of the dangers of giving out even tested drugs on compassionate grounds for a disease that is so novel.
• This article was amended on 30 April 2020. An earlier version said that the remdesivir trial had been stopped early because of side-effects. Although some patients were taken off the drug because of side-effects, it was stopped early because they did not recruit enough patients.
Gilead gets emergency FDA authorization for remdesivir to treat coronavirus, Trump says
Gilead gets emergency FDA authorization for remdesivir to treat coronavirus, Trump says
The Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency use authorization for Gilead's remdesivir drug to treat the coronavirus, President Trump said.
Ok...
What's going on here???
Germany Considering "Coronavirus Cards" To Allow Immune Citizens Freedom Of TravelZerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
Fri, 05/01/2020 - 03:10
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Germany is considering handing out “coronavirus immunity cards” to its citizens that would allow those who have developed antibodies to COVID-19 to have more freedom than the as-yet uninfected.
Health Minister Jens Spahn said that the cards could make life easier “in many places” for Germans who could prove they were immune.
Critics reacted to the proposal by likening it to the darkest chapter in Germany’s history.
Others suggested that the ID card would incentivize people to get infected so they could enjoy greater freedom of movement.
The same principle as the “immunity card” could also apply to any future vaccine, with those who refuse to to take the shot not allowed to travel.
The state of North Rhine-Westphalia is already trialing a digital immunity card that would have users link their COVID-19 test result to an app, providing authorities with a database they could check to see if a person is immune.
Juden, nicht wahr? Papiere, bitte?
OA
Ragnarok
On and On, South of Heaven
Surgeon General Doubles Down: Masks Increase Virus Risk
Surgeon General Jerome Adams Tuesday doubled down on his advice against healthy people wearing face masks to protect themselves from coronavirus, saying that wearing one improperly can "actually increase your risk" of getting the disease.
Surgeon General Doubles Down: Masks Increase Virus Risk
U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams speaks to members of the press on the White House ground March 20, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
By Sandy Fitzgerald | Tuesday, 31 March 2020 08:48 AM
Surgeon General Jerome Adams Tuesday doubled down on his advice against healthy people wearing face masks to protect themselves from coronavirus, saying that wearing one improperly can "actually increase your risk" of getting the disease.
"What the World Health Organization and the CDC have reaffirmed in the last few days is that they do not recommend the general public wear masks," Adams told Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "There was a study in 2015 looking at medical students. And medical students wearing surgical masks touch their faces on average 23 times. We know a major way that you can get respiratory diseases like coronavirus is by touching a surface and then touching your face."
Masks also can give the wearer a "false sense of security" and can encourage people to be too close to each other, said Adams, and further, there are still mask shortages nationwide.
People who are sick should wear masks, said Adams, but acknowledged that if healthy people feel better by wearing a mask, "by all means, wear it" but they should not touch their faces.
He also insisted the general public should not wear medical-style N95 masks, because they must be fitted properly to avoid infection.
"There may be a day where we change our recommendation, particularly for areas that have large spread going on, about wearing cotton masks but again the data is not there yet," said Adams.
Remdesivir works, Remdesivir doesn't work.
Masks work, Masks don't work.
Lockdowns help stop spread, Lockdowns don't stop spread.
Why can't anyone make up their freaking minds?!?!
This is a circus...