Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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Yep.

Have you been to Turkey?

I was there once for a couple of hours (in Istanbul, European side). I went to the Blue Mosque.

Is rand Paul a doctor in addition to a senator?

Yes. So is his father.

Based on your exchanges with Mr Greatshield, there is rather more to it than you admitted above.

I don't know of him but if that image isn't a joke, I have to say that man is a class act for lending his assistance so shortly after recovery.

I wonder...How much would it take to solve this? Surely organizations like WWF, PETA etc can afford to donate if this is made common knowledge?
I know many ordinary people would be happy to contribute if there was information available for donations. It would be something that could go viral.

It has been less than two weeks since New Zealand imposed a coronavirus lockdown so strict that swimming at the beach and hunting in bushland were banned. They’re not essential activities, plus we have been told not to do anything that could divert emergency services’ resources.

People have been walking and biking strictly in their neighborhoods, lining up six feet apart outside grocery stores while waiting to go one-in-one-out, and joining swaths of the world in discovering the vagaries of home schooling.
It took only 10 days for signs that the approach here — “elimination” rather than the “containment” goal of the United States and other Western countries — is working.

The number of new cases has fallen for two consecutive days, despite a huge increase in testing, with 54 confirmed or probable cases reported Tuesday. That means the number of people who have recovered, 65, exceeds the number of daily infections.

The speedy results have led to calls to ease the lockdown, even a little, for the four-day Easter holiday, especially as summer lingers on.

But Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is adamant that New Zealand will complete four weeks of lockdown — two full 14-day incubation cycles — before letting up. She has, however, given the Easter Bunny special dispensation to work this weekend.

How has New Zealand, a country I still call home after 20 years abroad, controlled its outbreak so quickly?
When I arrived here a month ago, traveling from the epicenter of China via the hot spot of South Korea, I was shocked that officials did not take my temperature at the airport. I was told simply to self-isolate for 14 days (I did).

But with the coronavirus tearing through Italy and spreading in the United States, this heavily tourism-reliant country — it gets about 4 million international visitors a year, almost as many as its total population — did the previously unthinkable: It shut its borders to foreigners on March 19.

Two days later, Ardern delivered a televised address from her office — the first time since 1982 that an Oval Office-style speech had been given — announcing a coronavirus response alert plan involving four stages, with a full lockdown being Level 4.

A group of influential leaders got on the phone with her the following day to urge moving to Level 4.

We were hugely worried about what was happening in Italy and Spain,” said one of them, Stephen Tindall, founder of the Warehouse, New Zealand’s largest retailer.

If we didn’t shut down quickly enough, the pain was going to go on for a very long time,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s inevitable that we will have to shut down anyway, so we would rather it be sharp and short.”

On March 23, a Monday, Ardern delivered another statement and gave the country 48 hours to prepare for a Level 4 lockdown. “We currently have 102 cases,” she said. “But so did Italy once.”

From that Wednesday night, everyone had to stay at home for four weeks unless they worked in an essential job, such as health care, or were going to the supermarket or exercising near their home.

A few hours before midnight, my phone sounded a siren as it delivered a text alert: “Act as if you have Covid-19. This will save lives,” it said. “Let’s all do our bit to unite against Covid-19.”

From the earliest stages, Ardern and her team have spoken in simple language: Stay home. Don’t have contact without anyone outside your household “bubble.” Be kind. We’re all in this together.

She’s usually done this from the podium of news conferences where she has discussed everything from the price of cauliflowers to wage subsidies. But she also regularly gives updates and answers questions on Facebook, including one done while sitting at home — possibly on her bed — in a sweatshirt.

There have been critics and rebels. The police have been ordering surfers out of the waves. The health minister was caught — and publicly chastised by Ardern, who said she would have fired him if it weren’t disruptive to the crisis response — for mountain biking and taking his family to the beach.

But there has been a sense of collective purpose. The police phone line for nonemergencies has been overwhelmed with people calling to “dob in,” as we say here, reporting others they think are breaching the rules.

The response has been notably apolitical. The center-right National Party has clearly made a decision not to criticize the government’s response, and, in fact, to help it.

These efforts appear to be paying off.

After peaking at 89 on April 2, the daily number of new cases ticked down to 67 on Monday and 54 on Tuesday. The vast majority of cases can be linked to international travel, making contact tracing relatively easy, and many are consolidated into identifiable clusters.

Because there is little evidence of community transmission, New Zealand does not have huge numbers of people overwhelming hospitals. Only one person, an elderly woman with existing health problems, has died.

Jacinda approached this decisively and unequivocally and faced the threat,” said Baker, who had been advocating for an “elimination” approach since reading a World Health Organization report from China in February.

“Other countries have had a gradual ramp-up, but our approach is exactly the opposite,” he said. While other Western countries have tried to slow the disease and “flatten the curve,” New Zealand has tried to stamp it out entirely.
Some American doctors have urged the Trump administration to pursue the elimination approach.

In New Zealand’s case, being a small island nation makes it easy to shut borders. It also helps that the country often feels like a village where everyone knows everyone else, so messages can travel quickly.

New Zealand’s next challenge: Once the virus is eliminated, how to keep it that way.

The 731 deaths reported brought the total to 5,489 deaths and 138,836 infections.
Authorities faced questions over their actions for at-risk people after an infected inmate at Rikers jail died.
Michael Tyson, 53, died waiting for a hearing over a non-criminal offence.

As of Monday, 286 inmates and 331 staffers in New York City's jails have tested positive for the coronavirus.

The governor disclosed that New York, which has been the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in the US, saw its highest number of fatalities in a 24 hour period between Monday and Tuesday.

The change came after the state had seen two days of slowing infection rates and fewer deaths.
However, the governor said the three day average for cases had fallen. However, he warned that New Yorkers must continue to follow health guidelines to socially distance and stay indoors.

In 2006, then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration began purchasing ventilators to allow the city to be prepared for a pandemic like the current coronavirus crisis -- only for the city to later auction them off, according to a report.

ProPublica reported Monday that the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene issued a report in 2006 on the city's preparedness for pandemic influenza -- similar to the 1918 Spanish Flu or the 2019 novel coronavirus -- that projected the city would need thousands of extra ventilators in order to properly treat all of its residents who got sick. The plan was then put into action, with the city initially buying 500 ventilators before it ran out of money to buy more and to maintain the ones it had already stockpiled, according to ProPublica.

Those ventilators were then auctioned off some time before 2016 because the city could not afford to maintain them in working order, partially because the model of ventilator the city had purchased was no longer in production after 2009, the report said.

We tried to fill in the gap as best we could," Dr. Issac Weisfuse, the former deputy commissioner of the city's health department, told ProPublica.

"This was beyond our control but had a direct impact on cost and viability of maintaining a stockpile," Michael Lanza, the current assistant press secretary for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said according to ProPublica.

The outlet also reported that New York City set out to purchase over one million N95 face masks -- the type suggested for use to protect against the coronavirus -- in order to distribute them to health professionals. It purchased less than one-quarter of that and the masks all eventually expired.

LOL

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressi ... V-H9o0nTOA

Turkey has nothing to do with turkey the bird, whatsoever.

It means “land of the Turks.” The Turks have been calling themselves “Turks” since at least the 6th century AD.

The Ottoman Empire was known amongst common folks as “Turkey.”

I dont know of him but if that image isn't a joke, I have to say that man is a class act for lending his assistance so shortly after recovery.

One of the most libertarian members of Congress. He was one of the group of Republican senators that was shot at in an attempted mass assassination by Bernie Bro James Hodgkinson, and then some time later he was attacked from behind while mowing his lawn at home, sending him to the hospital with lung damage. He has in past years joined groups of doctors performing volunteer surgical services in Guatemala and Haiti (if I remember the locations correctly).

^ As far as I understand it they have a liberal outlook on both social issues (like the democrats) and economic issues (like the republicans): this side of the Atlantic they would probably have their own third party.

I thought libertarians had a mix of Democrats and Republicans ideology?