Open Windows. Don't Share Food. Here's the Government's Coronavirus Advice. 

CORONAVIRUS.GOV NOT EVEN THE CORRECT NAME; COVID-19

Noah Weiland, The New York Times•March 10, 2020


WASHINGTON — The Trump administration Monday night issued several pages of tips for navigating the coronavirus, organizing a set of recommendations for schools, businesses, homes and offices into a document that resembles easy-on-the-eye restaurant food-safety charts.

The simple behaviors recommended in the guidelines — like washing hands, managing air flow, protecting food and carving out private space in a home — show how federal health officials believe the virus could influence everyday life.

“These are really simple, low-tech things,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key member of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, said at a White House news briefing. “There’s nothing in there that’s complicated. But it’s just stated in a way that’s clear, that people can understand.”

After the briefing, Vice President Mike Pence posted images of the guidelines on Twitter. They are expected to also be published on Coronavirus.gov, a federal hub of virus information where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already posted similar advice

Here is what the guidelines recommend.

How to navigate the office
Stay home if you or family members who live with you are sick. Several top health officials have repeatedly urged Americans to not risk going to work if they come down with symptoms that might indicate an infection.

Use the usual electronic means of work life, like email, to remind yourself to wash your hands. Devise ways to remember to not touch your face. And avoid shaking hands — “noncontact methods of greeting” are preferable.

Instead of in-person meetings, the guidelines suggest teleconferencing. If meetings are held in person, they should be in open, well-ventilated rooms. Open windows will help.

The World Health Organization warns that “poorly ventilated buildings affect air quality and can contribute to the spread of disease,” and that in health facilities with a high concentration of infectious patients, poor ventilation worsens the risk of transmission.

How to divide a home

Divvy up your home to account for the elderly or those with underlying conditions that make them particularly susceptible to infection. Make a “protected space” for those at risk, and give the sick their own rooms, where the door should be kept closed. Only one person should care for the ill.

Healthy people in your home should act as if they could be a risk to the vulnerable, washing their hands frequently before interacting with them.

How to keep a school safe

Schools should avoid mixing ages and consider adjusting or postponing in-school and extracurricular gatherings that intermingle classes and grades. Classes should be held outdoors, if possible, or anywhere well ventilated. 

(OK IF YOU ARE IN HAWAII BUT NOT MINNESOTA OR NORTH DAKOTA)

Students should limit sharing food, and cafeteria workers should practice strict hygiene. Schools should screen cafeteria workers and those they come in contact with.

WHERE ARE THE CLEANING INSTRUCTIONS? FOR CUSTODIAL STAFF

WHAT DOES STRICT HYGIENE MEAN?

How to protect a business

Businesses should limit attendance at large gatherings and use online transactions for events, avoiding the kind of close contact that occurs at box offices. The advice follows news of several large event cancellations, including the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, a major professional tennis tournament in California and a health conference where President Donald Trump was scheduled to speak.

Businesses should promote “tap and pay” machines that cut down on the use of cash, a notorious germ-carrying material.

Drivers for ride-sharing services and taxis should keep their windows open and regularly disinfect surfaces. Uber has said it will offer drivers two weeks of paid sick leave if they are infected with the coronavirus or are quarantined.
(PATHETIC, AMATEURISH AND CHILDISH 

OH RIGHT, IT WAS WRITTEN FOR TRUMP)

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

What’s so scary about the inclusion of ‘God’ in the Russian constitution?

By Katherine Kelaidis, Religion Dispatches - Commentary on March 6, 2020
This article was paid for by reader donations to Raw Story Investigates
Last Friday, the House’s Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights heard testimony that Russia’s human rights record, including its record on religious freedom, is worsening. There were few surprises in Elizabeth Cassidy’s testimony—particularly for those who’ve been paying even the most passing attention to the Putin regime’s power grab both at home and abroad. Cassidy, the director of research and policy at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told the Congressional commission, “The Russian government maintains, frequently updates and enforces an array of laws that restrict religious freedom…

 These violations are escalating, spreading through the country and even across its borders.”

Indeed, USCIRF has “been calling for the designation of Russia as a [Country of Particular Concern] since 2017… given the Russian government’s repressive activities both in Russia and abroad,” reads an USCIRF statement from December. Trump’s State Department has thus far refused to do so. And the reality is that the worst might be yet to come.


Earlier this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he would seek major changes to the Russian Constitution. Most of the media coverage rightly focused on what such reforms would mean for Putin’s future at the country’s helm (there’s little doubt that the primary motivation for these reforms was to allow Putin to remain in power beyond the 2022 expiration of his presidential term). However, the opening of Russia’s first democratic constitution to significant structural overhaul poses other dangers as well. There have been more than three hundred proposed changes to the constitution, many of which have serious implications for human rights and religious freedom in the country.
In his February 2nd column for the Russian-language service of the German newspaper Deutsche Welle, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and a man considered by most to be an ally of Putin, called for “God” to be mentioned in the new preamble. On the surface, this isn’t a particularly alarming request. While Ukraine is, to date, alone among post-Soviet states in including a reference to God in its constitution, many more liberal states absolutely do, including Germany, Canada, Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland. In these instances, the constitutional reference to God is frequently a nod to a country’s shared religious heritage and does little to undermine the principles of secularism and pluralism upon which modern liberal democracy is built. Arguably, such references in fact enforce these values, by offering the seal of divine imprimatur to the legal foundations of the nation. In the case of Russia, however, this is a suggestion that takes on a much more sinister tone.


The Russian Orthodox Church has, to say the least, a bad track record on issues of political liberty and civil rights. Patriarch Kirill himself rather infamously declared in 2016 that “some human rights are heresy.” The Russian Orthodox Church, including close deputies of the Patriarch, were intimately involved in the 2017 law that decriminalized domestic violence in Russia, as well as the 2013 “gay propaganda” law that’s been a major force for the state persecution of LGBTQ people in Russia. Furthermore, Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church he leads have worked hard to develop close alliances with illiberal forces around the world, including Franklin Graham, Steve Bannon, and the World Congress of Families.


In fact, it would not be going too far to say that the arch-conservative positions of Kirill’s Russian Orthodox Church operate as an instrument of Russian soft-power, drafting reactionary forces around the world onto the Russian side. It is, for instance, difficult not to see the Patriarch’s ongoing ecclesiastical conflict with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, focused on hotspots such as Ukraine and Western Europe, through the lens of Russia’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy and its desire to not only cause chaos in Western democracies, but to undermine the fundamental trust in liberalism and pluralism that underlie their success.


It’s in this light that the seemingly innocuous request of a bishop that “God” be included in the preamble of his nation’s constitution takes on a significantly more sinister tone. And it should, for any honest observer, raise serious concerns about the failure of liberalism to have taken root in post-Soviet Russia and the country’s slide even more deeply into totalitarianism.



Moreover, given Russia’s aggressive foreign posture, one that’s not just military or political, but also distinctly cultural, it ought to worry those invested in the larger project of global democracy. One of the cornerstones of contemporary Russian foreign policy is to undermine the faith of those living in liberal, pluralist societies in the effectiveness, stability, and frankly goodness of their values and institutions. This is an objective that has been all too appealing to the Russian Orthodox Church, and particularly its current leader. If Russia ceases to be simply an authoritarian state and becomes increasingly theocratic in its authoritarianism there could be greater trouble ahead for us all.
Russia has never been a country synonymous with liberty. Authoritarianism is as native to her as her birch forests. But there is evidence that things are getting worse, and that the Russian Orthodox Church is renewing its ancient role as the handmaiden of Russian state power. And that is something that should concern anyone worried about the future of liberalism. Particularly in places where it has historically been much more successful than Russia.

White House Considers Providing Federal Aid to Oil Companies in Face of Financial Crisis

SOCIALISM FOR THE RICH AND WELL CONNECTED 

Tobias Hoonhout,National Review•March 10, 2020


Sources are signaling that President Trump could push for federal funds to assist oil and natural gas producers affected by a steep decline in global oil prices, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Shale companies were hammered on Monday as the price for oil suffered the sharpest one-day drop in almost 30 years. The White House is worried that with credit drying up, the industry could enter a serious decline without assistance, and is gauging whether to offer government loans to slow the bleeding.

Harold Hamm, a Trump supporter and founder of Continental Resources, lost $2 billion dollars on Monday as the stock market fell over seven percent, its worst day since the 2008 financial crisis. He told the Post in an interview that he had reached out to the White House, but did not make “direct” contact.
“I don’t want to prescribe what the president would or shouldn’t do. He’s very capable of handling this situation,” he said, adding that he was worried “how this could jeopardize those jobs and the economies in producing states and communities across America from Pennsylvania to California and Texas to North Dakota.”

Trump said Monday in a press conference that the administration would be helping seriously affected parts of the economy, and was meeting with Republicans Tuesday to discuss efforts.

“This was something that we were thrown into and we’re going to handle it, and we have been handling it,” he said.

Some Republicans have been getting nervous over the White House’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, with White House officials have privately expressing their concerns that Trump’s initial comments on the virus were spreading panic.

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Republican congressman threatens Joe Biden and Beto O'Rourke in sinister gun video

Mr Buck told the Washington Post in a 2015 interview that his weapon is legal and he always keeps the rifle unloaded and had the bolt carrier assembly removed prior to placing it in his office.

"YOU CAN TAKE MY FAKE GUN FROM MY WET CLAMMY HANDS"
Graig Graziosi, The Independent•March 6, 2020

Congressman Ken Buck Twitter

Colorado Congressman Ken Buck posted a video to Twitter Friday challenging former US Representative Beto O’Rourke and former vice president Joe Biden to come to his office and take his AR-15.

It is obvious that the underlying message is a threat to the men that if they did try to take his gun, he would shoot them.

“I have a message for Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke, if you want to take everyone’s AR-15s in America, why don’t you swing by my office in Washington, D.C. and start with this one,” Mr Buck said. “Come and take it.”

Mr Buck grabbed the rifle off his wall as he delivered the message.


“Come and take it” is a common refrain among far-right gun rights enthusiasts, though the phrase is often delivered as “Molon labe,” referencing the supposed response of King Leonidas of the Spartans to Persian King Xerxes I when he demanded the Greeks surrender their weapons.

The Oath Keepers, which is classified by the SPLC as a far-right extremist group, produced a documentary called “Molon Labe” in 2013.

Mr O’Rourke responded to the video on Twitter.

“This guy makes the case for both an assault weapons ban and a mandatory buyback program better than I ever could. These are weapons of war that have no place in our communities, in our politics or in our public discourse,” Mr O’Rourke tweeted.

This guy makes the case for both an assault weapons ban and a mandatory buyback program better than I ever could. These are weapons of war that have no place in our communities, in our politics or in our public discourse. https://t.co/ce5PvaxqMk
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) March 6, 2020

The bizarre video was likely prompted by a statement Mr Biden made suggesting that - should he win the Democratic nomination and the presidency - he would bring Mr O’Rourke into his administration to oversee gun control reforms.

During a Democratic debate in the waning days of Mr O’Rourke's primary ambitions, he inspired the ire of gun enthusiasts when he said “hell yes we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed in the Parkland, Florida school shooting, responded to the video as well.

“@RepKenBuck, had I seen this yesterday when in DC I gladly would have. My daughter died from a single AR 15 bullet. You may find joy in that, I don’t. I will gladly come back to DC to discuss your AR 15 and removing it for safe storage. Do not make threats of AR 15 violence,” he wrote.

Mr Guttenberg was removed from the State of the Union address after shouting at President Donald Trump when he was talking about protecting gun rights.

Mr Buck’s AR-15 - which is decorated in an American flag gun wrap - does have a trigger lock, though it appears to simply be hanging on a pair of nails jutting from the congressman’s wall. The NRA recommends that gun owners ensure their weapons are not stored in the open where individuals other than the owner could access them. Mr Buck’s improper storage wasn’t the only gun safety basic that he violated.

One of Mr Buck’s fellow Congressmen, Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona, pointed out that the senator broke a basic rule of proper gun handling; he pointed it at someone he didn’t intend to shoot.

“You literally flagged the cameraman. First rule of weapons handling, treat every weapon as if it were loaded,” he wrote. “Second rule, never point the weapon at anything you don’t intend to shoot.”

Mr Gallego served as a Marine in Iraq.

Mr Buck told the Washington Post in a 2015 interview that his weapon is legal and he always keeps the rifle unloaded and had the bolt carrier assembly removed prior to placing it in his office.

That information would suggest that Mr Biden and Mr O’Rourke could, in fact, take his AR-15, as it is apparently unloaded and incapable of being fired. Perhaps Mr Buck intended to use it as a bludgeon.

Opinion: Why this epidemiologist is more worried about coronavirus than he was a month ago

Americans need to prepare themselves that the next 12 months are going to look very different.

March 9, 2020 By Maciej F. Boni The Conversation

Passengers get off a New York City subway on March 7. 

AFP/Getty Images

The Harvard historian Jill Lepore recounted recently in The New Yorker magazine that when democracies sink into crisis, the question “where are we going?” leaps to everyone’s mind, as if we were waiting for a weather forecast to tell us how healthy our democracy was going to be tomorrow. Quoting Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, Lepore writes that “political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”

And so it is with the coronavirus epidemic. How big will this epidemic be? How many people will it infect? How many Americans will die? The answers to these questions are not written in stone. They are partially within our control, assuming we are willing to take the responsibility to act with commitment, urgency and solidarity.

I am an epidemiologist with eight years of field experience, including time on the front lines of the isolation and quarantine efforts during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. One month ago, I was under the impression that the death reports due to COVID-19 circulation in China were giving us an unfair picture of its mortality rate. I wrote a piece saying that the death rate of an emerging disease always looks bad in the early stages of an outbreak, but is likely to drop once better data become available. After waiting for eight weeks, I am now worried that these new data — data indicating that the virus has a low fatality rate — may not arrive.
Case fatality rate and infection fatality rate

By Jan. 31, China had reported a total of 11,821 cases of COVID-19 and 259 deaths; that’s about a 2% case fatality rate. Two weeks later, the tally had risen to more than 50,000 cases and 1,524 deaths, corresponding to about 3% case fatality (the rise in the case fatality is expected as deaths always get counted later than cases). For an easily transmissible disease, a 2% or 3% fatality rate is extremely dangerous.

However, case fatality rates are computed using the officially reported numbers of 11,821 cases or 50,000 cases, which only include individuals who (a) experience symptoms; (b) decide that their symptoms are bad enough to merit a hospital visit; and (c) choose a hospital or clinic that is able to test and report cases of coronavirus.

Surely, there must have been hundreds of thousands cases, maybe a million cases, that had simply gone uncounted.

First, some definitions from Steven Riley at Imperial College. The infection fatality rate (IFR) gives the probability of dying for an infected person. The case fatality rate (CFR) gives the probability of dying for an infected person who is sick enough to report to a hospital or clinic. CFR is larger than IFR, because individuals who report to hospitals are typically more severely ill.

If China’s mid-February statistic of 1,524 deaths had occurred from 1 million infections of COVID-19 (counting all symptomatic and asymptomatic infections), this would mean that the virus had an infection fatality rate of 0.15%, about three times higher than seasonal influenza virus; this is a concern but not a crisis.

After waiting for eight weeks, I am now worried that data indicating the virus has a low fatality rate may not arrive.

The IFR is much more difficult to estimate than the CFR. The reason is that it is hard to count people who are mildly ill or who show no symptoms at all. If you are able to count and test everybody — for example, on a cruise ship, or in a small community — then you may be able to paint a picture of what fraction of infections are asymptomatic, mild, symptomatic and severe.

Scientists working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Institute for Disease Modeling have used these approaches to estimate the infection fatality rate. Currently, these estimates range from 0.5% to 0.94% indicating that COVID-19 is about 10 to 20 times as deadly as seasonal influenza. Evidence coming in from genomics and large-scale testing of fevers is consistent with these conclusions. The only potentially good news is that the epidemic in Korea may ultimately show a lower CFR than the epidemic in China.

Impact of the epidemic in the U.S.

Now that new COVID-19 cases are being detected in the U.S. every day, it is too late to stop the initial wave of infections. The epidemic is likely to spread across the U.S. The virus appears to be about as contagious as influenza. But this comparison is difficult to make since we have no immunity to the new coronavirus.

On balance, it is reasonable to guess that COVID-19 will infect as many Americans over the next year as influenza does in a typical winter — somewhere between 25 million and 115 million. Maybe a bit more if the virus turns out to be more contagious than we thought. Maybe a bit less if we put restrictions in place that minimize our travel and our social and professional contacts.

The bad news is, of course, that these infection numbers translate to 350,000 to 660,000 people dying in the U.S., with an uncertainty range that goes from 50,000 deaths to 5 million deaths. The good news is that this is not a weather forecast. The size of the epidemic, i.e., the total number of infections, is something we can reduce if we decrease our contact patterns and improve our hygiene. If the total number of infections decreases, the total number of deaths will also decrease.

What science cannot tell us right now is exactly which measures will be most effective at slowing down the epidemic and reducing its impact. If I stop shaking hands, will that cut my probability of infection by a half? A third? Nobody knows. If I work from home two days a week, will this reduce my probability of infection by 40%? Maybe. But we don’t even know the answer to that.

What we should prepare for now is reducing our exposures — i.e., our chances of coming into contact with infected people or infected surfaces — any way that we can. For some people this will mean staying home more. For others it will mean adopting more stringent hygiene practices. An extreme version of this exposure reduction — including mandatory quarantine, rapid diagnosis and isolation, and closing of workplaces and schools — seems to have worked in Hubei province in China, where the epidemic spread appears to have slowed down.

For now, Americans need to prepare themselves that the next 12 months are going to look very different. Vacations may have to be canceled. Social interactions will look different. And risk management is something we’re going to have to think about every morning when we wake up. The coronavirus epidemic is not going to extinguish itself. It is not in another country. It is not just the cold and flu. And it is not going away.

Maciej F. Boni is as associate professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pa. This was first published on The Conversation — “How big will the coronavirus epidemic be? An epidemiologist updates his concerns”

New York's solution to hand sanitizer shortage: Prison labor, hourly wages below $1

LIBERTARIANS, LABOUR AND THE LEFT AGREE 

THAT PRISON LABOUR  IS SLAVE LABOUR

THE DEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT IS NO DIFFERENT THAN THE REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT 

Jon Campbell, New York State Team, USA TODAY•March 10, 2020

New York's solution to hand sanitizer shortage: Prison labor, hourly wages below $1

ALBANY, N.Y. – What do you do when fear over the new coronavirus leads to a shortage of hand sanitizer?

If you're the state of New York, you make it yourself. Or you have prisoners do it.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday the state had begun producing its own line of hand sanitizer, known as NYS Clean. The state will distribute the products to schools, local governments, prisons and other public entities free of charge.

The low price of making the sanitizer in house – $6.10 a gallon – will allow the state and local governments to save big, particularly when a coronavirus-fueled run on the product has led to rising prices if you're even able to find it at all.
- ADVERTISEMENT -


But it's the way the state is containing its costs that has some lawmakers and advocacy groups alarmed: By paying prisoners as little as 16 cents an hour to make it.

"There is price gouging happening across the state and we are in a public-health crisis, so I do applaud the governor for acting very quickly," said State Sen. Zellnor Myrie, D-Brooklyn. "But I am incredibly concerned that we're using a company that pays its workers sweat-shop wages."

New York is using prison labor to produce its own line of hand sanitizer -- NYS Clean -- amid a coronavirus-fueled shortage, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday, March 9, 2020.

NYS Clean made by division of state prison systemNYS Clean is being produced by Corcraft, a division of the state prison system that uses inmate labor to manufacture products to sell primarily to state and local government agencies.

At 13 prisons across New York, Corcraft produces a wide range of products, from metal products at Albion to mattresses and pillows at Eastern to textiles at Clinton and Coxsackie.

The program generates tens of millions of dollars in sales, in part because it is considered a "preferred source" provider, meaning state agencies can purchase goods from Corcraft without putting out a contract for bid.

Corcraft employees – all inmates in state prison – are paid a starting wage of 16 cents per hour and a maximum wage of 65 cents per hour, according to the Department of Corrections and Community Service.

We’re hearing from local governments that acquiring hand sanitizer has been a real problem.

NYS will immediately begin producing hand sanitizer ourselves — 100,000 gallons per week. We'll provide it to government agencies, schools, the MTA, prisons, & others. #COVID19
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) March 9, 2020

They can also earn a bonus of up to $1.30 a day for productivity.

The hand sanitizer is being produced at the Great Meadow Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Comstack, Washington County. It will only be distributed for free to public entities and coronavirus hot spots; It will not be offered for sale, according to Cuomo's office.

Already, inmates at Great Meadow were making various cleaning solutions for janitors and chemicals for vehicle maintenance. Making hand sanitizer at a time of public-health concern was a natural step, Cuomo said Monday.

Corcraft will be able to make 100,000 gallons of hand sanitizer a week, according to Cuomo.

"Corcraft makes glass cleaner, floor cleaners, degreasers, laundry detergent, vehicle fluids, hand cleaner, and now they make hand sanitizer with alcohol," he said.

In this 2018 file photo, Gov. Andrew M.Cuomo tours the Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, Washington County. In March 2020, the prison's inmates began producing hand sanitizer there amid a coronavirus outbreak.

Reform advocates critical: 'Last vestige of slavery'

New York's prison-labor system has long been criticized by reform advocates, who note the hourly wage hasn't risen for state inmates since Cuomo's father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo, was in office in the early 1990s.

Last year, Myrie and New York Assemblyman Nick Perry, D-Brooklyn, sponsored a bill that would have given working inmates a significant raise, setting a minimum wage of at least $3 an hour.

Inmates are working to produce hand sanitizer to protect against the spread of COVID-19. Some of these workers get paid as low as $0.16 per hour! Now is the time to end this last vestige of slavery. It’s time to pass the Prison Minimum Wage Act. https://t.co/arT7kgxugZ
— N Nick Perry (@NNickPerry) March 9, 2020

The bill was never put to a vote, though Myrie said he's hopeful the renewed attention being paid to the prison-labor program could get it over the finish line this year.

"If you are asking the incarcerated to save the public from this health crisis, give them the dignity of paying a fair wage," he said.

In a tweet, Perry called the prison-labor system a "last vestige of slavery."

Inmates at the Great Meadow Correctional Facility who work for Corcraft make cleaning solutions and vehicle maintenance chemicals.

Cuomo pledged support for an inmate pay raise last August, which came as his administration faced criticism for a since-scrapped plan to force New York drivers with aging license plates to pay for new ones.

License plates are made by Corcraft employees at the Auburn Correctional Facility.

Rich Azzopardi, a Cuomo spokesman and senior adviser, defended the state's decision to use Corcraft to produce hand sanitizer.

“A central part of prison rehabilitation is job training and skill development, and this is part of that existing program that’s existed for years," he said in a statement.

In a joint statement, Tina Luongo and Adriene Holder – top attorneys for The Legal Aid Society, a New York City-based organization that provides legal representation to the indigent – called on the state to pass a bill requiring prisoners to be paid the minimum wage.

"This is nothing less than slave labor and it must end," they said.

---30---

SEE
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/iconic-distilleries-turn-to-hand.html
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/loreal-announces-plans-to-produce-hand.html
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/from-vodka-and-gin-to-hand-sanitizer.html
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/dior-and-givenchy-to-use-perfume.html
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/he-has-17700-bottles-of-hand-sanitizer.html
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/new-yorks-solution-to-hand-sanitizer.html

Trump Can’t Handle the Truth
And neither can the rest of America’s right.

By Paul Krugman, Opinion Columnist March 9, 2020

Over the weekend Donald Trump once again declared that the coronavirus is perfectly under control, that any impressions to the contrary are due to the “Fake News Media” out to get him. Question: Does anyone have a count of how many times he’s done this, comparable to the running tallies fact checkers are keeping of his lies?

In any case, we’ve pretty clearly reached the point where Trump’s assurances that everything is fine actually worsen the panic, because they demonstrate the depths of his delusions. Even as he was tweeting out praise for himself, global markets were in free-fall.

Never mind cratering stock prices. The best indicator of collapsing confidence is what is happening to interest rates, which have plunged almost as far and as fast as they did during the 2008 financial crisis. Markets are implicitly predicting not just a recession, but multiple years of economic weakness.

And at first I was tempted to say that our current situation is even worse than it was in 2008, because at least then we had leadership that recognized the seriousness of the crisis rather than dismissing it all as a liberal conspiracy.

When you look back at the record, however, you discover that as the financial crisis developed right-wingers were also deeply in denial, inclined to dismiss bad news or attribute it to liberal and/or media conspiracies. It was only in the final stages of financial collapse that top officials got real, and right-wing pundits never did.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

The 2008 financial crisis was brought on by the collapse of an immense housing bubble. But many on the right denied that there was anything amiss. Larry Kudlow, now Trump’s chief economist, ridiculed “bubbleheads” who suggested that housing prices were out of line.

And I can tell you from personal experience that when I began writing about the housing bubble I was relentlessly accused of playing politics: “You only say there’s a bubble because you hate President Bush.”

When the economy began to slide, mainstream Republicans remained deeply in denial. Phil Gramm, John McCain’s senior economic adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign, declared that America was only suffering a “mental recession” and had become a “nation of whiners.”

Even the failure of Lehman Brothers, which sent the economy into a full meltdown, initially didn’t put a dent in conservative denial. Kudlow hailed the failure as good news, because it signaled an end to bailouts, and predicted housing and financial recovery in “months, not years.”

Wait, there’s more. After the economic crisis helped Barack Obama win the 2008 election, right-wing pundits declared that it was all a left-wing conspiracy. Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly accused the news media of hyping bad news to enable Obama’s socialist agenda, while Rush Limbaugh asserted that Senator Chuck Schumer personally caused the crisis (don’t ask).

The point is that Trump’s luridly delusional response to the coronavirus and his conspiracy theorizing about Democrats and the news media aren’t really that different from the way the right dealt with the financial crisis a dozen years ago. True, last time the crazy talk wasn’t coming directly from the president of the United States. But that’s not the important distinction between then and now.

No, what’s different now is that denial and the resulting delay are likely to have deadly consequences.

It’s not clear, even in retrospect, how much better things would have been if right-wingers had recognized economic reality in 2008. Years of deregulation and lax enforcement had already weakened the financial system, and it was probably too late to head off the coming crisis.

Virus denial, by contrast, squandered crucial time — time that could have been used to slow the coronavirus’s spread. For the clear and present danger now isn’t so much that large numbers of Americans will get sick — that was probably going to happen anyway — but that the epidemic will move so fast that it overloads our hospitals.

By not instituting widespread testing from the start, the U.S. has ensured that there are now cases all over the country — we have no idea how many — and that the virus will spread rapidly. And even now there is no hint that the administration is ready for the kinds of public health measures that might limit the pace of that spread.

Oh, and when it comes to the economic response, it’s worth noting that basically everyone on the Trump economic team was totally wrong about the 2008 crisis. It seems to be a job requirement.

The bottom line is that like so much of what is happening in America right now, the coronavirus crisis isn’t just about Trump. His intellectual and emotional inadequacy, his combination of megalomania and insecurity, are certainly contributing to the problem; has there ever been a president so obviously not up to the job? But in refusing to face uncomfortable facts, in attributing all bad news to sinister conspiracies, he’s actually just being a normal man of his faction.

In 2020 we’re relearning the lessons of 2008 — namely, that America’s right-wingers can’t handle the truth.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

PAUL KRUGMAN’S NEWSLETTER
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Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

Fox Business Host Claims Coronavirus Is ‘Impeachment All Over Again’ In Bonkers Rant


Ed Mazza,HuffPost•March 10, 2020


Fox Business Host Claims Coronavirus Is ‘Impeachment All Over Again’ In Bonkers Rant

Fox Business host Trish Regan claims the coronavirus outbreak is just “another attempt to impeach” President Donald Trump.

On Monday, Regan claimed that Democrats “blame him and only him for a virus that originated halfway around the world.” She said they were trying to “create mass hysteria to encourage a market selloff” and “stop our economy dead in its tracks.” And she said Democrats, the media and even investors were allowing their hate to “spiral out of control” and cause markets to crash.

As she spoke, a graphic reading “CORONAVIRUS IMPEACHMENT SCAM” appeared on the screen:

We’ve reached a tipping point. The chorus of hate being leveled at #PresidentTrump is nearing a crescendo as #Dems blame him—and only him—for #coronavirus - a #virus that originated halfway around the world! This is yet another attempt to #impeach THE PRESIDENT. #TrishRegan pic.twitter.com/nU3P4zcONA

— Trish Regan (@trish_regan) March 10, 2020

Regan’s comments were at odds with those of Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who on Monday night seemed to call out other Fox voices and even the president, saying they “have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem.”

Regan’s monologue also created a false impression that Trump was being blamed for the virus when, in fact, criticism has focused on his delayed response to the crisis as well as his release of misinformation. For example, on Feb. 26, Trump said there were just 15 cases in the country and within a couple of days, that number was “going to be down to close to zero.”

There are now more than 750 cases in the United States.

Even conservative media has slammed his response.

“President Trump’s bombastic style has served him well through many stages of his political career, but as the coronavirus spreads rapidly throughout the United States, it is exposing how deeply unsuited he is to deal with a genuine crisis that he can’t bluff his way through,” wrote The Washington Examiner’s executive editor Philip Klein.

Regan’s wild defense of the president caused her name to trend on Twitter and much of the reaction wasn’t complimentary:

@trish_regan you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself and have zero career as a “ journalist” after this segment. It is a virus. It is apolitical. Trump ignored it for his own selfish perceived benefit. And it is sadly biting us in the ass as a result.
— Suzanne Lindbergh (@suzannebuzz) March 10, 2020

I don’t know what show you were trying out for but you aren’t getting a callback.
I mean, I assume this was an audition for something... something terrible.
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) March 10, 2020


Omg.. no one is blaming the president for the virus.. he is being blamed for his response. Hello!?
— Tammy Harrington (@tammyharrington) March 10, 2020

You seem mad
— andy lassner (@andylassner) March 10, 2020

You should talk to a therapist because you're suffering from severe delusions. I mean that.
— Thor Benson (@thor_benson) March 10, 2020

Dear @trish_regan,
You really made a fool of yourself today.
Not in the normal way that you do every day as a @FoxNews commentator, but in especially awful way.
People are dying.
This is real.
Stop posting selfies, wake the fuck up and start telling your viewers the truth.
— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) March 10, 2020

Guys, Trish Regan is a character actress pretending to be a newscaster... https://t.co/CMhUjPiinD
— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) March 10, 2020

You should maybe see a doctor, this was unhinged even by Fox news standards.
— Midnight in Washington (@DerpStateActor) March 10, 2020
It's as if Kate McKinnon is performing an SNL skit of Trish Regan. She's roasting herself.
— Dr. Jack Brown (@DrGJackBrown) March 10, 2020

Does Trish Regan think she is on a telenovela? https://t.co/He8rBibEAZ
— Red *WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS* Painter (@Redpainter1) March 10, 2020

.@trish_regan is my least favorite SNL cast member. This skit needs work. https://t.co/tDWobXuYnk
— Jon Zal (@OfficialJonZal) March 10, 2020

Trish Regan is a bad actor, both in the idiomatic sense and the performing arts sense.
This kind of ineptly portrayed drama is usually seen in 17-year olds explai
I watched it and I’ve come to the Conclusion that Trish is not smart and maybe a little nutso.

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) March 10, 2020

AUSTERITY KILLS
Hospitals gird for coronavirus surge after years of cutbacks

By Dan Goldberg and Rachel Roubein,Politico•March 10, 2020


Hospitals for years have faced economic pressures to cut costs and reduce in-patient treatments as the nation tried to slow down health spending.

Now the hospital industry is facing a reckoning.

With a potential surge of coronavirus patients, there may not be enough beds, equipment and staff to handle an epidemic. Executives face tough decisions about who could have to be isolated and, in some cases, need oxygen, ventilators and protective gear that’s already in short supply.

“There are parts of the health care system that can be and should be lean but there are public health preparedness efforts that need to be ongoing.” said Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
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What brought this on? The industry has gone through long-term consolidation that’s put a premium on shortening patient stays, moving care outside the hospital to cheaper settings and investing in high-tech diagnostic tools and big-ticket items like proton beam treatments for cancer. Infectious disease prevention, emergency preparedness and primary care made do with less.

But with some projections of millions of hospital admissions in a full-blown coronavirus pandemic, the industry is forced to consider pivoting back to a hospital-centric, all-hands-on-deck approach featuring sick patients who may stay for weeks, labor intensive staffing and anything but a check in-check out mentality.

The industry says it's up to the challenge and readying contingency plans. Some operators, for instance, are trying to boost telehealth capabilities in an effort to keep potentially infected people who aren't very sick away from the most vulnerable patients — and to keep beds open for those who need in-person treatment.

But the outbreak is reinforcing the idea that preparedness is an ongoing process.

Over the last decade, the federal government, the nation’s largest insurer, has rewarded hospitals that reduced the number of patients who walked through the doors. One of the only pieces of Obamacare with broad bipartisan support is the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Innovation Center, which tries to provide better care at lower costs in part by pushing people into outpatient settings.

In 2015, scientists from HHS, CDC and the FDA warned that resources would be squeezed during a large scale public health emergency.

Since then the number of staffed beds in the United States has declined, dozens of hospitals in rural communities across the country have closed and President Trump, in his most recent budget, called for an $18 million cut to the hospital preparedness program.

Now that the coronavirus has arrived and is quickly spreading, hospitals and local public health officers are scrambling to keep up — and worried about a prolonged outbreak. At Providence St. Joseph Health, a multistate hospital system headquartered in Washington state, officials have created a way to monitor patients’ vitals at home.

In Island County, Wash., northwest of Seattle, small hospitals are coordinating with other regional facilities in case they need to transfer coronavirus patients. Other hospitals in the state, which has already seen 22 deaths, are conserving respirators, by scaling back on drills in which health care workers practice wearing them.

Across the country, NYU Langone in New York is trying to protect its staff and preserve gear by using telemedicine in the emergency room to diagnose patients who are suspected of having the virus.

“We remove the infection risk and a physician is still evaluating the patient,” said Paul Testa, the system's chief medical information officer.

In California, the public health department received a federal signoff to dip into its emergency stockpile of 21 million face masks for medical providers.

The hospitals have already worked through a bad flu season, which has some worried that there may not be enough beds should the coronavirus cases surge, as some models predict.

“This is not going to be a financial issue,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “If anything … it will be a capacity issue, the number of beds.”

There are no signs the health system is cracking under pressure, but that may change depending on the severity and duration of the epidemic.

“Surge capacity remains something that is not able to be sustained for extended periods of time,” Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois health department, told the House Homeland Security Committee last week.

Hospital industry executives contend that they routinely drill for complex public health cases.

“This is not an isolated event. Every discussion I’ve had with my hospital people is that they have vast experience from H1N1, to SARs, to MERS,” said Chip Kahn, president and CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals. “They’re in a heavy prep mode, and they feel pretty confident that they’re doing the drilling now and the prep now.”

But hospitals have reached breaking points. Just two years ago, during flu season, a hospital in Texas had to turn patients away, while some in California set up tents in the parking lot.

The coronavirus, which has already infected more than 100,000 people around the world and 600 in the United States, has the potential to be much worse.

“Given that we’ve had a month or more of prep time, we have created contingency plans and will have additional beds available … but the actual ICU beds and ventilators are somewhat fixed and those numbers are what they are,” said Mark Mulligan, director of NYU Langone Health’s division of infectious diseases and immunology.

The Trump administration continues to hold regular calls and meetings with health care providers, according to a spokesperson for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. Hospitals have shared concerns “about their readiness for a possible widespread outbreak with regard to personal protective equipment, infection prevention and control, diagnostic testing availability, and other medical supply shortages,” the spokesperson said.

Vice President Mike Pence announced the administration is working with a manufacturer to make 35 million more masks at a time when 86 percent of hospitals are concerned about the supply of personal protective gear, according to a recent survey of 300 hospitals. The administration also approved the use of masks in industrial jobs, like construction, for doctors and intends to buy 500 million more over the next 18 months.

But it's still unclear how quickly those will come and whether they’ll be enough.

“Every hospital has limited, finite ability to surge,” said NYU Langone's Mulligan.

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There’s every reason to be skeptical of Mike Pence’s Coronavirus prayer circle



By Chrissy Stroop, Religion Dispatches

Published March 3, 2020
This article was paid for by reader donations to Raw Story Investigates.

A plague is upon us. And white evangelicals, naturally, are on the scene—theologizing the COVID-19 outbreak, praying, scolding, and generally being counterproductive. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s response is being led by one of them—Vice President Mike Pence, a fellow Hoosier and one who, as governor of Indiana, allowed an HIV outbreak to blow up because his Christian extremist ideology prevented him from adopting sensible policy. There are reasons I’ve left that state.

If you find that Pence’s record of failing to pray disease away doesn’t inspire confidence in his ability to tackle coronavirus, you’ll most likely find the derision aimed at a picture of Pence and his (decidedly white and male) team in prayer that’s been going around perfectly reasonable.
https://twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/1234252762055090176?s=20

However, if you’re a white evangelical or evangelical-adjacent commentator or pastor with pretensions to respectability, your response might instead be to put out a tone-deaf take in defense of the picture. And then to take umbrage, naturally couched in the rhetoric of holier-than-thouness, when people inevitably point out that your tone-deaf take is tone-deaf.

It is precisely this scene that’s been playing out on religion Twitter since Monday. In addition to culture warriors Franklin Graham and Robert P. George, the charge was also led by none other than award-winning religion writer Jonathan Merritt who scolded those critical of the VP’s public response to the Coronavirus outbreak:

Criticize Mike Pence all you want for being inept in his strategy to dealing with this. But mocking him for praying—like 79% of Americans have done in the past 3 months—is why so many regular Americans despise wine-and-cheese liberals.  https://t.co/LCHG5MhFxg

— Jonathan Merritt (@JonathanMerritt) March 2, 2020

Graham and George are clear proponents of a “Christian nation,” but Merritt should know better. Did he pause to consider the broader context, one wonders, before tweeting that “mocking [Pence] for praying—like 79% of Americans have done in the past 3 months—is why so many regular Americans despise wine-and-cheese liberals”?

For starters, the Coronavirus Task Force is a U.S. government effort. Unless the prayer was entirely without reference to any specific religion—and I’d be happy to take bets on whether or not a Mike Pence prayer was Christian—it is utterly inappropriate. I mean, does anyone seriously think that Graham and George defended Pence assuming that it wasn’t an explicitly Christian prayer?

Also, putting aside the fact that this godless liberal can only afford inexpensive wine, did Merritt stop to think about the relationship of the praying Pence image to the constant barrage of Christian nationalist imagery put out by the Trump regime, which might help explain the negative reaction?

Did he ask himself whether his use of the term “regular American” might not play directly into the nationalist Christian supremacism that’s fueling the destruction of American democracy, such as it was? Or that words like “regular,” “real,” and “normal,” in this context are often code for “conservative white Christians”?

Might Merritt have devoted a thought or two to the possibility that American criticism of “thoughts and prayers” responses to real-world problems have everything to do with the fact that right-wing Christians—white evangelicals above all—constitute the one demographic that stands in the way of us seriously addressing our gun violence problem? As Daniel Schultz wrote on RD two years ago, in the wake of the Parkland shooting, in his defense of prayers, “Praying for victims of violence and injustice without being changed by their grief is shit.” In other words, people aren’t mocking Pence’s prayer circle because they’re praying, they’re mocking it because it reflects a history of substituting prayer for action in situations that require material actions that the prayer-givers are powerful enough to take.

Alas, we cannot know what’s in Jonathan Merritt’s heart. We can be pretty sure, however, that something similar is taking place in the heart of Brian Zahnd, Christian author and head pastor of the non-denominational Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, MO. In response to author and “recovering fundamentalist” Marc Alan Schelske’s rather muted tweet in defense of those who criticized the Pence prayer image, Zahnd put forth what he imagines is a “high road” tweet:


What Jesus forbids is for *me* to pray in public from the motive of being seen praying in public.
Jesus does not authorize me to pronounce judgment on the motives of others who pray in public.
Judging the motives for the spiritual practices of other people is a dangerous thing.
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) March 2, 2020

While Merritt is a gay man and Zahnd has refused to state his views on same-sex marriage publicly, both certainly share considerable white male privilege, which might just have something to do with how skewed their perspective can be when it comes to an image of nearly all white men more than likely engaging in Christian prayer as part of a U.S. government task force.

Zahnd has a curious understanding of what it means to be inclusive, to put it generously. The man, whose Word of Life church is non-affirming in LGBTQ policy and doesn’t disclose its policy on the inclusion of women in leadership, once tweeted with evident pride that his congregation, in its “culture of kindness,” included both ICE officers and undocumented immigrants, thus putting the latter immediately at risk for his moment of performative kumbaya.

I pastor a church, not a Twitter following. A real real church in Missouri…for 37 years. We have all kinds of people—from newborn to 99, Trumpers and progressives, ICE officers and undocumented immigrants (for real). What we have in common is JESUS…and a culture of kindness.
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) November 22, 2018

I no longer have ICE officers in my church.
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) June 23, 2019

In fairness, Zahnd has called for humane treatment of detained refugees and asylum seekers:

One ounce of Jesus tells you that children held in detention camps lacking basic hygiene—no matter what the reason—is an egregious evil. I know this, you know this, and @Franklin_Graham knows this.

So I call upon @SamaritansPurse to respond to this humanitarian crisis. #Retweet https://t.co/Xla4vmQgZA
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) June 23, 2019

Nevertheless, it’s unsurprising that Zahnd came to Merritt’s (and, more or less, Pence’s) defense in the unfolding Twitter storm. It may be that pushback on this inspired Zahnd to later tweet a cryptic comment on how “the satan” seeks to divide us:

Us vs. Them is what the satan does.

And when you absolutely know you are on the right side of the issue (and you really on right side!), that’s when the satanic temptation to operate from a hateful Us vs. Them stance is most seductive.

Us vs. Them is NEVER the Jesus way.
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) March 2, 2020

The problem with Christians like Merritt and Zahnd who fancy themselves uniters is that their approach to “unity” is one that favors the already privileged at the expense of othered groups. Despite striving to be more inclusive than most conservative Christians, Merritt and Zahnd consistently call for those harmed by right-wing social politics and Christian nationalism to play nice with Christian nationalists, allowing their dignity and equality to be trampled on in the process.

Merritt and Zahnd are, to be sure, no Rick Wiles, the extreme anti-Semitic Christian TV host who recently declared that God would stop the coronavirus pandemic if China would convert to Christianity. Nor are they even Jason Seville, who in the face of the disaster wrote a self-aggrandizing piece for The Gospel Coalition on why he would be remaining in China, where he pastors a church.

Nevertheless, the Zahnds and Merritts of the world could do much better in helping America move past this era of empty “thoughts and prayers” if they would devote some of the former—and hell, perhaps even some of the latter—to the ways in which they’re still blinded to the realities of those Americans (and others) they don’t see as “regular.”

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