Thursday, April 16, 2020

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES - THOUSANDS OF MEDICAL WORKERS ARE GETTING SICK

ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS 


"I hope I’m wrong, because the reckoning due for China and its globalists enablers is a consummation devoutly to be wished. And if the current economic disaster worsens, we may see a critical mass of voters demand that at least the U.S. as much as possible decouple economically from China. Or we may see a reaction much more sinister and dangerous. But either way, the “new world order,” as George Bush senior called it, will not go gently into that good night." BRUCE THORNTON 


Thousands of medical workers are getting sick from coronavirus

Paul Kwak believes he was infected with the virus while inserting tubing into a covid-19 patient’s neck. 
Kwak, an otolaryngologist at NYU Langone hospital, was wearing an N95 mask, a face shield and a full-length gown as he performed a tracheostomy — a procedure in which a tube is placed through a small incision into a severely ill patient’s windpipe to help them breathe.
But those personal protections, while helpful, are no guarantee. Days after the procedure, on March 30, Kwak started feeling feverish. He tested positive for the coronavirus and spent the next 10 days fighting what he describes as a relatively mild version of the illness. 
“You’re literally face-to-face with a patient’s throat and airway and even in the most controlled situation there are secretions and droplets going everywhere,” the 38-year-old doctor told me. “Providers who are part of that team are inevitably high-risk.”
A doctor wears a face shield and a protective suit while working at the ICU of the Hospital del Mar clinic in Barcelona, Spain. (Alejandro Garcia/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) 
A doctor wears a face shield and a protective suit while working at the ICU of the Hospital del Mar clinic in Barcelona, Spain. (Alejandro Garcia/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) 
Health-care workers may constitute between 1 and 2 of every 10 coronavirus cases in the United States.
As of one week ago, 9,282 medical workers had tested positive for the virus and 27 had died, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. That’s 19 percent of the 49,370 reported cases in which data was included about whether the patient was a health worker. In a dozen states that did a better job reporting the information, about 11 percent of cases were medical workers.
“These numbers are believed to be a gross undercount of infections due to the continuing lack of available tests in many areas,” my colleague Ariana Eunjung Cha writes. “Some regions and institutions are no longer testing health-care workers, reserving kits for the sickest patients.”
The Guardian and Kaiser Health News have launched a project to document the lives of medical workers in the United States who die of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
There was particularly grim news out of Ohio this week, where health officials reported more than 1,300 medical workers had tested positive. That’s about 1 in 5 of all known infections in the state.
Hospital workers and first responders pose for a group photo outside Westchester Medical Center in New York. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Hospital workers and first responders pose for a group photo outside Westchester Medical Center in New York. (John Moore/Getty Images)
The highly infectious disease has struck health-care workers around the globe. Nearly 13,000 health-care workers in Italy had been infected as of April 7, according to the country’s National Institute of Health. Ninety-four doctors and 26 nurses had died. In Spain, nearly 14 percent of infected individuals in March were medical workers. China’s National Health Commission has said more than 3,300 workers have been infected and at least 13 have died.
Medical workers are committed to their jobs, but some worry about repeated exposure to such a risky disease. 
Officials have stressed that the risks to the medical community and the need to prevent hospitals from getting overloaded should inspire people to keep appropriate social distance and stop the spread. And they're urging Americans to construct homemade face masks to preserve the supply for hospitals facing shortages. 
But even having sufficient protective gear – which is not a guarantee in every hospital – doesn’t erase the fear medical workers can feel amid repeated daily encounters with severely ill patients. 
“Some residents have expressed strong reservations about participating in covid care,” Kwak told me. “I was very much like, guys, this is what I signed up for; we took an oath and this is our time.” 
Kwak said he went “to a pretty dark place” when he started getting sick because of the stories he had read about young, healthy people succumbing to the virus. He said he was particularly nervous around the seventh day, because patients with covid-19 often see their symptoms subside after a few days, only for them to return more aggressively than before. He didn’t even tell his parents he had contracted the virus until the 14th day after getting sick.
But now that he has returned to work, he feels less frightened. “Those of us who have had it, we feel a little bit more comfortable being in the wards,” Kwak said. “It’s not like we’re trying to be reckless, but … there’s less fear, which has been liberating, I suppose." 
A doctor puts a face mask on a colleague before treating patients infected with the novel coronavirus COVID-19 at the Intensive Care Unit of the Hospital de Clinicas, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on April 15, 2020. (Photo by SILVIO AVILA/AFP via Getty Images)
A doctor puts a face mask on a colleague before treating patients infected with the novel coronavirus COVID-19 at the Intensive Care Unit of the Hospital de Clinicas, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on April 15, 2020. (Photo by SILVIO AVILA/AFP via Getty Images)
Workers don't always know how many patients have the coronavirus and in what units they are being treated. 
My colleagues Rachel Chason, Jenna Portnoy and Kyle Swenson found that 11 hospitals in D.C., Maryland and Virginia take dramatically different approaches on how they share information about infected patients and employees.
“Interviews with health-care workers showed many feel kept in the dark by leaders at their organizations and fear a lack of information could hurt their families, or their patients,” they write. “Staff in some medical centers and hospitals said that in addition to wanting more notice when a fellow employee tests positive, they would like to see more information provided about the number and condition of covid-19 patients being seen in their facilities.”
And the demand for personal protective gear has been a point of contention in some health care centers. Some nurses and aides say they have been asked to reuse face masks far beyond their intended use, prompting pushback from unions who say their members are being forced to put their own health at risk.
Yonkers Fire Department workers decontaminate after carrying a patient with covid-19 symptoms out of her house for emergency transport to a hospital. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Yonkers Fire Department workers decontaminate after carrying a patient with covid-19 symptoms out of her house for emergency transport to a hospital. (John Moore/Getty Images)
States are prioritizing medical workers for testing.
Cognizant of the risks, many state health officials have placed medical workers in a class of people considered top priority for getting tested for having the virus. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) says medical workers in his state will also be prioritized for getting antibody tests, which show whether someone has already had the virus and is therefore considered to have some level of immunity to it.
Some medical workers used little protective gear before they fully understood how contagious the virus is.
The Los Angeles Times tells the story of Ryan Padgett, an emergency room doctor in the Seattle area, who nearly died after contracting the virus and had to be placed on a ventilator in his own hospital. At first, he and his colleagues used only surgical masks and gloves before adding respirators and other gear. 
“To worry about myself, as a 44-year-old healthy man, didn’t even cross my mind,” Padgett told the Times.
Similarly, workers didn’t use special protective gear while interacting with a patient with respiratory issues who arrived Feb. 15 at a hospital in Solano County, Calif. These doctors and nurses, whose cases were detailed in the CDC report, interacted with the patient and performed multiple aerosol-generating procedures without special protection.
“Eleven days later, they discovered the patient had covid-19, and 121 staff had been exposed to the virus,” Ariana writes.
“Of the 43 staffers who subsequently experienced flu-like symptoms and were tested with nasal swabs, three had confirmed infections — making them among the first known cases of occupational transmission in a hospital,” she adds. “While two of those three workers were involved in higher-risk procedures that tend to kick the virus into the air, the third was not.”
Note to readers: Health 202 is on an abbreviated schedule this week and won't publish tomorrow. Thanks for reading and get some rest this weekend, if you can. We'll be back in your inbox on Monday.


Silicon Valley, and the Chinese Connection to Coronavirus Infection

By James Fulford

After Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to colleagues, even once claiming “that in my last life maybe I was Chinese.” HARIS ALIC

FEINSTEIN HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.

SHE HAS AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT OUT THERE!


  
IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.


“All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon


“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com


Senator Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President

 

  

A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings with the communist regime.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures in Congress.
Feinstein said in a statement:
I’ve worked closely with Vice President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his statesmanship, and most importantly his moral fortitude (NO, IT’S NOT A JOKE, BUT THEN FEINSTEIN IS THE MOST SELF-SERVING CORRUPT POL IN U.S. HISTORY). During his time in Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard working (ILLEGALS) MEXICAN families.

U.S. Intelligence Estimates Millions of Chinese Deaths From Coronavirus

But ex-fake news CNN “fact-checker” disagrees.
 
Joseph Klein

China’s official tally of deaths attributable to the coronavirus stands at 3,341 as of April 14, 2020. Anyone who believes that this figure is anywhere near accurate should reflect on Confucius’s quote about truth: “Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”
The Chinese government withheld crucial information regarding the human to human transmission of the coronavirus in the early days of the outbreak and has published phony numbers on cases and deaths in China linked to the virus ever since. The truth is coming out slowly but surely regarding the real death toll in China. Some observers have estimated more than 40,000 deaths in Wuhan alone, based on a variety of data points, including the numbers of urns provided by funeral homes and the volume of cremations. More recently, according to new data intercepted and analyzed by the United States intelligence, as reported in an article published earlier this month by News NT, it is estimated that China has experienced at least 20.9 million deaths from December 2019 to March 2020 linked to the coronavirus. This was the period during which the spread of the deadly virus was reaching its peak in China.
One way of deriving a more accurate number of deaths in China as opposed to the Chinese government’s absurdly low propaganda number is to examine the number of cell phone account closings, which the Chinese government itself reported during the relevant time period. The Chinese government announced on March 19th that over 21 million cell phone accounts in China were canceled in the past three months, according to the News NT article. After some increase of cell phone accounts still open in December 2019, when the virus was first detected, the number of open accounts dropped sharply in 2020 as the coronavirus outbreak was raging in China. “Cell phones are an indispensable part of life in China and its only closed when the user is dead,” the intelligence report said, as quoted by NT News.
However, the U.S. media apologists for Chinese propaganda think otherwise. A so-called “fact-check” article written by Ryan Cooper, a former CNN employee who now writes for an organization called “Lead Stories,” purported to refute the accuracy of the NT News article. Cooper did admit that other sources were reporting the existence of an intelligence report in early April, which concluded that China had deliberately underreported the number of coronavirus cases and related deaths. Nevertheless, Cooper claimed that the NT News story “is false and wrongly interpreted data from Chinese cellphone companies to make a broad claim that isn't backed up by facts.”
Cooper’s method of “fact-checking” included citing to an Associated Press article that quoted a representative of China Mobile Ltd., who claimed that the decline in cell phone accounts was due to a change in lifestyle. China Mobile is owned by the Chinese government. Does Cooper seriously believe that the ridiculous rationale offered by a Chinese-government owned mobile company for explaining the drastic increase in cell phone account closings during the relevant period of the coronavirus’s deadly spread in China should be taken at face value? Apparently, he does. Instead of independently fact-checking and evaluating the credibility of the sources on which he relied to challenge the accuracy of the NT News article, Cooper took the lazy path of trying to marginalize NT News itself. “News NT is a relatively new player online,” he wrote. He added that “its domain name was only registered a month ago. A subheadline written in Vietnamese in the republished English-language article suggests the site originates from that Southeast Asian country.”
It turns out that Lead Stories, the organization that Cooper has been writing for after he left CNN, was co-founded by another CNN veteran, Alan Duke. Duke, who serves as Lead Stories’ editor-in-chief, worked at CNN for 26 years. Out of the 15 writers listed on Lead Stories’ website, 7 of them (including Cooper) came from fake news CNN.
Corinne Weaver, a senior analyst for the Media Research Center, has done a bit of fact-checking into Lead Stories itself. Facebook has been using Lead Stories as one of its top “fact-checkers.” But Lead Stories appears to have bias problems of its own. “Lead Stories published 296 fact-checks between January 1, 2020, and March 9, 2020,” Ms. Weaver wrote. “Out of those, 55 entries were from right-leaning social media users and news outlets. Only 12 were from left-leaning social media users and news outlets.” Among Lead Stories’ targets so far in 2020 alone are The Washington Times, the GOP, Newsmax, Rush Limbaugh, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Judicial Watch, Breitbart, and The Daily Caller. CNN meanwhile has escaped from its former employees’ clutches unscathed.
Lead Stories wants to go beyond its targeting of conservative outlets. Its editor-in-chief Alan Duke told his former employer CNN last October that there is “an urgent need for a fair method to identify egregiously false political ads in 2020." He proposed that Facebook, working with his organization and other so-called “fact-checkers,” begin cracking down on political ads deemed to be false. "It would likely involve fact-check journalists researching and debunking,” Duke explained, “but with the added process of a nongovernmental, nonpartisan blue-ribbon panel reviewing the results to determine if a candidate's political ad should be flagged and banned." In other words, Lead Stories’ editor-in-chief advocates blatant censorship, aided and abetted by his fellow former employees of Trump-hating CNN who pretend to be “fact-checking journalists.”
Real fact-checking journalists should be investigating the Chinese government’s deliberate disinformation about the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan. Chinese officials manipulated the data from the start, using a variety of definitions as to what constitutes a COVID-19 infection.
“Early on we did not get correct information, and the incorrect information was propagated right from the beginning,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said last weekend.
To its credit, TIME ran an article on April 1st entitled “China Says It's Beating Coronavirus. But Can We Believe Its Numbers?” As the article stated, “political considerations appear paramount” in the numbers that the Chinese government issues. The article continued: “TIME has spoken with many sickened Wuhan residents and relatives of presumed COVID-19 victims who were never included on official tallies during the outbreak’s peak. There are also countless reports of people collapsing in the street and bodies laid out outside apartment buildings. But only those who died after first being diagnosed with COVID-19 are included in official statistics.”
TIME quoted Mario Esteban, a senior analyst specializing in E.U.-East Asia relations at the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid, who said, “Nobody believes China’s numbers.” Well, almost nobody. The CNN alumnus now working as a supposed “fact checker” with a bunch of other CNN alumni chose to believe, without any fact-checking, a Chinese government-owned company’s rationale for the steep increase in the number of cell phone accounts that closed while the coronavirus was ravaging the country. The U.S. intelligence report’s explanation buttressing the estimate of millions of coronavirus-related Chinese deaths is far more plausible: “Cell phones are an indispensable part of life in China and its only closed when the user is dead.”

What Will Change After the Virus Crisis?

Will the “New World Order” really just go gently into that good night?
 
Bruce Thornton

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
We’ve reached that point in the Wuhan pandemic when we start talking about how the world will change after the crisis passes. The impact on everything from the media to globalism is being reassessed, and prognostications about the future, both good and bad, are being promulgated. But those hoping for improvement are likely to be disappointed, just as those who said “this changes everything” were after the terrorist attacks on 9/ll. To quote Adam Smith, “there is a lot of ruin in a nation,” as stubborn inertia created by entrenched vested interests and received wisdom protect the status quo.
The media’s performance during the virus crisis has been par for the course in their unhinged zeal to damage the Trump administration, which has made the president’s attempt to handle the crisis even more difficult. From claims that Trump called the outbreak a “hoax,” to accusations that his comments about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine were “snake oil,” the media have doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on their usual repertoire of fake “facts,” anonymous leaks, bought-and-paid-for “experts,” dishonest editing, and outright lies––even to the point of impeding treatment that might save lives.
Worse yet, they have reinforced China’s propaganda about the origins of the virus and the regime’s claim of great success in fighting it. Indeed, the media have become so shameless that they contradict their own statements in a few weeks or even days––telling the public the virus wasn’t serious, then criticizing Trump for not taking it serious enough while they hysterically portrayed it as the end of times.
One would think that such blatant dishonesty and hypocrisy might lead to reform, particularly given plummeting numbers of viewers and being ranked last in polls about the trustworthiness of public institutions. Not a chance. The degeneration of the media is irreversible, for it has been corrupt for decades now in its partisan biases. In the Sixties, the bias became more open in the coverage of the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. Their disdain for conservatives was obvious in their treatment of Republican presidents from Nixon to Reagan to both Bushes.
But it became blatant during the two terms of Barack Obama, when all pretenses to objectivity and balance were dropped in the media’s refusal to vet him as a candidate and their unwillingness to report his failures in both domestic and foreign policy, not to mention their embarrassing sycophancy and lapdog groveling. The candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump pushed them over the edge, but they had been dancing on it for a long time.
Given how deeply this professional malfeasance has penetrated the industry, it is beyond shame and reform. Indeed, their coverage of the Wuhan virus outbreak is laying down yet another fake predicate like Russia “collusion” and Ukrainian “quid pro quo” for their upcoming one-sided, partisan coverage of the presidential election.
Next, our relationship with China seems ripe for a transformation. There is no doubt that China’s cover-up of the outbreak last December turned it into a pandemic. Charles Lipson in Real Clear Politics succinctly summarized China’s misdeeds:
The Chinese Communist Party, like all dictatorships, maintains tight control over information. It gives out only what helps the regime, hides whatever hurts it, spews propaganda, and cracks down on anyone who speaks out of turn. The Wuhan doctors who first sounded the alarm bells were immediately silenced. Science labs, which decoded the viral structure, were shut down and their data destroyed. China still won’t share vital information about how the virus works and how it affects different populations. Reporters, both professional and amateur, who mentioned the pandemic were suppressed. Some international reporters were expelled. Some locals have not been seen again.
And China lied about person-to-person infection, corrupted the World Health Organization, and is still reporting dishonest numbers of dead and infected in China.
But why should we now be shocked about the nature of a totalitarian, thuggish regime? For all its gleaming skyscrapers and gigantic economy, its leaders are still Orwellian in their control of the government, and its censorship and intense surveillance of its citizens. Plus, China still occupies Tibet, violates international law in the South China Sea, ignores international tribunals that condemn their behavior, and has imprisoned about a million Muslim Uighurs, trying to brainwash them out of their faith––crimes against the “rules-based international order” whose champions only occasionally and feebly mention these offenses. In fact, China was recently rewarded with a seat on the Human Rights Council even as the pandemic they created still rages.
So, will unleashing a global pandemic that has taken hundreds of thousands lives and seriously damaged the world’s economies be the final offense that ignites a change in our relationship with Beijing? Probably not. American businesses from tech to Hollywood to the NBA have done good business with China, taking advantage of its cheap labor and huge market, and acquiescing to the regime’s illiberal and mercantilist demands. Indeed, business has been so good that China’s violations of international protocols such as those of the World Trade Organization, including illegal dumping of products, the theft of intellectual property, and weaponizing of companies like 5G provider Huawei, have been ignored.
These economic ties and dependencies are deeply implicated in the West’s economies, and attempts to reform them are stoutly resisted, as we have seen with the heated criticism of Trump’s tariffs war and attempts to force China to play by the rules. Even now, despite China’s malign role in creating the pandemic, we hear calls for increasing cooperation with China, rather than holding it to account, coming from the Davoisie in business, academe, and government agencies.
Finally, the problem of China is at the center of criticisms of globalism or “moralizing internationalism” or the “rules-based international order.” The long-developing return of repressed nationalism is evident in the election of Donald Trump and his “America First” credo;
Brexit and the election of the Eurosceptic Boris Johnson as Prime Minister; the success of other populist/nationalist parties in Europe; the rapid violation of the once-sacred Schengen Zone and return to national border controls, and the pushback against the transnational EU and Eurozone financial regimes that has been strengthened by the pandemic and its exorbitant cost.
Exhibit one, however, in the indictment of globalism is China’s role in the pandemic, which has starkly exposed the internationalist delusions about the power of free global trade and transnational institutions and covenants to create the old Kantian dream of the peace and prosperity that would follow from lessening the power and influence of sovereign nations by subordinating them to technocratic global elites. China’s involvement in trade with the West, its growing GDP, and its membership in the World Trade Organization have not transformed it into a liberal democracy  and truly free market economy.
Rather, China’s predatory economy and oppressive government have merely proved yet again the fundamental flaw of globalism: believing that all the world’s people want to be like us and enjoy freedom and prosperity, rather than to pursue their own interests and beliefs radically different from ours. The globalists have confused the potential for the peoples of the world to become like us, with the inevitability that they eventually will.
We’ve had over a century of empirical evidence that the foundational assumptions of the “rules-based international order” are flawed. The serial failures of international agreements and institutions from the First Hague Convention of 1899 to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that created the EU, from the League of Nations to the United Nations, are ample evidence that diverse peoples with diverse, often conflicting identities and aims based on custom, mores, religious beliefs, and traditions are not so eager to abandon them and become Westerners.
Of course, given the outsized power and global reach of the West, those peoples will make a pretense of endorsing our liberal notions and use the vocabulary of human rights and political freedom.  And they like our antibiotics and advanced weaponry. But they join transnational institutions like the UN or sign multilateral treaties like the WTO not because they believe in the principles those institutions supposedly embody, but because they find them useful for pursuing their own particular aims and interests often inimical to our own. Just witness WHO’s eagerness to do China’s bidding and confirm its egregious propaganda campaign to shift the blame from its own responsibility for the outbreak.
Given that long record of failures followed by even greater expansion of the “rules-based international order” since the end of the Cold War, it’s unlikely that the Wuhan virus will lead to a significant rollback of that order’s reach and power. Too many powerful interests are served by it––corporations, popular culture, high culture, universities, think-tanks, journalists, and the whole global technocratic elite that fancies itself superior to the parochial citizens of diverse nations. And don’t forget, we the people have become hooked on cheap goods.
I hope I’m wrong, because the reckoning due for China and its globalists enablers is a consummation devoutly to be wished. And if the current economic disaster worsens, we may see a critical mass of voters demand that at least the U.S. as much as possible decouple economically from China. Or we may see a reaction much more sinister and dangerous. But either way, the “new world order,” as George Bush senior called it, will not go gently into that good night.

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