(AP) As many as 1 million people in New York City may have been exposed to the coronavirus, the city’s health commissioner said Thursday.
More than 142,000 people in the city have tested positive for the virus, “but that really is, I think, the tip of the iceberg,” Dr. Oxiris Barbot said.
She noted the city is still telling people who suspect they have the virus but aren’t seriously ill that they don’t need to seek a test, so the true number of sick people is unknown.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if, at this point in time, we have probably close to 1 million New Yorkers who have been exposed to COVID-19,” she said.
Early on in the pandemic, health officials estimated that as many as half of all people in the city would get the virus. Mayor Bill de Blasio said that’s still plausible, though the lack of comprehensive, widespread testing makes it difficult to say for sure.
“We are still dealing with the great unknown in the absence of testing. We don’t even 100 percent know when the first cases emerged in this city, because we didn’t have testing in February. We know it was February, but we don’t know how many people got it back then.”
De Blasio said that “in a perfect world” hundreds of thousands of people a day would be tested for the coronavirus in the city.
He said the city needs help from the federal government to reach that level of testing but is building testing capacity and should reach 20,000 to 30,000 tests a day by next month.
438 deaths were reported on Thursday, down from 474 reported Wednesday. The number of deaths during the first four days of this week is down 33 percent from the first four days of last week. New York State’s death toll is now 15,740. The number of virus patients entering hospitals has stayed around 1,350 per day for the last three days. That is down from around 2,000 per day last week.
But Cuomo noted the number of new coronavirus hospitalizations was relatively flat which is “not great news.”
Cuomo said that 3,000 antibody tests conducted across New York indicate 13.9% of state residents are positive for antibodies. But those figures vary dramatically by region. While 21.2% of New York City residents tested positive, only 3.6% of residents from upstate New York have the antibodies.
Cuomo said a 13.9% infection rate would translate to 2.7 million people infected statewide. Considering the more than 15,000 deaths recorded by the state, New York’s coronavirus death rate is approximately 0.5%, which is lower than some estimates had predicted.
Cuomo announced the state would launch an investigation into nursing homes’ handling of coronavirus. Cuomo said the investigation would be jointly overseen by the state department of health and the state attorney general. The governor empashized that nursing homes must be taking every possible step to limit the spread of coronavirus, warning that facilities found to be negligent could be subjected to a fine or lose their license.
Nearly a quarter of New York’s 15,740 coronavirus deaths have come from long-term care facilities, prompting criticism of officials’ oversight of the facilities, Guardian noted
More than 3,500 people have died in nursing homes since the outbreak began, according to state data — roughly 20 percent of all deaths in New York
Andrew Cuomo criticized Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell for suggesting states should declare bankruptcy rather than receive more federal funding. The governor warned that states declaring bankruptcies could cause “a collapse of this national economy.
Cuomo also lamabasted McConnell for suggesting relief money for states would represent a bailout for Democratic states, which have generally been harder hit by the virus. “If there’s ever a time for humanity and decency, now’s the time,” Cuomo said. “How irresponsible and how reckless.”
BERNARD CONDON, MATT SEDENSKY AND JIM MUSTIAN (AP)
After two months and more than 10,000 deaths that have made the nation’s nursing homes some of the most terrifying places to be during the coronavirus crisis, most of them still don’t have access to enough tests to help control outbreaks among their frail, elderly residents.
Neither the federal government nor the leader in nursing home deaths, New York, has mandated testing for all residents and staff. An industry group says only about a third of the nation’s 15,000 nursing homes have ready access to tests that can help isolate the sick and stop the spread. And homes that do manage to get a hold of tests often rely on luck and contacts.
“It just shows that the longer that states lapse in universal testing of all residents and staff, we’re going to see these kinds of stories for a very long time,” said Brian Lee of the advocacy group Families for Better Care. “Once it’s in, there’s no stopping it and by the time you’re aware with testing, too many people have it. And bodies keep piling up.”
That became clear in some of the nation’s biggest nursing home outbreaks. After a home in New York City’s Brooklyn borough reported 55 coronavirus deaths last week, its CEO acknowledged it was based entirely on symptoms and educated guesses the dead had COVID-19 because they were unable to actually test any of the residents or staff.
At a nursing home in suburban Richmond, Virginia, that has so far seen 49 deaths, the medical director said testing of all residents was delayed nearly two weeks because of a shortage of testing supplies and bureaucratic requirements. By the time they did, the spread was out of control, with 92 residents positive.
Mark Parkinson, CEO of the American Health Care Association, which represents long-term care facilities, says “only a very small percentage” of residents and staff have been tested because the federal and state governments have not made nursing homes the top priority.
“We feel like we’ve been ignored,” Parkinson said. “Certainly now that the emphasis has gone away from hospitals to where the real battle is taking place in nursing homes, we should be at a priority level one.”
Two-thirds of U.S. nursing homes still don’t have “easy access to test kits” and are struggling to obtain sufficient resources, said Chris Laxton, executive director of The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.
“Those nursing home leaders who have developed good relationships with their local hospitals and health departments seem to have better luck,” said Laxton, whose organization represents more than 50,000 long-term care professionals. “Those that are not at the table must fend for themselves.”
Public health officials have long argued that current measures like temperature checks aren’t sufficient. They can’t stop workers with the virus who aren’t showing signs from walking in the front door, and they don’t catch such asymptomatic carriers among residents either. What is needed is rigorous and frequent testing — “sentinel surveillance,” White House virus chief Deborah Birx calls it — to find these hidden carriers, isolate them and stop the spread.
The U.S. is currently testing roughly 150,000 people daily, for a total of 4.5 million results reported, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project. Public health experts say that needs to be much higher. “We need likely millions of tests a day,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
The federal Health & Human Services Department told The Associated Press that ”there are plenty of tests and capability for all” priority categories and that all should be tested. The agency also noted one of President Donald Trump’s briefings this week in which he underscored the states’ role in coordinating testing.
Only one governor, West Virginia’s Jim Justice, appears to be mandating testing for all nursing homes without conditions. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan ordered tests at all 26 nursing in the city, using new kits that can spew out results in 15 minutes. Massachusetts abruptly halted a program to send test kits directly to nursing homes this week after 4,000 of them turned out to be faulty. New Hampshire teamed with an urgent-care company to test care workers. Several states including Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Tennessee and Wisconsin have dispatched National Guard testing strike teams.
“It’s a snapshot,” New Hampshire Health Care Association President Brendan Williams said of the national piecemeal approach. “We need a motion picture.”
While the federal government promised this week to start tracking and publicly releasing nursing home infections and deaths, which could help identify hotspots, that work was only beginning. In the meantime, The AP’s own tally from state health departments and media reports put the count at 10,217 deaths from outbreaks in nursing homes and long-term care facilities nationwide. About a third of those are in New York.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has described COVID-19 in nursing homes as “fire through dry grass,” said he would ideally like to see any resident, staffer or visitor seeking to enter a nursing home take a rapid test that would come back in 20 minutes. But, he said, “that’s millions of tests.”
Dr. Roy Goldberg, medical director of a nursing home in New York City’s Bronx borough that this past week reported 45 deaths, said his facility still can’t test asymptomatic patients because of shortages that have limited testing to those showing fever or a cough.
“This isn’t what anyone signed up for,” Goldberg said. “It just breaks my heart that the long-term care industry is going to end up being totally scapegoated on this.”
Amid the tragedies have emerged hopeful cases in which early and aggressive testing has made huge difference.
After the first of two deaths at a Sheboygan, Wisconsin, nursing home and other residents and staffers started falling ill, administrator Colinda Nappa got on the phone and pleaded with state officials: “I got to know what is going on,.”
A 65-member National Guard testing unit soon showed up, donned head-to-toe protective suits and quickly tested nearly 100 residents and 150 staffers.
In all, 19 residents and staffers tested positive and all are either now housed in a special section of the building or quarantined at home. There have been no more deaths.
In the Seattle area, which had the nation’s first major nursing home outbreak that eventually claimed 43 lives, health officials are targeting their testing efforts on homes that have shown little sign of the disease.
Their plans for testing at 19 such facilities are aimed at trying to head off hotspots by quickly identifying and containing cases. In conjunction with ramped-up capacity for tracing contacts of patients, it’s considered an important prerequisite to reopening he economy.
This past week, medical professionals led by the University of Washington’s Dr. Thuan Ong went room by room through a nursing home in a highly orchestrated ballet of swabbing and bagging. In all, 115 residents were tested and results came back the next day as all negative — a development that drew cheers from the facility’s staff.
“One of the greatest values,” Ong said, “is to catch it before it spreads.”
So far, Israel’s Operation Breaking Dawn is not getting the media’s full attention here in the United States.
This is changing, for the worse, as we write.
The IDF’s initiative is to silence the guns of August from Gaza’s Islamic Jihad, which has been firing rockets into Israel from the Hamas-controlled enclave.
A check of America’s leading news sources finds the coverage to be mostly “below the fold” …for the time being.
Everything will change once the terrorists release photos of “dead Palestinian babies,” most likely killed, as in the past, from their own terrorist machinery.
Already, late breaking, such news is over the wires…misfired missiles of theirs, and the deadly results, being blamed on Israel, by the terrorists.
The cameras are being rushed to the scene to photo “innocent Palestinians” weeping over their dead.
Staging such images, for Western consumption, and for Front Page New York Times, has been a popular device toward winning the PR wars.
So often their aim is to win the hearts and minds of the American people, and to stir up their “streets.” Taking note, synagogues in and around New York City are on heightened alert, often doubling up on security.
Meanwhile, The New York Times has only this to say for a headline: “Israel and Gaza Militants Exchange Fire.”
Language that straightforward is a win for Israel. But it’s early…and within hours, expect blazing headlines from the media faulting Israel.
The networks, which always look first to the Times, had conformed with the same cool message initially.
But that’s going to change.
Islamic Jihad and their gangs have been designated by the US as a terrorist organization. So, it would be farfetched for anyone to take their side automatically.
Supposedly they are at odds with Hamas, which rules their territory (since 2007) But they are a single family upon a shared murderous intent against Israel.
In any case, mainstream media in the United States is generally parochial. There is always the weather, Jan 6, and Donald Trump.
World-events are covered reluctantly.
The Brittany Griner story has topped the news cycle for more than a week. She’s the US basketball player who was sentenced to nine years imprisonment for smuggling drugs into Russia. Efforts are underway to manage a prisoner exchange and the business of “bring Brittany home” has been covered obsessively.
Apparently, the Russians don’t share the same warmth for gays as we do. Nor do they view her favorably even as she complains about hearing the US national anthem at sporting events. No points for that, either.
China is also big news, but that too is local, due to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, stirring up that faraway hornet’s nest. But with dire consequences back home.
Therefore, events in the Middle East will have to wait their turn.
Operation Breaking Dawn is expected to last 10 days. During that time, or after that time, who knows?
That is, will the US media give Israel a fair shot?
If so, that would be news.
Accordingly so on realizing that virtually all newsrooms are controlled by Democrats, and being mindful that the Party has within it elements hostile to Israel.
So as of this writing, we have not yet heard from the Squad. Once they speak up…AOC. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, prepare for a different story from the press.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
Israel thwarted several terror attacks in Jerusalem, including at the country’s largest soccer stadium, the Shin Bet security services announced on Wednesday.
The Shin Bet arrested three Hamas members last month who planned to carry out attacks against Israel Defense Forces’ soldiers near Ramallah and at the Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem that can hold more than 30,000 people, according to a Ynet report.
The men were Ahmed Sajadia, 27, from Qalandiya refugee camp; Muhammad Hamad, 26, from Kafr Aqab near Jerusalem; and Omar Eid, 24, from the village of Deir Jarir near Ramallah.
The Shin Bet said they became friends while studying at Birzeit University near Ramallah. The Hamas network among university students there served as a “go between” for the three Hamas operatives and provided them funds.
Eid apparently used his Israeli identity card to attend a soccer match at Teddy Stadium in order to check the security level, according to the report.
The operatives also planned to use improvised explosive devices to attack IDF vehicles and checkpoints in Judea and Samaria. They were trying to construct the explosives using instructions from online.
Two high school students in Minnesota apologized for posting a clip on a popular video-sharing app that pokes fun at Jews who were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
In the TikTok video titled “Me and the boys on the way to camp,” two students from Nicollet High School in Nicollet, Minn., hold hands and pretend to happily skip onto a photo of a boxcar that is headed to Auschwitz. The background music is a rendition of “On My Way” by Phil Collins.
Nicollet Public School Superintendent Dennis Morrow was informed of the disturbing video on April 16.
The next day, he wrote to the students that their video “crossed several lines of decorum” and called it “an affront to our school and community to portray that one could be educated here, and then choose to demonstrate such a callous disregard for the plight of others.”
He assigned each of the students a 10-page research paper on “Hitler’s final solution at Auschwitz” and “medical experiments at Auschwitz.”
Morrow, a former AP US History teacher, said both students have submitted written apologies for the video and are working on their research papers (WIN news)
The tic toc video was taken off the app, but someone had a clip of it, this is what remains of it
By ROBERT BURNS, DARLENE SUPERVILLE and JON GAMBRELL
Tensions between Washington and Tehran flared anew Wednesday as Iran’s Revolutionary Guard conducted a space launch that could advance the country’s long-range missile program and President Donald Trump threatened to “shoot down and destroy” any Iranian gunboats that harass Navy ships.
The launch was a first for the Guard, revealing what experts described as a secret military space program that could accelerate Iran’s ballistic missile development. American officials said it was too early to know whether an operational Iranian satellite was successfully placed into orbit. Trump’s top diplomat accused Iran of violating U.N. resolutions.
After Iran’s announcement, Trump wrote on Twitter, without citing any specific incident, “I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.”
Last Wednesday, the U.S. Navy reported that 11 Guard naval gunboats had carried out “dangerous and harassing approaches” to American Navy and Coast Guard vessels in the Persian Gulf. The Americans used a variety of nonlethal means to warn off the Iranian boats, and they eventually left. Such encounters were relatively common several years ago, but have been rare recently.
We don’t want their gunboats surrounding our boats, and traveling around our boats and having a good time,” Trump told reporters Wednesday evening at the White House. “We’re not going to stand for it. … They’ll shoot them out of the water.”
Iran said the U.S. was to blame for last week’s incident.
Conflict between Iran and the U.S. escalated after the Trump administration withdrew from the international nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers in 2018 and reimposed crippling sanctions. Last May, the U.S. sent thousands more troops, including long-range bombers and an aircraft carrier, to the Middle East in response to what it called a growing threat of Iranian attacks on U.S. interests in the region.
The tensions spiked when U.S. forces killed Iran’s most powerful general, Qassem Soleimani, in January. Iran responded with a ballistic missile attack on a base in western Iraq where U.S. troops were present. No Americans were killed but more than 100 suffered mild traumatic brain injuries from the blasts.
At the Pentagon on Wednesday, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Hyten, welcomed Trump’s tweet as a useful warning to Iran. He drew a parallel between last week’s naval encounter in the Gulf and Wednesday’s space launch, which said was “just another example of Iranian malign behavior.”
“And it goes right along with the harassment from the fastboats. … You put those two things together and it’s just more examples of Iranian malign behavior and misbehavior,” Hyten said.
Iran considers the heavy U.S. military presence in the Middle East a threat to its security.
Trump did not cite a specific Iranian provocation in his tweet or provide details. Senior Pentagon officials gave no indication that Trump had directed a fundamental change in military policy on Iran.
“The president issued an important warning to the Iranians,” David Norquist, the deputy secretary of defense, said at a Pentagon news conference when asked about the tweet. “What he was emphasizing is, all of our ships retain the right of self-defense.”
Rep. Elaine Luria, a Virginia Democrat and Navy veteran, said Trump’s tweeting could lead to war.
“The president’s continued issuing of orders to our military via tweet is a threat to our national security and, if followed without clear guidance and rules of engagement, will unnecessarily escalate tensions with Iran and possibly lead to all-out-conflict,” she said.
Hyten said he thinks the Iranians understand what Trump meant. Asked whether the tweet means a repeat of last week’s incident in the Gulf would require a lethal U.S. response, Hyten said, “I would have to be the captain of the ship in order to make that determination.” The nature of the response, he said, “depends on the situation and what the captain sees.”
Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, a spokesman for Iran’s armed forces, accused Trump of “bullying” and said the American president should focus on caring for U.S. service members infected with the coronavirus. The U.S. military has more than 3,500 confirmed cases of coronavirus, and at least two service members have succumbed to COVID-19, the disease the virus causes.
The space launch has potentially bigger implications for conflict with Iran. U.S. officials believe it is intended to advance Iran’s development of intercontinental-range ballistic missiles that could threaten the U.S.
Using a mobile launcher at a new site, the Guard said it put a “Noor,” or “Light,” satellite into a low orbit circling the Earth. Iranian state TV late Wednesday showed footage of what it said was the satellite, and said it had orbited the earth within 90 minutes. State TV said the satellite’s signals were being received.
Hyten said it was too soon to know whether the launch had successfully placed a satellite in orbit. He said U.S. tracking technology showed the launch vehicle had traveled “a very long way, which means it has the ability once again to threaten their neighbors, their allies, and we want to make sure they can never threaten the United States.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United Nations needs to evaluate whether the space launch was consistent with Security Council resolutions. “I don’t think it remotely is, and I think Iran needs to be held accountable for what it’s done,” Pompeo said.
In a letter Wednesday to Trump, 50 former senior U.S. officials and experts on Iran accused Tehran of using COVID-19 as a reason to pressure the U.S. to ease sanctions while continuing to spend money to bankroll malign activities in the region. The administration has repeatedly said humanitarian aid to Iran is not affected by the sanctions.
The letter called on Trump “to double down on the maximum pressure campaign to force the mullahs to spend their money on the Iranian people, not their nuclear ambitions, imperialism, and internal oppression.”
Migrant areas of Paris were hit with a 3rd consecutive night of rioting following an accident in which a motorcyclist was seriously injured after a confrontation with police, Breitbart pointed out
The disorder was sparked by a motorcycle accident in the Paris suburb of Villeneuve-la-Garenne when a 30-year-old rider was seriously injured after he struck a police vehicle that opened its door at a red light.
The rider then hit a nearby poll and was hospitalized with a fractured leg and a fractured femur.
Rioting began in on Sunday night then spread to the notorious Seine-Saint-Denis migrant ghettos and other suburbs of Paris.
As Breitbart reports, after Monday night, areas in at least 25 cities and departments in France erupted in unrest in response to the original incident.
President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that he had signed an executive order “temporarily suspending immigration into the United States.” But experts say the order will merely delay the issuance of green cards for a minority of immigrants.
Trump said his move, announced in a Monday tweet, was necessary to help Americans get back to work in an economy ravaged by the coronavirus.
“This will ensure that unemployed Americans of all backgrounds will be first in line for jobs as our economy reopens,” he said.
But the order includes a long list of exemptions, including for those who are currently in the country and those seeking entry to work as physicians and nurses, as well as the spouses and minor children of American citizens. The 60-day pause also leaves untouched the hundreds of thousands of temporary work visas the country issues each year.
That left partisans on both sides of the immigration battle suggesting the order was driven more by politics than policy during an election year.
Trump ran in 2016 on promising to crack down on both illegal and legal immigration, making the case — disputed by many — that foreign workers compete with Americans for jobs and drive down wages because they are willing to accept lower pay. While many of Trump’s efforts to dramatically upend the nation’s immigration system, from travel bans to asylum restrictions, had been stymied by Congress and the courts, the pandemic has allowed him to move forward on certain changes.
Like other world leaders, Trump has restricted travel from much of the globe, including China and large swaths of Europe. The borders with Mexico and Canada have been closed to all but “essential” travel.
With consulates closed, almost all visa processing by the State Department has been suspended for weeks. And Trump has used the virus to effectively end asylum at U.S. borders, turning away migrants, including children, by invoking a rarely used 1944 law aimed at preventing the spread of communicable diseases.
The green card measure will limit the ability of current green card holders to sponsor their extended families — a practice Trump has derided as “chain immigration” and tried to restrict.
The final version was far less drastic than advocates on both sides of the issue had expected after Trump posted a tweet late Monday that sent businesses, would-be immigrants and administration officials scrambling.
“In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!” Trump wrote.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said before the order was released that it would “have some very modest policy effect,” but he said “it’s actually not even that big a deal.” He said “the primary function was political, to respond to people’s concern that at this point, with maybe 15% of the labor force out of work, they had to do something.”
Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a liberal immigration reform group, agreed in part.
“This announcement is more about grabbing a headline than changing immigration policy,” he said Wednesday. “To me, it smacks of an electoral strategy, not a policy change, and it smacks of desperation and panic.”
Omar Jadwat, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, accused Trump of launching a “transparent attempt to distract from his own failures” that “will cause real pain for families and employers across the country.”
Pivoting to immigration is a strategy Trump has used before. He often turns to immigration when he feels backed into a corner and is looking for an issue to rev up his base.
Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, for instance, Trump put immigration at the forefront, using migrant caravans in Latin America as a rallying cry as he ordered thousands of U.S. troops to the southern border to stop an “invasion.” He also floated ending the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
In recent days, officials bolstered by their successful efforts to restrict travel at the country’s borders had been discussing how they might seize the opportunity to enact additional immigration restrictions. Trump’s tweet nonetheless took many across the administration by surprise.
During the coronavirus crisis, Trump has found other ways to pivot to immigration. He used one of his task force briefings to highlight enhanced counternarcotics efforts to prevent smugglers from taking advantage of the pandemic — though he said there was no evidence of that — and has repeatedly invoked his border wall.
“In the meantime, even without this order, our Southern Border, aided substantially by the 170 miles of new Border Wall & 27,000 Mexican soldiers, is very tight – including for human trafficking!” he tweeted Wednesday.
Trump’s team on Tuesday, however, denied he was using the virus to make good on a long-standing campaign promise during an election year.
“This is common sense the American people can very well understand: When Americans need jobs, Americans must come first,” said White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany.
“The president’s immigration policy just makes sense,” agreed Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh. With 22 million Americans applying for unemployment, he asked, “Why would you in good conscience introduce brand-new competition for them?”
Trump’s campaign showcased the move in an email blast to supporters that read: “PRESIDENT TRUMP WILL SIGN AN EXECUTIVE ORDER TO TEMPORARILY SUSPEND IMMIGRATION.”
For weeks, the Trump administration played up the dangers of the coronavirus as it sought to convince Americans to disrupt their lives and stay home. Now, as President Donald Trump aims for a swift nationwide reopening, he faces a new challenge: Convincing people it’s safe to come out and resume their normal lives.
It’s a defining question for a cloistered nation — and a political imperative for Trump, whose reelection likely rides on the pace of an economic rebound.
Can the country move beyond a crippling fear of the virus and return to some modified version of its old routines, doing what’s possible to mitigate the risk of COVID-19, but acknowledging that it may be a fact of life for years to come?
We need to create the kind of confidence in America that makes it so that everybody goes back to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a White House adviser and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. “And that confidence is going to require testing and confidence that your workplace is a healthy place, but also confidence in the economy.”
At the White House, officials believe they’ve entered a new chapter of the pandemic response, moving from crisis mode to sustained mitigation and management.
It began last Thursday with the release of guidelines to governors for how to safely reopen their states. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence celebrated Americans for successfully “flattening the curve” of the epidemic.
A day later, a phalanx of the administration’s top medical officials sought to reassure the nation that there were plenty of tests avHowever, he slapped Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s aggressive reopening plans. “I disagree strongly,” he said. “I think it’s too soon.”ailable to safely begin easing restrictions.
Governors have been lifting restrictions each day since then, including aggressive moves announced Wednesday in Montana and Oklahoma. The Montana governor gave schools the green light to open their doors in early May, and Oklahoma will allow salons, barbershops, spas and pet groomers to reopen Friday.
Trump, in his evening press conference, did take issue with Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s bold reopening plans. “I disagree strongly,” he said. “I think it’s too soon.”
The governors’ moves coincided with lingering bleak news around the country. The death toll in Massachusetts eclipsed 2,000 on Wednesday, doubling from just a week earlier. About 16,000 people remain hospitalized across New York. A meat plant in Iowa that is vital the nation’s pork supply is the latest slaughterhouse to shut down because of outbreaks. With the economy in for a long, brutal slump, Congress was on the verge of passing an almost $500 billion relief bill to bolster small businesses.
At his press briefing, Trump flatly promised Americans that there will no repeat of the national lockdown.
“We will not go through what we went through for the last two months,” Trump said.
It’s a sharp shift in rhetoric after Trump and allies stressed the threat of an “invisible enemy” to convince people to abide by social distancing recommendations. The American people have also been scarred by the daunting death toll and images of body bags piled up in refrigerated trailers.
Moving from fear to acceptance will take confidence in government, medical professionals and businesses at a time when faith in those institutions is low. White House aides say restoring confidence will require the same “whole-of-America” approach that slowed the virus spread.
“It’s one thing for government to say, ‘OK, it’s safe to go out,’” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said Tuesday. “If people don’t believe it’s safe, they’re not going to go.”
While there have been isolated protests in states aimed at lifting aggressive stay-at-home measures, most Americans don’t believe it will be safe to ease the restrictions anytime soon, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
rump predicted earlier this month that the economy would take off like a “rocket ship once we get back to business.” But experts say the recovery will be far slower.
“It’ll be a very gradual process regardless of what a governor says or the president says,” said Dr. Robert Blendon, a Harvard professor of health policy and political analysis. He said the history of lockdowns, particularly the quarantine of more than 25,000 people around Toronto in 2003 to slow the spread of SARS, shows that it will take weeks, even months, for people to develop the confidence to resume normal activity.
Blendon also warned that a predicted second wave of COVID-19 could reverse any gains made in the interim.
It’s not just government, but individual businesses that will need to persuade employees and consumers that it’s safe to return, once they decide to reopen.
Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian on Wednesday warned his employees to be prepared for a “choppy, sluggish recovery even after the virus is contained.”
The White House says it expects businesses “will advertise to the public” about the safety measures they are putting in place when they reopen, said Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council. He said the White House is also considering asking Congress to provide liability protection for employers in case their workers or customers fall sick. “We want small businesses to have some confidence that if they do reopen, they’ll stay open,” Kudlow said.
The outbreak has infected over 2.5 million people and killed about 180,000 around the world, including more than 45,000 in the U.S., according to a tally compiled by Johns Hopkins University from official government figures, though the true numbers are believed to be far higher.
Mark Schlesinger, a Yale professor of health policy, said it’s going to take time “for people to re-equilibrate emotionally, and it’s very hard to predict how long.”
“For lots of reasons we put people on a state of heightened anxiety,” he said.
So even if people who are worried about their economic situation want to get back to work, “it’s less clear whether consumers who would go to a restaurant or a store or the doctor’s office” will change their behavior.
“There may be permanent behavioral changes in how people do business and interact as a society,” he said.
Trump hosted Cuomo in the Oval Office on Tuesday, viewing it as opportunity to win over one of the most trusted voices on the virus response about the nation’s ability to conduct enough tests to ensure it has a handle on the virus.
Trump agreed to work with Cuomo to double his state’s testing capacity, believing that if the administration can earns the buy-in of Cuomo, other governors across the state will follow.
Cuomo announced on Wednesday that he is is enlisting former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg to help create a massive “tracing army” that will find infected people and get them into isolation, a move toward building confidence among leery Americans.
At the White House, the administration is adjusting its posture away from drastic containment measures to managing virus “flareups” and bottlenecks in testing or supplies.
And officials hope to use the daily White House briefings to inundate Americans with facts and figures on testing and therapeutics, blanketing television with graphics of flattening and declining curves and statistics on the number of testing kits available.
White House officials also are planning to step up travel in coming weeks as a visual representation of reopening. Pence has traveled to Colorado and Wisconsin in recent days, and Trump is pushing aides to get him back on the road.
There are still plenty of caution flags.
“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” CDC Director Robert Redfield told The Washington Post in an interview on Tuesday. “We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time.”
“We’ve got to be very careful,” Trump said Tuesday of a potential second wave, which in some predictions could hit just weeks before the November elections. “We don’t want that to happen; it could happen. I think we stamp it out if it does happen.”
Instead, White House aides hope that people accept a “new normal” that envisions short-term disruptions when there are COVID-19 cases, causing routine week-long school or office closures but not panic.
But Blendon said, “People will watch the cases and listen to the major public health leaders, and if there’s a conflict, that will slow things even greater.”
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday confirmed by voice vote the first Chassidic Jew for a senior position in a U.S. administration.
The upper congressional chamber confirmed Mitchell Silk as assistant secretary of the Treasury for International Markets. He had held the position in an acting role since July.
In this position, Silk is responsible for leading the U.S. Treasury Department’s role on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. He will also direct the department’s portfolio on international financial services regulation, trade, banking and securities, development and technical assistance.
Previously, Silk was “a projects partner in the banking department and head of the U.S. China group in the New York office of the global law practice of Allen & Overy LLP, where he concentrated on project finance and direct investment matters in the energy and infrastructure sectors,” according to his LinkedIn profile.
He advised on many of China’s landmark project financings in a number of sectors and on China’s largest investment in Colombia, which was in the energy sector, as well as on major wind, solar, gas, coal and nuclear-power project acquisitions and financings in the U.S., Asia, Latin America, Caribbean and Africa.”
In his opening statement during his nomination hearing in November, Silk gave a shout-out to “my amazing wife Yocheved Rivka,” who “serves our community as a physician’s assistant in a family practice in Brooklyn [N.Y.] while looking after our eight children and doting on our three grandchildren.”
“My grandparents immigrated to this country from hardship and persecution in Eastern Europe. Their life experiences were chilling,” he said. “My maternal grandfather, the guiding light of my life, grew up in abject poverty, witnessed Cossacks brutally murder his family members and struggled to cope with the extermination of his family in the Holocaust.”
“For my family, this country represented freedom, security and immense opportunity,” he continued. “They worked hard as tradesmen and laborers.”
Senate Banking Committee chairman Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) called Silk “a key voice on trade negotiations, energy and infrastructure finance, export credit and financial services.”
Winner of the Academy Award for “Best Feature Documentary” in 1997, and narrated by the actor Morgan Freeman,
“The Long Way Home” is the tale of Jews who survived the Holocaust and made aliyah to then fight in Israel’s struggle for Independence in 1948.
One tale was particularly telling.
Born in 1937, former Israeli Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau was a young child when World War II broke out and along with his slightly older brother Naftali survived the horrors of the Holocaust. Liberated from Buchenwald, he was the youngest prisoner there.
Interviewed in that Oscar-winning documentary, Rabbi Lau still recalled the admonition of his brother, uttered during the last months of their incarnation in 1945 when they feared that they were about to be separated.
Rabbi Lau remembers:
“It was on the last months. My brother, older than me, came to the fence of my barrack, and told me ‘We don’t have parents any more. The only one you had was me. But now, they take me away. We will never meet again. I don’t believe that this hell will end. I don’t see any light in the edge of this tunnel.”
He continued, quoting his brother:
“You are eight, adult enough, to understand what I’m telling you. I want you to know, that if a miracle will happen, a day will come and you will survive this hell, there is a place in the world named ‘Eretz Yisrael’. Repeat the name and don’t forget it. Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel. This is our old homeland. This is the place where they don’t kill the Jews. So if you survive, tell anybody whom you meet that they have to take you to that particular place. Eretz Yisrael.”
He repeated the name: Eretz Yisrael. The Land of Israel.
Where they don’t kill the Jews!
It is really more than ironic. It is terribly tragic that today, Israel is the one place in the world where, perhaps more than any other, they still try to murder Jews. Ironic, that Israel has constructed walls to prevent murderers from coming in unchecked, and where bomb shelters are still functional, serving as bunkers shielding Jewish children from rockets raining down on its innocents. Ironic, that Israel continues to petition its declared enemies, to please stop the assaults.
And, this as well: How ironic that the very deniers of the Holocaust are the Muslims who promulgate a genocidal ideology that targets the Jewish State that serves as the only trusted refuge against future horrors.
But nothing is more ironic than the fact that today the Jewish State, no longer powerless, has the ability to crush this savage assault, but remains fearful of the condemnations of the very world that remained quite characteristically silent when a young Meir Lau feared for his life as well.
You see, it didn’t end in Buchenwald.
It’s really quite simple. Like the Nazis before them, the Arab objection is not to anything Israel and the Jews have done, or failed to do, but to the very fact that they exist at all.
It is really more than ironic. It is terribly tragic that today, Israel is the one place in the world where they still try to murder Jews.
Meir Jolovitz is a past national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, and formerly associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Another 474 New Yorkers died of coroanvirus yesterday, bringing the state’s total death toll to 15,302. The daily death toll has dropped somewhat from last week, but it remains alarmingly high.
It was the third day in a row that fewer than 500 deaths were reported, an indication that the outbreak is stabilizing after several days where nearly 800 people died.
Mr. Cuomo also said that the president had committed to helping New York State double its testing capacity to 40,000 tests a day, including both diagnostic and antibody tests. “We spoke truth, we spoke facts, we made decisions and we have a plan going forward,” Mr. Cuomo said.
While New York can do 20,000 tests day, the governor has said that testing needs to increase sharply before restrictions on business and public life can be lifted.
The governor said at his Wednesday morning briefing that the president had agreed to work to waive the standard agreement in which a state has to pay for 25 percent of the funding it gets from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Billionaire Mike Bloomberg is helping the state develop a testing and tracing program.New York officials said Bloomberg would donate about $10 million to the effort, which would be focused on identifying and isolating new coronavirus cases to mitigate the spread of the virus.
Cuomo said he thought it was “madness” that the US is “wholly dependent on China” for the production of medical equipment.
Andrew Cuomo criticized the arguments from demonstrators who are protesting his stay-at-home order outside the state capitol. A reporter who spoke to some of the protesters said they have complained of economic harship due to the crisis, and they argued “the cure cannot be worse than the illness.” Cuomo replied, “How can the cure be worse than the illness if the illness is potential death?” The governor asked the protesters to understand that they had to consider the health of others, not just themselves. “It’s not just about you,” Cuomo said. “You have a responsibility to me.” He suggested the protesters should take “essential worker” jobs
Cuomo said he would not allow political pressure to determine the timetable on when to reopen the economy.“This is not going to be over anytime soon,” Cuomo said of social-distancing restrictions, warning the state risked a surge in coronavirus cases if they became complacent. Cuomo acknowledged the current situation is “unsustainable,” but he added, “I also know more people will die if we are not smart.”
Cuomo told his fellow New York elected officials, “We can’t make a bad decision. Frankly, this is no time to act stupidly. Period. I don’t know how else to say it.”
FILE - In this Oct. 22, 2019, file photo, a sign stands outside a home for sale in southeast Denver. On Friday, Feb. 21, 2020, the National Association of Realtors reports on sales of existing homes in January, (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)
Sales of existing homes tumbled at the fastest rate in more than four years, the first signal of what’s to come during the crucial selling season as prospective home buyers remain sidelined amid the coronavirus crisis, Baron’s reported.
Sales of previously owned homes, which make up most of the U.S. housing market, dropped 8.5% last month from February, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday
About 14% of the American workforce has already applied for unemployment benefits , the outlook for housing has grown dimmer
Sales fell in every region of the country, led by a 13.6% month-over-month decline in the West, Baron’s pointed out
Total housing inventory at the end of March totaled 1.50 million units, up 2.7% from February. If inventory were to continue to rise, downward pressure on prices—which had been rising at the fastest pace since early 2016—could usher in some new buyers that had been increasingly priced out of the market, despite low mortgage rates, Baron’s pointed out .
Economists predict the numbers for April could be even worse.
US President Donald Trump announced via his Twitter that he has given the green light to the American Navy to attack and sink small Iranian military vessels if they start harassing US military ships.
“The IRGC Navy vessels repeatedly crossed the bows and sterns of the US vessels at extremely close range and high speeds”, a US Naval Forces Central Command statement said, adding that some passed within 50 yards of the bow of the expeditionary mobile base vessel USS Lewis B. Puller and within 10 yards of a US Coast Guard Island-class cutter- according to Sputnik news
The US Navy has complained on multiple occasions that so-called Iranian fast boats are approaching dangerously close to their destroyers and carriers patrolling the Persian Gulf region. On 15 April, the American military reported that a group of 11 vessels from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy harassed US warships in the northern Persian Gulf.
The latest escalation happened after the US Air Force killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in an airstrike in Iraq on 3 January 2020.
I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.
Medical personnel transport a body from a refrigerated container past a carpenter who is building a ramp to the container at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, Wednesday, April 8, 2020, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
Edited by: JV Staff
Americans are increasingly hostile to China as the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc on the U.S. and global economies, according to a nationwide poll released on Tuesday, as was reported by the AP.
The poll, conducted last month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, found that two-thirds of those surveyed, or 66%, had an unfavorable view of China. That’s the most since the center first asked the question 15 years ago and a significant jump of 20 percentage points since President Trump entered the White House in 2017. The results suggest that Americans are receptive to the Trump administration’s perspective on China which has increased in recent weeks over criticism of Beijing’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak that originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, according to the AP report.
The survey also found that about 90% of Americans see growing Chinese influence and power as a threat, with 62% of those saying it is a “major threat.” And, while the total seeing China as a threat has not changed since 2018, the percentage viewing China as a “major threat” has jumped 14 percentage points in the past two years, according to the results.
AP reported that the poll was conducted throughout March when the impact of the virus pandemic was beginning to be recognized around the world, with countries shutting down their borders, issuing stay-at-home orders and closing off vast sections of their economies. However, the findings do not suggest that Americans’ opinions of China worsened as the month went on, with the negative views expressed early in the month matching those later in the month, according to the authors.
“While China’s handling of the virus may have made an impression on some Americans, it does not appear that escalating conditions in the U.S. over the course of March shifted attitudes toward China during that period,” they said.
ABC News reported on Monday that thousands of Americans have reportedly signed onto a class action lawsuit in the state of Florida which seeks compensation from the Chinese Government for COVID-19 damages, as Western politicians increasingly call for accountability.
Medical workers step over bodies as they search a refrigerated trailer at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, April 3, 2020, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
According to a statement from the Miami-based Berman Law Group, the lawsuit “seeks billions of dollars in compensatory damages for those who have suffered personal injuries, wrongful deaths, property damage and other damages due to China’s failure to contain the COVID-19 virus, despite their ability to have stopped the spread of the virus in its early stages”.
The firm said it “looks forward to fighting for the rights of people and businesses across Florida and the rest of the country, who are now becoming sick or caring for loved ones, dealing with financial calamity, and navigating this new world of panic and social distancing and isolation”.
A separate class action lodged on behalf of Las Vegas businesses is seeking billions of dollars in damages on behalf of five local businesses.
The lawsuit claims that China’s Government should have shared more information about the virus but intimidated doctors, scientists, journalists and lawyers while allowing the COVID-19 respiratory illness to spread.
On April 3rd, it was reported that an Illinois lawmaker wants to remove China’s sovereign immunity and sue for damages incurred from the coronavirus (COVID-19).
Assistant Republican Leader C.D. Davidsmeyer, R-Jacksonville, introduced two House Resolutions that would compel China to pay the State of Illinois for the damages.
In order to do this, Rep. Davidsmeyer wants the United States Congress to waive China’s sovereign immunity.
Davidsmeyer is calling for Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul to start the litigation against China for damages caused to the State of Illinois and its citizens by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rep. Davidsmeyer cited a Bloomberg report that said the U. S. intelligence community found that “China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease.”
AP reported that Missouri’s attorney general on Tuesday sued the Chinese government over the coronavirus, claiming Chinese officials are to blame for the global pandemic.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Missouri, alleges Chinese officials are “responsible for the enormous death, suffering, and economic losses they inflicted on the world, including Missourians.”
“The Chinese government lied to the world about the danger and contagious nature of COVID-19, silenced whistleblowers, and did little to stop the spread of the disease,” Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s office said in a written statement. “They must be held accountable for their actions.”
Schmitt’s office is seeking unspecified damages for deaths in Missouri and the hit the virus has taken on the state’s economy, according to the AP report.
The number of Missouri deaths statewide rose by 16 Tuesday to 215, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering. The number of cases rose by 156 to 5,963.
The DailyMail of the UK reported on April 18th that the legal challenges – set to be followed by another from Israeli human rights lawyers who specialize in suing states for terrorism – ramp up the pressure on Chinese President Xi Jinping to account fully for his country’s actions.
In this Feb. 21, 2020, photo, patients rest at a temporary hospital at Tazihu Gymnasium in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province. Top Chinese officials secretly determined they were likely facing a pandemic from a novel coronavirus in mid-January, ordering preparations even as they downplayed it in public. Internal documents obtained by the AP show that because warnings were muffled inside China, it took a confirmed case in Thailand to jolt Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. (Chinatopix via AP)
The DailyMail also reported that there are calls also for the United Nations to set up an inquiry to establish how the coronavirus broke out in the city of Wuhan and then spread so fast around the world.
This follows a warning last week from UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who is running the Government while Boris Johnson recovers from the virus, that it could not be ‘business as usual’ after the crisis.
‘We will have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it couldn’t have been stopped earlier,’ he said.
Also on Tuesday, the New York Post reported that the World Health Organization rejected theories that coronavirus was created in a lab, saying that all known evidence points to the pathogen emerging from animals in China late last year.
WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said that it’s “probable, likely, that the virus is of animal origin.”
“All available evidence suggests the virus has an animal origin and is not manipulated or constructed in a lab or somewhere else,” Chaib told a Geneva news briefing.
However, she said that more research was necessary to determine how the virus jumped from animals to humans.
Bats have been eyed as one of the possible hosts of the contagion, which has been linked to the animal markets in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
On April 15th it was reported that in the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.
President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.
That delay from Jan. 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.
But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak. China’s attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected more than 2 million people and taken more than 133,000 lives.
“This is tremendous,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system.”
Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.
But the six-day delay by China’s leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan. 5 to Jan. 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.
It’s uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It’s also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine.
But what is clear, experts say, is that China’s rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for “rumor-mongering,” broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city’s hospitals.
“Doctors in Wuhan were afraid,” said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. “It was truly intimidation of an entire profession.”
Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan. 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases — distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients. They also instructed officials in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, to begin temperature checks at transportation hubs and cut down on large public gatherings. And they did it all without telling the public.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.
“Those accusing China of lacking transparency and openness are unfair,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday when asked about the AP story.
On April 17th, it was reported that China’s official death toll from the coronavirus pandemic jumped sharply as the city of Wuhan announced a major revision that added nearly 1,300 fatalities.
The new figures resulted from an in-depth review of deaths during a response that was chaotic in the early days. They raised the official toll in Wuhan by 50% to 3,869 deaths. While China has yet to update its national totals, the revised numbers push up China’s total to 4,632 deaths from a previously reported 3,342.
The higher numbers are not a surprise — it is virtually impossible to get an accurate count when health systems are overwhelmed at the height of a crisis — and they confirm suspicions that many more people died than the official figures had showed.
The review found 1,454 additional deaths, as well as 164 that had been double-counted or misclassified as coronavirus cases, resulting in a net increase of 1,290. The number of confirmed cases in the city of 11 million people was revised up slightly to 50,333.
Questions have long swirled around the accuracy of China’s case reporting, with Wuhan in particular going several days in January without reporting new cases or deaths. That has led to accusations that Chinese officials were seeking to minimize the impact of the outbreak and could have brought it under control sooner.
