Author: BigGuy

Posted on

GOP and Dems reach deal on $2T COVID-19 bill

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House and Senate leaders of both parties announced agreement early Wednesday on unprecedented emergency legislation to rush sweeping aid to businesses, workers and a health care system slammed by the coronavirus pandemic.

The urgently needed pandemic response measure is the largest economic rescue measure in history and is intended as a weeks- or months-long patch for an economy spiraling into recession and a nation facing a potentially ghastly toll.

Top White House aide Eric Ueland announced the agreement in a Capitol hallway shortly after midnight, capping days of often intense haggling and mounting pressure. It still needs to be finalized in detailed legislative language. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are done. We have a deal,” Ueland said. The unprecedented economic rescue package would give direct payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits and provide a $367 billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home. One of the last issues to close concerned $500 billion for guaranteed, subsidized loans to larger industries, including a fight over how generous to be with the airlines. Hospitals would get significant help as well. “After days of intense discussions, the Senate has reached a bipartisan agreement on a historic relief package for this pandemic,” said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a key negotiator. “It will rush new resources onto the front lines of our nation’s health care fight. And it will inject trillions of dollars of cash into the economy as fast as possible to help Americans workers, families, small businesses and industries make it through this disruption and emerge on the other side ready to soar.” At the White House on Tuesday, even as the public-health crisis deepened, President Donald Trump expressed eagerness to nudge many people back to work in coming weeks and held out a prospect, based more on hope than science, that the country could be returning to normal in less than a month. “We have to go back to work, much sooner than people thought,” Trump told a Fox News town hall. He said he’d like to have the country “opened up and just raring to go” by Easter, April 12. But in a White House briefing later, Trump said that “our decision will be based on hard facts and data.” The World Health Organization says the U.S. could be the next hot spot for Covid-19 Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said pointedly at the briefing, “No one is going to want to tone down anything when you see what is going on in a place like New York City.” On Capitol Hill, five days of arduous talks produced the bill, creating tensions among Congress’ top leaders, who each took care to tend to party politics as they maneuvered and battled over crafting the legislation. But failure was never an option, which permitted both sides to mark big wins.

Even before the deal was reached, news of the likely but elusive agreement had sent the stock market rocketing on Tuesday. The emerging rescue package would be larger than the 2008 bank bailout and 2009 recovery act combined.

Continue reading “GOP and Dems reach deal on $2T COVID-19 bill”

Posted on

Coronavirus Traces Lingered in Vacated Cruise Cabins for 17 Days

(Bloomberg) — Traces of new coronavirus were found on surfaces in cruise-ship cabins for as many as 17 days after passengers left, researchers said, though it wasn’t possible to determine whether they caused any infections. Researchers looked at the rooms of infected passengers aboard the Diamond Princess, both those who showed symptoms and those who didn’t, according to a study Monday in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The ship, operated by Carnival Corp.’s Princess Cruises, had more than 700 coronavirus cases. It was quarantined for a time off of Yokohama, Japan, and was the largest outbreak outside of mainland China at one point. A previous analysis found that the virus remained viable on plastic and stainless steel for up to three days, although levels fell dramatically over time. It was less stable on copper, where no viable virus was found after 4 hours, and cardboard, which was clean after 24 hours, according to the report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The latest study looked at uncleaned rooms, but other research has found that cleaning the rooms of Covid-19 patients was highly effective at killing the virus. Coronavirus has forced the U.S. cruise industry to shut down after a series of outbreaks at sea, and policymakers are looking for clues about the safety of the vessels going forward. The episodes have caused cruise line stocks to crater. The industry has been hurt in the past by outbreaks of norovirus, sometimes called stomach flu. The CDC report also said that passengers on the Diamond Princess mainly spread the virus before the ship went into quarantine, but infections among the crew peaked afterward.

Posted on

Nobel laureate predicts a quicker coronavirus recovery: ‘We’re going to be fine’

https://youtu.be/Ls4HVzUYavU

Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted. Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world.

While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don’t support such a dire scenario — especially in areas where reasonable social distancing measures are in place.

“What we need is to control the panic,” he said. In the grand scheme, “we’re going to be fine.” Here’s what Levitt noticed in China: On Jan. 31, the country had 46 new deaths due to the novel coronavirus, compared with 42 new deaths the day before. Although the number of daily deaths had increased, the rate of that increase had begun to ease off. Essentially, although the car was still speeding up, it was not accelerating as rapidly as before.

Now Levitt, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing complex models of chemical systems, is seeing turning points in other nations, even ones that did not instill the draconian isolation measures that China did. He analyzed 78 countries with more than 50 reported cases of COVID-19 every day and sees “signs of recovery.” He’s not looking at cumulative cases, but the number of new cases every day — and the percentage growth in that number from one day to the next. Continue reading “Nobel laureate predicts a quicker coronavirus recovery: ‘We’re going to be fine’”

Posted on

They are starting to figure out there is a cure.

As we have previously published months ago, for the record, hydroxychloroquine, sold under the trade name plaqenuil and a common antibiotic azithromycin, is stopping the infection dead in its tracks. be smart and get some. 

According to the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, they have found early evidence that the combination of hydroxycholorquine, a popular anti-malarial drug known under the trade name Plaqenuil, and antibiotic azithromycin (aka Zithromax or Azithrocin) could be especially effective in treating the COVID-19 coronavirus and reducing the duration of the virus in patients.

Posted on

Inside The Military’s Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government

Even as President Trump says he tested negative for coronavirus, the COVID-19 pandemic raises the fear that huge swaths of the executive branch or even Congress and the Supreme Court could also be disabled, forcing the implementation of “continuity of government” plans that include evacuating Washington and “devolving” leadership to second-tier officials in remote and quarantined locations. But Coronavirus is also new territory, where the military itself is vulnerable and the disaster scenarios being contemplated — including the possibility of widespread domestic violence as a result of food shortages — are forcing planners to look at what are called “extraordinary circumstances”.

Above-Top Secret contingency plans already exist for what the military is supposed to do if all the Constitutional successors are incapacitated. Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law.

According to new documents and interviews with military experts, the various plans – codenamed Octagon, Freejack and Zodiac – are the underground laws to ensure government continuity. They are so secret that under these extraordinary plans, “devolution” could circumvent the normal Constitutional provisions for government succession, and military commanders could be placed in control around America. “We’re in new territory,” says one senior officer, the entire post-9/11 paradigm of emergency planning thrown out the window. The officer jokes, in the kind of morbid humor characteristic of this slow-moving disaster, that America had better learn who Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy is. He is the “combatant commander” for the United States and would in theory be in charge if Washington were eviscerated. That is, until a new civilian leader could be installed.

‘We’re in territory we’ve never been in before’

What happens, government expert Norman Ornstein asked last week, if so many members of Congress come down with the coronavirus that the legislature cannot meet or cannot muster a quorum? After 9/11, Ornstein and others, alarmed by how little Washington had prepared for such possibilities, created a bipartisan Continuity of Government Commission to examine precisely these and other possibilities. It has been a two-decade long futile effort, Ornstein says, with Congress uninterested or unable to either pass new laws or create working procedures that would allow emergency and remote operations. The rest of the federal government equally is unprepared to operate if a pandemic were to hit the very people called upon to lead in an emergency. That is why for the first time, other than planning for the aftermath of a nuclear war, extraordinary procedures are being contemplated. In the past, almost every imagined contingency associated with emergency preparedness has assumed civil and military assistance coming from the outside. One military officer involved in continuity planning calls it a “cavalry” mentality: that military assistance is requested or ordered after local civil authority has been exhausted. “There might not be an outside,” the officer says, asking that she not be named because she is speaking about sensitive matters. In recognition of the equal vulnerability of military forces, the Pentagon has instituted unprecedented restrictions on off-base travel. Last Wednesday it restricted most overseas travel for 60 days, and then on Friday issued supplemental domestic guidance that essentially keeps all uniformed personnel on or near military bases. There are exceptions, including travel that is “mission-essential,” the Pentagon says. Mission essential in this regard applies to the maze of more than a dozen different secret assignments, most of them falling under three larger contingency plans:

Continue reading “Inside The Military’s Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government”

Posted on

UK government plans to buy into airlines

https://youtu.be/e2nryqPGEF8

(Reuters) – The British government is planning to buy equity stakes in airlines and other companies affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the Financial Times reported. The government plans to invest billions of pounds in companies including IAG-owned British Airways (ICAG.L) in return for shares that would eventually be sold back to private investors, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The move comes after the government was warned that its economic support packages, including a 330 billion-pound ($385 billion) lifeline of loan guarantees, will not be enough to save companies from collapse, the paper reported. Transport Minister Grant Shapps spoke to major airports and airlines on Wednesday about how the government could support the industry. Discussions about a support package for airlines and airports are ongoing. The United Kingdom has reported 3,983 coronavirus infections and 177 deaths.

Posted on

Fed’s Bullard: Coronavirus shutdown not a recession but an investment in survival

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In normal times massive unemployment and a collapse in economic output would be tragic. This time, as the coronavirus cloisters millions of Americans and shuts down the U.S. economy, it should instead be saluted as an investment in public health that lays the groundwork for a rapid rebound. That is the view of St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard, who argues that a potential $2.5 trillion hit coming to the economy is both necessary and manageable if officials move fast and keep it simple. It may seem an unconventional view in a moment of global anxiety, but Bullard argues the shutdown measures now being rolled out are essential to shortening the course of the pandemic. They must also be coupled with massive federal government support to sustain the population through its coming isolation and prime the economy to pick up where it left off.

Posted on

US coronavirus relief package worth over $2T – Kudlow

The coronavirus stimulus package being negotiated by the U.S. Senate would be worth more than $2 trillion

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow arrives for a meeting on Capitol Hill on March 20, 2020. © Susan Walsh White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow arrives for a meeting on Capitol Hill on March 20, 2020.

“The package is coming in at about 10 percent of GDP,” Kudlow told reporters. Asked if that amounted to more than $2 trillion, Kudlow said: “That’s correct.” “We’re just trying to cover the right bases,” Kudlow said as he entered the talks. “It’s a problem of weeks and months, not years. We just want a bridge.” Kudlow also said lawmakers are considering a payroll tax holiday for small businesses.

Posted on

ITS NO ACCIDENT YOU HAVE NOT BEEN TOLD OF THE CURE

Antiviral Res. 2008 Feb;77(2):150-2. Epub 2007 Nov 20.

Inhibition of human coronavirus 229E infection in human epithelial lung cells (L132) by chloroquine: involvement of p38 MAPK and ERK.

Kono M1, Tatsumi K, Imai AM, Saito K, Kuriyama T, Shirasawa H.

Abstract

The antiviral effects of chloroquine (CQ) on human coronavirus 229E (HCoV-229E) infection of human fetal lung cell line, L132 are reported. CQ significantly decreased the viral replication at concentrations lower than in clinical usage. We demonstrated that CQ affects the activation of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK). Furthermore, p38 MAPK inhibitor, SB203580, inhibits CPE induced by HCoV-229E infection and viral replication. Our findings suggest that CQ affects the activation of MAPKs, involved in the replication of HCoV-229E.

Posted on

HERE is the Report that convinced me

ten years ago my research turned up this report

Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread

Martin J Vincent,1 Eric Bergeron,2 Suzanne Benjannet,2 Bobbie R Erickson,1 Pierre E Rollin,1 Thomas G Ksiazek,1 Nabil G Seidah,2 and Stuart T Nicholcorresponding author1

Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is caused by a newly discovered coronavirus (SARS-CoV). No effective prophylactic or post-exposure therapy is currently available. We report, however, that chloroquine has strong antiviral effects on SARS-CoV infection of primate cells. These inhibitory effects are observed when the cells are treated with the drug either before or after exposure to the virus, suggesting both prophylactic and therapeutic advantage. In addition to the well-known functions of chloroquine such as elevations of endosomal pH, the drug appears to interfere with terminal glycosylation of the cellular receptor, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2. This may negatively influence the virus-receptor binding and abrogate the infection, with further ramifications by the elevation of vesicular pH, resulting in the inhibition of infection and spread of SARS CoV at clinically admissible concentrations.

Conclusion

Chloroquine is effective in preventing the spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. Favorable inhibition of virus spread was observed when the cells were either treated with chloroquine prior to or after SARS CoV infection. In addition, the indirect immunofluorescence assay described herein represents a simple and rapid method for screening SARS-CoV antiviral compounds.