Author: BigGuy

No no say it ain’t so there goes the croissants

TROOPS ON THE STREETS

TROOPS could guard hospitals and supermarkets in drastic new measures set to be rolled out in a bid to tackle the coronavirus. It comes as the death toll in the UK soared to 21 and plans were announced to isolate people over the age of 70 for four months. Shoppers have stripped supermarket shelves of essentials including toilet paper and dried pasta as officials say they’ve moved into the second phase of plans to contain the deadly bug. As a result, it is understood the government will deploy the armed forces. The plans feature in a list of strict rules set to be revealed by Boris Johnson as the pandemic rages. As part of plans for a worst-case scenario situation, defence sources told The Mail on Sunday that Army units are stepping up their training for public order roles – including the guarding of hospitals and supermarkets. The source said officers from the Royal Logistics Corps will food convoys, while the Royal Army Medical Corps could build tented field hospitals next to care homes. Troops trained in chemical, biological and nuclear warfare will deep-clean empty public buildings in case they need to be turned in to hospitals or morgues. Under the new scheme, local councils would work with military liaison officers and essential staff including RAF Typhoon pilots will be quarantined at work so they don’t fall sick. Members of the Army’s police force, the Royal Military Police, will also work with constabularies across Britain. The virus is widespread in Europe, and while Italy remains in lockdown, France has tonight ordered restaurants and bars to shut. Flights were also turned away from Spain just 40 miles before landing. Britain’s decision not to lock down has been criticised by a group of 229 scientists from UK universities. In an open letter, they say the approach will “risk many more lives than necessary”.

Public closures, a ban on gatherings, quarantine notices and orders for isolation have become increasingly common as the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States. Officials in Washington state and San Francisco are limiting the number of people allowed to attend public gatherings. The governor of California joined them on Thursday in urging the cancellation of all events with more than 250 people in attendance. The governor of Kentucky, a Bible belt state, has asked churches and other religious institutions to temporarily cancel services. But if it seems these actions are infringing on individual freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, think again. Hodge is the director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University, an affiliate of the Network for Public Health Law. As the number of COVID-19 cases climbs, he said, the types of “aggressive measures” taking place in some parts of the country will be used elsewhere. Continue reading “Coronavirus vs. Constitution: What can government stop you from doing in a pandemic?”

New York (CNN Business)The New York Federal Reserve is taking out the big guns to calm panicky financial markets.

The NY Fed announced plans Thursday to inject vast amounts of money into the financial system, totaling at least $1.5 trillion. And the Fed promised to start purchasing a range of Treasuries — a step that effectively marks a return to the 2008 crisis-era bond buying program known as quantitative easing, or QE.

The Fed said the dramatic moves will address “highly unusual disruptions” in the Treasury market linked to the coronavirus outbreak. This accelerates weeklong efforts by the NY Fed aimed at easing fears that companies will lose access to capital or that markets will become unhinged. “The Fed is all in. They’ve fired their nuclear weapon. and they did it because financial markets are seizing up,” said James Bianco, president of Bianco Research. “There is no liquidity in the markets. They are trying to unstick them.”

Not only did US stocks nosedive Thursday, but the ultra-safe government bond market malfunctioned. Even though Treasuries are supposed to be the safest assets on the planet, liquidity dried up in that market, setting off alarm bells on Wall Street. Continue reading “NY Fed vows to pump in $1.5 trillion to fight coronavirus-linked ‘highly unusual disruptions’ on Wall Street”

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump has decided to use federal disaster powers to release more resources to combat the spread of coronavirus, people familiar with the decision said, and could declare a major disaster or emergency by Thursday afternoon. The formal declaration is going through White House legal review as officials navigate how broad it can be, the sources said.

Trump’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Republicans the President could sign a disaster declaration under the Stafford Act on Thursday afternoon.

Aides have been weighing such a move for the past several days as a way to provide more resources for combating the coronavirus outbreak. States and White House consider disaster declaration to deal with coronavirus outbreak “We have things that I can do, we have very strong emergency powers under the Stafford Act,”
Continue reading “Trump may sign disaster or emergency declaration Thursday Afternoon”

United States President Donald Trump announced on Thursday the country will suspend all travel from Europe, excluding the United Kingdom, for 30 days starting with Friday in order to contain the coronavirus outbreak. However, the import of goods and cargo won’t be stopped. Trump insisted the US has taken the “most aggressive effort to contain the foreign virus in modern history,” adding that the government responded with “great speed and professionalism.” He claimed the European Union failed to take the necessary precautions to prevent the virus from spreading, causing a large number of new clusters in the US to appear due to infected European travelers. Exemptions from the aforementioned measure, he said, will apply to American citizens returning home from Europe, while travel restrictions will also affect foreign nationals who traveled to the Schengen area in the last two weeks. The move failed to stem heavy losses on financial markets and prompted one top economist to warn that a global recession was now “highly probable”. In a sombre primetime address from the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, the US president boasted that the travel ban and series of other measures designed to cushion the economic blow of the outbreak amounted to “the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in history”. Continue reading “US suspends all travel from Europe for 30 days – Trump”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials. The officials said that dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions have been held since mid-January in a high-security meeting room at the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), a key player in the fight against the coronavirus. Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were excluded from the interagency meetings, which included video conference calls, the sources said. “We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go,” one official said. “These should not be classified meetings. It was unnecessary.” The sources said the National Security Council (NSC), which advises the president on security issues, ordered the classification.”This came directly from the White House,” one official said. The White House insistence on secrecy at the nation’s premier public health organization, which has not been previously disclosed, has put a lid on certain information – and potentially delayed the response to the crisis. COVID19, the disease caused by the virus, has killed about 30 people in the United States and infected more than 1,000 people. HHS oversees a broad range of health agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which among other things is responsible for tracking cases and providing guidance nationally on the outbreaks. The administration officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said they could not describe the interactions in the meeting room because they were classified. U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference on the coronavirus outbreak with U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield and U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams at the White House in Washington, U.S., February 29, 2020. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts Critics have hammered the Trump administration for what they see as a delayed response to coronavirus outbreaks and a lack of transparency, including sidelining experts and providing misleading or incomplete information to the public. State and local officials also have complained of being kept in the dark about essential federal response information. The meetings at HHS were held in a secure area called a “Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility,” or SCIF, according to the administration officials. SCIFs are usually reserved for intelligence and military operations. Ordinary cell phones and computers can’t be brought into the chambers. HHS has SCIFs because theoretically it would play a major role in biowarfare or chemical attacks. 00A high-level former official who helped address public health outbreaks in the George W. Bush administration said “it’s not normal to classify discussions about a response to a public health crisis.” Attendees at the meetings included HHS Secretary Alex Azar and his chief of staff Brian Harrison, the officials said. Azar and Harrison resisted the classification of the meetings, the sources said. Continue reading “Exclusive: White House told federal health agency to classify coronavirus deliberations – sources”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told lawmakers during a House Oversight Committee hearing Wednesday that COVID-19 — the disease caused by the novel coronavirus — is probably about 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.

President Trump has often compared COVID-19 to the flu, which affects tens of thousands of Americans each year, in an effort to calm people down, but Fauci clearly wasn’t trying to downplay the seriousness of the virus’ spread. Fauci is a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force.

At the same time, he did clarify that 10 times figure actually brings the new coronavirus’ fatality rate lower than official estimates, which hover around 3 percent. The flu has a mortality rate of about 0.1 percent, so, when considering the likelihood that there are many asymptomatic or very mild cases that have gone undiagnosed, Fauci places the new coronavirus’ lethality rate at somewhere around 1 percent. While that’s a good deal lower than the current data suggests, it still would lead to significant numbers of fatalities, and makes the flu comparisons seem pretty questionable. Tim O’Donnell

Q: How does COVID-19 compare to other previous health situations — SARS, H1N1?

Dr. Fauci: “…It is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. I think that’s something that people can get their arms around and understand.”

The coronavirus sweeping across the world is a pandemic, the World Health Organization declared today.

https://youtu.be/XnhxjYCVHp8

There are now over 118,000 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, in 114 countries around the world.

BREAKING

“We have therefore made the assessment that #COVID19 can be characterized as a pandemic”-@DrTedros #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/JqdsM2051A

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) March 11, 2020

The WHO continues to closely monitoring spread of the virus, said Tedros Adhanom, director general of the WHO, during the announcement. “We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” he said. “We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action.”There are large outbreaks of the virus in Italy, South Korea, and the United States. In the US, the slow rollout of testing and limited testing capacity has crippled response to the disease. The spread of the virus can still be controlled, Adhanom said. He pointed to both China and South Korea, where outbreaks appear to be declining. “It’s doable.” Continue reading “WHO declares coronavirus global pandemic”