Author: BigGuy

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The overall U.S. positivity rate, or the percentage of Covid-19 tests that come back positive, is at 6.2%, up from around 5.2% last week, according to Hopkins. Illinois, where businesses are bracing for new coronavirus restrictions amid a rise in new Covid cases, has a positivity rate of 6.3%. Wisconsin, which hit a record high in average daily cases Sunday, has a positivity rate of 16%. Kentucky, another state that hit a new high, has a positivity rate of 8.4%. Additionally, Covid-19 hospitalizations were growing by 5% or more in 34 states as of Sunday, according to a CNBC analysis of data collected by the Covid Tracking Project. Fifteen states hit record highs in hospitalizations. El Paso County in Texas enacted a curfew after ICUs in the area reached full capacity. The increase in hospitalizations could be especially dire as the nation enters flu season and more people seek treatment, medical experts warn. ″Too many countries are seeing an exponential increase in cases, and that’s now leading to hospitals and ICU running close or above capacity, and we’re still only in October,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said during a press briefing Friday. “We are at a critical juncture in this pandemic, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere,” he added.Tedros said, “Now is the time to double down” and to take quick action for arising clusters. “We urge leaders to take immediate action to prevent further unnecessary deaths, essential health services from collapsing and schools shutting again,” he added. “This is not a drill.” Trump’s former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, warned that the U.S. is “at a tipping point” in its pandemic. “We’re likely to see a very dense epidemic. I think we’re right now at the cusp of what is going to be exponential spread in parts of the country,” Gottlieb said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.Public health officials and medical experts also say an uncontrolled virus through the fall and winter months could lead to a sharp increase in deaths. A coronavirus model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, once cited by the White House, now projects more than 385,600 Covid-19 deaths by Feb. 1. The projection could worsen if states ease on mandates that enforce the wearing of face masks. “I recognize that we are all getting tired of the impact Covid-19 has had on our lives,” Jay Butler, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s deputy director for infectious diseases, told reporters on a call Wednesday. “We’re tired of wearing masks, but it continues to be as important as it has ever been and I would say even more important than ever as we move into the fall season.”

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Months of mixed messages, political pressure and public gaffes about COVID-19 have caused morale at the Centers for Disease Control to turn “toxic,” say four current and two former CDC staffers, with one saying the election could be a “tipping point” for a mass exodus if President Donald Trump wins. “The house is not only on fire,” said a veteran CDC staffer who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. “We’re standing in ashes.” Current and former CDC employees tell NBC News that career staffers are still struggling to influence key decisions on the pandemic as new daily COVID cases soar nationwide , but are overruled by Trump appointees when politics intrudes.

Most recently, they said, they wanted to extend the “No Sail” order for cruise ships through February. It had been set to expire four days before the Nov. 3 election. Instead, they say Vice President Pence’s office pushed for the order to expire, which stands to benefit 21,000 cruise industry workers in the swing state of Florida.

A White House official told NBC News that when the CDC proposed an extension to the “no sail” order it seemed “arbitrary” and “they provided no metrics or data as to why.” The White House official added that two or three weeks ago the vice president, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Robert Redfield hosted a call with the cruise lines to discuss their plan and “discussions about lifting no sail are currently in front of them, but no decision made yet. The political pressure has taken its toll on CDC employees, said the current and former staffers. One current staffer said that during a recent Zoom call, a supervisor went so far as to instruct CDC staff to be loyal to the Constitution, not to the president. Another current employee told NBC News, “I don’t know if the damage to our reputation can be overcome with a new administration. I worry it’s a permanent problem.” White House spokesperson Brian Morgenstern denied that political pressure had influenced decisions about pandemic response. “President Trump’s coronavirus response is about saving lives, not politics,” he said. “The CDC occupies a critical seat on the Task Force, which provides appropriate attention, consultation, and input on coronavirus-related matters. Through the administration’s historic efforts, we are delivering testing and supplies to protect vulnerable populations, PPE and ventilators across the country, guidance to schools and businesses, and safe and effective treatments and vaccines in record time.” Prior to the pandemic, according to one former official, the CDC would regularly post guidance about public health issues on the agency website without White House approval. After the pandemic was declared in March, White House staffers got on the phone to CDC headquarters in Atlanta demanding web administrator credentials to independently edit the CDC website, said the former official. According to the former official, the CDC ultimately denied access, but officials have since then been consistently overruled as they push agency guidance through the Washington approval process. One current CDC staffer who did not want to be named out of fear of retribution said that the administration pushed CDC staff in mid-April to say that reopening churches was safe. “I told them I will not be involved in putting out [church] guidance where we have evidence that [Covid-19] can be transmitted by passing a collection plate and singing — as we knew had happened in Chicago,” said the staffer. According to the staffer, members of the relevant team took a firm stance against interference. “If the guidance gets changed, it gets changed above us — that’s the line — we said that,” recalled the staffer. “We said we have scientific basis that it’s not safe to reopen churches.”

By Saturday, April 25, White House staff told CDC staffers, Office of Management Budget and HHS officials to get on a conference call to discuss reopening guidelines, including those involving houses of worship, where they were “screamed at by White House deputies,” according to an official who was on the call. While the call addressed a number of reopening guidelines about which the White House was concerned, the official said White House deputies were especially worried about guidance that could upset churches and the president’s church-going base.

“I’ll never forget the shrill voice screaming at me, ‘My job is to protect the president from pissing off his constituency,” said the official. The official said a White House deputy took CDC officials to task for their wish to advise houses of worship to refrain from singing and standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Additional internal emails reviewed by NBC News show that CDC staffers were admonished for early drafts of guidelines penned in the spring that advised against houses of worship holding in-person gatherings. “This declaration/command in a CDC doc will be read as authoritative by local enforcers and could cause people of faith to be vilified/prosecuted for exercising their faith,” representatives of HHS wrote to the CDC in April. “The federal government has no authority to do so. … The CDC must be more vigilant to not burden the free exercise of religion.” The push on the part of White House officials for politics over public health throughout April stunned career CDC staffers. “I fear we are bordering on not following the science,” wrote one concerned staffer in an internal CDC e-mail in April, referring to White House pressure to refrain from offering churches specific guidelines. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testifies at a hearing with the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, on Capitol Hill, on Sept. 16, 2020.Anna Moneymaker / Pool via AP The dispute over public health guidance for churches was originally reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Continue reading “‘Toxic’: CDC staffers say morale inside the public health agency has plummeted during the pandemic”

PARIS (Reuters) – The COVID-19 virus is spreading more quickly than during its initial outbreak in the spring, French government scientific advisor Arnaud Fontanet said on Friday, in one of the starkest warnings yet about the scale of the disease’s resurgence engulfing Europe. “The virus is circulating more quickly …The resurgence of the pandemic started in August”, Fontanet, an epidemiologist, told BFM TV, adding the fight against the disease would be a “marathon”. He spoke the day after France published a record 41,622 daily tally of new COVID-19 infections, bringing the country just shy, at 999,043, of a million cases. France will go over that threshold this Friday, becoming the second Western European country to do after Spain. Like many other European countries facing a renewed spike in the number of cases since early September, France has ramped up restrictions to contain the disease, announcing Thursday a widening of a curfew, initially put in place in nine cities including Paris, to more than two thirds of its population.,

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. stocks gained ground on Thursday after oscillating for much of the session as growing optimism about an imminent U.S. coronavirus relief deal helped offset concern about a global surge in COVID-19 cases. All three major U.S. stock indexes closed higher and long-dated Treasury yields rose on news of two opposing sides in Washington nearing agreement on a new fiscal aid package. “There’s a lot of volatility in the market,” said Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment Counsel in Charlottesville, Virginia. “If Mnuchin and Pelosi come out this evening and say ‘we’re not talking any more’ and the market will sell off.” Amid talks with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, said negotiations were progressing and that legislation could be hammered out “pretty soon.” While a White House spokesman added a further note of optimism, saying “this is really the most optimistic we’ve felt about getting a deal,” President Donald Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow said “significant policy differences” remain. “There are some positive signs that maybe we’ll get stimulus reasonably soon,” Tuz added. “I think we’ll see some kind of deal between now and sometime next week.” The United States was on the brink of a widespread coronavirus outbreak, with nearly two-thirds of states in a danger zone and six, including election battleground Wisconsin, reported a record one-day increase in COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday. U.S. economic data surprised to the upside, as jobless claims fell more than expected and existing home sales blew past estimates to more than a 14-year high. t record increases.

Germany is facing a “very serious” rise in COVID19 cases, the head of Robert Koch Institute said.Lothar Wieler said that it was because of private gatherings. Germany is facing a “very serious” rise in coronavirus cases, the head of Robert Koch Institute said on October 22. Addressing media reporters from Berlin, Lothar Wieler asserted that it was because of “private gatherings”, especially amongst the youth, that had led to the dramatic rise in the COVID-19 cases. However, touting a solution for the same he went on to reckon that “systematic compliance with restrictive measures” could help better the situation. Germany which was one of the initial countries to curb the spread coronavirus pandemic is currently witnessing a surge in cases. The EU nation on October 22, reported another high with over 11,287 new infections. As per statistics, Thursday’s caseload exceeds the previous record of 7,830 recorded on October 16 and a marks a steep jump from 7,595 cases reported on October 21. With the latest rise, the nationwide total now stands at 3,97,922 reported COVID-19 cases and 9,913 deaths, the latest tally of John Hopkins University revealed. In the city of Essen, the public assembly has been limited to 25, from the earlier 50, mandating the face-masks at all times in public buildings. Whereas, Berlin and Cologne a nightly curfew have been imposed following the surge. Last week, an aide to Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly said that with hard months to come and a stricter clampdown, people will have to stop the travel and partying, where infection chains spread mostly. Chancellor’s chief of staff, Helge Braun, told public broadcaster ARD that the country had plans to cap the total number of people allowed in public premises, much like England, unfortunately, imposing sweeping measures to curb transmission rate as country battles the second wave. According to the sources of the local broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Germany’s western city of Essen exceeded far beyond the nation’s key coronavirus threshold, with Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart reporting daily alarming spikes in infections that prompted authorities to tighten measures.

Unemployment benefits for millions of unemployed Americans ran out in August.

Two Devils – The Plague And The Elections

Time to update you on both of these monsters.