Unknown Spanish Influenza 1918
• Walking back earlier predictions of 200,000 US deaths, two weeks ago, on April 9, Dr. Fauci said overall deaths from COVID19 might be as high as 60,000. It’s at 54,000 now.
• US records 2,494 more #coronavirus deaths in 24 hours: Johns Hopkins
• The US overall death toll 53,511, with 936,293 confirmed cases – Johns Hopkins Saturday 8:30 pm
• New York reports 10,553 new cases of coronavirus and 437 new deaths. Total of 282,143 cases and 16,599 deaths.
• Italy reports 2,357 new cases of coronavirus and 415 new deaths.
• Middle East:
– Turkey: 2,861 new cases
– Saudi: 1,197 new cases
– Iran: 1,134 new cases
– Qatar: 833 new cases
– UAE: 532 new cases
– Kuwait: 278 new cases
– Egypt: 227 new cases
– Oman: 115 new cases
– Israel: 90 new cases
– Bahrain: 70 new cases
• @yaneerbaryam
US tests dramatically up again to 300K yesterday from 150K for much of April. NY, MA particularly.
4/25/20 – Top 12 State Cases
New York: 282,143
New Jersey: 105,523
Mass : 53,348
Illinois: 41,777
California: 41,137
Pennsylvania: 40,049
Michigan: 37,023
Florida: 30,839
Louisiana: 26,512
Connecticut: 24,582
Texas: 23,773
Georgia: 22,695
• Cases 2,934,639 (+ 88,781 from yesterday’s 2,845,858)
• Deaths 203,683 (+ 5,837 from yesterday’s 197,846 )
From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-
From Worldometer – NOTE: among Active Cases, Serious or Critical fell to 3%. Among Closed Cases, Deaths have fallen to 20%
From SCMP:
From COVID19Info.live:
After having failed miserably -and very deathly- to act when the virus was first detected, our “leaders” went into “Little Managers” mode, something – the only thing- they’re actually somewhat capable of. But now a new phase looms, and the abject failures start again. They all have different approaches to tracing apps, they all have their highly paid experts venting opinions on things they don’t know about (yes, it’s the same issues again) and the mess will be sensational again.
Politicians MUST admit they don’t know enough to make decisions and conveniently hide behind their experts, but who’s checking the experts?
• Australia’s Coronavirus Tracing App Set To Launch Today (G.)
The controversial coronavirus tracing app will be released by the government on Sunday, despite lingering privacy concerns. The home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, likened the app to a “bluetooth handshake” and said it was an important piece of the aggressive identify, trace and isolate strategy the Commonwealth is attempting, as it looks at life beyond physical distance restrictions. But Dutton’s Labor counterpart, Kristina Keneally, said she would be waiting to see how the government has addressed privacy concerns before deciding whether or not she would download it, while acknowledging the app had the potential to be a “great tool” for public health protection.
“Like many Australians, I’m waiting to see what the federal government has to say in terms of the privacy protections that are built into the app, and the legislated privacy protections they’re going to put in place,” she told the ABC on Sunday. The app, based on source code from Singapore’s Tracetogether software, maintains a log of bluetooth connections a person’s phone makes with the phones of those they have come into contact with, making it easier for health authorities to trace potential Covid-19 carriers in the case of a positive diagnosis. For the app to be successful, just under half the population would need to carry it on their phones.
Germany failed in its first app attempt. And sure, DP-3T sounds attractive, but who knows enough about it to provide useful advice? What if it’s only the techies at Apple and Google?
• Germany Flips On Smartphone Contact Tracing, Backs Apple And Google (R.)
Germany changed course on Sunday over which type of smartphone technology it wanted to use to trace coronavirus infections, backing an approach supported by Apple and Google along with a growing number of other European countries. Chancellery Minister Helge Braun and Health Minister Jens Spahn told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that Berlin would adopt a ‘decentralized’ approach to digital contact tracing, in so doing abandoning a home-grown alternative. Nations are rushing to develop apps to assess at scale the risk of catching COVID-19, where the chain of infection is proving hard to break because the flu-like disease can be spread by those showing no symptoms.
In Europe, most countries have chosen short-range Bluetooth ‘handshakes’ between devices as the best approach, but have differed over whether to log such contacts on a central server or on individual devices. Germany as recently as Friday backed an initiative called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT), whose centralized approach was criticized by hundreds of scientists in an open letter last Monday as opening the way to state surveillance. “We will back a decentralized architecture that will only store contacts on devices. That is good for trust,” Braun told ARD public television in an interview.
Although Bluetooth-based smartphone contact tracing is an untested technology and early results in countries like Singapore are modest, its development is already redefining the relationship between the state and individual. It would work by assessing the closeness and length of contact between people and, should a person test positive for COVID-19, tell recent contacts to call a doctor, get tested or self-isolate. One of the members of PEPP-PT, Germany’s Fraunhofer HHI research institute, was told on Saturday that it was being taken off the project, correspondence seen by Reuters showed. “The project will be handed over and others will be able to make use of the results we have achieved so far to build a decentralized solution,” Fraunhofer HHI head Thomas Wiegand said in a message to colleagues.
Germany’s change of tack would bring its approach into line with that taken by Apple and Alphabet’s Google, which said this month they would develop new tools to support decentralized contact tracing. Importantly, Apple’s iPhone would under the proposed setup only work properly with decentralized protocols such as DP-3T, which has been developed by a Swiss-led team and has been backed by Switzerland, Austria and Estonia. [..] Backers of DP-3T, short for Decentralised Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing, say it is still possible for users to opt in to sharing their phone number to aid contact tracing – but this would be part of an app, not of the system architecture.
Ergo: you need a vaccine. Which may take many years to develop. There has never been a sucessful vaccine for any coronavirus developed.
• WHO: No Evidence COVID-19 Antibodies Protect From Potential Re-Infection (BBG)
Catching COVID-19 once may not protect you from getting it again, according to the World Health Organization, a finding that could jeopardize efforts to allow people to return to work after recovering from the virus. “There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection,” the United Nations agency said in an April 24 statement. The WHO guidance came after some governments suggested that people who have antibodies to the coronavirus could be issued an “immunity passport” or “risk-free certificate” that would allow them to travel or return to work, based on the assumption that they were safe from re-infection, according to the statement. People issued such a certificate could ignore public-health guidance, increasing the risk of the disease spreading further.
[..] While there’s a consensus that the key to ending the coronavirus pandemic is establishing co-called herd immunity, there are many unknowns. One is whether researchers can develop a safe and effective vaccine. Another is how long people who’ve recovered have immunity; reinfection after months or years is common with other human coronaviruses. Finally, it’s not clear what percentage of people must be immune to protect the “herd.” That depends on the contagiousness of the virus. The WHO said it’s reviewing the scientific evidence on antibody responses to coronavirus, but as yet no study has evaluated whether the presence of antibodies “confers immunity to subsequent infection by this virus in humans.” And while many countries are currently testing for antibodies, these studies aren’t designed to determine whether people recovered from the disease acquire immunity, the agency said.
Because they’re meaningless if immunity doesn’t exist.
• WHO Warns Against Coronavirus “Immunity Passports” (Vox)
The World Health Organization (WHO) released a scientific brief on Saturday recommending countries refrain from issuing certificates of immunity to people who have been infected with the novel coronavirus, warning there is “currently no evidence” that someone cannot be reinfected. Countries like Germany and Chile are looking into giving residents “immunity passports” that would allow people who have recovered from Covid-19 to be excluded from restrictive protection measures and to work outside the house. Public health officials would use tests that detect antibodies to the virus to determine if someone has previously had the virus.
But the WHO cautioned against this practice due to concerns that reinfection cannot be ruled out based on antibodies alone. “There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection,” the WHO says in the brief. The report went even further, suggesting immunity passports could backfire and unwittingly accelerate the spread of the virus. “People who assume that they are immune to a second infection because they have received a positive test result may ignore public health advice. The use of such certificates may therefore increase the risks of continued transmission,” the report says.
Part of the reason the WHO is counseling caution is because scientists don’t yet understand what ensures immunity to the virus. “Most of these [antibody response] studies show that people who have recovered from infection have antibodies to the virus. However, some of these people have very low levels of neutralizing antibodies in their blood, suggesting that cellular immunity may also be critical for recovery,” the brief says.
Modi needs to watch more CNN. Protects against any and all HCQ addictions.
• Mumbai Is Trying To Stop COVID19 With Hydroxychloroquine (IT)
In the past fortnight, Mumbai’s Dharavi area has emerged as a major hotspot of novel coronavirus cases. To prevent further spread of Covid-19 cases in one of the largest slums in the world, the state government has chalked out a three-fold strategy. Speaking on this at a special session at e-Agenda Aaj Tak on Saturday, Maharashtra Health Minister Tajesh tope said the biggest challenge for the state government is to implement the lockdown strictly and contain the spread of novel coronavirus in densely populated areas like Dharavi. Health Minister Rajesh Tope said the government has decided to administer hydroxychloroquine to people who are quarantined in areas with a high number of Covid-19 cases.
Rajesh Tope said instead of putting people in home quarantine, the government has decided to out high-risk people in institutional quarantine. “For this, we would use schools, colleges, hotels or any institute as required and arrange facilities,” Tope said. “We are also working on early detection because many times reports of infection come after the patient reaches a critical stage,” he said. Speaking about the Covid-19 cases in Maharashtra, Rajesh Tope said the number of cases are increasing in the state and the state government’s objective is to reduce the doubling rate and death rate. “The death rate has come down from seven to four,” he said.
But there are plenty Americans willing to piss on the graves of the WWII fallen.
• Trump, Putin Issue Joint Statement Promoting Unity (JTN)
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday issued a rare joint statement promoting unity and cooperation between their respective countries, calling for trust and cooperation “in pursuit of a greater cause.” The statement was meant to mark the 75th anniversary of the “Meeting on the Elbe,” the historic confluence of American and Russian troops in Germany very near the end of World War II in what was seen as one of the final blows against Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler would commit suicide five days after the two sets of troops met at the Elbe River, with Germany surrendering a week later.
In the joint statement, the two leaders said the meeting “represented a culmination of tremendous efforts by the many countries and peoples” that “required enormous sacrifice by millions of soldiers, sailors, and citizens in multiple theaters of war.” “The ‘Spirit of the Elbe’ is an example of how our countries can put aside differences, build trust, and cooperate in pursuit of a greater cause. As we work today to confront the most important challenges of the 21st century, we pay tribute to the valor and courage of all those who fought together to defeat fascism,” the statement continues, also paying tribute to the domestic industries that supplied the efforts on the warfront.
The statement’s message of fraternal international cooperation did not impress everyone, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that “some officials within the administration” have been “concerned about the decision to issue the statement, fearing that it may undercut the stern U.S. messages toward Moscow.”
The UK outbreak has a much longer time to go than Germany or Italy.
• UK Scientists Warn Over Grim Virus Data (G.)
The number of new cases of Covid-19 being diagnosed is still much too high to allow any easing of the lockdown soon, leading scientists have warned, as the virus death toll in UK hospitals passed 20,000 on Saturday. The home secretary, Priti Patel, described the figure as a “terrible milestone” and a “deeply tragic and moving moment”. She said it showed the need for the British public to “stay strong” and remain at home for the foreseeable future. A further 813 deaths were reported in hospitals, taking the UK total to 20,319. This figure does not include deaths from Covid-19 in care homes, hospices and in the community.
As ministers came under increasing pressure to ease the lockdown from the business community and Tory MPs concerned at the plight of small firms in their own constituencies, scientists said the drop in new coronavirus cases being reported daily was disappointingly slow. Professor John Edmunds, a member of the government’s Sage group of Covid-19 experts, said if the lockdown was eased now, the newly enhanced testing and contact tracing system being put in place would be swamped. “The strategy behind plans to lift the lockdown is based on the idea [that] you could then control the epidemic by testing people for infections before tracing their contacts,” Edmunds said.
[..] “However, if we lifted the lockdown now, the testing and tracing system would be overwhelmed. We will have to get case numbers down a lot lower than they are now before we can think of lifting current regulations.” Professor Keith Neal of Nottingham University agreed that the number of patients being taken to hospital with Covid-19 remained far too high. “This daily figure peaked on 5 April with 5,903 cases. This Saturday it stood at 3,583,” he added. This latter figure was boosted by an extra 1,330 new cases of infected care and health workers, which brought Saturday’s overall total to 4,913.
“It has therefore taken three weeks for numbers of hospitalised Covid-19 patients to decline from a daily total of 5,903 to 3,641.” Professor Paul Hunter, of the University of East Anglia, added: “There is no doubt this rate of decline is disappointing. Certainly it is far too high to consider lifting lockdown restrictions at present. We need to get numbers down to a few hundred new cases a day before we can do that. Such a decline could take months.”
And AirFrance/KLM get €10 billion too. Why? It will take years to achieve the traffic they aim for.
• US Airlines Receive Extra $9.5 Billion In Payroll Support (R.)
The U.S. Treasury Department said on Saturday it has released $9.5 billion in additional funds from the Payroll Support Program to U.S. air carriers, bringing to $12.4 billion the total provided to the airline sector hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. In total, the government has disbursed grant funds to 10 major airlines and 83 smaller carriers. Congress approved $25 billion in grants for payroll assistance for passenger airlines. Treasury required major airlines receiving more than $100 million in assistance to repay 30% in low-interest loans over 10 years and issue warrants equal to 10% of the loan amount.
Airlines must not cut pay or jobs through Sept. 30 as a condition of the grants and are barred from buying back stock or paying dividends and face restrictions on executive compensation. SkyWest CEO Chip Childs told employees on Friday the airline expects to receive $438 million from Treasury in payroll assistance. “There is still much about the future and recovery that remains uncertain, and there is a very real possibility that we could be a smaller airline by the end of the year,” he wrote in a email seen by Reuters. The four largest U.S. carriers are receiving $19.2 billion in total out of the $25 billion – American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines.
Treasury is awarding major carriers 50% of the grant funds initially and then releasing the remainder through July. Treasury said additional money will continue to be provided to approved applicants “on a rolling basis.” The department is still reviewing how to award $4 billion in grants to cargo carriers and $3 billion to airport contractors such as caterers. Cargo carriers that receive $50 million or less of payroll support and contractors that receive $37.5 million or less “will not be required to provide financial instruments as appropriate compensation” for support, the department said.
Far too soon, but Macron listens to the press.
• French PM To Present Plan To Unwind Coronavirus Lockdown On Tuesday (R.)
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe will present the government’s plan to unwind the country’s coronavirus lockdown to parliament on Tuesday, followed by a debate and vote, his office said in a statement. The lockdown ordered by President Emmanuel Macron to slow the spread of the virus has been in place since March 17 and is due to be lifted on May 11. Macron is aiming to ease some of the lockdown measures then with schools reopening first, although the government has yet to finalise how it might work in practice. France has also offered retailers some relief by saying it wants them to reopen on May 11, though some curbs could remain in certain areas to delay a new wave of the coronavirus. The death toll in France from the coronavirus now stands at 22,614, the health ministry said on Saturday.
“Times have changed and we’re going to have to get some new good ideas that fit the new times.”
• The Mule Business! (Kunstler)
The plague didn’t cause the economic crash. But the lockdown response certainly accelerated, amplified, and ramified it. The crash happened because we built up a hyper-complex, over-scaled, just-in-time economic system with all its ecological redundancy edited out for the sake of efficiency, making it hyper-fragile. The system’s basic power module (fossil fuel) was failing on a cost-basis and we tried to compensate for that with debt. The debt got out of hand in both sheer quantity and from the dishonest games that bankers and politicians were playing with it. All of this happened for the reason that most things happen in history: it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The old system is permanently broken now. We’re having a hard time recognizing that, plague or no plague. Many activities have flunked the scale challenge and will not come back to running the way they used to, generally anything organized at the giant scale: global supply chains, global corporations that depend on them, fracking for shale oil, big institutions like colleges and even public school systems, commercial aviation and tourism, the auto industry, show business (including the Disney empire and things like it), suburbia as a general proposition, skyscrapers and megastructures, shopping malls, pension funds, insurance companies, mega-banks, and, of course, medical conglomerates. We’re deceived by Amazon.com, which appears to be successful at the moment because it is filling a vacuum that Amazon will also eventually fall into. Amazon’s business model is a joke.The model is: every item purchased makes a separate journey by truck to the customer. That’s a “sell” signal to me.
The lockdown is making people crazy. It’s one thing to be stuck in the house with spouses and relatives you can barely stand under normal circumstances. But to see all your financial support systems melt down at the same time, along with the implications for your hopes-and-dreams, is a pretty big shock. Naturally so many want to bust out of the waking nightmare and get going, to return to action, to at least see whether what they were doing before all this happened might restart. I dunno about that. They might flock back to restaurants to spend some of that fresh-minted $1200, and then what? Where will the next $1200 come from? Modern Monetary Theory? A new Guaranteed Basic Income? From what? From taxes paid by which businesses generating what profits from people too broke to buy goods and services?
I don’t think so. Times have changed and we’re going to have to get some new good ideas that fit the new times. But, the craziness out there is very likely to start expressing itself differently as we discover the urge to action does not produce the desired result of returning-to-normal. Instead, it produces more disorder in the foundering system, and then the question is: how much disorder do we have to slog through to get to those new ideas suited to the new times? I’ve got one of my own. The mule business! Seriously.
400 families, 5,000 commitments. So far it doesn’t sound like a very big movement.
• Organizers Plan the Largest US Rent Strike in Nearly a Century (IC)
At least 400 hundred families who live in buildings each containing over 1,500 rent units are coordinating building-wide rent strikes, according to Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for Housing Justice For All, a New York-based coalition of tenants and housing activists. Additionally, over 5,000 people have committed, through an online pledge, to refuse to pay rent in May. Precise strike numbers will be impossible to track, but the number of commitments alone points to a historic revival of this tenant resistance tactic. Coordinated rent strikes of this size in New York City haven’t been seen since the 1930s, when thousands of renters in Harlem and the Bronx successfully fought price gouging and landlord neglect by refusing to pay rent en masse.
The numbers committing to a rent strike might seem insignificant compared to the millions who don’t frame nonpayment as a strike, but simply will not be able to pay rent in the coming month. By the first week of April, one-third of renters nationwide — approximately 13.4 million people — had not paid rent; since then, 26 million workers have joined the ranks of the unemployed. Meanwhile, government stimulus checks of $1,200 are disorganized, overdue, and woefully inadequate. The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in New York City, for example, was $2,980 last year. The federal government’s pitiful offering is also, of course, unavailable to many immigrants. Since we can therefore expect nonpayment of May’s rent to reach an unprecedented scale anyway, the idea of advocating for a rent strike might at first seem moot.
Schiff kicking Mueller in the balls.
• DOJ Will Appeal Ruling Over Sealed Mueller Materials To Supreme Court (Hill)
The Department of Justice will appeal to the Supreme Court after it was ordered to hand over sealed documents from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation to Congress. The department on Friday asked the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to stay its ruling while it petitions the high court. “Whether and under what circumstances Congress may resort to the courts to seek grand jury materials generated in a criminal investigation in aid of an impeachment inquiry is plainly a question of great significance to all three branches of government, as well as to the functioning of the grand jury system in high-profile, politically-charged matters,” the Justice Department wrote.
The move comes after a three-judge D.C. Circuit panel ruled 2-1 that the Trump administration would have to hand over to Congress grand jury materials from Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. “The Department has objected to disclosure of the redacted grand jury materials, but the Department has no interest in objecting to the release of these materials outside of the general purposes and policies of grand jury secrecy, which as discussed, do not outweigh the Committee’s compelling need for disclosure,” Judge Judith Rogers wrote in a majority opinion.
People must be prosecuted for this.
• Michael Flynn Deliberately Set Up, Framed By Corrupt FBI Agents – Lawyer (JTN)
Attorneys for retired Gen. Michael Flynn asked a judge Friday to dismiss his criminal conviction immediately, saying new evidence belatedly turned over by federal prosecutors proves the former national security adviser to President Trump was framed in the Russia investigation. “This afternoon, the government produced to Mr. Flynn stunning Brady evidence that proves Mr. Flynn’s allegations of having been deliberately set up and framed by corrupt agents at the top of the FBI,” Flynn’s attorneys said in an eight page filing Brady evidence is pretrial information that could exonerate a defendant. The attorneys also argued in the filings that the long-awaited evidence defeats any argument that a key interview with Flynn on January 24, 2017, was material to any “investigation.”
The redacted documents were filed in a District of Columbia federal court as a supplement to Flynn’s court motion in January to dismiss charges against him. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, pleaded guilty in 2017 to making false statements to the FBI in connection with the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether members of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the election. “The government has deliberately suppressed this evidence from the inception of this prosecution – knowing there was no crime by Mr. Flynn,” the attorneys also wrote in Friday’s filings. “All this new evidence, and the government has advised there is more to come, proves that the crimes were committed by the FBI officials and then the prosecutors. The government’s misconduct in this case is beyond shocking and reprehensible. It mandates dismissal.”
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The @CIA has been at war with Journalism for over a decade. Their main targuet: Julian #Assange and @WikiLeaks staff. Through the scurity contractor @UCGlobal_ they spied on Julian's every visitor. Me, my brother @JosePassa and a few others were on a special surveillance list. pic.twitter.com/pEud0KgezR
— Juan Passarelli (@jlpassarelli) April 22, 2020
Cuomo pointed out this morning that NYC has been locked down for 56 days. It feels like a lifetime, but the Spanish Influenza went on for 2yrs, WWI 4yrs, Great Depression 4yrs, WWII 6yrs and Vietnam War 8yrs.
A quick injection of perspective. Oof.
— Megan Greene (@economistmeg) April 25, 2020
This is the kind of crap dichotomy you hear, as if
1) letting the virus run wild would not kill the economy
2) It is the government that is closing the economy, not ppleA segment of libertarians/conservatives have a reasoning defect as they think in binary & static labels. https://t.co/VQXST3RE12
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) April 25, 2020
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1254184132143349762
4 stages of quarantine
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