The Chinese mainland on Tuesday registered 7 new COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the National Health Commission announced on Wednesday.
This is the 52nd consecutive day of zero domestic transmissions reported on the Chinese mainland. No deaths related to the coronavirus were reported over the previous 24 hours, while 15 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The COVID-19 tally on the Chinese mainland stands at 85,489 infections and 4,634 fatalities, while 376 asymptomatic patients remain under medical observation.
There has been no coronavirus death on the Chinese mainland since May 17. There has been no community or domestic coronavirus case for 52 days. Since June began there have been only 2 limited community clusters of infections, in Beijing and Urumqi in Xinjiang, both of which were contained with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine, and both outbreaks ended in a few weeks. Imported coronavirus cases are caught at entry points with required testing and immediate quarantine. Asymptomatic cases are all quarantined.
The flow of imported cases to China is low, but has been persistent. There are as a result 205 active imported coronavirus cases on the Chinese mainland, but of which only 2 cases are classed as serious or critical.
‘It Really Was Abandonment.’ Virus Crisis Grips British Universities With no bailout forthcoming from the government, financially strapped British universities beckoned students back to campus, with predictably dire results. By Benjamin Mueller
LONDON — Inside a dormitory now known by students as H.M.P., for Her Majesty’s Prison, trash piled up in shared kitchens. Students washed their clothes in bathroom sinks. Security guards stalked the gates, keeping anyone from leaving or entering.
The building had been primed for a coronavirus outbreak since first-year students arrived at Manchester Metropolitan University for Freshers’ Week, Britain’s debaucherous baptism into university life, complete with trips to heaving pubs and dorm room parties.
But when the inevitable happened, and the virus tore through chockablock student suites, the university largely left students on their own: It imposed such a draconian lockdown that students had to nurse roommates back to health, parents drove hours to deliver food and lawyers offered pro bono help.
To date, roughly 90 British universities have reported coronavirus cases. Thousands of students are confined to their halls, some in suites with infected classmates, and many are struggling to get tested. The government, fearful of students seeding outbreaks far from campus, has warned that they may need to quarantine before returning home for Christmas.
Britain had ample warning: The reopening of American colleges weeks earlier reportedly swelled the country’s case count by 3,000 a day and left several students dead. But British universities beckoned students to campus anyway, fueling outbreaks that are seeping into surrounding towns. The infection rate in Manchester is ten times as high as it was in August.
The outbreaks have shone a harsh light on Britain’s decade-long campaign to turn higher education into a ruthless market. By cutting state grants and leaving schools dependent on tuition fees and room rents, the government encouraged them to jam more students onto campuses.
The pandemic threatened to dry out that income stream. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government largely withheld the rescue money it gave to other industries, so universities carried on as normal, whatever the risks.
To academics, the government’s policies reflect not only its erratic and fumbling approach to the coronavirus, but also its longstanding suspicions of universities….
The news that the president himself had contracted the coronavirus, just days after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg triggered a high-stakes Supreme Court battle in the middle of a global pandemic that has upended nearly every aspect of modern life, raised a number of questions for the American people. Among them, “Do we have the strength to survive this?" “How have we so angered the gods?” and, of course, “Is this the most deranged year ever to occur in American history because it certainly feels that way?”
Without the therapeutic or spiritual skills to answer the first two questions, I set off to answer the third, conducting a rigorously unscientific survey of historians to provide you with the four years in American history that rival 2020.
A group of scholars graciously offered their assistance, even though, as Stanford professor emeritus Jack Rakove gently explained, “Craziest year is not exactly a category that historians ordinarily deal in.”
The year 2020 is looking like a strong contender, having so far clobbered us with President Trump’s impeachment, a pandemic that has killed more than 210,000 Americans and collapsed large swaths of the economy, massive protests that broke out in dozens of cities after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed by police, wildfires that devastated millions of acres across the West Coast, and an increasingly bitter election that may threaten the stability of democracy. (In fact, things have been so nuts in 2020 that giant hornets with shark fin-like spikes that can puncture beekeeping suits and kill humans — aptly named murder hornets — barely registered in the national consciousness.)
But history is long, with plenty to teach us and perhaps even some hope to offer.
“This isn’t the only terrible year,” said Adriane Lentz-Smith, a professor of history at Duke University. “It’s not even the only year when people couldn’t imagine an end to terribleness.” ...
(In addition to 2020: 1861, 1919, 1932, and last but not least:)
1968
As the Vietnam War raged, student protests erupted across the country. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for reelection. Robert Kennedy, a hope for the Democratic Party, was also assassinated. US troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre. Armed police greeted tens of thousands of antiwar protesters at the Democratic convention in Chicago, beating participants while national TV cameras rolled.
“This feeling of the relentlessness of the crises — I think that was a year when people felt that the world was coming apart," said Lizabeth Cohen, a historian at Harvard University. “That feeling of ‘Oh my God, have we not hit bottom yet?’ ”
Perhaps you think 2020 pales in comparison to those past catastrophes; perhaps you think the troubles we face far exceed the ones that came before.
In either case, don’t forget that it’s only October.
“I do think it’s going to get even worse, the next three months,” said Hacsi. “We are almost just getting started.”
Jump in Wage Growth Shows Disparate Impact of Layoffs By DEAN BAKER
This recession has been very different from prior recessions. Most prior recessions were caused by the Fed jacking up interest rates to fight inflation, which sinks the housing and auto sectors. The last two recessions were driven by the collapse of bubbles that were driving the economy (stocks and housing). This recession is due to the pandemic, which has whacked personal services that are especially likely to spread the disease, such as restaurants, hotels, and gyms.
This has meant that a very different group of workers is being hit with unemployment. Historically, manufacturing and construction, two relatively high-paid sectors were hardest hit. (Manufacturing is no longer a relatively high-paying sector.) The sectors now being hard-hit are relatively low-paying. While there is always some skewing in layoffs in a downturn, with the last hired, and lowest paid, generally being the first to go, the skewing in this recession is far more pronounced. We are not only seeing the lower paid workers in each sector losing their jobs, but we are also seeing large-scale layoffs in the lowest paid sectors.
This shows up clearly if we look at the trends in the average hourly wage. The chart below shows the trends in the year-over-year change in the average hourly wage in the Great Recession and Pandemic Recession.
[ https://cepr.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Book2_23745_image001.png ] As can be seen, there is a sharp jump in wage growth reported in April. This was due to the mass layoffs associated with the shutdowns. The year-over-year pace slowed to 4.5 percent in August and September, which is still 1.5 percentage points above the pre-recession pace. (Wage growth had actually slowed slightly before the recession, from 3.5 percent to 3.0 percent, in spite of the extraordinarily low unemployment rate.)
There is no remotely comparable uptick in wage growth in the Great Recession....
WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday tried to salvage its favorite items lost in the rubble of COVID-19 relief talks that President Donald Trump blew up, with his administration pressing for $1,200 stimulus checks and a new wave of aid for airlines and other businesses hard hit by the pandemic.
In a barrage of tweets, Trump pressed for passage of these chunks of assistance, an about-face from his abrupt and puzzling move on Tuesday afternoon to abandon talks with a longtime rival, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The California Democrat has rejected such piecemeal entreaties all along.
Trump's tweets amounted to him demanding his way in negotiations that he himself had ended
He called on Congress to send him a “Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200)” — a reference to a preelection batch of direct payments to most Americans that had been a central piece of negotiations between Pelosi and the White House.
“I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?” Trump said on Twitter Tuesday evening. He also urged Congress to immediately approve $25 billion for airlines and $135 billion the Paycheck Protection Program to help small businesses.
Trump's decision to scuttle talks between Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Pelosi came after the president was briefed on the landscape for the negotiations — and on the blowback that any Pelosi-Mnuchin deal probably would have received from his GOP allies in Congress. ...
Having apparently approached a containment of the coronavirus in June, the Israeli government incautiously opened schools and businesses, and the result has been a persistent community infection spread contributing to what are now 281,481 cases in the small country as compared to 85,489 in all through all of mainland China.
Israel has unfortunately more than three-times the number of coronavirus cases in mainland China. Paul Krugman noticed the Israeli “disaster” on September 14 when there were 160,000 coronavirus cases. The per capita case rate is startlingly high. The persisting difficulty in limiting a new spread of infections in so developed a country has become startling to me.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2029812 October 8, 2020
Dying in a Leadership Vacuum
Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.
The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly.
We know that we could have done better. China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay. These measures were severe but effective, essentially eliminating transmission at the point where the outbreak began and reducing the death rate to a reported 3 per million, as compared with more than 500 per million in the United States. Countries that had far more exchange with China, such as Singapore and South Korea, began intensive testing early, along with aggressive contact tracing and appropriate isolation, and have had relatively small outbreaks. And New Zealand has used these same measures, together with its geographic advantages, to come close to eliminating the disease, something that has allowed that country to limit the time of closure and to largely reopen society to a prepandemic level. In general, not only have many democracies done better than the United States, but they have also outperformed us by orders of magnitude.
Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly? We have failed at almost every step. We had ample warning, but when the disease first arrived, we were incapable of testing effectively and couldn’t provide even the most basic personal protective equipment to health care workers and the general public. And we continue to be way behind the curve in testing. While the absolute numbers of tests have increased substantially, the more useful metric is the number of tests performed per infected person, a rate that puts us far down the international list, below such places as Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, countries that cannot boast the biomedical infrastructure or the manufacturing capacity that we have. Moreover, a lack of emphasis on developing capacity has meant that U.S. test results are often long delayed, rendering the results useless for disease control....
Throughout its 208-year history, The New England Journal of Medicine has remained staunchly nonpartisan. The world’s most prestigious medical journal has never supported or condemned a political candidate.
Until now.
In an editorial signed by 34 editors who are United States citizens (one editor is not) and published on Wednesday, the journal said the Trump administration had responded so poorly to the coronavirus pandemic that they “have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.”
The journal did not explicitly endorse Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, but that was the only possible inference, other scientists noted.
The editor in chief, Dr. Eric Rubin, said the scathing editorial was one of only four in the journal’s history that were signed by all of the editors. The N.E.J.M.’s editors join those of another influential journal, Scientific American, who last month endorsed Mr. Biden, the former vice president.
The political leadership has failed Americans in many ways that contrast vividly with responses from leaders in other countries, the N.E.J.M. said.
In the United States, the journal said, there was too little testing for the virus, especially early on. There was too little protective equipment, and a lack of national leadership on important measures like mask wearing, social distancing, quarantine and isolation.
There were attempts to politicize and undermine the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the journal noted.
As a result, the United States has had tens of thousands of “excess” deaths — those caused both directly and indirectly by the pandemic — as well as immense economic pain and an increase in social inequality as the virus hit disadvantaged communities hardest.
The editorial castigated the Trump administration’s rejection of science, writing, “Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.” ...
There was always an expectation that health care would be one of the biggest issues in this year’s presidential campaign, as was the case in the 2018 mid-term elections.
That is definitely the case, but not in the way anyone saw coming. In a surprise plot twist, a pandemic has eclipsed other issues like the Affordable Care Act (ACA), though do not expect those other issues to fade entirely.
The notion of “issues” in this campaign is, to be sure, something of a misnomer. The election is likely to be largely a referendum on President Trump. And Trump has never been a conventional candidate with conventional policy proposals. He governs and campaigns more through 280 character tweets than 10-point plans.
Voters will no doubt judge Trump based on the tone of his public statements and his conduct in office, but also on his policy actions and inactions and how they contrast with what former Vice President Biden is proposing. Much of that policy making has revolved around health care, especially as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to hit the US much harder than the rest of the world. Polling shows the public has an increasingly negative view of Trump’s response to the public health crisis, which could prove to be an important barometer for the campaign. ...
Trump ... has supported failed Congressional proposals to repeal and replace the ACA with weakened protections for preexisting conditions, reduced premium assistance, elimination of the Medicaid expansion, and a cap on all federal funding for Medicaid. He supports a lawsuit currently before the Supreme Court to overturn the ACA in its entirety, and expanded the availability of short-term insurance plans that have lower premiums but can exclude coverage of preexisting conditions and ACA-required benefits. In addition, he ended cost-sharing subsidy payments to insurers, suggesting they would cause the ACA to be “dead” and “gone.” Insurers, however, largely offset the terminated federal payments by increasing premiums, which in turn increased federal premium subsidies. He also signed legislation to repeal the individual mandate penalty. ...
Just days after being prescribed a powerful cocktail of drugs to treat his coronavirus infection, President Trump returned to the Oval Office on Wednesday as he delivered a barrage of incendiary tweets that referred to a “treasonous plot” and “coup” against him.
Trump’s behavior, which included tweets about ending negotiations with Democrats over an economic stimulus package and then more tweets about resuming those negotiations, appeared erratic even by his standards and raised questions among some medical professionals about the effect of the treatment on his mental state and whether it impacted his ability to govern.
Among the drugs Trump was prescribed is a potent steroid known as dexamethasone, which has shown benefits in patients with severe cases of COVID-19. While the drug helps reduce inflammation, it has a variety of possible side effects, such as blurred vision, headaches, and “psychic derangements,” including insomnia, mood swings, and “frank psychotic manifestations,” according to the drug’s label. ...
after commission makes changes in wake of president’s COVID-19 diagnosis
via @BostonGlobe - October 8
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump vowed Thursday not to participate in next week’s debate with Democratic nominee Joe Biden after organizers announced it will take place virtually because of the president’s diagnosis of COVID-19.
“I’m not going to do a virtual debate,” Trump told Fox Business News, moments after the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates announced the changes.
The shakeup comes a week before Trump and Biden were set to square off for the second presidential debate in Miami. Biden’s campaign insisted its candidate was ready to move forward, but the future of the event is now in serious doubt.
The Commission on Presidential Debates made the decision unilaterally, citing the need “to protect the health and safety of all involved with the second presidential debate.” ...
Trump tells Maria Bartiromo he will not participate in virtual debate: 'I'm not going to waste my time'
Canada ( 252) Germany ( 115) India ( 76) China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 10.4%, 7.8% and 5.0% for Mexico, the United Kingdom and France respectively. These ratios are high, but have been significantly higher, while falling recently.
The Chinese mainland on Wednesday registered 11 new COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the National Health Commission announced on Thursday.
This is the 53rd consecutive day of zero domestic transmissions reported on the Chinese mainland. No deaths related to the coronavirus were reported over the previous 24 hours, while 16 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The COVID-19 tally on the Chinese mainland stands at 85,500 infections and 4,634 fatalities, while 366 asymptomatic patients remain under medical observation.
[ There has been no coronavirus death on the Chinese mainland since May 17. There has been no community or domestic coronavirus case for 53 days. Since June began there have been only 2 limited community clusters of infections, in Beijing and Urumqi in Xinjiang, both of which were contained with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine, and both outbreaks ended in a few weeks. Imported coronavirus cases are caught at entry points with required testing and immediate quarantine. Asymptomatic cases are all quarantined.
The flow of imported cases to China is low, but has been persistent. There are as a result 200 active imported coronavirus cases on the Chinese mainland, but of which only 2 cases are classed as serious or critical. ]
‘Rural Surge’ Propels India Toward More Covid-19 Infections Than U.S. The contagion is hitting towns and villages where resources are scant and people are skeptical of lockdown efforts. If unchecked, Indian infections could exceed those in the United States. By Karan Deep Singh and Jeffrey Gettleman
MASLI, India — Sliding out of their rickshaw, masks on, fresh sanitizer smeared across their hands, a team of health workers approached one of the mud-walled homes in Masli, a remote village in northeast India surrounded by miles of mountainous rainforest.
“Are you Amit Deb?” they asked a lean, shirtless man standing in his yard. Mr. Deb nodded cautiously. Five days earlier, he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Now his family members needed to be tested.
They all refused.
“We can’t afford to quarantine,” explained Mr. Deb, a shopkeeper. If anyone else in his family was found positive, they would all be ordered to stay inside, which would mean even more weeks of not working, which would push the family closer to running out of food.
The medical team moved on to the next house. But they kept meeting more refusals.
The defiance of the coronavirus rules is being reflected across rural India, and it is propelling this nation’s virus caseload toward the No. 1 spot globally. Infections are rippling into every corner of this country of 1.3 billion people. The Indian news media is calling it “The Rural Surge.” ...
Having apparently approached a containment of the coronavirus in June, the Israeli government incautiously opened schools and businesses, and the result has been a persistent community infection spread contributing to what are now 284,705 cases in the small country as compared to 85,500 in all through all of mainland China.
Israel has unfortunately more than three-times the number of coronavirus cases in mainland China. Paul Krugman noticed the Israeli “disaster” on September 14 when there were 160,000 coronavirus cases. The per capita case rate is startlingly high. The persisting difficulty in limiting a new spread of infections in so developed a country has become startling to me. Obviously there is a profound public health infrastructure failing, that shows a development failing and will have to be addressed.
Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah is facing a backlash after questioning the idea of democracy in an overnight tweet.
“Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are,” Lee tweeted overnight Thursday, misspelling the word “prosperity.” “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
It was unclear what Lee was responding to, but it was one of several tweets about democracy he sent while live tweeting the vice presidential debate between Senator Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence earlier in the evening. ...
President Donald Trump, in a head-spinning reversal, has told allies he's interested in a large-scale stimulus deal, according to a person with direct knowledge of his comments.
The person stressed it's unclear what, exactly, Trump's vision of a comprehensive deal would entail and there remains significant hurdles -- and skepticism -- when it comes to reaching an agreement through talks that have been largely stuck in the same place for several months.
But for Trump, who faced dropping markets and criticism from within his own party for his decision to abruptly end talks earlier this week, it marks another turn in the long-shot negotiations.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in a call with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday, said Trump was now interested in coming back to the table on a comprehensive agreement, according to Drew Hammill, Pelosi's deputy chief of staff. But even that was called into question by Pelosi on the call, who noted that another White House official had just earlier Thursday afternoon "contradicted that assertion." But Mnuchin assured the California Democrat the President was interested in a comprehensive deal and Pelosi, on a call with her leadership team later in the afternoon, said she believed the talks were back on, according to a source familiar with the call. ...
Trump Is Killing the Economy Out of Spite So what will he do if he loses the election? By Paul Krugman
Last year Donald Trump called Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person.” Actually, she isn’t — but he is.
Trump’s vindictiveness has become a major worry as the election approaches. He has already signaled that he won’t accept the result if he loses, which seems increasingly likely though not certain. Nobody knows what chaos, possibly including violence, he may unleash if the election doesn’t go his way.
Even aside from that concern, however, a defeated Trump would still be president for two and a half months. Would he spend that time acting destructively, in effect taking revenge on America for rejecting him?
Well, we got a preview of what a lame-duck Trump presidency might look like Tuesday. Trump hasn’t even lost yet, but he abruptly cut off talks on an economic relief package millions of Americans desperately need (although as of Thursday he seemed to be backtracking). And his motivation seems to have been sheer spite.
Why do we need economic relief? Despite several months of large employment gains, America has only partly recovered from horrific job losses in the early months of the pandemic — and the pace of recovery has slowed to a relative crawl. All indications are that the economy will remain weak for many months, maybe even years.
Given this grim reality, the federal government should still be providing the kind of relief it offered in the first few months of the crisis: generous aid to the unemployed and loans that help keep small businesses afloat. Otherwise we’ll soon be seeing millions of families unable to pay their rent, hundreds of thousands of businesses going under.
In addition, state and local governments — which, unlike the federal government, are generally required to balance their budgets — are in desperate fiscal straits, because the pandemic slump has drastically reduced their revenues. They need a lot of aid, soon, or they will be forced into deep cuts in employment and services. We’ve already lost around 900,000 jobs in state and local education....
China has signed an agreement with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to officially join the global vaccine initiative known as COVAX, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Friday.
Hua said this is an important step China has taken to uphold the concept of a shared community of health for all and to honor its commitment to turn COVID-19 vaccines into a global public good.
Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic still poses a severe threat to the safety and health of people in all countries. China continues to focus on ensuring that developing countries have equal access to appropriate, safe and effective vaccines.
"To that end, we have solemnly pledged to make vaccines developed and deployed by China a global public good, which will be provided to developing countries as a priority," Hua said.
China has maintained close communication with COVAX with a positive attitude towards joining it, Hua said, noting that even when China is leading the world with several vaccines in advanced stages of R&D and with ample production capacity, it still decided to join COVAX.
"We are taking this concrete step to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines, especially to developing countries, and hope more capable countries will also join and support COVAX. China will also strengthen vaccine cooperation with relevant countries through the COVAX network," said the spokesperson.
China will continue to work together with COVAX partners and contribute its share to the global fight against the pandemic to safeguard all human beings' safety and health, Hua said.
On the afternoon's news briefing, the spokeswoman told the media that China will purchase COVID-19 vaccines for 1% of its population, or 15 million people, via the program, a move that shows the country's participation in the program and accommodates interests of other countries.
The first batch of vaccine available under the plan will be in short supply, so there would be less for other countries if China had secured doses for a large number of its 1.4 billion people, Hua explained....
The Chinese mainland on Thursday registered 21 new COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the National Health Commission announced on Friday.
This is the 54th consecutive day with zero domestic transmissions reported on the Chinese mainland. No deaths related to the coronavirus were reported over the previous 24 hours, while 15 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The COVID-19 tally on the Chinese mainland stands at 85,521 infections and 4,634 fatalities, while 357 asymptomatic patients remain under medical observation.
[ There has been no coronavirus death on the Chinese mainland since May 17. There has been no community or domestic coronavirus case for 54 days. Since June began there have been only 2 limited community clusters of infections, in Beijing and Urumqi in Xinjiang, both of which were contained with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine, and both outbreaks ended in a few weeks. Imported coronavirus cases are caught at entry points with required testing and immediate quarantine. Asymptomatic cases are all quarantined.
The flow of imported cases to China is low, but has been persistent. There are as a result 206 active imported coronavirus cases on the Chinese mainland, but of which only 2 cases are classed as serious or critical. ]
Pandemic Exposes Holes in Sweden’s Generous Social Welfare State Decades of budget-cutting and market reforms laid the ground for a wave of death in Swedish nursing homes. By Peter S. Goodman and Erik Augustin Palm
In the popular imagination, Sweden does not seem like the sort of country prone to accepting the mass death of grandparents to conserve resources in a pandemic.
Swedes pay some of the highest taxes on earth in exchange for extensive government services, including state-furnished health care and education, plus generous cash assistance for those who lose jobs. When a child is born, the parents receive 480 days of parental leave to use between them.
Yet among the nearly 6,000 people whose deaths have been linked to the coronavirus in Sweden, 2,694, or more than 45 percent, had been among the country’s most vulnerable citizens — those living in nursing homes.
That tragedy is in part the story of how Sweden has, over decades, gradually yet relentlessly downgraded its famously generous social safety net....
The Chinese mainland on Friday registered 15 new COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the National Health Commission announced on Saturday.
No deaths related to the coronavirus were reported over the previous 24 hours, while 15 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The COVID-19 tally on the Chinese mainland stands at 85,536 infections and 4,634 fatalities, while 380 asymptomatic patients remain under medical observation.
[ There has been no coronavirus death on the Chinese mainland since May 17. There has been no community or domestic coronavirus case for 55 days. Since June began there have been only 2 limited community clusters of infections, in Beijing and Urumqi in Xinjiang, both of which were contained with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine, and both outbreaks ended in a few weeks. Imported coronavirus cases are caught at entry points with required testing and immediate quarantine. Asymptomatic cases are all quarantined.
The flow of imported cases to China is low, but has been persistent. There are as a result 206 active imported coronavirus cases on the Chinese mainland, but of which only 2 cases are classed as serious or critical. ]
Having apparently approached a containment of the coronavirus in June, the Israeli government incautiously opened schools and businesses, and the result has been a persistent community infection spread contributing to what are now 289,799 cases in the small country as compared to 85,536 in all through all of mainland China.
Israel has unfortunately more than three-times the number of coronavirus cases in mainland China. Paul Krugman noticed the Israeli “disaster” on September 14 when there were 160,000 coronavirus cases. The per capita case rate is startlingly high. The persisting difficulty in limiting a new spread of infections in so developed a country has become startling to me. Obviously there is a profound public health infrastructure failing, that shows a development failing and will have to be addressed.
After a Hospital Stay for Covid, Patients May Face Months of Rehabilitation Many patients who were critically ill with Covid-19 face arduous recoveries, often requiring extensive physical rehabilitation. By Anahad O’Connor
Not long ago, Allen Washington was a busy executive who traveled the country on business trips while trying to stay healthy and active, walking up to two miles a day for exercise.
But that came to an end when he developed Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, in June. Mr. Washington spent three weeks lying in a hospital bed in a medically induced coma. When he woke up, he discovered his body had deteriorated. He had bedsores and was too weak to walk or stand. He had nerve damage in his legs, neck and shoulders. He suffered from memory loss and kidney failure.
While he survived Covid-19, Mr. Washington, 60, is now grappling with the aftermath of the disease. To regain his strength and motor skills, he undergoes physical and occupational therapy at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago, which specializes in helping people who have been debilitated by Covid-19 and other illnesses. Since leaving the hospital, he has had to relearn simple tasks that became too difficult because of his memory loss and muscle weakness, like walking up stairs, tying his shoes and getting dressed in the morning.
“I came back from death’s door, and now I have a lot of work to do to get better,” he said.
Even after surviving Covid-19, many patients who were critically ill face long and arduous recoveries, often requiring extensive physical rehabilitation. The problems they encounter are wide ranging....
The Chinese mainland on Saturday registered 21 new COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the National Health Commission announced on Sunday.
No deaths related to the coronavirus were reported over the previous 24 hours, while 9 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The COVID-19 tally on the Chinese mainland stands at 85,557 infections and 4,634 fatalities, while 381 asymptomatic patients remain under medical observation.
[ There has been no coronavirus death on the Chinese mainland since May 17. There has been no community or domestic coronavirus case for 56 days. Since June began there have been only 2 limited community clusters of infections, in Beijing and Urumqi in Xinjiang, both of which were contained with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine, and both outbreaks ended in a few weeks. Imported coronavirus cases are caught at entry points with required testing and immediate quarantine. Asymptomatic cases are all quarantined.
The flow of imported cases to China is low, but has been persistent. There are as a result 218 active imported coronavirus cases on the Chinese mainland, none of which cases are classed as serious or critical. ]
A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his family’s hotels and resorts — and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration.
... Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.
But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.
The tax records — along with membership rosters for Mar-a-Lago and the president’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., as well as other sources — reveal how much money this new line of business was worth. ...
These last 50 years, the Dominican Republic has had the fastest per capita GDP growth in all the Americas. Cuba has been subject to fierce economic sanctions by the US these last 50 years. Nonetheless, Cuba has built fine public health institutions that have allowed for a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than the US as well as the Dominican Republic. The coronavirus experience of Cuba reflects the decades of public health emphasis.
45 comments:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
October 6, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 7,722,746)
Deaths ( 215,822)
India
Cases ( 6,754,179)
Deaths ( 104,591)
Mexico
Cases ( 789,780)
Deaths ( 81,877)
France
Cases ( 634,763)
Deaths ( 32,365)
UK
Cases ( 530,113)
Deaths ( 42,445)
Germany
Cases ( 307,119)
Deaths ( 9,635)
Canada
Cases ( 171,323)
Deaths ( 9,530)
China
Cases ( 85,482)
Deaths ( 4,634)
October 6, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
US ( 651)
Mexico ( 633)
UK ( 624)
France ( 496)
Canada ( 252)
Germany ( 115)
India ( 76)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 10.4%, 8.0% and 5.1% for Mexico, the United Kingdom and France respectively.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-07/Chinese-mainland-reports-7-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-UnYv9qrwGI/index.html
October 7, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 7 new COVID-19 cases
The Chinese mainland on Tuesday registered 7 new COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the National Health Commission announced on Wednesday.
This is the 52nd consecutive day of zero domestic transmissions reported on the Chinese mainland. No deaths related to the coronavirus were reported over the previous 24 hours, while 15 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The COVID-19 tally on the Chinese mainland stands at 85,489 infections and 4,634 fatalities, while 376 asymptomatic patients remain under medical observation.
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-07/Chinese-mainland-reports-7-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-UnYv9qrwGI/img/8af18011530743f0a3d25e25d26eb9e6/8af18011530743f0a3d25e25d26eb9e6.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-07/Chinese-mainland-reports-7-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-UnYv9qrwGI/img/0849a27bb2a2414d9fbb7d015c39d341/0849a27bb2a2414d9fbb7d015c39d341.jpeg
There has been no coronavirus death on the Chinese mainland since May 17. There has been no community or domestic coronavirus case for 52 days. Since June began there have been only 2 limited community clusters of infections, in Beijing and Urumqi in Xinjiang, both of which were contained with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine, and both outbreaks ended in a few weeks. Imported coronavirus cases are caught at entry points with required testing and immediate quarantine. Asymptomatic cases are all quarantined.
The flow of imported cases to China is low, but has been persistent. There are as a result 205 active imported coronavirus cases on the Chinese mainland, but of which only 2 cases are classed as serious or critical.
Surely remarkable writing on political economics:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/world/europe/virus-UK-universities.html
October 6, 2020
‘It Really Was Abandonment.’ Virus Crisis Grips British Universities
With no bailout forthcoming from the government, financially strapped British universities beckoned students back to campus, with predictably dire results.
By Benjamin Mueller
LONDON — Inside a dormitory now known by students as H.M.P., for Her Majesty’s Prison, trash piled up in shared kitchens. Students washed their clothes in bathroom sinks. Security guards stalked the gates, keeping anyone from leaving or entering.
The building had been primed for a coronavirus outbreak since first-year students arrived at Manchester Metropolitan University for Freshers’ Week, Britain’s debaucherous baptism into university life, complete with trips to heaving pubs and dorm room parties.
But when the inevitable happened, and the virus tore through chockablock student suites, the university largely left students on their own: It imposed such a draconian lockdown that students had to nurse roommates back to health, parents drove hours to deliver food and lawyers offered pro bono help.
To date, roughly 90 British universities have reported coronavirus cases. Thousands of students are confined to their halls, some in suites with infected classmates, and many are struggling to get tested. The government, fearful of students seeding outbreaks far from campus, has warned that they may need to quarantine before returning home for Christmas.
Britain had ample warning: The reopening of American colleges weeks earlier reportedly swelled the country’s case count by 3,000 a day and left several students dead. But British universities beckoned students to campus anyway, fueling outbreaks that are seeping into surrounding towns. The infection rate in Manchester is ten times as high as it was in August.
The outbreaks have shone a harsh light on Britain’s decade-long campaign to turn higher education into a ruthless market. By cutting state grants and leaving schools dependent on tuition fees and room rents, the government encouraged them to jam more students onto campuses.
The pandemic threatened to dry out that income stream. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government largely withheld the rescue money it gave to other industries, so universities carried on as normal, whatever the risks.
To academics, the government’s policies reflect not only its erratic and fumbling approach to the coronavirus, but also its longstanding suspicions of universities….
October 6, 2020
Coronavirus
Massachusetts
Cases ( 135,957)
Deaths ( 9,538)
Deaths per million ( 1,384)
New York
Cases ( 501,824)
Deaths ( 33,330)
Deaths per million ( 1,713)
2020 is one of the top 5 contenders for craziest year in American history
via @BostonGlobe - October 6
The news that the president himself had contracted the coronavirus, just days after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg triggered a high-stakes Supreme Court battle in the middle of a global pandemic that has upended nearly every aspect of modern life, raised a number of questions for the American people. Among them, “Do we have the strength to survive this?" “How have we so angered the gods?” and, of course, “Is this the most deranged year ever to occur in American history because it certainly feels that way?”
Without the therapeutic or spiritual skills to answer the first two questions, I set off to answer the third, conducting a rigorously unscientific survey of historians to provide you with the four years in American history that rival 2020.
A group of scholars graciously offered their assistance, even though, as Stanford professor emeritus Jack Rakove gently explained, “Craziest year is not exactly a category that historians ordinarily deal in.”
The year 2020 is looking like a strong contender, having so far clobbered us with President Trump’s impeachment, a pandemic that has killed more than 210,000 Americans and collapsed large swaths of the economy, massive protests that broke out in dozens of cities after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed by police, wildfires that devastated millions of acres across the West Coast, and an increasingly bitter election that may threaten the stability of democracy. (In fact, things have been so nuts in 2020 that giant hornets with shark fin-like spikes that can puncture beekeeping suits and kill humans — aptly named murder hornets — barely registered in the national consciousness.)
But history is long, with plenty to teach us and perhaps even some hope to offer.
“This isn’t the only terrible year,” said Adriane Lentz-Smith, a professor of history at Duke University. “It’s not even the only year when people couldn’t imagine an end to terribleness.” ...
(In addition to 2020: 1861, 1919, 1932, and last but not least:)
1968
As the Vietnam War raged, student protests erupted across the country. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for reelection. Robert Kennedy, a hope for the Democratic Party, was also assassinated. US troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre. Armed police greeted tens of thousands of antiwar protesters at the Democratic convention in Chicago, beating participants while national TV cameras rolled.
“This feeling of the relentlessness of the crises — I think that was a year when people felt that the world was coming apart," said Lizabeth Cohen, a historian at Harvard University. “That feeling of ‘Oh my God, have we not hit bottom yet?’ ”
Perhaps you think 2020 pales in comparison to those past catastrophes; perhaps you think the troubles we face far exceed the ones that came before.
In either case, don’t forget that it’s only October.
“I do think it’s going to get even worse, the next three months,” said Hacsi. “We are almost just getting started.”
https://cepr.net/jump-in-wage-growth-shows-disparate-impact-of-layoffs/
October 7, 2020
Jump in Wage Growth Shows Disparate Impact of Layoffs
By DEAN BAKER
This recession has been very different from prior recessions. Most prior recessions were caused by the Fed jacking up interest rates to fight inflation, which sinks the housing and auto sectors. The last two recessions were driven by the collapse of bubbles that were driving the economy (stocks and housing). This recession is due to the pandemic, which has whacked personal services that are especially likely to spread the disease, such as restaurants, hotels, and gyms.
This has meant that a very different group of workers is being hit with unemployment. Historically, manufacturing and construction, two relatively high-paid sectors were hardest hit. (Manufacturing is no longer a relatively high-paying sector.) The sectors now being hard-hit are relatively low-paying. While there is always some skewing in layoffs in a downturn, with the last hired, and lowest paid, generally being the first to go, the skewing in this recession is far more pronounced. We are not only seeing the lower paid workers in each sector losing their jobs, but we are also seeing large-scale layoffs in the lowest paid sectors.
This shows up clearly if we look at the trends in the average hourly wage. The chart below shows the trends in the year-over-year change in the average hourly wage in the Great Recession and Pandemic Recession.
[ https://cepr.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Book2_23745_image001.png ]
As can be seen, there is a sharp jump in wage growth reported in April. This was due to the mass layoffs associated with the shutdowns. The year-over-year pace slowed to 4.5 percent in August and September, which is still 1.5 percentage points above the pre-recession pace. (Wage growth had actually slowed slightly before the recession, from 3.5 percent to 3.0 percent, in spite of the extraordinarily low unemployment rate.)
There is no remotely comparable uptick in wage growth in the Great Recession....
In about-face, Trump seeks to salvage parts of virus aid
AP via @BostonGlobe
WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday tried to salvage its favorite items lost in the rubble of COVID-19 relief talks that President Donald Trump blew up, with his administration pressing for $1,200 stimulus checks and a new wave of aid for airlines and other businesses hard hit by the pandemic.
In a barrage of tweets, Trump pressed for passage of these chunks of assistance, an about-face from his abrupt and puzzling move on Tuesday afternoon to abandon talks with a longtime rival, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The California Democrat has rejected such piecemeal entreaties all along.
Trump's tweets amounted to him demanding his way in negotiations that he himself had ended
He called on Congress to send him a “Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200)” — a reference to a preelection batch of direct payments to most Americans that had been a central piece of negotiations between Pelosi and the White House.
“I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?” Trump said on Twitter Tuesday evening. He also urged Congress to immediately approve $25 billion for airlines and $135 billion the Paycheck Protection Program to help small businesses.
Trump's decision to scuttle talks between Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Pelosi came after the president was briefed on the landscape for the negotiations — and on the blowback that any Pelosi-Mnuchin deal probably would have received from his GOP allies in Congress. ...
October 7, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 281,481)
Deaths ( 1,824)
Deaths per million ( 198)
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
Having apparently approached a containment of the coronavirus in June, the Israeli government incautiously opened schools and businesses, and the result has been a persistent community infection spread contributing to what are now 281,481 cases in the small country as compared to 85,489 in all through all of mainland China.
Israel has unfortunately more than three-times the number of coronavirus cases in mainland China. Paul Krugman noticed the Israeli “disaster” on September 14 when there were 160,000 coronavirus cases. The per capita case rate is startlingly high. The persisting difficulty in limiting a new spread of infections in so developed a country has become startling to me.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2029812
October 8, 2020
Dying in a Leadership Vacuum
Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.
The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly.
We know that we could have done better. China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay. These measures were severe but effective, essentially eliminating transmission at the point where the outbreak began and reducing the death rate to a reported 3 per million, as compared with more than 500 per million in the United States. Countries that had far more exchange with China, such as Singapore and South Korea, began intensive testing early, along with aggressive contact tracing and appropriate isolation, and have had relatively small outbreaks. And New Zealand has used these same measures, together with its geographic advantages, to come close to eliminating the disease, something that has allowed that country to limit the time of closure and to largely reopen society to a prepandemic level. In general, not only have many democracies done better than the United States, but they have also outperformed us by orders of magnitude.
Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly? We have failed at almost every step. We had ample warning, but when the disease first arrived, we were incapable of testing effectively and couldn’t provide even the most basic personal protective equipment to health care workers and the general public. And we continue to be way behind the curve in testing. While the absolute numbers of tests have increased substantially, the more useful metric is the number of tests performed per infected person, a rate that puts us far down the international list, below such places as Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, countries that cannot boast the biomedical infrastructure or the manufacturing capacity that we have. Moreover, a lack of emphasis on developing capacity has meant that U.S. test results are often long delayed, rendering the results useless for disease control....
In a First, New England Journal of Medicine Joins Never-Trumpers
NY Times - October 7
Throughout its 208-year history, The New England Journal of Medicine has remained staunchly nonpartisan. The world’s most prestigious medical journal has never supported or condemned a political candidate.
Until now.
In an editorial signed by 34 editors who are United States citizens (one editor is not) and published on Wednesday, the journal said the Trump administration had responded so poorly to the coronavirus pandemic that they “have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.”
The journal did not explicitly endorse Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, but that was the only possible inference, other scientists noted.
The editor in chief, Dr. Eric Rubin, said the scathing editorial was one of only four in the journal’s history that were signed by all of the editors. The N.E.J.M.’s editors join those of another influential journal, Scientific American, who last month endorsed Mr. Biden, the former vice president.
The political leadership has failed Americans in many ways that contrast vividly with responses from leaders in other countries, the N.E.J.M. said.
In the United States, the journal said, there was too little testing for the virus, especially early on. There was too little protective equipment, and a lack of national leadership on important measures like mask wearing, social distancing, quarantine and isolation.
There were attempts to politicize and undermine the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the journal noted.
As a result, the United States has had tens of thousands of “excess” deaths — those caused both directly and indirectly by the pandemic — as well as immense economic pain and an increase in social inequality as the virus hit disadvantaged communities hardest.
The editorial castigated the Trump administration’s rejection of science, writing, “Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.” ...
Related:
Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden
(Also related:)
Trump vs Biden on Health Care
via @JAMA Health Forum - September 3
There was always an expectation that health care would be one of the biggest issues in this year’s presidential campaign, as was the case in the 2018 mid-term elections.
That is definitely the case, but not in the way anyone saw coming. In a surprise plot twist, a pandemic has eclipsed other issues like the Affordable Care Act (ACA), though do not expect those other issues to fade entirely.
The notion of “issues” in this campaign is, to be sure, something of a misnomer. The election is likely to be largely a referendum on President Trump. And Trump has never been a conventional candidate with conventional policy proposals. He governs and campaigns more through 280 character tweets than 10-point plans.
Voters will no doubt judge Trump based on the tone of his public statements and his conduct in office, but also on his policy actions and inactions and how they contrast with what former Vice President Biden is proposing. Much of that policy making has revolved around health care, especially as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to hit the US much harder than the rest of the world. Polling shows the public has an increasingly negative view of Trump’s response to the public health crisis, which could prove to be an important barometer for the campaign. ...
Trump ... has supported failed Congressional proposals to repeal and replace the ACA with weakened protections for preexisting conditions, reduced premium assistance, elimination of the Medicaid expansion, and a cap on all federal funding for Medicaid. He supports a lawsuit currently before the Supreme Court to overturn the ACA in its entirety, and expanded the availability of short-term insurance plans that have lower premiums but can exclude coverage of preexisting conditions and ACA-required benefits. In addition, he ended cost-sharing subsidy payments to insurers, suggesting they would cause the ACA to be “dead” and “gone.” Insurers, however, largely offset the terminated federal payments by increasing premiums, which in turn increased federal premium subsidies. He also signed legislation to repeal the individual mandate penalty. ...
Trump’s Twitter storm raises some concerns among doctors about possible risks of powerful steroid
via @BostonGlobe - October 7
Just days after being prescribed a powerful cocktail of drugs to treat his coronavirus infection, President Trump returned to the Oval Office on Wednesday as he delivered a barrage of incendiary tweets that referred to a “treasonous plot” and “coup” against him.
Trump’s behavior, which included tweets about ending negotiations with Democrats over an economic stimulus package and then more tweets about resuming those negotiations, appeared erratic even by his standards and raised questions among some medical professionals about the effect of the treatment on his mental state and whether it impacted his ability to govern.
Among the drugs Trump was prescribed is a potent steroid known as dexamethasone, which has shown benefits in patients with severe cases of COVID-19. While the drug helps reduce inflammation, it has a variety of possible side effects, such as blurred vision, headaches, and “psychic derangements,” including insomnia, mood swings, and “frank psychotic manifestations,” according to the drug’s label. ...
Trump vows not to participate in ‘virtual’ debate with Biden
after commission makes changes in wake of president’s COVID-19 diagnosis
via @BostonGlobe - October 8
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump vowed Thursday not to participate in next week’s debate with Democratic nominee Joe Biden after organizers announced it will take place virtually because of the president’s diagnosis of COVID-19.
“I’m not going to do a virtual debate,” Trump told Fox Business News, moments after the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates announced the changes.
The shakeup comes a week before Trump and Biden were set to square off for the second presidential debate in Miami. Biden’s campaign insisted its candidate was ready to move forward, but the future of the event is now in serious doubt.
The Commission on Presidential Debates made the decision unilaterally, citing the need “to protect the health and safety of all involved with the second presidential debate.” ...
Trump tells Maria Bartiromo he will not participate in virtual debate: 'I'm not going to waste my time'
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
October 7, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 7,776,224)
Deaths ( 216,784)
India
Cases ( 6,832,988)
Deaths ( 105,554)
Mexico
Cases ( 794,608)
Deaths ( 82,348)
France
Cases ( 653,509)
Deaths ( 32,445)
UK
Cases ( 544,275)
Deaths ( 42,515)
Germany
Cases ( 311,113)
Deaths ( 9,652)
Canada
Cases ( 173,123)
Deaths ( 9,541)
China
Cases ( 85,489)
Deaths ( 4,634)
October 7, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
US ( 654)
Mexico ( 637)
UK ( 625)
France ( 497)
Canada ( 252)
Germany ( 115)
India ( 76)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 10.4%, 7.8% and 5.0% for Mexico, the United Kingdom and France respectively. These ratios are high, but have been significantly higher, while falling recently.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-08/Chinese-mainland-reports-11-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-UpCJbByDOE/index.html
October 8, 2020
Chinese mainland reports11 new COVID-19 cases
The Chinese mainland on Wednesday registered 11 new COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the National Health Commission announced on Thursday.
This is the 53rd consecutive day of zero domestic transmissions reported on the Chinese mainland. No deaths related to the coronavirus were reported over the previous 24 hours, while 16 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The COVID-19 tally on the Chinese mainland stands at 85,500 infections and 4,634 fatalities, while 366 asymptomatic patients remain under medical observation.
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-08/Chinese-mainland-reports-11-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-UpCJbByDOE/img/46f9f62bdd67412bb299630743aec43d/46f9f62bdd67412bb299630743aec43d.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-08/Chinese-mainland-reports-11-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-UpCJbByDOE/img/65ceb8ddb06244d390b964c0ad5aaf56/65ceb8ddb06244d390b964c0ad5aaf56.jpeg
[ There has been no coronavirus death on the Chinese mainland since May 17. There has been no community or domestic coronavirus case for 53 days. Since June began there have been only 2 limited community clusters of infections, in Beijing and Urumqi in Xinjiang, both of which were contained with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine, and both outbreaks ended in a few weeks. Imported coronavirus cases are caught at entry points with required testing and immediate quarantine. Asymptomatic cases are all quarantined.
The flow of imported cases to China is low, but has been persistent. There are as a result 200 active imported coronavirus cases on the Chinese mainland, but of which only 2 cases are classed as serious or critical. ]
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/world/asia/india-covid-19-rural.html
October 8, 2020
‘Rural Surge’ Propels India Toward More Covid-19 Infections Than U.S.
The contagion is hitting towns and villages where resources are scant and people are skeptical of lockdown efforts. If unchecked, Indian infections could exceed those in the United States.
By Karan Deep Singh and Jeffrey Gettleman
MASLI, India — Sliding out of their rickshaw, masks on, fresh sanitizer smeared across their hands, a team of health workers approached one of the mud-walled homes in Masli, a remote village in northeast India surrounded by miles of mountainous rainforest.
“Are you Amit Deb?” they asked a lean, shirtless man standing in his yard. Mr. Deb nodded cautiously. Five days earlier, he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Now his family members needed to be tested.
They all refused.
“We can’t afford to quarantine,” explained Mr. Deb, a shopkeeper. If anyone else in his family was found positive, they would all be ordered to stay inside, which would mean even more weeks of not working, which would push the family closer to running out of food.
The medical team moved on to the next house. But they kept meeting more refusals.
The defiance of the coronavirus rules is being reflected across rural India, and it is propelling this nation’s virus caseload toward the No. 1 spot globally. Infections are rippling into every corner of this country of 1.3 billion people. The Indian news media is calling it “The Rural Surge.” ...
October 8, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 284,705)
Deaths ( 1,864)
Deaths per million ( 203)
-----------------------------------
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
Having apparently approached a containment of the coronavirus in June, the Israeli government incautiously opened schools and businesses, and the result has been a persistent community infection spread contributing to what are now 284,705 cases in the small country as compared to 85,500 in all through all of mainland China.
Israel has unfortunately more than three-times the number of coronavirus cases in mainland China. Paul Krugman noticed the Israeli “disaster” on September 14 when there were 160,000 coronavirus cases. The per capita case rate is startlingly high. The persisting difficulty in limiting a new spread of infections in so developed a country has become startling to me. Obviously there is a profound public health infrastructure failing, that shows a development failing and will have to be addressed.
Republican Senator Mike Lee says ‘democracy isn’t the objective’ in baffling tweet
via @BostonGlobe - October 8
Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah is facing a backlash after questioning the idea of democracy in an overnight tweet.
“Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are,” Lee tweeted overnight Thursday, misspelling the word “prosperity.” “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
It was unclear what Lee was responding to, but it was one of several tweets about democracy he sent while live tweeting the vice presidential debate between Senator Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence earlier in the evening. ...
October 8, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 7,797,452)
Deaths ( 217,190)
Trump, in total reversal, is telling allies he is, in fact, interested in a broad stimulus deal
CNN - October 8
President Donald Trump, in a head-spinning reversal, has told allies he's interested in a large-scale stimulus deal, according to a person with direct knowledge of his comments.
The person stressed it's unclear what, exactly, Trump's vision of a comprehensive deal would entail and there remains significant hurdles -- and skepticism -- when it comes to reaching an agreement through talks that have been largely stuck in the same place for several months.
But for Trump, who faced dropping markets and criticism from within his own party for his decision to abruptly end talks earlier this week, it marks another turn in the long-shot negotiations.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in a call with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday, said Trump was now interested in coming back to the table on a comprehensive agreement, according to Drew Hammill, Pelosi's deputy chief of staff. But even that was called into question by Pelosi on the call, who noted that another White House official had just earlier Thursday afternoon "contradicted that assertion." But Mnuchin assured the California Democrat the President was interested in a comprehensive deal and Pelosi, on a call with her leadership team later in the afternoon, said she believed the talks were back on, according to a source familiar with the call. ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/opinion/donald-trump-economy.html
October 8, 2020
Trump Is Killing the Economy Out of Spite
So what will he do if he loses the election?
By Paul Krugman
Last year Donald Trump called Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person.” Actually, she isn’t — but he is.
Trump’s vindictiveness has become a major worry as the election approaches. He has already signaled that he won’t accept the result if he loses, which seems increasingly likely though not certain. Nobody knows what chaos, possibly including violence, he may unleash if the election doesn’t go his way.
Even aside from that concern, however, a defeated Trump would still be president for two and a half months. Would he spend that time acting destructively, in effect taking revenge on America for rejecting him?
Well, we got a preview of what a lame-duck Trump presidency might look like Tuesday. Trump hasn’t even lost yet, but he abruptly cut off talks on an economic relief package millions of Americans desperately need (although as of Thursday he seemed to be backtracking). And his motivation seems to have been sheer spite.
Why do we need economic relief? Despite several months of large employment gains, America has only partly recovered from horrific job losses in the early months of the pandemic — and the pace of recovery has slowed to a relative crawl. All indications are that the economy will remain weak for many months, maybe even years.
Given this grim reality, the federal government should still be providing the kind of relief it offered in the first few months of the crisis: generous aid to the unemployed and loans that help keep small businesses afloat. Otherwise we’ll soon be seeing millions of families unable to pay their rent, hundreds of thousands of businesses going under.
In addition, state and local governments — which, unlike the federal government, are generally required to balance their budgets — are in desperate fiscal straits, because the pandemic slump has drastically reduced their revenues. They need a lot of aid, soon, or they will be forced into deep cuts in employment and services. We’ve already lost around 900,000 jobs in state and local education....
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-09/China-officially-joins-COVAX-vaccine-facility-Url8WVbWHS/index.html
Oct0ber 9, 2020
China officially joins COVAX vaccine facility
China has signed an agreement with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to officially join the global vaccine initiative known as COVAX, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Friday.
Hua said this is an important step China has taken to uphold the concept of a shared community of health for all and to honor its commitment to turn COVID-19 vaccines into a global public good.
Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic still poses a severe threat to the safety and health of people in all countries. China continues to focus on ensuring that developing countries have equal access to appropriate, safe and effective vaccines.
"To that end, we have solemnly pledged to make vaccines developed and deployed by China a global public good, which will be provided to developing countries as a priority," Hua said.
China has maintained close communication with COVAX with a positive attitude towards joining it, Hua said, noting that even when China is leading the world with several vaccines in advanced stages of R&D and with ample production capacity, it still decided to join COVAX.
"We are taking this concrete step to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines, especially to developing countries, and hope more capable countries will also join and support COVAX. China will also strengthen vaccine cooperation with relevant countries through the COVAX network," said the spokesperson.
China will continue to work together with COVAX partners and contribute its share to the global fight against the pandemic to safeguard all human beings' safety and health, Hua said.
On the afternoon's news briefing, the spokeswoman told the media that China will purchase COVID-19 vaccines for 1% of its population, or 15 million people, via the program, a move that shows the country's participation in the program and accommodates interests of other countries.
The first batch of vaccine available under the plan will be in short supply, so there would be less for other countries if China had secured doses for a large number of its 1.4 billion people, Hua explained....
October 8, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 7,833,763)
Deaths ( 217,738)
India
Cases ( 6,903,812)
Deaths ( 106,521)
Mexico
Cases ( 799,188)
Deaths ( 82,726)
France
Cases ( 671,638)
Deaths ( 32,521)
UK
Cases ( 561,815)
Deaths ( 42,592)
Germany
Cases ( 315,514)
Deaths ( 9,667)
Canada
Cases ( 175,559)
Deaths ( 9,557)
China
Cases ( 85,500)
Deaths ( 4,634)
October 8, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
US ( 657)
Mexico ( 640)
UK ( 625)
France ( 498)
Canada ( 253)
Germany ( 115)
India ( 77)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 10.4%, 7.6% and 4.8% for Mexico, the United Kingdom and France respectively.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-09/Chinese-mainland-reports-21-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-Urhm8ZP5Mk/index.html
October 9, 2020
Chinese mainland reports21 new COVID-19 cases
The Chinese mainland on Thursday registered 21 new COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the National Health Commission announced on Friday.
This is the 54th consecutive day with zero domestic transmissions reported on the Chinese mainland. No deaths related to the coronavirus were reported over the previous 24 hours, while 15 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The COVID-19 tally on the Chinese mainland stands at 85,521 infections and 4,634 fatalities, while 357 asymptomatic patients remain under medical observation.
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-09/Chinese-mainland-reports-21-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-Urhm8ZP5Mk/img/345728e3aab24b8689fb50df1b001179/345728e3aab24b8689fb50df1b001179.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-09/Chinese-mainland-reports-21-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-Urhm8ZP5Mk/img/8c1e3a26863e4285a5e1d1273e3a521c/8c1e3a26863e4285a5e1d1273e3a521c.jpeg
[ There has been no coronavirus death on the Chinese mainland since May 17. There has been no community or domestic coronavirus case for 54 days. Since June began there have been only 2 limited community clusters of infections, in Beijing and Urumqi in Xinjiang, both of which were contained with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine, and both outbreaks ended in a few weeks. Imported coronavirus cases are caught at entry points with required testing and immediate quarantine. Asymptomatic cases are all quarantined.
The flow of imported cases to China is low, but has been persistent. There are as a result 206 active imported coronavirus cases on the Chinese mainland, but of which only 2 cases are classed as serious or critical. ]
October 9, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 7,863,045)
Deaths ( 218,137)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/business/coronavirus-sweden-social-welfare.html
October 8, 2020
Pandemic Exposes Holes in Sweden’s Generous Social Welfare State
Decades of budget-cutting and market reforms laid the ground for a wave of death in Swedish nursing homes.
By Peter S. Goodman and Erik Augustin Palm
In the popular imagination, Sweden does not seem like the sort of country prone to accepting the mass death of grandparents to conserve resources in a pandemic.
Swedes pay some of the highest taxes on earth in exchange for extensive government services, including state-furnished health care and education, plus generous cash assistance for those who lose jobs. When a child is born, the parents receive 480 days of parental leave to use between them.
Yet among the nearly 6,000 people whose deaths have been linked to the coronavirus in Sweden, 2,694, or more than 45 percent, had been among the country’s most vulnerable citizens — those living in nursing homes.
That tragedy is in part the story of how Sweden has, over decades, gradually yet relentlessly downgraded its famously generous social safety net....
October 9, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 7,894,478)
Deaths ( 218,648)
India
Cases ( 6,977,008)
Deaths ( 107,450)
Mexico
Cases ( 804,488)
Deaths ( 83,096)
France
Cases ( 691,977)
Deaths ( 32,583)
UK
Cases ( 575,679)
Deaths ( 42,679)
Germany
Cases ( 320,478)
Deaths ( 9,687)
Canada
Cases ( 178,117)
Deaths ( 9,585)
China
Cases ( 85,521)
Deaths ( 4,634)
October 9, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
US ( 659)
Mexico ( 643)
UK ( 628)
France ( 499)
Canada ( 253)
Germany ( 116)
India ( 78)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 10.3%, 7.4% and 4.7% for Mexico, the United Kingdom and France respectively.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-10/Chinese-mainland-reports-15-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-Ut02Mlzvs4/index.html
October 10, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 15 new COVID-19 cases
The Chinese mainland on Friday registered 15 new COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the National Health Commission announced on Saturday.
No deaths related to the coronavirus were reported over the previous 24 hours, while 15 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The COVID-19 tally on the Chinese mainland stands at 85,536 infections and 4,634 fatalities, while 380 asymptomatic patients remain under medical observation.
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-10/Chinese-mainland-reports-15-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-Ut02Mlzvs4/img/4600b4ed7a2946d2bc85c18318e02a20/4600b4ed7a2946d2bc85c18318e02a20.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-10/Chinese-mainland-reports-15-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-Ut02Mlzvs4/img/82c1294e7ee54d689d1739d0dbde4abd/82c1294e7ee54d689d1739d0dbde4abd.jpeg
[ There has been no coronavirus death on the Chinese mainland since May 17. There has been no community or domestic coronavirus case for 55 days. Since June began there have been only 2 limited community clusters of infections, in Beijing and Urumqi in Xinjiang, both of which were contained with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine, and both outbreaks ended in a few weeks. Imported coronavirus cases are caught at entry points with required testing and immediate quarantine. Asymptomatic cases are all quarantined.
The flow of imported cases to China is low, but has been persistent. There are as a result 206 active imported coronavirus cases on the Chinese mainland, but of which only 2 cases are classed as serious or critical. ]
October 10, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 289,799)
Deaths ( 1,914)
Deaths per million ( 208)
-----------------------------------
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
Having apparently approached a containment of the coronavirus in June, the Israeli government incautiously opened schools and businesses, and the result has been a persistent community infection spread contributing to what are now 289,799 cases in the small country as compared to 85,536 in all through all of mainland China.
Israel has unfortunately more than three-times the number of coronavirus cases in mainland China. Paul Krugman noticed the Israeli “disaster” on September 14 when there were 160,000 coronavirus cases. The per capita case rate is startlingly high. The persisting difficulty in limiting a new spread of infections in so developed a country has become startling to me. Obviously there is a profound public health infrastructure failing, that shows a development failing and will have to be addressed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/well/live/covid-19-hospital-rehabilitation.html
October 8, 2020
After a Hospital Stay for Covid, Patients May Face Months of Rehabilitation
Many patients who were critically ill with Covid-19 face arduous recoveries, often requiring extensive physical rehabilitation.
By Anahad O’Connor
Not long ago, Allen Washington was a busy executive who traveled the country on business trips while trying to stay healthy and active, walking up to two miles a day for exercise.
But that came to an end when he developed Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, in June. Mr. Washington spent three weeks lying in a hospital bed in a medically induced coma. When he woke up, he discovered his body had deteriorated. He had bedsores and was too weak to walk or stand. He had nerve damage in his legs, neck and shoulders. He suffered from memory loss and kidney failure.
While he survived Covid-19, Mr. Washington, 60, is now grappling with the aftermath of the disease. To regain his strength and motor skills, he undergoes physical and occupational therapy at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago, which specializes in helping people who have been debilitated by Covid-19 and other illnesses. Since leaving the hospital, he has had to relearn simple tasks that became too difficult because of his memory loss and muscle weakness, like walking up stairs, tying his shoes and getting dressed in the morning.
“I came back from death’s door, and now I have a lot of work to do to get better,” he said.
Even after surviving Covid-19, many patients who were critically ill face long and arduous recoveries, often requiring extensive physical rehabilitation. The problems they encounter are wide ranging....
October 9, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 7,894,478)
Deaths ( 218,648)
Serious, Critical Cases ( 14,777)
[ Notice the number of coronavirus patients listed as "serious, critical." This has been the situation for months. ]
October 10, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 7,945,505)
Deaths ( 219,282)
India
Cases ( 7,051,543)
Deaths ( 108,371)
Mexico
Cases ( 809,751)
Deaths ( 83,507)
France
Cases ( 718,873)
Deaths ( 32,637)
UK
Cases ( 590,844)
Deaths ( 42,760)
Germany
Cases ( 323,453)
Deaths ( 9,691)
Canada
Cases ( 180,179)
Deaths ( 9,608)
China
Cases ( 85,536)
Deaths ( 4,634)
October 11, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
US ( 661)
Mexico ( 647)
UK ( 629)
France ( 500)
Canada ( 254)
Germany ( 116)
India ( 78)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 10.3%, 7.2% and 4.5% for Mexico, the United Kingdom and France respectively.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-11/Chinese-mainland-reports-21-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-UuDlzlua1q/index.html
October 11, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 21 new COVID-19 cases
The Chinese mainland on Saturday registered 21 new COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the National Health Commission announced on Sunday.
No deaths related to the coronavirus were reported over the previous 24 hours, while 9 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The COVID-19 tally on the Chinese mainland stands at 85,557 infections and 4,634 fatalities, while 381 asymptomatic patients remain under medical observation.
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-11/Chinese-mainland-reports-21-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-UuDlzlua1q/img/8bd38a702d704576b7fb0f07d8aaa081/8bd38a702d704576b7fb0f07d8aaa081.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-11/Chinese-mainland-reports-21-new-COVID-19-cases-all-from-overseas-UuDlzlua1q/img/92721728d1934487b54c35d10233ac4c/92721728d1934487b54c35d10233ac4c.jpeg
[ There has been no coronavirus death on the Chinese mainland since May 17. There has been no community or domestic coronavirus case for 56 days. Since June began there have been only 2 limited community clusters of infections, in Beijing and Urumqi in Xinjiang, both of which were contained with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine, and both outbreaks ended in a few weeks. Imported coronavirus cases are caught at entry points with required testing and immediate quarantine. Asymptomatic cases are all quarantined.
The flow of imported cases to China is low, but has been persistent. There are as a result 218 active imported coronavirus cases on the Chinese mainland, none of which cases are classed as serious or critical. ]
The Swamp That Trump Built
NY Times - October 10
A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington
to his family’s hotels and resorts — and earned millions
as a gatekeeper to his own administration.
... Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.
But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.
The tax records — along with membership rosters for Mar-a-Lago and the president’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., as well as other sources — reveal how much money this new line of business was worth. ...
October 11, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 118,477)
Deaths ( 2,173)
Deaths per million ( 200)
Cuba
Cases ( 5,978)
Deaths ( 123)
Deaths per million ( 11)
These last 50 years, the Dominican Republic has had the fastest per capita GDP growth in all the Americas. Cuba has been subject to fierce economic sanctions by the US these last 50 years. Nonetheless, Cuba has built fine public health institutions that have allowed for a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than the US as well as the Dominican Republic. The coronavirus experience of Cuba reflects the decades of public health emphasis.
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