Coronavirus - worldwide breaking news, discussion, stats, updates and more

[sparkybird]

I have just seen video from India with thousands of people milling around outside trying to leave New Delhi - it seems they are directly flaunting the country's stay at home instruction.

A friend of mine in Kerala sent m a pic of a newspaper, basically people leaving the big cities as there is no work and having to walk 'home' (I guess to extended family) with kids, often over 100km. No support from govt

 

[donkyboy]

Bastards at Fox:

 

[weltweit]

So, Trump is threatening to quarantine New York.

the state's governor, Andrew Cuomo, said he had not discussed such measures with the president.

"I didn't speak to him about any quarantine," he told reporters shortly after he had spoken with Mr Trump by phone.

"I haven't had those conversations," he added. "I don't even know what that means."
..
New York state has the highest number of cases of Covid-19 in the US.

Speaking before he left to visit a Navy hospital ship in Virginia, Mr Trump said that "New Jersey [and] certain parts of Connecticut" could also be quarantined under the measures.
..
"They're having problems down in Florida. A lot of New Yorkers are going down. We don't want that," he said as he left the White House.

Similar quarantine measures in other countries have involved widespread closures, bans on public gatherings and major restrictions on travel in and out of the affected area.

From Trump 'considering quarantine on New York'

Florida governor Ron DeSantis says his administration is looking into ways to secure the state border amid the coronavirus pandemic, saying “it’s not fair to the people of Florida” that outsiders have continued to flock to the state.

“I don’t as governor have the ability to shut down flights,” he says during his daily briefing. “But I think it’s an issue when people who are in the hot zone, then leaving the hot zone, to come to different parts of the country.
..
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Florida has soared to 3,763, more than five times the total of 706 from a week ago. Eight more deaths were reported overnight on Saturday, bringing the overall total to 54.

from US coronavirus live: Trump floats three-state quarantine as New York deaths rise to 728

It looks like New York and surrounds is a big hot spot and nearby states including Florida are complaining of New Yorkers fleeing and bringing their infection with them. It seems Trump hasn't yet discussed the possibility of a quarantine with NY governor Cuomo but will be speaking to him about now as a hospital ship is being sent to New York to assist with casualties of the coronavirus.

My bet is Trump will do the quarantine, NY is America's Wuhan at the moment and threatens to spread the virus wider across the states. Will know more later or in the next days.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Whether it should be done or not, and there is a case for something - it's really not so different from European countries closing their borders - it is absolutely bonkers that the state and federal govt aren't working together to make it happen. I fear for the US - as Katrina did before, natural disasters and crises expose its vicious system of government for what it is. States bidding against each other for equipment and driving prices up is another case in point to illustrate the dysfunction.

 

[weltweit]

Yes, at the moment it seems infected New Yorkers can just get on a flight to Florida as easy as we might catch a bus. Wuhan was a travel hub also until travel was stopped, somehow the Americans will have to prevent New Yorkers travelling by air road or sea and a quarantine could be the most sensible way. Otherwise other places in the US will face also becoming hot spots themselves.

 

[bimble]

Yes and it seems the most aggressive self isolation demanded by a government thus far. Perhaps it is no surprise people are ignoring it.

They are not ignoring it. Millions of people are trying to get to their homes (labourers working in far away states from their villages) with no transport no money and no food.
twitter full of images like this.

 

[donkyboy]

Yes, at the moment it seems infected New Yorkers can just get on a flight to Florida as easy as we might catch a bus. Wuhan was a travel hub also until travel was stopped, somehow the Americans will have to prevent New Yorkers travelling by air road or sea and a quarantine could be the most sensible way. Otherwise other places in the US will face also becoming hot spots themselves.

we have a family holiday booked for Orlando Florida. Flying out on May 15. We haven't cancelled yet and are trying to leave it till end of April to see if situation improves...

 

[agricola]

A friend of mine in Kerala sent m a pic of a newspaper, basically people leaving the big cities as there is no work and having to walk 'home' (I guess to extended family) with kids, often over 100km. No support from govt

its beyond horrifying what that decision has done to people

 

[weltweit]

we have a family holiday booked for Orlando Florida. Flying out on May 15. We haven't cancelled yet and are trying to leave it till end of April to see if situation improves...

Somehow I doubt you will be going on that holiday.
If it were me and I could get my money back I probably would.

 

[William of Walworth]

As India has been raised ....

I can't even begin to imagine how horrific things must be in India right now
I've actually been avoiding reading about the lock-down there, to be honest .....
How the hell can it even be enforced at all, in such a poverty-stricken, densely populated country???

 

[weltweit]

I think it may be equally desperate in many developing countries, and as Bill Gates noted, the developed world will have to help the developing world to protect themselves from this and find ways to go through it, otherwise the world won't recover to anything like the global village it used to be.

The potential for misery and suffering and death is very big for developing countries.

 

[zahir]

Coronavirus pandemic simulation, New York, October 2019

Pandemic simulation exercise spotlights massive preparedness gap

Event 201 simulation hosted by university's Center for Health Security envisions a fast-spreading coronavirus with a devastating impact

hub.jhu.edu

With each fictional pandemic Johns Hopkins experts have designed, the takeaway lesson is the same: We are nowhere near prepared.
"Once you're in the midst of a severe pandemic, your options are very limited," says Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. "The greatest good can happen with pre-planning."
That center's latest pandemic simulation, Event 201, dropped participants right in the midst of an uncontrolled coronavirus outbreak that was spreading like wildfire out of South America to wreak worldwide havoc. As fictional newscasters from "GNN" narrated, the immune-resistant virus (nicknamed CAPS) was crippling trade and travel, sending the global economy into freefall. Social media was rampant with rumors and misinformation, governments were collapsing, and citizens were revolting.

 

[weltweit]

Coronavirus pandemic simulation, New York, October 2019

Pandemic simulation exercise spotlights massive preparedness gap

Event 201 simulation hosted by university's Center for Health Security envisions a fast-spreading coronavirus with a devastating impact

hub.jhu.edu

What a find that is!! And did policymakers act on the findings of the simulation apart from buying smallpox vaccines I don't think they did. There was also a simulation of a viral attack in London in I think 2016 and a conclusion from that simulation? The UK doesn't have enough ventilators, also not acted on.

 

[zahir]

More videos of the Event 201 simulation.

Event 201 | Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY.

www.centerforhealthsecurity.org

 

[D]

This came in the post today.

 

[weltweit]

Bill Gates in a CNN interview is urging a shutdown across the whole of the USA for a period to stop the virus. Doing things state by state or county by county won't work because if there are just 100 infected in a neighbouring area which are not stopped they will just re-infect their surroundings as they go through their exponential growth phase. He makes a compelling argument.

 

[mx wcfc]

As India has been raised ....

I can't even begin to imagine how horrific things must be in India right now
I've actually been avoiding reading about the lock-down there, to be honest .....
How the hell can it even be enforced at all, in such a poverty-stricken, densely populated country???

mrs mx is getting texts from family in India. It ain't good.

 

[circleline]

Not quoting posts here because, but:

The blokes being more susceptible to the virus must surely be down to the simple fact that they socialise more and work more at close contact than women do, generally..

(Simpleton post)

 

[mx wcfc]

Not quoting posts here because, but:

The blokes being more susceptible to the virus must surely be down to the simple fact that they socialise more and work more at close contact than women do, generally..

(Simpleton post)

I'm baffled by that. No one is socialising with anyone at the moment. And women work just as much in healthcare etc, if not more so, than men. What's your point?

 

[circleline]

I'm baffled by that. No one is socialising with anyone at the moment. And women work just as much in healthcare etc, if not more so, than men. What's your point?

World statistics. And of course we're not (socialising) at the moment.

 

[two sheds]

Not quoting posts here because, but:

The blokes being more susceptible to the virus must surely be down to the simple fact that they socialise more and work more at close contact than women do, generally..

(Simpleton post)

You made that up

 

[weltweit]

Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General on BBC Hard Talk making the case for G20 countries to work together first on their own defeat of coronavirus and then for developing countries. Asking for a war economy and a coordinated international response. Arguing that many countries are not following WHO guidelines, and it is difficult to bring countries together even against global issues like covid-19 and climate change.

He talks so fast it is hard to mentally keep up. Basically arguing for more international co-operation because relations between the big powers have never been so disfunctional.

It is interesting to me, what he was saying was making sense, but he talked so fast that he didn't convey confidence, I think if he spoke more slowly he would be a better communicator and probably a better Secretary General also.

 

[little_legs]

It's going to get ugly

 

[weltweit]

Apparently Trump has decided against a quarantine of NY.

 

[D]

Recommended viewing. This public hospital was notoriously overstressed BEFORE this epidemic.

 

[Yossarian]

Yes, at the moment it seems infected New Yorkers can just get on a flight to Florida as easy as we might catch a bus. Wuhan was a travel hub also until travel was stopped, somehow the Americans will have to prevent New Yorkers travelling by air road or sea and a quarantine could be the most sensible way. Otherwise other places in the US will face also becoming hot spots themselves.

I'm not sure how effective quarantining New York would be at this point, unless travel between all states and cities in the US was also halted - when Wuhan was locked down, there were 444 confirmed coronavirus cases in Hubei province and 571 across all of China. Florida alone now has more than six times that many cases.

According to the Johns Hopkins tracker, most cities and larger towns across the US now have as many coronavirus cases as entire Chinese provinces did at the height of the outbreak - according to China's official numbers, at least.

 

[Anju]

There was a New York newspaper editor on BBC last night saying that Trump only backed down on quarantine when the state governor told him it would cause the stock market to drop. On the same show another guest said that there was no joint announcement following the G7 remote meeting because Trump wanted the virus to be referred to as the Wuhan virus.

He's going to be responsible for a lot of deaths in the US and ultimately worldwide if America isn't in a position to help elsewhere in the world.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

It’s possible but unlikely. Trump will be given a pass by his fans at the election because he’s working so hard to preserve the economy/their personal wealth and the pandemic is foreign/not his fault/couldn’t be predicted. Added to this the bonkers end-times hard core Xians who see him as an agent of their god: this “plague” will confirm their belief that it’s all panning out as they predict, so strengthen their support of Trump.

But also, it’s hard for anyone who’s not witnessed it first hand to understand how thoroughly and intractably the right hate the disenfranchised. I don’t just mean they’re politically averse, I mean they have a deeply emotional sense of fear and disgust for anyone who hasn’t successfully climbed aboard the American Dream bandwagon. Even those who are themselves poor and disenfranchised are utterly opposed to anyone who doesn’t demonstrate their adherence to the story. These adherants are going to become very much more entrenched and defensive of their myth in the coming months. They will defend their own creation story identify (pioneering, independent, self-sufficient, loyal to family and nationhood (define “nation” as applicable) ) ahead of any other factor.

They will see this catastrophe as inevitable, a reckoning, a test of the fittest, an opportunity for cleansing society. They will shrug at the horror, tuck in and circle their wagons around their own and arm themselves against anyone else.

The sane and kind are in the minority in America. And it is a kind of madness, this stubborn blind inability to connect with the suffering of anyone outsider heir own experience. It’s what’s made them so successful around the world, but it’s the secret hollow in the heart of their culture.

Nothing will make them more caring, because that necessitates the dismantling of their self identity.

Well, it might happen if their self identify is destroyed by this pandemic, but then we’d be witnessing some kind of social apocalypse.

Wait... Isn’t that where I started ....? And round we go.






I'm deeply concerned about this.

I have friends and family all over America, including New York City and NY state. Fortunately a lot of them have been ignoring Trump's hubris and voluntarily locking down for weeks.

This is going to be such a shit show. Millions of invisible disenfranchised unsupported destitute people, many of them with opiate addictions and serious comorbities, no kind of supple widespread public health care system. People will be using brute force and guns to try to access help and to defend their own homes and properties.

In relative terms the UK may get off lightly (at least in the first wave). For developing countries, places under the cosh of war, poverty, abuse of power, it's inevitable that this is going to be harrowing. It seems peculiar and ironically fitting that the most powerful most developed most equipped most advanced yaddah yaddah nation, who has repeatedly and ignorantly stomped all over everything for so long could find themselves in the same kind of deep danger as those nations they've been stomping on.




As an aside, with regards public health care:

Back in 1986 I was travelling around America in my early 20s. I got sick in New Orleans and went to the public hospital. I hold an American passport so I was eligible for basic health care. It was a normal February day, no pandemic or other disaster (although at that time NO had a very high murder rate, there had already been more than 30 murders in the city, so one every day that year). The waiting room was overcrowded, queues down the corridors. I waited for 2 hours to be triaged and another 5 hours to be seen by a doctor, who assessed me, prescribed antibiotics and discharged me in less than 10 minutes. In that 7 hours I saw 2 gunshot wounds coming in, people in respiratory distress struggling and gasping, people in wheelchairs, and someone died in the waiting room. They didn’t even put a curtain around him while he died, they laid him on the floor and held him and then they put a blanket over him and called for a porter with a gurney.

This was the mid eighties and pre-Katrina so hopefully there are much better hospital facilities there now. But small more isolated towns will still have limited facilities. This pandemic is going to be utterly overwhelming for poor America while Amerikka does a better job of taking taking care of itself.

I doubt it. I was at a training course about 12 years ago. At MIT in Pittsburgh.
Large university city. The hotel was quite busy full of sick peoples. Because they come to the university hospitals for treatment. Unable to afford healthcare normally.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

Opinion | Trump Meets Nemesis, Punisher of Hubris (Published 2020)

A virus exposes the folly of what the president’s base believes.

www.nytimes.com

From that article:
“The word “nemesis” is too often misused. We tend to think of it as meaning a powerful, nefarious, but ultimately conquerable enemy: Vader; Voldemort; the Wicked Witch of the West. But the original Nemesis was not a villain. She was a goddess — an implacable agent of justice who gives the arrogant, insolent and wicked what they deserve.

As a matter of public health, nobody should ever suggest that the novel coronavirus represents any form of justice, divine or otherwise. It’s a virus that must be stopped.

As a matter of politics, however, it’s hard to think of a mechanism so uniquely well-suited for exposing the hubris, ignorance, prejudice, mendacity and catastrophic self-regard of the president who is supposed to lead us through this crisis.”

 

[weltweit]

I'm not sure how effective quarantining New York would be at this point, unless travel between all states and cities in the US was also halted - when Wuhan was locked down, there were 444 confirmed coronavirus cases in Hubei province and 571 across all of China. Florida alone now has more than six times that many cases.

According to the Johns Hopkins tracker, most cities and larger towns across the US now have as many coronavirus cases as entire Chinese provinces did at the height of the outbreak - according to China's official numbers, at least.

View attachment 203850

That is a pretty grim graphic. I guess now the only option is to act nationally rather than locally.