YOUR MEDIA ELITE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: NBC News anchor confusing a chart of the countries with the most testing with a chart of all countries’ testing. You would think he would have noticed the absence of Japan, the UK, etc.
Archive for 2020
April 8, 2020
LET’S: Let’s Zoom Xi. He has questions to answer.
China caused this disaster, but now wants to claim the credit for saving us from it. Liberally exporting testing kits (some of which don’t work) and face masks (most of which probably do, but I still got ours from Taiwan, thank you very much), the Chinese government is intent of snatching victory from the jaws of a defeat it inflicted.
The worst of it is that some people in the western world are so unhinged by Trump derangement syndrome, or so corrupted by Chinese money or, in the case of Italy, so disillusioned by the less than altruistic responses of their fellow Europeans to their exceptionally severe COVID-19 outbreak, that they actually swallow this toxic stream of hypocrisy and mendacity. Was anything dumber this year than the mayor of Florence’s “Hug a Chinese” campaign in February?
Let us try to restore sanity with five questions that we should ask Chinese President Xi Jinping the next time we Zoom, FaceTime, Google Hangout or WeChat him.
Read the whole thing.
LOTS OF DEREGULATORY LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM CORONAVIRUS: Don’t expect to read about it in the MSM but lots of bureaucratic red tape in the health care field is being waived to speed the official response to the coronavirus pandemic. Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) are compiling lists, pointing to additional areas for action and making the case for permanent reforms.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Will a Coronavirus Quarantine Baseball Season Be Awesome or Really Weird? “Major League Baseball is teasing me now. Ed Morrissey wrote a post yesterday at our sister site HotAir about a plan that baseball officials are working on to be able to stage a bizarro baseball season in this most bizarro of years.”
It’s a crazy idea, but it just might work. And crazy baseball is better than no baseball.
WE CERTAINLY NEED AN INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION, AND NOBODY TRUSTS THE WHO TO BE HONEST ABOUT CHINA:
GROCERY WORKERS ARE KEY HEROES, AND DESERVE BETTER PROTECTION. Front-line fatality: Market Basket worker dies after battling coronavirus.
As of Wednesday at 10am, Germany had more than 107,600 confirmed coronavirus cases, according to Johns Hopkins University figures.
They differ slightly from Robert Koch Institute (RKI) figures which only take into account electronically transmitted figures from Germany’s states and are updated once a day.
The actual number of Covid-19 cases is thought to be higher. Depending on an individual state’s policies, many other possible cases may not have been tested because they show only mild symptoms or have not been in contact with a known case.
There have also been more than 2,000 deaths, with increasingly more cases being reported in old people’s homes. More than 38,200 people are reported to have fully recovered.
According to RKI chief Wieler, the so-called reproduction rate of infections stood at around 1.3 on Wednesday April 8th. This number indicates how many more people a person with coronavirus infects on average. The goal in Germany is to keep the value below 1.0.
Stay tuned.
ITALY: “Infections continue to slow as Italy records 604 more coronavirus deaths.
The number of patients in intensive care also decreased by 106 to 3.792 on Tuesday, and 1.555 patients have recovered from the virus in 24 hours, with recoveries rising to a total of over 24,000.
There were 604 new fatalities reported.
In total, 17,127 lives have now been lost to the virus in Italy, and there have been 135.586 cases in total since the outbrk began, according to official figures.
If you look at lives lost as a percentage of total cases, the death rate looks pretty awful.
SPAIN: Spain’s daily coronavirus death toll rises again. ” The number of new infections in Spain grew to 146,690, up from 140,510, it added. The number of new infections rose by 4.4 percent to 146,690, the health ministry said, as Spain has ramped up its testing for the disease. The number of daily deaths, which peaked on Thursday at 950, rose for the first time on Tuesday after falling for four straight days. But the rate of increase in both deaths and new infections on Wednesday was largely in line with that recorded the previous day, and half of what was recorded just a week ago.”
FRANCE: ” French health authorities run daily briefings and the figures from Tuesday night make for difficult reading – the death toll now stands at 10,328, up from 4,503 a week ago. Between Monday and Tuesday 607 patients died in hospital and 7,131 people are seriously ill in intensive care.”
A total of 687 people have died with the coronavirus in Sweden, according to the Public Health Agency’s latest update (presented at 2pm), and there have been 8,419 confirmed cases so far. A total of 678 people have so far been in intensive care, and around 469 patients are currently in intensive care. Sweden is currently seeing an average of around 45 deaths a day, said state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.
Tegnell however told the press conference that there are signs that Sweden, or particularly Stockholm, may have reached “more of a plateau situation than before”. “But we are starting to see an increase in other parts of the country,” he said.
The department for thoracic surgery at Linköping University Hospital in Sweden tested all of its staff, around 50, for the coronavirus and found that around five to ten tested positive without obvious symptoms or with only very mild symptoms, such as a light headache or a slightly blocked nose.
A Public Health Agency survey is currently under way to investigate how many people in society may be carrying the coronavirus. But asked about the example from Linköping University Hospital, the agency’s analyst Karin Tegmark Wisell told Swedish radio: “This underlines that paying attention to symptoms is not enough, but you have to observe social distancing to as great an extent as possible.”
Yes. Lack of symptoms is great for you, but deadly for others.
SURPRISINGLY, THE EU BUREAUCRACY DISAPPOINTS IN A CRISIS: ‘Extremely Disappointed’: EU Science Chief Resigns In Stinging Criticism Of Coronavirus Response.
BUREAUCRACY KILLS: List: 30 regulations that stymied Trump’s virus response.
OLD HABITS DIE HARD: CBS News Goes Full Fake but Accurate With Correction on Viral Crying Nurse Video.
MODELS ARE MODELS: A Popular COVID-19 Model Just Got Rosier. Don’t Read Too Much Into It.. It’s important to remember that when you like the news they’re providing, just as much as when you don’t.
Models are always perfect, so long as you have perfect data and a perfect understanding of the processes that are being modeled.
Related: Modeling coronavirus: ‘Uncertainty is the only certainty.’
THE BOMBING BEGINS IN FIVE MINUTES: Broad coalition forming to close China’s bat, cat, and dog meat markets.
(Classical reference in the headline.)
UNEXPECTEDLY: Report: American Companies Are Leaving China.
A FRIEND IN ITALY TELLS ME THAT’S HAPPENING THERE; SHE’LL BE HELPING DISTRIBUTE THEM DOOR-TO-DOOR TOMORROW: Israel Makes Masks in Public Compulsory.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: All China’s Lies. “A roundup on what China is lying about today.”
If this becomes a regular feature, it could keep Battleswarm Blog very, very busy.