Life long Maverick: Seen it ALLl in 40 yrs of PROF. exposure as invest analyst/port mgr on the FRONT lines vs iHub Msg Bds.
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Confirmed Coronavirus Cases Are Growing Faster In The United States Than Any Other Country In The World
Forbes: Trevor
United States Than Any Other Country In The World
Trevor Nace
It is no secret that coronavirus testing in the United States has lagged compare to other countries. Limited testing in the United States potentially downplays the numbers below, leaving the true number of cases unknown.
In the past week, the number of tests conducted in the United States has increased, however, the data for the past couple days has not been compiled yet. This could skew the numbers to look like coronavirus is growing faster, yet we are simply testing more.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to capture the true number of coronavirus cases at any given point. The numbers show the minimum number of COVID-19 cases and are highly dependent on two factors: population and rate of testing
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2020/03/20/coronavirus-is-growing-faster-in-the-united-states-than-any-other-country-in-the-world/
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FEMA issues ‘Major Disaster Declaration’ for New York over coronavirus
By Ebony Bowden and Vincent Barone
March 20, 2020 | 9:21pm
https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/fema-issues-major-disaster-declaration-for-new-york-over-coronavirus/
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
“Without adequate protection, more of our hospital staff could become ill, which would mean there wouldn’t be people to care for patients,” said Nancy Foster, the American Hospital Association’s vice president of quality and patient safety policy.
Some hospitals are down to just a day or two of personal protective equipment, she said.
The AP found that in the past month, hand sanitizer and swab imports both dropped by 40%, N95 mask imports were down 55%, and surgical gowns, typically sourced from China, were at near normal levels because the sourcing was shifted to Honduras.“
https://apnews.com/6d9382c1e8ee36f9ed1a4dfe7815ceb1
NYC is stressed out as cases exploded to over 7,100 from ~3,000 the day before:
“Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the sweeping ramp up of restrictions on movement on Friday as the novel coronavirus spread through the state, with New York having the highest number of confirmed cases in the nation.”
https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/2880695001
This is THE REALITY setting in versus those in DENIAL!
Goldman Sachs released their updated 2020 Qtrly US GDP:’
1Q-6%
2Q -24%
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Coronavirus: Fauci warns Americans will be home for ‘several weeks’ as he contradicts Trump’s hopes for miracle malaria drug
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-anthony-fauci-social-distancing-several-weeks-malaria-drug-a9414091.html
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As chloroquine is already FDA-approved for the treatment of malaria, it does not have to undergo the traditional rounds of safety testing that a new drug would have to, before it could be put to market.
Inverse has contacted the FDA seeking confirmation that the agency is now approving the use of the drug as a treatment for COVID-19.
But at the time of writing, Bloomberg news has reported that the FDA has not officially approved the use of the drug for COVID-19.
The confusion is symptomatic of the drug's incredibly rapid rise from obscurity to national news.
Gregory Rigano is a co-author of the Google document. Rigano is not a scientist. He's a lawyer who has spoken about chloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment three times on Fox News this week.
Rigano tells Inverse he has been organizing scientists across the biopharmaceutical world for over a decade. He makes big claims — including that chloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin (used to treat infections like pink eye) are "cures" for COVID-19. He also says he is working with scientist Didier Raoult, the director of the Mediterranean Institute of Infection, on a chloroquine-based treatment. Inverse contacted Raoult for comment multiple times, but he did not respond to repeated requests
"The authors pointed out that this study is preliminary in nature and there are limitations."
The budding research on chloroquine suggests that it may be time to take it seriously. But the way that research has gained mass attention is unorthodox, to say the least, and moving at lightning speed.
Gregory Poland is a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic. He's the director of the Mayo Clinic's Vaccine research group.
"I would urge us to take these with a grain of salt."
"I would urge us to take these with a grain of salt," he tells Inverse regarding the hype around chloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. "Until randomized clinical trials are published we can't tell if it's anecdote. Is it due to some unforeseen or improbable set of circumstances?"
"The medical literature is littered with tens of thousands of case reports like this where there is a claim of efficacy only to fall apart when randomized clinical trials are done."
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/chloroquine
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Virus drug touted by President Trump, Elon Musk can kill with just two gram dose
Bloomberg
The drug is known to have short-term side effects such as nausea, diarrhea and tinnitus while long-term use can irreversibly impair eyesight. It’s forbidden for pregnant women as it can cause congenital defects in babies.
China Health Commission revised the dosage in a Feb. 29 notice tightening chloroquine use. The drug cannot be given to pregnant women, those with heart disease, terminal liver and renal disease, retina and hearing loss and patients on antibiotics such as azithromycin and steroid.
It can now be given only to patients between 18 to 65 years of age for a seven-day treatment course. Patients weighing over 50 kilograms (110 pounds) can take 500mg twice a day — the usual dose — while those weighing less will be administered the drug just once a day after two days of use, according to the latest guidelines.
https://www.mercurynews.com/virus-drug-touted-by-president-trump-elon-musk-can-kill-with-just-two-gram-dose
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California: Governor Gavin Newson orders the state’s 40 million residents to “stay at home.” The order is “open ended.” Modeling predicts that 56% of the state’s population will be infected over the next eight weeks. Only essential businesses will be allowed to remain open. All indoor public and private gatherings with 10 or more people are prohibited
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WW MarketS continuing to Fall: ST rallies( less than 2 days) was for selling:
UNCERTAINTIES GALORE
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
ALWAYS better to be AHEAD of the proverbial CURVE!
Coronavirus: Map shows how Covid-19 patients could overwhelm hospitals
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-map-hospital-beds-covid-19-ventilators-a9412026.html
USA Today
U.S. state coronavirus curves show many could be close behind New York
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/03/18/u-s-coronavirus-growth-rates-show-many-states-could-close-behind-new-york/5072663002/
USA TODAY analysis: America's coronavirus 'curve' may be at its most dangerous point
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/world/2020/03/19/coronavirus-curve-us-may-its-most-dangerous-point/2863553001/
BUT US health care INFRASTRUCTURE is TAXED due to lack of health investment
in last 5 years!
AND:
New York Recorded 1,763 New Coronavirus Cases In One Day
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dm448/new-york-recorded-1763-new-coronavirus-cases-in-one-day
New York City looking to turn hotels into makeshift hospitals
CNBC's Contessa Brewer on the coronavirus impact on New York as the city considers using empty hotel rooms to house patients.
New York City looking to turn hotels into makeshift hospitals
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/new-york-state-likely-has-tens-of-thousands-of-coronavirus-cases-gov-cuomo-says.html
More than half of Californians could become infected with coronavirus
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-19/gavin-newsom-california-1-billion-federal-aid-coronavirus
CORONAVIRUS
Texas governor issues lockdown orders
The executive order shuts schools and limits public gatherings to 10 people.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/19/texas-governor-coronavirus-lockdown-orders-137691
Gov. Ron DeSantis Says Florida is Shutting Down For Spring Breakers: ‘The Party is Over’
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/gov-ron-desantis-says-florida-is-shutting-down-for-spring-breakers-the-party-is-over/
Young adults under age 44 make up a big part of coronavirus hospitalizations in the US
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/19/health/coronavirus-age-victims/index.html
Young people getting sick from coronavirus, according to COVID-19 data from Italy, France younger adults | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-young-people-getting-sick-covid-19-us-italy-france/
Coronavirus Outbreaks Spreading in Nursing Homes
Scores of cases have emerged at facilities from Illinois to Oregon and Wyoming following a deadly outbreak near Seattle
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-outbreaks-spreading-in-nursing-homes-11584628291
US jails begin releasing prisoners to stem Covid-19 infections
High profile inmates like ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen are among those who have asked for early release.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51947802
NONE of this should be surprising unless one was complacent rather than vigilant along with:
Jobless claims spike to highest level in 2 1/2-years:
Unprecedented spike in weekly jobless claims is just the start, as unemployment is set to double!
https://edition.cnn.com/business/live-news/stock-market-news-today-031920/h_2454042985769c1661a006224eca932a
Ex-Trump advisor Gary Cohn warns the US will have ‘massive unemployment very, very quickly’
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/gary-cohn-warns-us-will-have-massive-unemployment-very-very-quickly.html
CNBC: Nearly 25 million jobs could be lost globally due to the coronavirus
The new coronavirus could claim up to 24.7 million jobs, according to International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates.
Read in CNBC
Intelligence Chairman Raised Virus Alarms Weeks Ago, Secret Recording Shows
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/19/818192535/burr-recording-sparks-questions-about-private-comments-on-covid-19
I did indicate DRACONIAN ECONOMIC DISLOCATIONS through the floor:
So far it’s EXCEEDING that of the both the Great Worldwide Financial Collapse of 2008 caused by repeal of Glass Stegall Act of 1930’s and Sub Prime Lending and 9/11 events!(dissension between key govt agencies).
IF one cannot process any of the above, self explanatory citations, you should not be investing vs gambling!
Unless someone has a constructive commentary I will not be responding based on just the last six years of dealing with inexperienced retail folks: and too time consuming & unpaid & unproductive when there are clearly more pressing priorities.
The whole loaf versus crumbs.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Each ONE should be accountability only to ONE’s CONSCIENCE and TO the Greater Good versus getting contentious rebukes IMHO
Clearly FEW here have the wherewithal nor the temperament to have POSITIVE “day trader” talents !
To have criticism is a natural reflexive of ENVY!
Best to keep it to oneself IMHO
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
You should do your OWN due diligence and POST versus being pugnacious
CLOSINGS/Natl Pks $Waived!
Kansas is the first state to close schools for the rest of the academic year amid the coronavirus crisis — and California could be next
Re Washington Post
Vegas bust: (30 day shutdown) Nevada governor orders casinos, restaurants to close over coronavirus
Re NY Post; Bloomberg
NYSE: Doing it electronically this Monday
National Park Service to waive entrance fees at open parks to aid social distancing
Re CNN
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
How Washington Failed to Build a Robust Coronavirus Testing System
Re Wall St Journal
“U.S.
How Washington Failed to Build a Robust Coronavirus Testing System
Government decisions that limited testing for the pathogen blinded the U.S. to the outbreak’s scale. Here’s how it happened.
When cases of the new coronavirus began emerging several weeks ago in California, Washington state and other pockets of the country, U.S. public-health officials worried this might be The Big One, emails and interviews show.
The testing program they rolled out to combat it, though, was a small one.
Limited testing has blinded Americans to the scale of the outbreak so far, impeding the nation’s ability to fight the virus through isolating the sick and their contacts, public-health officials say. As of early Wednesday, about 6,500 people in the U.S. had tested positive, data compiled by Johns Hopkins University show, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reported only about 32,000 tests conducted at its facilities and other public health labs.
Limited testing is also keeping patients like Justin LaBor in the dark, despite recent improvements. Mr. LaBor, 36, said he went to the emergency room at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Pomona, N.J., Monday with a fever and dry cough, symptoms typical in a coronavirus infection. Doctors admitted him, but he hasn’t been tested for coronavirus, he said on Tuesday, gasping for breath over the phone.
“Everyone just told me there were no tests and I didn’t check all the boxes for the state,” said Mr. LaBor, a social-media marketer from Elwood, N.J., referring to the criteria that state labs require patients to meet before running tests. A New Jersey health-department spokeswoman said the state “has sufficient lab capacity to test those who meet the testing criteria.” An AtlantiCare spokeswoman said the hospital system “is not testing patients in a widespread manner for coronavirus.”
While the virus was quietly spreading within the U.S., the CDC had told state and local officials its “testing capacity is more than adequate to meet current testing demands,” according to a Feb. 26 agency email viewed by The Wall Street Journal, part of a cache of agency communications reviewed by the Journal that sheds light on the early response. The agency’s data show it tested fewer than 100 patients that day.
When the CDC first dispersed test kits in early February, it shipped them to a network of state and local government labs and restricted testing to people with virus symptoms who had recently traveled to China, where the virus first emerged, or had been exposed to a known case. Federal officials hoped the virus could be contained—even as they disputed alarms from those on the front lines that the CDC’s guidelines weren’t keeping up with the outbreak’s spread, emails between the U.S. agency and local officials show. The government left other laboratories on the sidelines for crucial weeks.
The narrow effort is “a failing,” said Anthony Fauci, a government doctor who has become the de facto face of the administration’s coronavirus response, in congressional testimony last week that for many in Washington was a wake-up call.
While problems still clearly persist, more labs are beginning to do tests and manufacturers are ramping up production. “We can expect to see a marked acceleration of the availability and implementation of testing,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview Friday.
‘Three separate failures’
CDC officials botched an initial test kit developed in an agency lab, retracting many tests. They resisted calls from state officials and medical providers to broaden testing, and health officials failed to coordinate with outside companies to ensure needed test-kit supplies, such as nasal swabs and chemical reagents, would be available, according to suppliers and health officials.
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, also involved in the response, finally opened testing to more outside labs, a run on limited stocks of some supplies needed for the CDC-developed test quickly depleted stores, lab operators and suppliers said. Hospital and commercial lab operators said the government didn’t reach out to enlist their help until it was too late.
“This was kind of a perfect storm of three separate failures,” said Tom Frieden, who directed the CDC from 2009 to 2017, citing the botched test, overstrict FDA rules and sidelined private labs. He cautioned he didn’t have direct knowledge of details.
Now, the U.S. is testing far fewer patients than public-health and infectious-disease experts say is necessary and just a fraction as many as other countries that rolled out wide-reaching diagnostic programs. South Korea as of Tuesday was testing up to 20,000 patients a day, more than half the total of U.S. patients who have been tested since the outbreak began.
The test shortage hurt U.S. efforts to contain the virus, said Neil Fishman, chief medical officer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and an infectious-disease specialist.
“If we would have had a true understanding of the extent of disease several weeks ago, implementation of social distancing measures could have prevented the escalation of the disease,” Dr. Fishman said, and demand for the test is now huge.
Health-care officials say the current state of testing reflects both technical and planning failures, as well as a broader failure of imagination. Leaders including President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar early in the outbreak appeared unable or unwilling to envision a crisis of the scale that has now emerged, and no one stepped up to effectively coordinate among federal agencies or the private sector labs, medical providers and manufacturers needed for a large-scale testing push, they say.
An HHS spokeswoman said Brett Giroir, a deputy Mr. Azar put in charge of testing last week, would assume that role. She said the FDA began working with private test developers in January by sharing information about the process for approving tests.
The CDC said in an email to the Journal on Monday that its work with public-health labs is meant to fill “the short-term gap until experienced commercial diagnostic manufacturers come to market.”
Mr. Trump repeatedly dismissed the threat of a broad U.S. outbreak, saying in late February, “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” The next day, the first reported American death tied to Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, occurred in Washington state.
Some White House aides learned of complaints about the availability of testing from the media, not the public-health officials in their own government, an administration official familiar with the matter said. Only in the first week of March did discussions in a White House coronavirus task force about the testing shortfall take on a sense of urgency, the person said.
Even then, Mr. Azar, defended the testing program in television interviews including twice on ABC News that week, citing the low number of confirmed cases—at a time when almost no tests were available to detect them.
The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment. The HHS spokeswoman said health officials are focused on efforts to increase test accessibility and pointed to a series of recent statements on the topic.
At the CDC, the tone was more dire. “While leaning forward aggressively with the hope that we will be able to prevent community spread, we also are preparing for the worst,” the agency told state public-health officials in a Feb. 20 email.
The Government Accountability Office had warned federal officials in early January that its readiness for something like a pandemic fell short, a GAO official said. GAO investigators found crisis plans didn’t fully account for the huge role the private sector would have to play, documents show.
The HHS spokeswoman said the agency’s coronavirus response was guided by other “well-practiced” operational plans, and not the strategic one the GAO reviewed. An HHS official told the GAO, in a letter dated Jan. 31, that the agency had addressed their concerns and put in place policies that would “prevent early implementation challenges from becoming institutionalized.”
Deterred development
In the weeks ahead, however, those very challenges did become institutionalized. The FDA first announced labs seeking to perform testing would have to submit a special application to get permission to start on Feb. 4. That initially deterred some hospitals and other lab operators—which normally aren’t required to submit any application—from developing tests, experts say.
“We had considered developing a test but had been in communication with the CDC and FDA and had been told that the federal and state authorities would be able to handle everything,” Alan Wells, the medical director for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s clinical laboratories, told reporters over the weekend. He said in an interview on Monday that it later became clear the CDC and states were overwhelmed.
Once the CDC launched its initial test in the first week of February, the response was quickly stymied by setbacks, including flaws that forced the CDC to claw back many of the kits it had already sent out to state public health laboratories, according to the agency and public-health officials.
An email to state public-health-lab officials later in February gives the fullest account from the CDC to emerge yet of what happened: The agency said some labs had encountered “sporadic reactivity in the negative control of one of the three assay components.” That means the test in some cases wrongly indicated it had detected coronavirus in samples of laboratory-grade water.
“It is unclear why quality control did not detect this issue before the kits were sent out to states,” said the email.
The CDC on Monday said it “has not yet determined if the problem involves the assay design or contamination. It could have been either.”
At one critical juncture, just before the CDC opened up testing to more state laboratories in February, its officials clashed with state epidemiologists on the front lines of the response to the epidemic over the scale of testing.
Despite news and official reports heralding the rapid spread of the virus in Japan and Hong Kong, on Feb. 22 CDC officials told state officials to refer for testing only patients showing symptoms who had travel histories in mainland China.
When a top Minnesota epidemiologist pointed out in an email to CDC officials that agency director Robert Redfield had recently tweeted that doctors treating patients who had visited Hong Kong and Japan should consider “#COVID19,” the CDC’s deputy incident commander responded: “This tweet is being taken down.” And, in fact, it was.
The CDC hasn’t responded to requests for comment on why the tweet was deleted.
Hawaii’s top epidemiologist, Sarah Park, chimed in on the thread, saying the bar for testing should be lowered. Dr. Park pointed out that the CDC’s own travel website said travelers from Japan with symptoms should be considered for coronavirus even though the guidelines precluded testing.
Rather than expand testing, the CDC replied that it was considering changes to its travel notices.
The epidemiologists, too, recognized the current testing program wouldn’t meet the widening need. As they debated expanding testing to more people, Marcelle Layton, a top official with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, expressed the worry that too many returning travelers would expect to be screened as the list of affected countries expanded.
“We all know this is not sustainable,” Dr. Layton said in a Feb. 25 email to other public-health officials. She and Dr. Park didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Broader testing
As the CDC sought to get the network of state labs up and running, it finally turned to an outside manufacturer, Integrated DNA Technologies Inc., to order a run of custom reagents—substances used in a chemical reaction—needed to identify the genetic imprint of coronavirus in late February, according to the company and a timeline provided by the CDC. IDT said in a statement that it shipped the CDC’s first order on Feb. 26.
The CDC said it signed a contract with IDT to supply reagents on Feb. 20. Contracting records show one IDT order from that day, for only about $90,000 of testing supplies. The CDC said that contract was for coronavirus-test material. IDT denied that contract was related to the coronavirus tests.
With IDT creating special coronavirus test kits, the federal government abruptly began to make moves that would open the door to more and broader testing, including expanding its criteria for whom to test. On Feb. 26, Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official, promised in a call with reporters that commercial labs would “be coming online soon,” and a couple of days later, the FDA allowed some labs seeking to use the CDC’s testing method or developing their own to jump through fewer hoops.
IDT would produce millions of tests worth of its coronavirus-detecting reagent over the next couple of weeks, according to the company’s statement.
Even still, the wave of private labs joining the fight against the virus didn’t arrive on schedule. One reason was that many of the off-the-shelf supplies used in the CDC’s testing method weren’t readily available on the scale needed, the Journal found. That included both the simple products like synthetic swabs—cotton interferes with readings—used to collect mucus samples, and complex ones. Because labs copying the CDC’s test method have to use its exact chemical recipe, there has been a run on manufacturer QiagenN.V.’s reagent for separating viral RNA from human mucus, one of the products used by the agency.
“We have heard concerns from labs who have questions about the availability of certain supplies,” said the HHS spokeswoman. The agency was providing labs with “information on alternative sources of reagents, extraction kits, swabs and more,” she said.
“Everyone in the world is going to want to get swabbed at one point or another,” said Iyda Antony a lab director at UC Davis Health, a large California health system that is ramping up its own testing program and worries its stores of swabs might not be sufficient.
A small lab owned by lab-manager Clinical Lab Consulting, in Dayton, Ohio, paid $2 per unit—six times its usual rate—for swabs from a Pittsburgh-based vendor on Sunday, email records show. On Tuesday, the vendor told the lab’s owners it was actually out of stock.
The U.S. government “could have just got out in front of it,” said Greg Ingle, one of the Dayton lab’s owners and an industry consultant. Rather, “we watched it play out in the rest of the world before getting into the market.”
Through mid-March, Qiagen spokesman Thomas Theuringer said the Dutch biotech has shipped more than twice as many units of the product in question as in the whole of 2019 to U.S. clients.
“It’s like queuing up in line to buy toilet paper at the grocery store,” said Richard Scanlan, the medical director of the Oregon Health and Sciences University Hospital laboratory, comparing the lab’s predicament to the empty shelves consumers are facing around the country. “Everyone is trying to buy it at the same time,” he said.
Qiagen said it was rationing test kits to its “most critical customers” and acknowledged the company was struggling to meet demand. Dr. Theuringer said the factories producing the kits had ramped up to “three shifts working seven days a week.”
Virus researcher Scott Weaver, at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, said a group he directs has sent out coronavirus RNA samples needed to do the validation studies to around 50 labs. Nonetheless, he said, some of those labs, including one at his own institution, were delayed as they waited for Qiagen to fill orders in order to begin testing. The Galveston lab is now able to perform tests, he said, but supplies remain limited.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said in a briefing that, “in case we need it,” he would invoke a Korean War-era law called the Defense Production Act that allows the federal government to force U.S. companies to produce needed supplies.
In recent days, the FDA has tried to confront the testing shortage by approving new test designs by manufacturers such as Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. and testing firms like Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings Inc., and relaxing requirements for labs to prove their tests actually work and stick strictly to the CDC recipe. Thermo said Tuesday it has 1.5 million tests ready to ship.
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn maintained the agency’s insistence on test accuracy has been vital. “If you don’t have that check on the test findings,” he said, “you run the risk of inaccurate test results which means you aren’t truly assessing the full scope of the outbreak.”
Now, in a concession to demand, the agency is letting labs run tests first and prove they are accurate later—within about two weeks.
After hearing news reports saying more tests had become available, Nathan Conder, a 30-year-old in Salt Lake City, called Utah’s coronavirus hotline Monday to ask about getting tested. He’d been sick with a fever, dry cough and fatigue for a week—all coronavirus symptoms, although also of other maladies.
“They told me all my symptoms match, but they don’t have enough tests so they’re only testing people who were in contact with someone who already tested positive,” said Mr. Conder, a regulatory specialist at a microbiology lab. Public health officials said “that I should act like I had it, but they can’t test,” he recalled.
On Tuesday, a doctor prescribed a coronavirus test for Mr. Conder after extensive screening and sent him to a nearby hospital lab. From there, he said, he was diverted to a new drive-in testing facility, where workers requested an additional form that took hours to obtain. After an ordeal of nearly six hours in total, he said, he got the test and was told he would get results within three days.
Thomas M. Burton and Rebecca Ballhaus contributed to this article.
Write to Christopher Weaver at christopher.weaver@wsj.com, Betsy McKay at betsy.mckay@wsj.com and Brianna Abbott at brianna.abbott@wsj.com
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MORE:
What Went Wrong with Coronavirus Testing in the U.S.
During three crucial weeks in February, as a first set of test kits sent out by the C.D.C. failed to work properly, labs across the country scrambled to fill the void.
Read in The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-went-wrong-with-coronavirus-testing-in-the-us/amp
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
CAN USA avoid this in the coming months given the many reports above worrisome US fragile under capacity infra structure (Hospital beds necessitating tent setups or like Seattle buying a motel; others considering buying or using hotels) along with needed training to dealt with new COVID 19 Test kits!
NBC News:
“Italy has a world-class health system. The coronavirus has pushed it to the breaking point.
“I have never seen so many people die together before my eyes,” said a nurse from one of the main hospitals in Bergamo, a city in northern Italy“ that is at the center of the worst outbreak in Europe. “It feels like we are crossing in the middle of a battlefield.”
Northern Italy has one of the best public health systems in the Western world. Its doctors and medical professionals are well-trained. They felt prepared when the coronavirus began to spread through their prosperous, well-educated region.
And they still could do nothing to prevent what happened.
More than 2,500 people have died in about four weeks in Italy. With over 31,500 confirmed cases, the country’s doctors and nurses — particularly in the hardest-hit cities in the north — are struggling to keep up. They’re running out of beds, equipment and even people, particularly as more health care workers catch the virus.
The nurse, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation, has since had to stop working. Like many of the frontline health care professionals in Italy, they have caught the virus that they’ve been trying to stop.
“We are getting sick one after the other,” they said.
In the months since the new pathogen was identified, northern Italy has emerged as a warning about what can happen even in a region that is considered to have one of the most proficient public health care systems in the world, and even after the country took drastic measures to try to contain the virus’ spread.
The cities of Milan and Bergamo have been especially devastated. Bergamo alone has had nearly 3,800 confirmed cases.
The huge number of infections has overwhelmed hospitals in the wealthy region of Lombardy, where both cities are, even as officials went to great lengths to prepare facilities by converting some wards into makeshift intensive care units and adding extra beds wherever possible.
Dr. Lorenzo D’Antiga, director of the pediatric department at the Hospital Papa Giovanni XXIII in Bergamo, said he and his colleagues are operating in a region with some of the highest incidents of new coronavirus cases.
“We are really in the eye of the cyclone,” he said.
In early March, as deaths from the virus spiked and the number of confirmed cases swelled, Italy’s government needed to take decisive steps to slow the lightning-fast rate of infection.
On March 8, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte issued a lockdown of Italy’s Lombardy region, effectively quarantining around 16 million people in the north. Two days later, Conte expanded the quarantine order to include the entire country. The decrees came just over a month after similar quarantines went into effect in parts of China where the virus first emerged.
Overnight, the normally bustling streets of cities like Milan and Venice were deserted, their sprawling piazzas and picturesque walkways silent and devoid of people.
But this tranquility betrayed a very different reality for Italians at the front lines of the pandemic.
“It seems relaxed because everyone is staying inside and people are cooking and looking at old photos and doing work at home,” said Francesco Longo, director of the Centre for Research on Health and Social Care Management at Bocconi University in Milan. “But in the hospitals, it’s like a war.”
At his hospital, D’Antiga said almost half of the 1,000 beds are dedicated to treating patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Most other operations at the hospital have either scaled back significantly or ground to a halt.
“In the gastroenterology ward, internal medicine and other wards, they have to send away patients and only admit those with COVID-19 — even in the neurology ward,” D’Antiga said. “We have 20 to 30 patients coming in every day requiring admission, but we’ve run out of beds. It’s a really difficult situation.”
What makes the situation even worse is that some of those beds are being used to treat medical personnel themselves.
“Here, probably 20 to 30 percent of healthcare professionals got infected,” D’Antiga said. “In my department, I have 25 pediatricians and currently 10 are off sick. This is the same in other departments, and it’s a major challenge.”
Though the majority of those who have tested positive for the coronavirus so far have experienced mild symptoms, the most serious cases can result in respiratory failure. Nearly 13,000 of Italy’s total coronavirus patients are currently hospitalized with symptoms, and of those, more than 2,000 are under intensive medical care, straining hospitals’ resources.
D’Antiga said 80 out of the 100 beds in his hospital’s ICU are occupied by coronavirus patients hooked up to ventilators to breathe, but hospitals are rapidly running out of beds and the equipment needed to keep patients alive.
These limited resources are forcing doctors to make excruciating decisions about who to treat — and who may be beyond help.
Though cases vary, doctors typically take into account the patient’s age and their condition, which is standard practice even without being in the midst of a pandemic, according to D’Antiga. So far, he said doctors are mostly heeding the same criteria when they do have to make tough choices.
“Outside of an epidemic, if a 90-year-old person comes in with severe pneumonia, we likely wouldn’t admit the patient into intensive care and intubate them,” D’Antiga said. “We do have to select, unfortunately, but at the moment, at least we don’t have to select among those who would have been treated in normal times.”
But that could change, he added. And as the virus spreads the heart wrenching situation in Lombardy could be intensified in other regions of Italy and in other countries.
“What we’re seeing in Italy is what we’re likely to start seeing in hospitals around the world in the coming weeks and months,” said Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “One of the characteristics of this disease is it has a very long incubation period. It takes a long time for it to start overburdening the health care system, but once it starts, the increase is very rapid.”
In Venice, one doctor in the region’s main hospital who spoke on the condition of anonymity said she and her colleagues are already treating 92 coronavirus patients, but they are anticipating an onslaught still to come.
“We are struggling, but we know we are not in the worst moment of the outbreak,” she said. “To work in these conditions is really exhausting. Everyone is feeling mentally exhausted.”
Her hospital has already created improvised ICUs and doctors and nurses across the northeast are being deployed into vulnerable areas. Even with more time to prepare than Lombardy, resources in and around Venice are already becoming strained.
“At the moment, we are in good condition, but if the emergency keeps going on for weeks and weeks, I don’t know how well we can react,” she said.
Some doctors and experts in Italy have been outspoken about the situation in their country in hopes that other nations will learn from the experience.
Longo said one crucial takeaway is that early actions can make a big difference.
“The quicker you close a country and reduce social contact, the better,” he said. “The only effective mechanism is to introduce a constraint to make people stay home. This is not just the lesson from Italy, it’s also the lesson from China.”
D’Antiga added that Italy’s experiences could also provide stark warnings about what can happen even in a country with a well-regarded health care system that provides universal coverage to its residents and citizens. In countries where that’s not the case, such as in the U.S., doctors could be under more stress and face additional challenges. There are already concerns, for instance, that hospitals in the U.S. could face a shortage of ventilators.
“We have a system in Italy where everybody has access, so we can make decisions based only on medical factors,” he said. “In the U.S., that will be much more challenging, and the choices will be very different from an ethical point of view.”
Still, as Italians approach the end of their second full week under quarantine, Longo said people have found ways to remain hopeful.
“There’s really a sense of solidarity, of belonging to the same community,” he said. “Everyone feels that we can only rescue ourselves if we stick together.”
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
ALL should listen to latest views of Pulitzer journalist Laurie Garrett:
On NPR today: Corona virus descending to SOUTHERN Hemisphere re Africa; South America and COMING Winter revisiting Northern Hemosphere and her elaborate views re 1918 Spanish Flu comparisons which many NOW share.
2 days ago: https://www.kuow.org/stories/we-re-going-to-be-tested
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46722.The_Coming_Plague
As I said last week:
DRACONIAN ECONOMIC DISLOCATIONS/COLLAPSE of
NOT seeing The Handwriting on the Wall AND WORST: BEING BEHIND the CURVE:
Re Italy’s handling of Corona Virus COVID19 as a PRECURSOR of what US is now facing!
Biggest US exporter and Dow Jones stalwart Boeing (BA) less than 1/3 in 3 months from mid $300’s to under $95 using it’s full credit lines $14 Bln and requesting aid as it’s customers seek Federal Aid
NYC: M.T.A., Citing Huge Drop in Riders, Seeks $4 Billion Virus Bailout:
Ridership has fallen 60 percent on the subways and as much as 90 percent on commuter railways.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-subway-federal-aid-.amp.html
SFO: Coronavirus chases 85% of riders off BART - but the agency won’t cut service as losses mount
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Coronavirus-chases-85-of-riders-off-BART-but-15139335.php
This is just a FRAGMENT of the ongoing MASSIVE WW Upheavals!
Too few can put this complex unravelling destructive forces at play.
The EXTREMES of the Capitalism and testing Leadership.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Too MANY are always BEHIND or FALL off the CURVE:
Regardless of the insider buying: UNDERWATER!
Since I was recommended to take a look at WEYL: that was 2 years ago at Reverse split adjusted $20 and now 19 cents NOTHING ever attracted my professional investing background ( take a look at my profile!)
Lots of devastation few were prepared for
AND with the foreseen WW tumult by me there are better opportunities at some point!
Too many touts with a modicum of experience PERIOD!
Even Boeing(BA) today down another 20% to $97 down from Mid $300 level SINCE Dec 2019: 3 months ago!
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Thanks Iwasadiver: Been on top of this critical sub topic over 10 days ago.
Be especially careful in your procedures:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/us/coronavirus-physicians-emergency-rooms.amp.html
Just posted today on AMRN board re TAXED HC System to deal with Corona virus / COVID19
Sunday, 03/15/20 09:28:59 PM
Re: maverick_1 post# 252655 0
Post # of 252780
US healthcare systems TAXED by Corona Virus( NO COVID 19 Test even for Heidi Klum)
1st CLEAR indication was TEN days ago:
Seattle w/Kirkland Nursing home where it has mushroomed:
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-03-05/seattle-area-officials-buy-4-million-quarantine-motel?context=amp
BTW: Seattle’s been BOOMING( NO state income taxes like 6 other states): In EACH of the last three years it has more construction cranes than the next three cities in the US COMBINED! due to AMZN; MSFT; BA; Immuno Oncolgy: JUNO; wealthy Chinese not liking 20 % Non Resident Vancouver tax migrated to Seattle: I lived in both Cities !
AND to put it in very CLEAR terms listen carefully to an EXPERT today and relate it to Italy’s crisis:
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/15/816174089/coronavirus-former-u-s-surgeon-general-vivek-murthy
Being AHEAD of the CURVE and not on a high horse matters except for POTUS:
Some Harvard Epidemiologists current views are alarming.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
—————————————————/-
maverick_1
Sunday, 03/15/20 11:53:52 PM
Re: maverick_1 post# 252771 0
Post # of 252780
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/14/hospital-doctors-patients-coronavirus/?outputType=amp
https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-cuomo-trump-us-army-corps-of-engineers-20200315-i6mtmnwylzeu5o5ky43zmpuke4-story.html
https://whdh.com/news/coronavirus-testing-tents-set-up-outside-a-number-of-mass-hospitals/amp/
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/east-bay-hospitals-delay-elective-surgeries-during-covid-19-surge/2254990/?amp
https://www.citybeat.com/news/blog/21121761/here-is-what-area-hospitals-are-doing-to-prepare-for-coronavirus
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/05/coronavirus-as-cases-climb-hospitals-brace-for-patient-surge/amp/
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
————————————————
A LL my posts can be found here:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.aspx?user=486527
———————————————
Lengthy posts with VERIFICATION versus going back and forth(waste of precious time) or
back to the Dark Ages with satirical Snipers or high post count but few sentences
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/14/hospital-doctors-patients-coronavirus/?outputType=amp
https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-cuomo-trump-us-army-corps-of-engineers-20200315-i6mtmnwylzeu5o5ky43zmpuke4-story.html
https://whdh.com/news/coronavirus-testing-tents-set-up-outside-a-number-of-mass-hospitals/amp/
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/east-bay-hospitals-delay-elective-surgeries-during-covid-19-surge/2254990/?amp
https://www.citybeat.com/news/blog/21121761/here-is-what-area-hospitals-are-doing-to-prepare-for-coronavirus
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/05/coronavirus-as-cases-climb-hospitals-brace-for-patient-surge/amp/
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Further corroboration: From an experienced NYC region ER Doctor:
Iwasadiver Sunday, 03/15/20 09:53:07 PM
Re: kabunushi post# 270538 0
Post # of 271222
Kabunushi, sorry, I’ve been really busy lately working clinically and trying to keep up with this as it’s becoming a bit of a furious pace. Yes, I’m on the front line in the ER. I’m working in both 4 rural ERs in our system and one big Level 1 Trauma Center in another large system I used to be a Medical Director of. I have to say we’re pushing as hard as possible to gain capacity as we also lower non emergent patients from flooding the ER. We’re looking at drastic measures such as ventilator sharing to increase critical care capacity. We’ll be increasing testing this week and we’re currently using outdoor and drive up triage trying to keep non emergent people out of the ED (we us ED for Emergency Department. I use ER in public because it’s better known/understood)
As far as underestimation; I feel the Doc at Johns Hopkins yesterday who said we could be underestimating by 50,000 to 500,000 the number of people infected in the US is about right. In the next week or two we’ll see a dramatic rise, be it from actual reports of an influx of hospitalizations/deaths or from official reports of confirmed cases. We’ve been handcuffed as our Academic System’s labs have developed a test just like a lot of other Academic Systems across the country but had been hamstrung by FDA bullshit holding up the process by requiring ridiculous bureaucratic paperwork to document that the test has met standards. That has finally been relaxed by FDA so the tests should take an upswing in the next week.
Italy and S. Korea are case studies in competency; S. Korea had tests almost immediately because they had done a table top drill in December practicing how to deal with the sudden emergence of a novel corona virus (no shit, not kidding) and had a plan. When it occurred the plan was implemented. They had a spike but were prepared with capacity and testing capability and are now way ahead of the curve and blunted the effect better than anyone. Italy? They screwed the pooch and we’re starting to see that France and the US are blindly following their example. Taiwan has been almost heroic in keeping it at bay. I’m actually doing some research about what methods they used as we speak.
I can’t even get enough personal protection equipment in most of our EDs and this is worrying as we head into an obvious impending spike in cases. I’m hoping we can remedy this ASAP because otherwise we’re in for a long war here“
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=154352655
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
US healthcare systems TAXED by Corona Virus( NO COVID 19 Test even for Heidi Klum)
1st CLEAR indication was TEN days ago:
Seattle w/Kirkland Nursing home where it has mushroomed:
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-03-05/seattle-area-officials-buy-4-million-quarantine-motel?context=amp
BTW: Seattle’s been BOOMING( NO state income taxes like 6 other states): In EACH of the last three years it has more construction cranes than the next three cities in the US COMBINED! due to AMZN; MSFT; BA; Immuno Oncolgy: JUNO; wealthy Chinese not liking 20 % Non Resident Vancouver tax migrated to Seattle: I lived in both Cities !
AND to put it in very CLEAR terms listen carefully to an EXPERT today and relate it to Italy’s crisis:
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/15/816174089/coronavirus-former-u-s-surgeon-general-vivek-murthy
Being AHEAD of the CURVE and not on a high horse matters except for POTUS:
Some Harvard Epidemiologists current views are alarming.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Goldman Sachs Warns S&P 500 Might Not Bottom Until 2,000 (2016! levels); Fri close@2711!
another 26%downside.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-15/goldman-sachs-warns-s-p-500-might-not-bottom-until-2-000
Coronavirus outbreak poses very real risk of zero growth, says Morgan Stanley's chief U.S. economist
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/03/13/coronavirus-outbreak-poses-very-real-risk-of-zero-growth-saysmorgan-stanleys-chief-us-economist.html
I was SPOT on re acceleration in Italy COVID 19 DEATHS:
~31% of China's Corona Virus cases
BUT
57% of China's deaths and it's portents for USA
ISOLATIONISM even for a few months has DRACONIAN ECONOMIC DISLOCATIONS!
Complacency vs VIGILANCE and NOTHING to do with Politics (71 yrs old and never registered!)
Being AHEAD of the CURVE with an open mind pays.
I have been through every market cycle since the early 1970's, and certainly not as a retail investor...
BUT working on the FRONT LINES dealing with Institutions as an analyst for Top Tier Wall St firms and money management as well.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Goldman Sachs Warns S&P 500 Might Not Bottom Until 2,000 (2016! levels); Fri close@2711!:
26% more downside
https://assets.bwbx.io/s3/readings/Q79070DWRGG21584299463389.mp3
Coronavirus outbreak poses very real risk of zero growth, says Morgan Stanley's chief U.S. economist
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/03/13/coronavirus-outbreak-poses-very-real-risk-of-zero-growth-saysmorgan-stanleys-chief-us-economist.html
I was SPOT on re acceleration in Italy COVID 19 DEATHS:
~31% of China's Corona Virus cases
BUT
57% of China's deaths and it's portents for USA
ISOLATIONISM even for a few months has DRACONIAN ECONOMIC DISLOCATIONS!
Complacency vs VIGILANCE and NOTHING to do with Politics (71 yrs old and never registered!)
Being AHEAD of the CURVE with an open mind covering ALL the basis of investing pays unlike what has been witnessed here on too many fronts for too long.
I have been through every market cycle since the early 1970's, not as a retail investor...
BUT working on the FRONT LINES dealing with Institutions as an analyst for Top Tier Wall St firms and money management as well.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
WH & Pelosi AGREE: up to House vote tonight + Senate next week
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/13/coronavirus-outbreak-pelosi-and-trump-administration-reach-deal.html
DIFFERENT STROKES DIFFERENT FOLKS
CLEAR USA /WW CRISIS PANDEMIC/RECESSION mode in place
US Shale Oil industry due to 30% lowered Crude Oil prices and their leveraged balance sheets:
even kingpin Occidental Petroleum:
2 days ago: Occidental Petroleum (NYSE:OXY) finished -17.7% in today's trade to close at 19-year lows, a day after slashing its dividend and cutting full-year capital spending plans by nearly a third to ~$3.6B.
Following Monday's oil market rout, Occidental would have been unable to pay out its planned $2.8B in dividend payments and invest in maintaining existing production without taking on additional debt, which had hit $41B $38 Bln for Andarko (NOW Biggest Permain Basin TX players) vs Chevron) at year-end 2019 - more than 4x its EBITDA vs. ~1x a year earlier.
Falling Travel Industry
BOEING: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/business/boeing-737-max-coronavirus/index.html
How does a large part of US economy that the US Federal Reserve indicates living paycheck to paycheck deal with multi week School Closings re Corona Virus & Child Care.
TRAVEL related industries and local economies will be hard hit.
OUTSIDE the US the rest of the world has been already in a recession.
JOB LOSSES are a lagging but yet to be reported
NOW NYC bankruptcies : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/new-york-hotels-face-bankruptcy-closures-on-virus-travel-fears
FDA approves 10 Times faster Coronavirius Test used only Roche machines : only 110 of them in USA:
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-03-13/roche-gets-clearance-for-coronavirus-test-that-s-10-times-faster
The medical system is already TAXED:
Why do you think the City of Seattle paid $4mln for a motel to house COVID 19 patients.
Same is happening in NYC and everyday the litany of news grows sadly in this vein.
BUT
Italy’s Nightmare Offers a Chilling Preview of What’s Coming
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-13/italy-s-coronavirus-nightmare-offers-a-preview-of-what-s-coming
COMMUNITY spread: CANCELLATIONS worldwide will inflict MAJOR economic through the floor damage as
corona virus can last up to 3 days on surfaces!
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-13/california-coronavirus-disney-shutdown-economy
https://www.dailynews.com/la-county-health-officials-announce-3-new-coronavirus-cases-including-more-community-spread
So far 23 USA states declared their own emergencies:
https://www.businessinsider.com/california-washington-state-of-emergency-coronavirus-what-it-means-2020-3?amp
Well after 2+ mos:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/trump-to-declare-national-em
The whole loaf versus bread crumbs
This has been edited and REPOSTED from 5 hours earlier.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
CLEAR USA CRISIS PANDEMIC/RECESSION mode despite VERY BELATED
political bureaucratic wrangling that FEW if any here could discern from the OUTSET:
Testing logjam symbolizes the struggling administration virus effort.
Administration’s efforts likened to Pres. Bush’s Katrina response but
politics first:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/03/13/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-markets-struggle/index.html
https://politicalwire.com/2020/03/11/jared-kushner-leading-coronavirus-response/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8108159/amp/Jared-Kushner-asks-Karlie-Klosss-doctor-father-help-asked-research-coronavirus.html
FDA approves 10 Times faster Coronavirius Test used only Roche machines : only 110 of them in USA:
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-03-13/roche-gets-clearance-for-coronavirus-test-that-s-10-times-faster
BUT
Italy’s Nightmare Offers a Chilling Preview of What’s Coming
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-13/italy-s-coronavirus-nightmare-offers-a-preview-of-what-s-coming
COMMUNITY spread: CANCELLATIONS worldwide will inflict MAJOR economic through the floor damage as
corona virus can last up to 3 days on surfaces!
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-13/california-coronavirus-disney-shutdown-economy
https://www.dailynews.com/la-county-health-officials-announce-3-new-coronavirus-cases-including-more-community-spread
So far 23 USA states declared their own emergencies since POTUS is politics first versus the greater good:
Same can be said for some high profile prolific posters since 2016
https://www.businessinsider.com/california-washington-state-of-emergency-coronavirus-what-it-means-2020-3?amp
But POTUS after 2+ mos of clear ineptitude PLUSES:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/trump-to-declare-national-emergency-to-speed-virus-response
Too many inexperienced and close minded here to bother with!
Let alone can not read between the lines re CEO Linda Powers; debacle of Neil Woodford: nefarious dark forces of Wall St; Along with the closing envelope of the pitfalls of ISOLATIONISM; reaching The EXTREMES of The Capitalist Model crushing the pillars via massive income equality!
The whole loaf versus bread crumbs since 2015
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
USA REALITY vs nonstop online obfuscations never hitting the mark:
Editor's picks
MARCH 12, 2020 / 03:42 PM / UPDATED 2 MINUTES AGO
USA REALITY vs nonstop online obfuscations never hitting the mark:
Editor's picks
MARCH 12, 2020 / 03:42 PM / UPDATED 2 MINUTES AGO
Material shortages for Test Kits & BACKORDERED; AND on ALLOCATION & PROCESS COMPLICATIONS to COMPOUND/ PROLONG:
Coronavirus testing in U.S. threatened by shortage of critical lab materials
The slow pace of coronavirus testing has created a major gap in the U.S. public health response.
Read in POLITICO: https://apple.news/AIzm1W1NZSju9aWBDmaoP5w
Exclusive: U.S. coronavirus testing threatened by shortage of critical lab materials
The slow pace of coronavirus testing has created a major gap in the U.S. public health response.
A looming shortage in lab materials is threatening to delay coronavirus test results and cause officials to undercount the number of Americans with the virus.
The slow pace of coronavirus testing has created a major gap in the U.S. public health response. The latest problem involves an inability to prepare samples for testing, creating uncertainties in how long it will take to get results.
CDC Director Robert Redfield told POLITICO on Tuesday that he is not confident that U.S. labs have an adequate stock of the supplies used to extract genetic material from any virus in a patient’s sample — a critical step in coronavirus testing.
“The availability of those reagents is obviously being looked at,” he said, referring to the chemicals used for preparing samples. “I’m confident of the actual test that we have, but as people begin to operationalize the test, they realize there’s other things they need to do the test.”
The coronavirus task force convened by the White House is also aware of the shortages, and one official said members are working on it.
The growing scarcity of these “RNA extraction” kits is the latest trouble for U.S. labs, which have struggled to implement widespread coronavirus testing in the seven weeks since the country diagnosed its first case. Epidemiologists and public health officials say that the delayed rollout, caused in part by a botched CDC test, has masked the scope of the U.S. outbreak and hobbled efforts to limit it.
If enough processing kits aren’t available, the risk that testing will be disrupted is “huge,” said Michael Mina, associate medical director of molecular diagnostics at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
“RNA extraction is the first step in being able to perform” a coronavirus test, he said. “If we cannot perform this step, the [coronavirus] test cannot be performed.”
Qiagen, a major supplier of the kits, confirmed that its product is backordered due to “the extraordinary pace” at which the world has increased coronavirus testing over the last few weeks.
Public health labs across the U.S. have tested more than 5,000 people, according to the Trump administration. HHS Secretary Alex Azar told lawmakers on Tuesday that U.S. labs’ capacity could grow to 10,000-20,000 people per day by the end of the week.
“Increased demand for testing has the potential to exhaust supplies needed to perform the test itself,” said Robin Patel, president of the American Society for Microbiology. That would limit the testing capacity of public health, hospital and commercial labs alike, she added.
Complicating the situation, most labs have been running at least two tests per patient — although that could soon change. The CDC issued interim guidelines on Monday that minimize the number of tests required for a diagnosis. The agency says labs can combine a patient’s nose and throat samples into one test, a move experts say will cut in half the amount of supplies used to test each person.
But Redfield said he doesn’t know how the agency would deal with any scarcity of RNA extraction kits and reagents that arise. “I don’t know the answer to that question,” he said when asked how the CDC would handle such a situation — adding that he is hopeful “there will be mechanisms between multiple manufacturers to correct” it.
Mandy Cohen, North Carolina’s secretary of health, said that a shortage of extraction kits and other chemicals had hampered testing in her state. “Folks were saying, ‘We are sending you the [test] kits,’ and I don’t think they understood at first what exact part of the supply chain we needed,” she said. “We needed extraction kits.”
An FDA spokesperson said that the agency is contacting labs that are testing for the coronavirus “to understand their supply issues and assist where we can.”
The FDA has also approved a change to the CDC diagnostic test that allows labs to switch from Qiagen’s RNA extraction method to another manufactured by Roche, says Denny Russell, who leads the coronavirus response at Washington state’s public health lab. But getting his lab ready to use the Roche method could take a week in part because technicians will need training to use it.
Commercial labs, which have recently started running coronavirus tests, have not experienced any supply shortages, according to a spokesperson for the American Clinical Laboratory Association.
In the meantime, Qiagen has told customers that it may not be able to fill large standing orders, because it is trying to provide smaller numbers of kits to as many labs as possible, said spokesperson Robert Reitze. The company is ramping up production of RNA extraction kits at manufacturing sites in Hilden, Germany; Barcelona, Spain; and Germantown, Md.
Nancy Cook and Dan Goldberg contributed to this report.
Life and it’s increasing COMPLEXITIES!
ONLY Experienced & Open Mindsets can deal with The Fury!
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
World Health Organization declares coronavirus a pandemic
From CNN Health’s Jamie Gumbrecht
Credit: NIAID-RML
Credit: NIAID-RML
The World Health Organization just declared the novel coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic.
The novel coronavirus outbreak is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday.
Remember: CNN began calling the virus a pandemic e
20 min ago
20% of students across the world are out of school because of coronavirus
From CNN's Jonny Hallam
The United Nations estimates that the coronavirus crisis is now impacting close to 363 million students worldwide, according to data published by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Schools and colleges across the globe have closed — some moving to online only classes — to contain the spread of novel coronavirus.
“One in five students worldwide is staying away from school due to the COVID-19 crisis and an additional one in four is being kept out of higher education establishments,” according to UNESCO.
UNESCO says 15 countries have ordered nationwide school closures and 14 have implemented localized closures, spanning Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
https://cnn.it/38CJiOw
Great ADVICE from Dr OZ: been doing ALL of it since 1988 except for FLU Shots:
My result since 1988: NO need to see a doctor; NO prescriptions or medications; few if any sniffles; ideal BMI even slimmed down from 33 inch waist to 29 inch; have LOW Blood Pressure!
This has been a 30 plus year time tested quality of strong IMMUNE System
AND I recognized since 1988 the BANE/DOWNSIDES of Food co’s Health Care costs!
AND although no science background fairly good track record in land mine infested emerging biotechs;
I do spend LOTS of time reading many nutrition/ trade journals to CONTINUALLY IMPROVE my IMMUNE system along with NOURISHING the most important of all: Your Brain!!
Followup on RESTORING your stomach's natural bacteria for HEALTHY DIGESTION:
https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Gut-Breakthrough-Eliminating-Revolutionizing/dp/006207587X/ref=sr_1_4?crid=36GAWUSU9PJOG&keywords=dr.+alejandro+junger&qid=1581471657&sprefix=dr.+ale%2Caps%2C197&sr=8-4
Dr. OZ today:
Oz also highlighted important areas of focus when it comes to keeping your immune system strong: sleep, exercise, supplements and a healthy diet. Here are a few specific things you can do to stay healthy.
1. Take care of yourself.
Practice good sleep hygiene, exercise and try to mediate. Meditation can help to reduce stress on your immune system.
"Something as simple as a five-minute yoga tactic,'' he said. "Go sit on the toilet seat, put it down — you're not going to the bathroom — sit there, quiet yourself and just realize that it's OK. No one will bother you there."
2. Consider taking a vitamin D supplement.
Oz suggested adding a few supplements to boost your defenses against illness.
"Supplements have never been shown to beat coronavirus, however there are some tactics that will slow down the progression of viruses in general,'' he said. "So ideas that work well generally are vitamin D, which you get from the sun, but this time of year you've got to take it as a supplement."
He also recommended vitamin C, zinc and elderberry supplements, as well as getting vitamin C from healthy sources like leafy greens, salmon and berries.
3. Load up on healthy fruits and vegetables.
"Fruits and vegetables make a huge difference, they enhance your immune response," he noted. Oz shared some recipes for delicious and healthy smoothies that also pack in plenty of antioxidants for immune system health.
His "green energy machine" smoothieincludes spinach, matcha powder and almond milk, while his "ginger hydrator" drink features oranges, bananas and pineapple.
"The nice thing about this baby is that it's got all the antioxidants you'd ever want to have, and I think you'll like the taste," he said about the ginger hydrator.
4. Get the flu shot.
"That way if you feel ill, you know it's not the flu, most likely," Oz explained.
For those who are 60 and older and worried about the coronavirus, Oz shared risk factors people in that demographic should keep an eye on.
He also noted that he has been frequently asked by people whether they should avoid going out in public due to the coronavirus, and he urged people not to panic.
"Live your life,'' he said. "Do not live your life with fear. Live it with joy and kindness”
https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2020/03/09/dr-oz-shares-4-ways-to-strengthen-your-immune-system/23945080/
LIFE is what YOU MAKE of IT!
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Coronavirus: Up to 70% of Germany could become infected - Merkel
Reuters
Chancellor Merkel addressed reporters alongside Health Minister Jens Spahn
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that up to 70% of the country's population - some 58 million people - could contract the coronavirus.
Mrs Merkel made the stark prediction at a news conference on Wednesday alongside Health Minister Jens Spahn.
She said since there was no known cure, the focus would fall on slowing the spread of the virus. "It's about winning time," she explained.
Her remarks came as Italy entered its second day of a national lockdown.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced the closure of schools, gyms, museums, nightclubs and other venues across the country, which on Wednesday passed 10,000 confirmed infections.
BBC
FOLLOW LIVE UPDATES
EASY STEPS: What can I do?
QUARANTINE: Could the US do what Italy has done?
A SIMPLE GUIDE: What are the symptoms?
IMMUNITY: Are women and children less affected?
MAPS AND CHARTS: Visual guide to the outbreak
VIDEO: The 20-second hand wash
What's happening elsewhere?
New York's governor announced that troops would be sent into New Rochelle, a town north of the city, in an attempt to contain an outbreak of the virus, as the total number of US cases passed 1,000 on Wednesday.
A one-mile (1.6km) containment zone was in force around New Rochelle - with all of those in the zone quarantined.
In Italy, which has seen a steep rise in cases, Mr Conte pledged 25bn euros ($22bn) to tackle the outbreak - up from the 7.5bn euros announced last week.
Music festivals and other major events, including Coachella festival in California, have been cancelled or postponed. Berlin city authorities on Wednesday banned all events with more than 1,000 participants.
Thousands of flights have been cancelled worldwide as airlines struggle to cope with a slump in demand.
A UK health minister, Nadine Dorries, said she had tested positive for coronavirus and was self-isolating at home.
China - where the virus was first detected - has seen a total of 80,754 confirmed cases and 3,136 deaths. But it recorded its lowest number of new infections, just 19, on Tuesday.
Third patient dies in Germany
Germany confirmed its third coronavirus-related death on Wednesday, in the badly affected district of Heinsberg in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The first fatality was an 89-year-old woman who died in the town of Essen, the second a 78-year-old man with pre-existing health conditions who died in Heinsberg.
Germany has so far reported 1,296 cases of the virus, according to figures released by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for disease control late on Tuesday. Lothar Wieler, the president of the RKI, said the body did not believe there was a significant number of undetected cases in the country.
Speaking alongside Mr Wieler at a press conference - her first public address on the outbreak - Chancellor Merkel warned that border closures would not be enough to prevent the spread of the virus. She ruled out following Austria's lead in banning visitors from Italy.
"This is a test for our solidarity, our common sense and care for each other. And I hope we pass the test," she said.
Mrs Merkel also said she was open to scrapping Germany's "black zero" rule to allow new government borrowing. She said it was "an extraordinary situation" and that ending the outbreak came first.
Wednesday also saw Berlin city authorities ban all events with more than 1,000 participants until the end of the Easter holidays.
"The coronavirus continues to spread. In such a phase, public life must be restricted," said the city's Health Minister, Dilek Kalayci. "The spread of the coronavirus can be slowed down by reducing major events. At the beginning of an epidemic, such a restriction is important."
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
LASER FOCUSED in USA versus errant crickets:
Quote:
New York has the most Covid-19 infections in the U.S., as of Monday afternoon
https://benzinga.com/z/15513760#.XmcZ81R0I34.mailto
Quote:
Tri-State COVID-19 Cases Triple Since Friday; NJ Declares State of Emergency
Quote:
The number of novel coronavirus cases in the tri-state area surged by 216 percent between late Friday and Monday afternoon, from 49 cases to 156
New York was up to at least 143 cases statewide, 20 of them in the five boroughs, as of Monday evening; the lion's share of those cases are in Westchester County
New Jersey had 11 positive samples that had been sent to the CDC for confirmation, and Gov. Murphy declared a state of emergency; Connecticut saw its second presumptive positive as well
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/brooklyn-sees-1st-coronavirus-cases-as-tri-state-total-surges-136-in-3-days-some-schools-close/2317966/
Temperature sensitivity of Corona Virus re China experts:
https://www.inkstonenews.com/health/coronavirus-highly-sensitive-high-temperatures-study-says/article/3074204
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
From the FRONT LINES The crystallization of USA issues with COVID 19 versus others: DISGRACEFUL!
As of Feb. 26, CDC had performed a total of 445 tests. For comparison, the UK, with a population five times smaller than the US, had conducted over 7,000 tests.
March 2, 2020
Dr. Matt McCarthy, a staff physician at New York-Presbyterian:
“I’m here to tell you, right now, at one of the busiest hospitals in the country, I don’t have [a rapid diagnostic test] at my finger tips.” “I still have to make my case, plead to test people. This is not good. We know that there are 88 cases in the United States. There are going to be hundreds by middle of week. There’s going to be thousands by next week. And this is a testing issue.”
“In New York State, the person who tested positive is only the 32nd test we’ve done in this state,” he said. “That is a national scandal. [...] They’re testing 10,000 a day in some countries and we can’t get this off the ground,” McCarthy said. “I’m a practitioner on the firing line, and I don’t have the tools to properly care for patients today.” (Video, CNBC)
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Instructive for ALL high profile prolific posters from a REAL expert versus babbling brook The Science from an Expert an EPIDEMIOLOGIST PRECLUDES errant misguided ways:
Quote:
Why this epidemiologist is more worried about coronavirus than he was a month ago
Maciej F. Boni
Americans need to prepare themselves that the next 12 months are going to look very different.
By Maciej F. Boni
Americans need to prepare themselves that the next 12 months are going to look very different.
Passengers get off a New York City subway on March 7.
The Harvard historian Jill Lepore recounted recently in The New Yorker magazine that when democracies sink into crisis, the question “where are we going?” leaps to everyone’s mind, as if we were waiting for a weather forecast to tell us how healthy our democracy was going to be tomorrow. Quoting Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, Lepore writes that “political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”
And so it is with the coronavirus epidemic. How big will this epidemic be? How many people will it infect? How many Americans will die? The answers to these questions are not written in stone. They are partially within our control, assuming we are willing to take the responsibility to act with commitment, urgency and solidarity.
I am an epidemiologist with eight years of field experience, including time on the front lines of the isolation and quarantine efforts during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. One month ago, I was under the impression that the death reports due to COVID-19 circulation in China were giving us an unfair picture of its mortality rate. I wrote a piece saying that the death rate of an emerging disease always looks bad in the early stages of an outbreak, but is likely to drop once better data become available. After waiting for eight weeks, I am now worried that these new data — data indicating that the virus has a low fatality rate — may not arrive.
Case fatality rate and infection fatality rate
By Jan. 31, China had reported a total of 11,821 cases of COVID-19 and 259 deaths; that’s about a 2% case fatality rate. Two weeks later, the tally had risen to more than 50,000 cases and 1,524 deaths, corresponding to about 3% case fatality (the rise in the case fatality is expected as deaths always get counted later than cases). For an easily transmissible disease, a 2% or 3% fatality rate is extremely dangerous.
However, case fatality rates are computed using the officially reported numbers of 11,821 cases or 50,000 cases, which only include individuals who (a) experience symptoms; (b) decide that their symptoms are bad enough to merit a hospital visit; and (c) choose a hospital or clinic that is able to test and report cases of coronavirus.
Surely, there must have been hundreds of thousands cases, maybe a million cases, that had simply gone uncounted.
First, some definitions from Steven Riley at Imperial College. The infection fatality rate (IFR) gives the probability of dying for an infected person. The case fatality rate (CFR) gives the probability of dying for an infected person who is sick enough to report to a hospital or clinic. CFR is larger than IFR, because individuals who report to hospitals are typically more severely ill.
If China’s mid-February statistic of 1,524 deaths had occurred from 1 million infections of COVID-19 (counting all symptomatic and asymptomatic infections), this would mean that the virus had an infection fatality rate of 0.15%, about three times higher than seasonal influenza virus; this is a concern but not a crisis.
After waiting for eight weeks, I am now worried that data indicating the virus has a low fatality rate may not arrive.
The IFR is much more difficult to estimate than the CFR. The reason is that it is hard to count people who are mildly ill or who show no symptoms at all. If you are able to count and test everybody — for example, on a cruise ship, or in a small community — then you may be able to paint a picture of what fraction of infections are asymptomatic, mild, symptomatic and severe.
Scientists working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Institute for Disease Modeling have used these approaches to estimate the infection fatality rate. Currently, these estimates range from 0.5% to 0.94% indicating that COVID-19 is about 10 to 20 times as deadly as seasonal influenza. Evidence coming in from genomics and large-scale testing of fevers is consistent with these conclusions. The only potentially good news is that the epidemic in Korea may ultimately show a lower CFR than the epidemic in China.
Impact of the epidemic in the U.S.
Now that new COVID-19 cases are being detected in the U.S. every day, it is too late to stop the initial wave of infections. The epidemic is likely to spread across the U.S. The virus appears to be about as contagious as influenza. But this comparison is difficult to make since we have no immunity to the new coronavirus.
On balance, it is reasonable to guess that COVID-19 will infect as many Americans over the next year as influenza does in a typical winter — somewhere between 25 million and 115 million. Maybe a bit more if the virus turns out to be more contagious than we thought. Maybe a bit less if we put restrictions in place that minimize our travel and our social and professional contacts.
The bad news is, of course, that these infection numbers translate to 350,000 to 660,000 people dying in the U.S., with an uncertainty range that goes from 50,000 deaths to 5 million deaths. The good news is that this is not a weather forecast. The size of the epidemic, i.e., the total number of infections, is something we can reduce if we decrease our contact patterns and improve our hygiene. If the total number of infections decreases, the total number of deaths will also decrease.
What science cannot tell us right now is exactly which measures will be most effective at slowing down the epidemic and reducing its impact. If I stop shaking hands, will that cut my probability of infection by a half? A third? Nobody knows. If I work from home two days a week, will this reduce my probability of infection by 40%? Maybe. But we don’t even know the answer to that.
What we should prepare for now is reducing our exposures — i.e., our chances of coming into contact with infected people or infected surfaces — any way that we can. For some people this will mean staying home more. For others it will mean adopting more stringent hygiene practices. An extreme version of this exposure reduction — including mandatory quarantine, rapid diagnosis and isolation, and closing of workplaces and schools — seems to have worked in Hubei province in China, where the epidemic spread appears to have slowed down.
For now, Americans need to prepare themselves that the next 12 months are going to look very different. Vacations may have to be canceled. Social interactions will look different. And risk management is something we’re going to have to think about every morning when we wake up. The coronavirus epidemic is not going to extinguish itself. It is not in another country. It is not just the cold and flu. And it is not going away.
Maciej F. Boni is as associate professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pa. This was first published on The Conversation — “How big will the coronavirus epidemic be? An epidemiologist updates his concerns”
https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/133133/count.gif
RELATED: When does a coronavirus epidemic become a pandemic? When does a coronavirus epidemic become a pandemic?
RELATED: Deadly viruses are no match for plain old soap — here’s the science behind it Deadly viruses are no match for plain old soap — here’s the science behind it
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http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-this-epidemiologist-is-more-worried-about-coronavirus-than-he-was-a-month-ago-2020-03-09
The level of so called Due Diligence is appalling IMHO.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
From the FRONT LINES The crystallization of USA issues with COVID 19 versus others: DISGRACEFUL!
As of Feb. 26, CDC had performed a total of 445 tests. For comparison, the UK, with a population five times smaller than the US, had conducted over 7,000 tests.
March 2, 2020
Dr. Matt McCarthy, a staff physician at New York-Presbyterian:
“I’m here to tell you, right now, at one of the busiest hospitals in the country, I don’t have [a rapid diagnostic test] at my finger tips.” “I still have to make my case, plead to test people. This is not good. We know that there are 88 cases in the United States. There are going to be hundreds by middle of week. There’s going to be thousands by next week. And this is a testing issue.”
“In New York State, the person who tested positive is only the 32nd test we’ve done in this state,” he said. “That is a national scandal. [...] They’re testing 10,000 a day in some countries and we can’t get this off the ground,” McCarthy said. “I’m a practitioner on the firing line, and I don’t have the tools to properly care for patients today.” (Video, CNBC)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Instructive for ALL high profile prolific posters from a REAL expert versus babbling brook The Science from an Expert an EPIDEMIOLOGIST PRECLUDES errant misguided ways:
LASER FOCUSED in USA versus errant crickets:
FACTUALLY from REAL EXPERTS on CoronaVirus: COVID 19 VERSUS heresay which not surprisingly happens to be always DEVOID of LINKS; debate postmaster etc:
Umibe: Stupendous OVER the Top closing summation before TLD:
Likened to a wrecking ball: leaving little to no oxygen for the bowled over skeptics
who may still need Iwasadiver to add his NYC skyscraper wrecking ball!
After 5 + years for many of SOLITARY confinement in one stock:
Anxiously awaiting being UNSHACKLED!
BTW Superb coverage/sleuthing by Lyricki/Longfellow series of posts re 17 acre left Sawston site
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
COVID 19: NPR Here&Now 3/2/20 morning Radio Interview w/former Sec of HHS Kathleen Sebelus:
Finally a delayed link ( since this interview 4 more Seattle deaths=6: happened in a nursing home! (older people more susceptible!) Accounts for all the USA deaths
City of booming Seattle(where I lived; last few yrs has had more construction cranes each year than the Next 3 USA cities COMBINED! City of Seattle has bought a Motel to deal with burgeoning COVID 19 issues!
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/03/02/health-us-covid-19-coronavirus
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
The "complete" basics on Maverick_1 previously posted:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=144839547
As for:
Listened to just ended NPR Here & Now:
Insightful, NO nonsense & comprehensive interview of Kathleen Sebelius former HHS re world’s leading expert on Infectious Diseases: Dr Tony Fauci( last week said not till NEXT year under control);Trump Politics; VP Pence; we are behind the curve; did not help that CDC funding was drastically reduced last two years by Trump! Covid19 will grow this Spring etc
Re Undertaking the Coronavirius (Covid 19).
NO link too recent
BELATEDLY DMiller is being recognized over The HERD!
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
I was employed by Cowen in 1980-1985 when they had one of the best Health Care; Technology; and Defense
research teams on Wall St then : re Cowen’s NEW Buy Recommendation today with a $51 price target
https://www.streetinsider.com/dr/news.php?id=16552196
https://thefly.com/landingPageNews.php?id=3042747&headline=AMRN-Amarin-initiated-with-an-Outperform-at-Cowen and AMRN appearing today at Cowen's 39th Annual Health Care Conference.
Cowen becomes the 12th Wall St firm to cover Amarin:
https://investor.amarincorp.com/analyst-coverage
OECD: Coronavirus: Global growth ‘could halve’ if outbreak intensifies
A "longer lasting and more intensive" outbreak could halve growth in 2020, says the OECD.
Disclaimer: The BBC
I have only offered constructive commentary on any msg bds: receded dramatically in last 6 months due to
“Oil does not mix with water: retail vs Institutional mindset differences”
AND many more critical time consuming endeavors in keeping abreast of the Investment scene!
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
BEST single eye POPPING DAILY site re COVID 19 developments in a nutshell IMHO & supplemented by CNN et al:
:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus
BTW I have been tracking the Corona Virus since close to it's inception:
Expected HUGE market impact as shutting down and isolating cities especially in China would have MASSIVE worldwide repercussions as China HAS BEEN RESPONSIBLE for a LARGE part of the world's economic recovery from the massive financial collapse.
Add to that the relentless downgrades previously by the IMF on world GDP due to Trump's Tariffs wars with China; the success of TSLA's EV's being leaps and bounds ahead of ALL their peers and close to 9 mln worldwide auto assembly workers doing internal combustion engines and it's attendant multiplier supply chain effectS; AND down the road: FASTER depreciation on existing gasoline cars.
There will be loads of China defaults in the coming months as those loans come due!.
The WW banking system will be STRAINED: on top of lower births in US/China ; BreExit ETC ETC Black SwanS
Even more Dramatic slowdown in Global Economic activity which was already faced many IMF growth reductions since Trump Tariff Wars began will be realized IMHO.
COMPLICATING the ABOVE are Trumps POOR judgements of my way or the highway (I am not a registered voter and turning 71!):
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/02/cdc-employees-demoralized-over-trump-interference-as-they-grapple-with-coronavirus-crisis-cnn/
Growing litany of articles citing WW economic impact from COVID 19:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/upshot/coronavirus-recession-US.html
BEGINNINGECONOMIC IMPACT from COVID19:
China factory activity shrank at its fastest rate on record in February
PUBLISHED FRI, FEB 28 20209:45 PM ESTUPDATED FRI, FEB 28 20209:55 PM EST
Reuters
KEY POINTS
China’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell to a record low of 35.7 in February from 50.0 in January.
The data highlight the damage from the coronavirus outbreak on the world’s second-largest economy.
The results suggest deepening cracks in an economy already hit by the trade war.
What does the coronavirus mean for China’s economy?
Factory activity in China contracted at the fastest pace on record in February, highlighting the damage from the coronavirus outbreak on the world’s second-largest economy.
China’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell to a record low of 35.7 in February from 50.0 in January, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Saturday, well below the 50-point mark that separates monthly growth from contraction. Analysts polled by Reuters expected the February PMI to come in at 46.0.
The somber readings provide the first official snapshot of the state of the Chinese economy since the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic which has killed almost 3,000 people in mainland China and infected about 80,000.
The results suggest deepening cracks in an economy already hit by the trade war as the coronavirus forces widespread transport curbs and tough public health measures which have paralyzed economic activity.
China’s economy is widely expected to suffer another sharp blow in the first quarter of this year, pressuring policymakers to unveil more stimulus measures.
Nomura expects first-quarter growth to be at 2.0% year-on-year while Capital Economics estimates China’s economy would contract outright in year-on-year terms this quarter, for the first time since at least the 1990s.
GP 200229 china pmi factory
Workers work at a vehicle chair manufacture factory in Lintong District of Xi’an, northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, Feb. 26, 2020.
Xinhua | Liu Xiao | Getty Images
A sub-index of manufacturing production nosedived to 27.8 in February from January’s 51.3 while a reading of new orders plunged to 29.3, down from 51.4 a month earlier.
Factories continued to lose jobs at the fastest pace in years as labor conditions remained tight amid the travel restrictions.
China’s leaders have urged local governments, factories and workers to re-start operations as soon as possible in less affected regions. But the response has been slow and many migrant workers — including those in worst-hit Hubei province — have yet to return to work due to stringent quarantine rules and ongoing travel bans.
Official data showed that only about 30% of China’s small- and medium-sized companies had resumed production as of Wednesday. Some firms that have restarted work are reportedly running below normal capacity.
Small- and mid-size firms account for more than 80% of nationwide employment and over 60% of gross domestic product.
Global outbreak could prolong China’s pain
As the coronavirus spreads to more countries, some analysts have warned that the impact on global supply chains could risk dampening the subsequent recovery for Chinese manufacturers.
“Even if labor shortages in China start to ease, some factories may run into problems resuming normal production if outbreaks in other countries mean they have trouble sourcing intermediate goods,” Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist at Capital Economics, said in a note on Friday.
Economists at Morgan Stanley have warned of a pronounced impact on first-quarter global growth, with rising risks of it extending into the second quarter this year.
China’s services sector activity also posted the deepest contraction on record, with official non-manufacturing PMI dropping to 29.6, from 54.1 in January, a separate NBS survey showed.
China’s economy has transitioned more towards services since the SARS coronavirus epidemic in 2002-2003, and the sector now accounts for about 60% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Transportation, tourism, catering and entertainment sectors have been hard hit during the coronavirus outbreak as people avoid crowded areas.
A sub-index of construction activity, a key driver of growth, stood at 26.6, down from 59.7 in January.
Expecting MORE collateral damage to China's economy and Europe's courtesy of BIG Chinese DEBTS DUE that may have Domino Effects. WW Banking System resources will be tested IMHO.
When so much of the world has been dependent on low cost mfg AND GROWTH from and in China (ie Starbucks has 4,000 stores there and is SBUX's 2nd largest market next to US; 70% of all shoes bought in US is made in China!; China is the world's computer hardware and micro electronics capital etc) and their awakening from the Sleeping Giant since 1990's and the US's
These TWO samplerS are a MUST READ:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/mckinsey-world-has-become-more-exposed-to-china-but-not-the-reverse.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/business/china-coronavirus-economy.html
SO INVESTORS doing their Due Diligence should NOT have been SURPRISED BY THE WORLDWIDE STOCK MARKET MELTDOWNS
CDC did NOT have the adequate COVID19 test kits nor the volume needed: only by end of next week.
TO WIT:
Japan is closing ALL it's schools for A MONTH
China's quarantine resulting in this: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Chinas-Floods-The-Market-With-Fuel-As-Coronavirus-Shatters-Local-Demand.html
Update COVID 19 growing FASTEST OUTSIDE China: there are 60 countries of 195 with confirmed cases I
AND EYE popping single best source IMHO:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus
AND in the USA: first death::
8 min ago
Investigation into US coronavirus death suggests person became ill through community spread
From CNN Health’s Jamie Gumbrecht
The Washington woman who died from the novel coronavirus appears to have become ill through community spread, says Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The investigation at this time shows no evidence of link to travel or a known contact,” Redfield told reporters at the White House on Saturday.
Trump said there are now 22 cases of the novel coronavirus in the United States. That number does not include individuals repatriated to the United States from Wuhan, China, or from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Those cases have been counted separately by the CDC.
COVID 19 cases by Country:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/locations-confirmed-cases.html
ALARMING how many countries have confirmed cases: largely plane travel; cruise ship and worst: "community spread"
Italy #1 in Europe 1200 cases
Germany now has 48 cases, making it the second most infected European country after Italy.
Looks like ALL of pre COVID19 Europe was on edge of recession AND WORST NOW w/Covid19 with
SHAKY FINANCES: NEGATIVE INTEREST RATES!
BEGINNING ECONOMIC IMPACT:
China factory activity shrank at its fastest rate on record in February
PUBLISHED FRI, FEB 28 20209:45 PM ESTUPDATED FRI, FEB 28 20209:55 PM EST
Reuters
KEY POINTS
China’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell to a record low of 35.7 in February from 50.0 in January.
The data highlight the damage from the coronavirus outbreak on the world’s second-largest economy.
The results suggest deepening cracks in an economy already hit by the trade war.
What does the coronavirus mean for China’s economy?
Factory activity in China contracted at the fastest pace on record in February, highlighting the damage from the coronavirus outbreak on the world’s second-largest economy.
China’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell to a record low of 35.7 in February from 50.0 in January, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Saturday, well below the 50-point mark that separates monthly growth from contraction. Analysts polled by Reuters expected the February PMI to come in at 46.0.
The somber readings provide the first official snapshot of the state of the Chinese economy since the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic which has killed almost 3,000 people in mainland China and infected about 80,000.
The results suggest deepening cracks in an economy already hit by the trade war as the coronavirus forces widespread transport curbs and tough public health measures which have paralyzed economic activity.
China’s economy is widely expected to suffer another sharp blow in the first quarter of this year, pressuring policymakers to unveil more stimulus measures.
Nomura expects first-quarter growth to be at 2.0% year-on-year while Capital Economics estimates China’s economy would contract outright in year-on-year terms this quarter, for the first time since at least the 1990s.
GP 200229 china pmi factory
Workers work at a vehicle chair manufacture factory in Lintong District of Xi’an, northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, Feb. 26, 2020.
Xinhua | Liu Xiao | Getty Images
A sub-index of manufacturing production nosedived to 27.8 in February from January’s 51.3 while a reading of new orders plunged to 29.3, down from 51.4 a month earlier.
Factories continued to lose jobs at the fastest pace in years as labor conditions remained tight amid the travel restrictions.
China’s leaders have urged local governments, factories and workers to re-start operations as soon as possible in less affected regions. But the response has been slow and many migrant workers — including those in worst-hit Hubei province — have yet to return to work due to stringent quarantine rules and ongoing travel bans.
Official data showed that only about 30% of China’s small- and medium-sized companies had resumed production as of Wednesday. Some firms that have restarted work are reportedly running below normal capacity.
Small- and mid-size firms account for more than 80% of nationwide employment and over 60% of gross domestic product.
Global outbreak could prolong China’s pain
As the coronavirus spreads to more countries, some analysts have warned that the impact on global supply chains could risk dampening the subsequent recovery for Chinese manufacturers.
“Even if labor shortages in China start to ease, some factories may run into problems resuming normal production if outbreaks in other countries mean they have trouble sourcing intermediate goods,” Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist at Capital Economics, said in a note on Friday.
Economists at Morgan Stanley have warned of a pronounced impact on first-quarter global growth, with rising risks of it extending into the second quarter this year.
China’s services sector activity also posted the deepest contraction on record, with official non-manufacturing PMI dropping to 29.6, from 54.1 in January, a separate NBS survey showed.
China’s economy has transitioned more towards services since the SARS coronavirus epidemic in 2002-2003, and the sector now accounts for about 60% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Transportation, tourism, catering and entertainment sectors have been hard hit during the coronavirus outbreak as people avoid crowded areas.
A sub-index of construction activity, a key driver of growth, stood at 26.6, down from 59.7 in January.
Expecting MORE collateral damage to China's economy and Europe's courtesy of BIG Chinese DEBTS DUE that may have Domino Effects. WW Banking System resources will be tested IMHO.
When so much of the world has been dependent on low cost mfg AND GROWTH from and in China (ie Starbucks has 4,000 stores there and is SBUX's 2nd largest market next to US; 70% of all shoes bought in US is made in China!; China is the world's computer hardware and micro electronics capital etc) and their awakening from the Sleeping Giant since 1990's and the US's
These TWO samplerS are a MUST READ:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/mckinsey-world-has-become-more-exposed-to-china-but-not-the-reverse.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/business/china-coronavirus-economy.html
SO INVESTORS doing their Due Diligence should NOT have been SURPRISED BY THE WORLDWIDE STOCK MARKET MELTDOWNS
CDC did NOT have the adequate COVID19 test kits nor the volume needed: only by end of next week.
That's why I finally buckled and elected to sacrifice myself here to ONE POST per Day FOR INFINITY:
To devote to many MORE critical issues! GIVEN the EVIDENCE faced here since 2015! even with what I sensed since my earliest posts beginning mid 2014.
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
Coronavirus unlikely to vanish NEXT Year re NIH Dr Tony Fauci!
FEBRUARY 28, 2020 / 03:49 PM / UPDATED 3 MINUTES AGO
Coronavirus unlikely to vanish next year-NIH's Fauci according to source
WASHINGTON, Feb 28 (Reuters) - A senior U.S. health official told lawmakers that the coronavirus that is spreading globally is unlikely to disappear next year and that many more cases should be expected in the United States, according to a source who attended a briefing on Friday.
Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases, also told House of Representatives members in a closed briefing that the United States currently does not have enough coronavirus testing resources.
Reporting by Richard Cowan Editing by Chizu Nomiyama
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Airlines Cancel Flights To Italy As Coronavirus Hampers Demand re Forbes
Topline: European airlines are cancelling flights to Italy, which has in recent days become a coronavirus hot spot in Europe, in the latest sign of the strain the aviation industry is under as Covid-19 spreads globally.
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For your enjoyment JL:
Tesla Model S Competes Against Hybrid Acura NSX: Electric Vs Hybrid
It is time for the “Tesla Model S Vs Acura NSX.” Don’t make any mistakes, it is an important drag race battle between an electric car and a Hybrid vehicle. Brooks from “DragTimes” uploaded a video of a drag race between these two monsters of green and sustainable energy and we are here to talk […] The post Tesla Model S Competes Against Hybrid Acura NSX: Electric Vs Hybrid appeared first on Fossbytes.
Read in Fossbytes:
Tesla Model S vs Acura NSX Drag Race
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS