Trump's denial of science and reality is costing lives

[The Biden Administration]

US records highest number of daily corona virus deaths since May

Thursday saw 2,015 deaths from Covid and more than 187,000 new cases, another daily record

The US recorded 2,015 deaths from Covid-19 on Thursday, the highest number of new deaths in a single day since May, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, as a top White House expert warned of worsening spread of the disease – even as America is just weeks away from the expected beginnings of vaccinating its people.

The country also saw more than 187,000 new confirmed cases on Thursday, another record for the daily count of infections.

Just weeks after the US first exceeded 100,000 new cases in a single day earlier this month, new cases are now on track to reach a grim daily milestone of 200,000.

On Wednesday, total US deaths due to Covid-19 reached 250,000 – the most seen of any country in the world.

At least 11 million Americans have been infected with the virus over the course of the pandemic, which began hitting the US in January.

This month, the number of Americans currently hospitalized with the coronavirus has been the highest it has ever been, surpassing 80,000 people across the country on Thursday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

Unlike previous surges of the virus, the uptick in cases is not concentrated in a single region. Cases have been rising in nearly every state, a concerning scenario as the US holiday season kicks into gear.

Dr Deborah Birx, a senior scientist on the White House’s coronavirus taskforce, told CNN Friday morning that more than half of the country is in the “red zone”, meaning more than 101 new cases per 100,000 residents.

“It’s faster, it’s broader and what worries me is it could be longer,” Birx said of the spread of the virus.

Public health experts have been pleading with the American public for weeks to limit or cancel any gatherings typically seen around Thanksgiving. A new ad campaign from a coalition of healthcare systems across the country begs Americans to wear masks, as hospitals become more overwhelmed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new guidelines around Thanksgiving that reiterates that “staying home is the best way to protect yourself and others this year”. Most states have some type of mandatory quarantine for travelers, with some exceptions to those who test negative for the virus.

On Thursday, Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, made his first appearance at a White House coronavirus press briefing after months of being sidelined by Donald Trump and steering clear of infections in Trump top circles.

At the podium, Fauci emphasized the importance of “simple public health measures” as the country comes closer to a vaccine for the virus.

“Mask wearing, social distance, avoiding congregant settings, doing things to the extent that we can outdoors versus indoors,” Fauci said. “If we do that, we’ll be able to hold things off until the vaccine comes.”

Public health experts believe a vaccine could be available to Americans with the highest priority by the end of this calendar year.

Dr. Fauci praised the vaccine developed by Moderna with his help.

“We need to actually double down on the public health measures as we’re waiting for that help to come, which will be soon,” he said.



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...s-cases-record

[The Biden Administration]

Donald Trump Jr. tests positive for corona virus

Donald Trump Jr., President Donald Trump's eldest son, has tested positive for the coronavirus, a personal spokesman told CNN on Friday.

"Don tested positive at the start of the week and has been quarantining out at his cabin since the result," the spokesman said. "He's been completely asymptomatic so far and is following all medically recommended COVID-19 guidelines."

Trump Jr. becomes the latest figure close to the outgoing president to test positive for Covid-19.

In addition to himself, outgoing first lady Melania Trump, his youngest son Barron, his chief of staff Mark Meadows and a number of other top aides both in his campaign and in the White House have tested positive in recent months.

Trump Jr.'s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, also tested positive for the virus over the summer as the duo campaigned for Trump throughout the country.

Trump Jr. was among the roughly 250 guests who attended the White House's indoor election night party, where nearly every attendee was seen not wearing a mask.

Other party attendees have since tested positive, including Meadows, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and White House political affairs director Brian Jack.

Trump Jr. has spread a significant amount of misinformation about the corona virus.

Late last month, he told Fox News that the number of deaths from Covid-19 is now "almost nothing."

Over the summer, his Twitter account was restricted for sharing a video that spread false information about the drug hydroxychloroquine and he shared a Facebook meme spreading doubt about the effectiveness of masks against the corona virus.

The news comes as Covid is spreading throughout the country, with daily case records being set nearly every day in November, and is also spreading throughout Washington's halls of power.

Two Republican senators, Rick Scott of Florida and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, have announced in the last few days that they tested positive and to this point 26 House members and 10 senators have so far tested positive or been presumed positive since the beginning of the pandemic.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/20/p...rus/index.html

[The Biden Administration]

California will impose ‘limited’ curfew due to COVID-19 surge

Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced a mandatory overnight stay-at-home order that will be instituted throughout most of California to combat a surge in new corona virus cases, a measure that comes just days after the governor enacted a dramatic rollback of reopening in much of the state.

The order issued by the California Department of Public Health will prohibit most nonessential activity outside the home from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. in counties in the strictest tier of the state’s reopening road map — the purple tier.

The restriction goes into place on Saturday and lasts through Dec. 21, though it could be extended.

“The virus is spreading at a pace we haven’t seen since the start of this pandemic and the next several days and weeks will be critical to stop the surge. We are sounding the alarm,” Newsom said in a statement released Thursday afternoon. “It is crucial that we act to decrease transmission and slow hospitalizations before the death count surges. We’ve done it before and we must do it again.”


https://www.latimes.com/california/s...covid-19-surge

[The Biden Administration]

NYC on brink of another COVID lock-down

Mayor Bill de Blasio is warning that all five boroughs of New York City could be put back under lock-down.



https://www.fox5ny.com/video/873139

[The Biden Administration]

Crushed by COVID-19, rural red states finally start to mandate masks. It may be too little, too late.


Earlier this week, Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds made national news when she reluctantly set aside her long-standing opposition to mask mandates and finally agreed to issue one in a state with a large rural population where COVID-19 is spreading at an "exponential and unyielding” rate.

Reynolds’s abrupt reversal, which coincided with similar U-turns in Montana and North Dakota, was largely seen as a welcome sign that red states are now accepting what blue states (and scientists) have known since summer: Mandating masks leads to more mask wearing, and more mask wearing leads to less corona virus.

According to a new study on the impact of St. Louis’s July 3 mask mandate, for instance, average daily COVID-19 case growth in that city three weeks after the ordinance went into effect was 44 percent lower than in neighboring counties where masks were not required. Twelve weeks later, case growth in St. Louis was still 40 percent lower.

Put another way, 13 of the 17 states currently struggling with the highest COVID-19 positivity rates are also states that don’t mandate masks or that just issued statewide mandates this month.

“The data shows that when you put in a mask mandate, more than 80 percent of that specific population [starts] following it,” explained Dr. Enbal Shacham of St. Louis University, the lead author of the Missouri mask study. “It’s going to have a reduction.”

But here’s the problem: It’s already too late for a mask mandate — particularly a half-hearted mask mandate like Reynolds’s — to keep Iowa’s hospitals from overflowing.

“We don’t have that many beds left,” Sioux City’s nonpartisan Mayor Bob Scott told the Times. “This should have happened three weeks ago.”

Or earlier. Mandating masks is a good way to help keep a COVID-19 outbreak under control. But if you wait until the outbreak is out of control to mandate face coverings — if you wait until your hand is forced — then you’re still going to be staring down weeks of baked-in infections, hospitalizations and deaths that could have been reduced or even prevented by a preexisting requirement.

This is doubly risky in the sort of red states that have resisted mask mandates the most. Small rural hospitals have been closing at a record pace due to a decline in elective procedures (and revenue) during the pandemic. The facilities that have managed to survive are often the last to upgrade their air-circulation systems and the first to run out of ventilators, PPE and available medical professionals. Patients are being airlifted out. Meanwhile, some rural hospitals, according to the Associated Press, are “converting chapels, cafeterias, waiting rooms, hallways, even a parking garage, into patient treatment areas. Staff members are desperately calling around to other medical centers in search of open beds. Fatigue and frustration are setting in among front-line workers.”

According to Eli Perencevich, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Iowa who spoke to the Atlantic’s Ed Yong, the state has already run out of staffed beds.

“The wave hasn’t even crashed down on us yet,” Perencevich predicted. “It keeps rising and rising, and we’re all running on fear. The health care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question.”

Needless to say, this is not an optimal environment for saving lives, which arguably makes routine mask wearing even more consequential in rural America than in places with sturdier medical systems (and presumably less burdensome, too, assuming lower population density means fewer close interactions with people from other households).

On Thursday, President-elect Joe Biden discussed a possible nationwide mask mandate during a call with Republican and Democratic governors, declaring afterward that covering your face is “not a political statement” but rather “a patriotic duty.” His team is also exploring ways to persuade resistant Republican governors to get on board, including possibly tying federal COVID-19 relief to statewide mandates.




https://news.yahoo.com/crushed-by-co...144945618.html

[The Biden Administration]

Rudy Giuliani’s son tests positive for corona virus

Andrew Giuliani serves as a special assistant to Trump

Andrew Giuliani, a special assistant to Donald Trump and the son of Rudy Giuliani, announced Friday that he had tested positive for corona virus.

Giuliani received his results Friday morning, he wrote on Twitter, and reported “experiencing mild symptoms.” He also wrote that he was “following all appropriate protocols, including being in quarantine and conducting contact tracing.”

Giuliani told POLITICO in a text message that he had “not heard from anyone else who has tested positive at this point.”

Giuliani is among the latest Trump administration and campaign officials to have become infected over the course of the pandemic, across three separate White House outbreaks. It is unclear whether he contracted Covid-19 in his capacity as an aide.


https://www.politico.com/news/2020/1...navirus-438694

[Walt]

This is going to take a lot of hard work, over a while, to solve. trump worshiper's magic wand is just a fantasy.

[Darth Omar]

This is going to take a lot of hard work, over a while, to solve. trump worshiper's magic wand is just a fantasy.

Lowering the bar for Biden already lol?

[Walt]

Lowering the bar for Biden already lol?

It is lowering the bar to say Biden will put in the hard work to get America back on track? I think adults realize that there are no magic wands.

[Earl]

It is lowering the bar to say Biden will put in the hard work to get America back on track? I think adults realize that there are no magic wands.

Raising taxes during a pandemic, if elected?

Get a clue, Walter.

[PoliTalker]

Hello Biden Transition Team,

Crushed by COVID-19, rural red states finally start to mandate masks. It may be too little, too late.


Earlier this week, Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds made national news when she reluctantly set aside her long-standing opposition to mask mandates and finally agreed to issue one in a state with a large rural population where COVID-19 is spreading at an "exponential and unyielding” rate.

Reynolds’s abrupt reversal, which coincided with similar U-turns in Montana and North Dakota, was largely seen as a welcome sign that red states are now accepting what blue states (and scientists) have known since summer: Mandating masks leads to more mask wearing, and more mask wearing leads to less corona virus.

According to a new study on the impact of St. Louis’s July 3 mask mandate, for instance, average daily COVID-19 case growth in that city three weeks after the ordinance went into effect was 44 percent lower than in neighboring counties where masks were not required. Twelve weeks later, case growth in St. Louis was still 40 percent lower.

Put another way, 13 of the 17 states currently struggling with the highest COVID-19 positivity rates are also states that don’t mandate masks or that just issued statewide mandates this month.

“The data shows that when you put in a mask mandate, more than 80 percent of that specific population [starts] following it,” explained Dr. Enbal Shacham of St. Louis University, the lead author of the Missouri mask study. “It’s going to have a reduction.”

But here’s the problem: It’s already too late for a mask mandate — particularly a half-hearted mask mandate like Reynolds’s — to keep Iowa’s hospitals from overflowing.

“We don’t have that many beds left,” Sioux City’s nonpartisan Mayor Bob Scott told the Times. “This should have happened three weeks ago.”

Or earlier. Mandating masks is a good way to help keep a COVID-19 outbreak under control. But if you wait until the outbreak is out of control to mandate face coverings — if you wait until your hand is forced — then you’re still going to be staring down weeks of baked-in infections, hospitalizations and deaths that could have been reduced or even prevented by a preexisting requirement.

This is doubly risky in the sort of red states that have resisted mask mandates the most. Small rural hospitals have been closing at a record pace due to a decline in elective procedures (and revenue) during the pandemic. The facilities that have managed to survive are often the last to upgrade their air-circulation systems and the first to run out of ventilators, PPE and available medical professionals. Patients are being airlifted out. Meanwhile, some rural hospitals, according to the Associated Press, are “converting chapels, cafeterias, waiting rooms, hallways, even a parking garage, into patient treatment areas. Staff members are desperately calling around to other medical centers in search of open beds. Fatigue and frustration are setting in among front-line workers.”

According to Eli Perencevich, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Iowa who spoke to the Atlantic’s Ed Yong, the state has already run out of staffed beds.

“The wave hasn’t even crashed down on us yet,” Perencevich predicted. “It keeps rising and rising, and we’re all running on fear. The health care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question.”

Needless to say, this is not an optimal environment for saving lives, which arguably makes routine mask wearing even more consequential in rural America than in places with sturdier medical systems (and presumably less burdensome, too, assuming lower population density means fewer close interactions with people from other households).

On Thursday, President-elect Joe Biden discussed a possible nationwide mask mandate during a call with Republican and Democratic governors, declaring afterward that covering your face is “not a political statement” but rather “a patriotic duty.” His team is also exploring ways to persuade resistant Republican governors to get on board, including possibly tying federal COVID-19 relief to statewide mandates.




https://news.yahoo.com/crushed-by-co...144945618.html

"The health care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question.”

How tragic that this was preventable.

[PoliTalker]

Hello Darth,

Lowering the bar for Biden already lol?

Trump has already pushed it to the moon.

It appears to be Republicans strategy to screw things up so badly that it takes an entire presidency just to correct them.

Just like with the Great Recession.

[artichoke]

Desperately trying to pressure people into accepting your theft.

[The Biden Administration]

Since Donald Trump’s election, mental health professionals have come forth in historically unprecedented ways to warn against entrusting the U.S. presidency to someone exhibiting dangerous mental impairments.

We held an ethics conference with the most highly respected psychiatrists in the country to ensure a solid ethical basis for speaking up.

Recently, 100 senior mental health professionals going on video record to declare the current president too psychologically dangerous and mentally unfit to be in the presidency or candidacy for reelection.

We recently published more than 300 pages of our letters, petitions, and conference transcripts in an attempt to alert the authorities.

When these did not have effect, we reconvened top experts in the fields of law, history, political science, economics, journalism, social psychology, climate science and nuclear science at an emergency interdisciplinary conference, to follow up on a meeting with the same speakers at the National Press Club in early 2019, with the full three hours broadcast on C-SPAN.

The president’s dangerousness is no longer debatable. Our warnings have now been realized exactly as we said they would four years ago, as if on schedule, with abundant real-life evidence.

When the right information became available, a peer-reviewed panel of independent experts performed a standardized assessment of mental capacity, to the highest rigor possible, in which the president failed every criterion.

This means he would be unfit for any job, let alone president.

Our evaluation fully predicted that he would disastrously mismanage a pandemic, as our blow-by-blow account shows.

We featured House member and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin’s lecture to us on the 25th Amendment in 2019, made current again through his reintroduction of legislation for a commission to oversee presidential capacity, of which physicians and psychiatrists would comprise half.

Dr. James Merikangas, a foremost forensic neuropsychiatrist joined us to discuss fitness tests.

The truly universal Declaration of Geneva says that we must prevent harm and injustice, especially when they are coming from a destructive government.

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine, editor of "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President," and president of the World Mental Health Coalition.


https://www.usatoday.com/story/opini...mn/6332417002/

[Earl]

Yes, entrusting the U.S. presidency to someone exhibiting dangerous mental impairments like dementia Biden is dangerous.