up and down

An interesting video clip.

https://www.livescience.com/new-zealand-coronavirus.html New Zealand is winning the war on coronavirus. Here’s why. Excerpts from the article above. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. keeps getting worse. China is just starting to reopen its society. South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore are managing their outbreaks with the help of massive contact tracing detetcive work. But New Zealand, which saw its first confirmed case on Feb. 28, is on track to stop its outbreak before it ever had a chance to begin. That's likely thanks to early and decisive nationwide action by its government. The small country of nearly 4.8 million people was able to quickly contain the virus and appears to have a real chance of wiping it out entirely, The Washington Post reported. As of April 7, according to the New Zealand Ministry of Health, the country has logged 1,160 confirmed and suspected cases in the country and just one death. More people recovered in the last 24 hours (65) than were found to have been infected (54), suggesting that the local outbreak is declining. Moreover, as of April 7, just one person is known to have died of the disease, according to Worldometer, which tracks COVID-19 cases around the globe. The key to success has been a straightforward, two-pronged strategy led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/03/22/covid-19-inadequate-medical-supplies-take-toll-on-lives-of-indonesian-medical-workers.html COVID-19: Inadequate medical supplies take toll on lives of Indonesian medical workers Excerpts from the article above. A hospital crisis looms as reports indicate that the combined capacity of the 132 referral hospitals designated to treat COVID-19 patients is far from adequate. Protective gear for medical workers is in short supply in both referral and regular hospitals across the country. While the system is inadequate, the government still maintains a lack of transparency over releasing information about patients and its preparedness, a policy that it has maintained since the emergence of the pandemic in January. This often leaves medical workers in the dark about whether they are treating a COVID-19 patient and it puts their lives at risk. The frustration of medical workers is emerging in many provinces as medical supplies become depleted. Adam Malik Hospital in Medan, North Sumatra, has experienced difficulties meeting the needs for medical coveralls, goggles and hand sanitizer by its staff members, according to hospital spokesperson Rosario Dorothy. “Frankly, I don’t think we are equipped enough as it is to deal with further escalation. There are only 1,200 lung specialists across the country who are proficient in examining respiratory illnesses caused by the virus. The mitigation should be viewed as a collective endeavor with active participation from the public,” he told the Post. Yani Muchtar, a radiologist at Harapan Kita Hospital, urged the government to devise a system that enables seamless cooperation between hospitals should any of them fail to function because of short supplies of resources at the height of the public health crisis. Disease surveillance and biostatistics researcher Iqbal Ridzi Fahdri Elyazar and his team at the Eijkman-Oxford Clinical Research Unit have used the geometric sequence method to determine “how much time it would take for the number of cases to double in Indonesia”. Based on their calculations, Indonesia could be grappling with up to 71,000 COVID-19 cases by the end of April.

News about lack of PPE. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-indonesia/indonesia-announces-biggest-daily-rise-in-coronavirus-cases-24-doctors-now-dead-idUSKBN21O0UW Indonesia announces biggest daily rise in coronavirus cases, 24 doctors now dead JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia announced its biggest daily increase in novel coronavirus cases on Monday and a medical association said 24 doctors had now died after contracting the virus. Medical workers wearing disposable raincoats as their protective suits to serve patients are pictured amid the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak at a local health center in Aceh, Indonesia, April 6, 2020 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Picture taken April 6, 2020. Antara Foto/Irwansyah Putra/ via The rise in the death toll among doctors, which has doubled since last week, followed criticism of a lack of protective equipment in Indonesia. The 218 new coronavirus cases took the number overall in Indonesia to 2,491. The 209 confirmed deaths among people who have contracted the virus is the highest number of fatalities in Asia outside China. “The trend of (doctors dying) is heading for the sky,” said Halik Malik, a spokesman for the Indonesian Doctors Association which confirmed the doctors’ deaths from COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus. “The risk of medical workers getting infected is always there... but the point is medical workers need to be protected in any way,” said Malik. A number of rights groups, including Amnesty International, have expressed concern at the high proportion of deaths among medical workers. “The death of medical workers is not just a number, but an alarm for the country to fix their health system in an emergency situation,” a coalition of the groups said in a statement on Saturday. Health experts have pointed to the high percentage of deaths among the number of confirmed cases as a sign the outbreak is much larger than official data suggests in the world’s fourth most-populous nation. Indonesia’s own intelligence agency last week revealed that it expected coronavirus cases to peak in the next three months, surpassing 100,000 cases by July. President Joko Widodo told a cabinet meeting on Monday that personal protective equipment (PPE) had been distributed across Indonesia, though he said regional officials must monitor the arrival of the equipment in hospitals. Indonesian healthcare workers have at time faced a lack of protective gear, with some doctors forced to wear raincoats and bring their own masks to protect themselves from the virus. A deficit in hospital beds, medical staff and intensive care facilities has raised concern the coronavirus crisis could push Indonesia’s health system to the brink. At least 10 Indonesian provinces, including the eastern provinces of Maluku and Papua, lack COVID-19 facilities, Doni Monardo, the head of Indonesia’s coronavirus taskforce, told parliament on Monday. In recent weeks, Indonesia has converted a former Vietnam war era refugee camp on an uninhabited island off Sumatra, and a former athletes’ village into coronavirus treatment facilities.

Had to agree with you on this part.

Main points from the long article above. Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there was little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered, because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost weeks placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the developed world: one-fourth of all confirmed cases anywhere on Earth. Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory. Statisticians cannot count fast enough to keep pace with the accelerating economic depression. It’s a good guess that the unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer. This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than nations nearer to China. Instead, the United States will suffer more than any peer country. It didn’t have to be this way. If somebody else had been president of the United States in December 2019—Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else—the United States would still have been afflicted by the coronavirus. But it would have been better prepared, and better able to respond.Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed. At a session with state governors on February 10, Trump predicted that the virus would quickly disappear on its own. “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases—11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” On February 14, Trump repeated his assurance that the virus would disappear by itself. He tweeted again on February 24 that he had the virus “very much under control in the USA.” On February 27, he said that the virus would disappear “like a miracle.”

A very interestting article. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/americans-are-paying-the-price-for-trumps-failures/609532/ This Is Trump’s Fault The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures. The article itself is extremely long. Here is the excerpts from the article above. " I don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up. Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead. The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country. That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not. The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault. For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump. Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.

My good guess here is that the whole world might just be laughing off whatever Trump has said or did throughout this tenure as the president. Honestly speaking all the different leaders in the world must be thinking this is the most insane US president they have seen making no sense and lots of U-turns all the time.

Glad to be able to provide the information.

This news is so shocking to even believe it.

This is the response of an incompetent leader towards the pandemic.

https://www.vogue.com/article/donald-trump-coronavirus-white-house-briefings-dangerous Donald Trump Is Dangerously Wrong About Coronavirus. Don’t Listen to Him. Exceprts from the article. If, after three years of his presidency, any doubt remained, Monday’s press briefing at the White House confirmed the obvious: Donald Trump is not the strong, informed leader that this country needs to get us through the coronavirus pandemic. As governors around the country shutter all but essential businesses and demand that residents stay home in order to try and contain this increasingly deadly virus, Trump suggested that everyone was just overreacting and that things would soon return to normal. “America will again, and soon, be open for business, very soon, a lot sooner than the three or four months somebody was suggesting,” Trump promised, insisting Americans may soon be able to return to work. He added, “We’re not going to let the cure be worse than the problem. At the end of the 15-day period, we’ll make a decision as to which way we want to go, where we want to go.” On Tuesday morning New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose own fact-filled and measured briefings have become essential television viewing for many New Yorkers, delivered a message that directly contradicted the one from the president the day before. Saying that the rate of infections in New York was now doubling every three days, Cuomo suggested that any optimism was clearly misplaced. “We’re not slowing it, and it is accelerating on its own,” said Cuomo at a briefing at Manhattan’s Javits Center, which is being converted to a 2,000-bed hospital complex. “The [disease] forecaster said to me, ‘We were looking at a freight train coming across the country.” Added Cuomo: “We’re now looking at a bullet train.” It may feel counterintuitive not to listen to the president, but right now Americans are better off taking their advice on how to limit the effect of COVID-19 directly from Fauci, who echoes the CDC’s advice to “essentially self-isolate.” It’s unclear even to experts how long COVID-19 will continue to ravage the U.S., but it depends at least in part on how willing Americans are to suspend normal life and flatten the curve in order to protect our most vulnerable populations. In a Saturday column for the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan noted that Trump’s daily COVID-19 briefings have become made-for-TV events at which “Trump is doing harm and spreading misinformation while working for his own partisan political benefit.” Sullivan called on cable-news networks and other news organizations to stop airing the briefings live, and the proposition makes sense; in a time of unprecedented turmoil, when Americans are grappling with disease, job loss, and social isolation, maybe no news is better than fake news.

You are absolutely right about this.

The person in the video clip above mentioned about a doctor who got fired after the doctor spoke about the lack of PPE and lack of gear. He said that the person who fired the doctor for speaking out need to be fired. He said we should not let the politicians run the show. It should be the doctors running the whole thing as a team together. I guess the America leader ought to be fired for his failure and the mess that he has created.

A very interesting video clips. Support this doctor. Stop Silencing Doctors.

Oh no bad news.

Good to hear that things are under control.

Good to hear about this.

This is really scary.

Moral of the story is this. Let the doctors handle the cases and let them do the full report. This is all easier said than done. Lots of countries in the world including USA still have the president as the front line person to handle the pandemic and do daily reports. No wonder the situation worsens. Politicians can never replace doctors.

You are right about it. The UK government is pretty much busy over Brexit than getting prepared to face the pandemic.

Latest development about Coronavirus worldwide. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2237475-coronavirus-latest-us-hospitals-come-under-increasing-strain/ Excerpts from the article above. Worldwide cases pass one million Coronavirus cases and deaths have begun to plateau in some European countries, including Italy and Spain, although cases and deaths continue to accelerate in the UK and the US. More people in the UK have died with coronavirus than in China, according to today’s figures from Johns Hopkins University. In the US hospitals across the country are coming under increasing strain. In Louisiana, the death toll is mounting and there are concerns that the state could run out of hospital beds. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered the National Guard to seize and redistribute any ventilators and personal protective equipment from facilities in the state. Florida has issued a stay-at-home order – over the past week cases in the state have been growing by hundreds daily. There have now been more than one million confirmed coronavirus cases diagnosed across the globe, though the true number of cases will be much higher. More than 55,000 people have died from covid-19. UK government faces questions over testing UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, has pledged to have 100,000 people in England tested per day by the end of the month, following criticism of the UK’s coronavirus testing strategy. Last month, Boris Johnson promised to move up to 25,000 tests a day with a goal of 250,000, but the UK is still only carrying out around 10,000 coronavirus tests per day. The new testing target for England includes the introduction of antibody tests, to check whether people have already had the virus, in addition to the existing swab tests, which determine whether a person is currently infected. Antibody tests are still being validated and the government says they won’t roll them out if they aren’t effective.

Latest development about Coronavirus in UK. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52169648 Coronavirus: 'Serious mistakes' made, says Starmer Exceprts from the article above. Failure to provide enough protective equipment for frontline workers and delays over testing have been "serious mistakes" in tackling coronavirus, the new Labour leader has said. Sir Keir Starmer said in an article in the Sunday Times, that ministers took too long to explain why they were "so far behind" on testing. He also called for a "national vaccine programme" against the virus. And he said ministers should publish an "exit strategy" to end the lockdown. The 57-year-old decisively won the contest to succeed Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday, defeating Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey in a ballot of party members and other supporters. Writing in the paper, Sir Keir said: "The Labour Party I lead will do our bit to offer solutions. "But we will also speak for those who have been ignored; and where we see mistakes we are under a duty to expose them to ensure that they are rectified as soon as possible."

Yes you are right about this. Considering that USA is the third biggest country in the world, I have to agree with you that their reponse have been very slow. They have only started to conduct more test in the month of March. The first 70 days in USA have really been wasted by not doing much.