Rand Paul becomes first senator to test positive for coronavirus

Rand Paul becomes first senator to test positive for coronavirus BY JORDAIN CARNEY - 03/22/20 01:46 PM EDT

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has tested positive for the coronavirus, a spokesman said on Sunday, becoming the first senator known to contract the disease.

“Senator Rand Paul has tested positive for COVID-19. He is feeling fine and is in quarantine. He is asymptomatic and was tested out of an abundance of caution due to his extensive travel and events,” Sergio Gor, Paul’s spokesman, said.

Gor added that Paul “was not aware of any direct contact with any infected person.”

Paul is the first senator and third lawmaker overall to announce that they had tested positive. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) and Rep. Ben McAdams (D-Utah) said last week they had tested positive.

The announcement from the two House members sparked a wave of decisions by their colleagues to self-quarantine. No senators immediately said they would self-quarantine.

Paul is now expected to miss a vote scheduled for Sunday afternoon related to a massive coronavirus stimulus package. Senate Republicans also want to take a final vote on the package on Monday.

Gor said that Paul would “be back in the Senate after his quarantine period ends.”

“Ten days ago, our D.C. office began operating remotely, hence virtually no staff has had contact with Senator Paul,” he said.

The Kentucky senator was involved in decisions relating to the coronavirus stimulus package before his diagnosis. He has spoken out against providing $1,000 to all Americans, saying the payment should be based on unemployment and those out of work because of the containment policies.

“If you’re still employed and doing well, why would we want to send you $1,000?” he said Wednesday. “It just seems to me fiscally irresponsible just to send everybody money.”

The senator forced amendment votes on the two coronavirus packages that have already passed, slowing down the process. Paul said Friday he planned to introduce his own proposed package that includes a 60-day payroll tax holiday and would change paid sick leave to expanded unemployment insurance.

“The national emergency we face may be new, but the answers out of Washington have so far been the same: more spending, more debt, and more mandates on the American people,” Paul said last week.

President Trump has signed two coronavirus packages passed by Congress. The first designated money to health agencies and first responders, and the second funded emergency paid leave, free coronavirus testing and unemployment insurance.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has scheduled a procedural vote for the third stimulus package Sunday, but the Democratic leaders are hesitant, as they haven’t signed off yet.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said after a meeting between congressional leaders and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that the Democrats would provide their own stimulus package, which she hopes will be “compatible” with the Senate version.

The U.S. has documented more than 31,000 cases of COVID-19 and 390 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Kentucky has recorded 99 cases and three deaths.

Chloroquine and Azithromycin which the good doctor in France is testing the first and having great results, both of these old time drugs have been tested up the wazoo for safety over decades and are now being ramped up into rapid increased production as trials such as the French Doctor’s show the treatments, especially the combo treatment, are amazingly effective. They are administered in pill form, not as shots as in vaccines.

So what Dr. Raoult is doing is showing these old anti-malarial and antibiotic treatments are effective in a clinical trial against Covid-19. In addition, there are credible reports that these drugs are PREVENTATIVE too against thee SARS-CO-2 (SRAS-COV-2 is the virus strain, Covid-19 is the disease it cause) which is very important. My only ‘back of the mind’ fear is there is another coronavirus engineered to be even more deadly than the current one that could be released but my intuition discounts this fear as so many testing trials are underway, there will be a slew of powerful treatments coming onboard to fight future pandemics.

I learned something today. It’s not a good idea to drum up a war dance against China, not because they are to be feared (they are not) but because the Trump Doctrine is not to smash one’s enemies under foot but to offer a deal and get cooperation going.

Still I am pissed off at the PRC. The only time the Trump White House threatened China was after they accused the US Army as having unleashed the virus. That was addressed by Pompeo who I like immensely. Now we are not hearing much from the PRC about their accusations of the US Army.

Importantly, note the vaccine lobby of which Dr. Fauci is part, is deeply saddened and have dispatched their shills in the fake news to cast doubt about Chloroquine and Azithromycin.

Bill Gates has patented many viruses including variants of coronaviruses, and he has patented many vaccines to go along with them. He is deeply saddened to hear about the success of non-vaccine treatments. Now he’s stepped down from his self-constructed throne and he’s going to focus on ‘Climate Change’. Yeah, don’t let the door smack your dumbass backside as you exit there Bill!

Gates is on record as saying the next war to threaten humanity will not be seen in a mushroom cloud but in a microbe. He’s such a sweet little turd. Actually, he’s a dangerous little eugenicist prick with a boatload of billions in stock and tax dodge foundations all over the map in the land of Oligarchs.

But as this pandedrama plays out, I am beginning to understand the viewpoint that a coming ‘darkness’, meaning a global internet outage, will be countered by operation of the National Emergency Broadband System which Trump started to have built in 2017 and as some believe, this may be a time when the worldwide ‘deep state’ is rounded up and the fabled ‘global reset’ is brought into view. It’s being circulated on the internet as finally “The Storm is upon us”. That Barr is suspending Habeas Corpus and other peacetime constructs supports the view that a massive roundup “all in one fell swoop” is in work. Some are viewing Barr’s actions as protecting deep state networks but many others see it as a wartime footing against the deep state conspiracy.

I’ve followed such ‘coming storm’ groups before, discarded the whacky ones, continued looking in on the reasoned ones and it seems to be coming to pass. I am always reminded it was President Trump who said early on “This is the calm before the Storm”. Long and short is that although effective treatments will address the current pandedrama, the aftermath is going to be historic in its changes. And so far I can see how the changes are going to be awesome for Americans.

The goal in the development of tests is to minimize to zero the number of false negatives and to minimize as much as practical the number of false positives.

Senator Rand Paul had a positive test but it must be confirmed. There is a two-phase process, screen with tests and confirm with certainty with lab kits those with positive screen results.

Not sure if the Senator has had a confirmation test come back yet.

In test development, we want ZERO people with the virus to get past a screening test but that does not mean they have the virus. It means those who come back negative are really negative as in ‘true negative’. With Statistics we want false negatives to be like 99.5+% precise.

With false positives, we can allow a little more relaxation. We can allow a test to be say 90+% confident.

There is usually a trade off between the confidence bands in false negatives and false positives. We want no one to ‘slip through’ on a false negative and we don’t want to inconvenience too many who are false positive.

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