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All Los Angeles County beaches are closing temporarily in an effort to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus as the number of confirmed cases topped 1,400 Friday, officials said. The countywide closures come after large crowds of beachgoers were seen at beaches last weekend, despite stay-at-home orders and calls for social distancing. “The crowds we saw at our beaches last weekend were unacceptable,” Supervisor Janice Hahn said in a written statement. “In order to save lives, beaches in LA County will be temporarily closed." The order goes into effect "immediately" and runs through April 19, 2020, according to the...

The $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus deal that the Senate passed this week includes $100 billion for hospitals. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling these funds "a Marshall Plan" for the health care system. Yet unlike the post-WWII Marshall Plan, these healthcare stimulus dollars come with little accountability to ensure they're used efficiently. First, some credit where it's due: Policymakers agreed to language in the legislation that requires providers to publish cash prices for coronavirus tests online, so patients and employers can easily shop around for the best deal. Clear market prices for tests will offer taxpayers some protection by providing a powerful check on providers'...

Cuomo trying to explain the stockpile of ventilators in NY

[snip] "We started then to find out what we could make," he said. "We worked with the administration. They have a coalition to what kind of masks are need out there. Obviously, we specialize in cotton and we found out different materials that they didn't want -- latex...and stuff. So, finally, we got the final prototype three days ago." Lindell said it took MyPillow workers three days to turn over a 200,000-square-foot factory into a facility to produce the masks. They are currently making about 10,000 a day and aim to produce up to 50,000 a day.

President to wave off USNS Comfort as it departs for New York ‘I think it’s a good thing when I go over there and say thank you’ Despite repeated warnings from authorities against non-essential travel during the coronavirus outbreak, Donald Trump was set to visit Norfolk, Virginia on Saturday, to bid bon voyage to the US navy hospital ship USNS Comfort as it departs for stricken New York City. As the 73-year-old president prepared for his visit, which also flew in the face of official insistence that older people refrain from travel, he continued to attack favorite targets including the...

On Friday, the U.S. media gleefully reported that the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. had surpassed the number of confirmed cases in China. In addition, the number of people who have died from the virus in both Italy and Spain has exceeded the total in China. As of Thursday, according to the Chinese Government, there have been 81,340 cases and a total of 3,292 people people have died. On Friday, the government claimed only one new person had been infected through local transmission, but that there had been 54 new imported cases. Remarkably, the country reported...

List of closed hospitals in New York City – Full list of all 174 hospitals that are now closed in Brooklyn, Manhattan and The Bronx in NYC, USA. ALL OF THESE FACILITIES WERE CLOSED DURING THE GOVERNORSHIP OF ANDREW CUOMO AND WHILE DEMENTED JOE AND THE ROGUE KENYAN USURPER WERE IN OFFICE.

A densely populated neighbor of China, Vietnam has a weak health care system and a low budget for combating the coronavirus. So how has it managed to keep its COVID-19 infection rate so low? At the end of January, Vietnam's government said it was "declaring war" on the coronavirus, although the outbreak at that time was still confined to China. Premier Nguyen Xuan Phuc said "Fighting this epidemic, means fighting the enemy". Vietnam instituted rigorous quarantine policies, and carried out complete tracing of all people who came in contact with the virus. These measures were implemented much earlier in the...

...As the clock struck midnight on the east coast Friday morning, Dylan released a new song, “Murder Most Foul,” that has a 16:57 running time — and it’s an epic free association on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy...In the song’s view, the killing of JFK, “right there in front of everyone’s eyes,” is the “greatest magic trick” — and one he presumably thinks has some relevance in 2020.

Throughout the ancient world, many people, including Jews, carved and painted words and pictures (we might call them graffiti today) in places that would shock modern sensibilities -- inside and around holy spaces and shrines, pagan sanctuaries, synagogues, and churches; and throughout cemeteries, necropoleis, and tombs in regions of modern Israel, Syria, Greece, Italy, Malta, Sardinia, Tunisia, and Libya. The ancients also made their marks in other locations: upon cliffs and open-air sanctuaries along desert roads and trade routes of Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, and Saudi Arabia; and around public theaters and hippodromes (horse racecourses) along the Syrian coast (modern...

A stampede for an unproven “cure” for Covid-19 is clearing the pharmacy shelves of a medicine that is vital for up to 5 million people around the world suffering from lupus, as countries bow to populist pressure and abandon the trials that would show whether hydroxychloroquine works against coronavirus infection. Both Italy and France have said doctors can now prescribe hydroxychloroquine – a less toxic version of the malaria drug chloroquine – even though there is no robust evidence to prove that it is effective against Covid-19. Popular pressure for access to the drug has been ramped up by pronouncements...

President Donald Trump is rightly talking about when we can reopen the country for business, noting that we cannot allow the cure to become worse than the disease. However, Trump does not have the keys to the shop. It is the country's governors and mayors. Thus far they have not been expressing the same sentiment. If they do not loosen their shutdown orders within a reasonable time, we may have to turn to the courts. It turns out that many, if not all, of these orders would likely be struck down as unconstitutional. The federal government thus far has only...

I'm sure this is not such a terribly unique idea, but it seems to me we don't really need a randomized double-blind clinical trial on the drug when we know about 2 million people are prescribed hydroxychloroquine. How hard would it be for the government to ask rheumatologists to contact their patients prescribed hydroxychloroquine to find out how many of them have tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus? While the total number of people that have acquired this disease related to the population of the United States is probably somewhat insignificant, the absence of cases among hydroxychloroquine users in areas...

A Belgian woman from the Liège province has infected her cat with the coronavirus, reported the FPS Public Health during the daily update press conference about the new coronavirus (Covid-19). “The veterinary medicine faculty in Liège reported that a coronavirus infection has been determined in a cat. The cat lived with her owner, who started showing symptoms of the virus a week before the cat did,” said professor Steven Van Gucht. The animal lived in close contact with its owner, and started showing symptoms a week after the woman did. “The cat had diarrhoea, kept vomiting and had breathing difficulties....

At a time when doctors, nurses and health care professionals are working to exhaustion and risking their own safety to treat the COVID-19 outbreak, Fox News and other pro-Trump media outlets have repeatedly given a platform to dubious coronavirus experts with phony or misidentified medical credentials. This week, Fox News host Laura Ingraham featured Dr. William Grace, who was billed as “an oncologist with Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City,” to talk about the use of hydroxychloroquine ― an unproven drug treatment that President Donald Trump has repeatedly praised. Grace talked about the situation “in the trenches” and suggested...

Brussels (AFP) - The European Union has faced and survived a series of existential threats over the years but the coronavirus epidemic has exposed old wounds that could yet prove fatal. A debt crisis in Mediterranean countries, a series of refugee influxes and the ongoing saga on Brexit all rattled the European project but did not sink it. They may, however, have left it vulnerable to a new disease. "The germ is back," former European Commission president and one of the modern union's chief architects, Jacques Delors, told AFP on Saturday. "The climate that seems to hang over the heads...

The coronavirus pandemic is driving up the price of heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl as Mexican cartels scramble to get their hands on Chinese-manufactured chemicals now in short supply. “The cartels are having a lot of difficulty producing drugs right now, and when the supply is low the price always goes up,” a US federal law enforcement source told The Post. “China has pretty much stopped production on the chemicals they need to do business.”

A UConn Health doctor has been arrested after an incident in which police said he intentionally coughed on and hugged nurses, police said. UConn police charged Dr. Cory Edgar, 48, of West Hartford with breach of peace Thursday morning. Edgar is an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at the UConn Musculoskeletal Institute. According to a police report, police were called to the UConn Health outpatient surgery clinic for a report of a doctor “deliberately coughing on and hugging nurses, causing them a substantial amount of alarm.” There were multiple witnesses. Stephanie Reitz, university spokeswoman, said, “The witnesses and medical workers...

I live in the greatest city in the world. At least that’s my opinion. A lot of people like to drag us, but we don’t care, we kind of like it, actually. We know who we are; we know what we are. And now we are the epicenter of the world-killing virus. In Casablanca, asked if he can imagine the Germans occupying New York City Rick says “Well there are certain sections of New York that I wouldn’t suggest you try to invade.” This is as true of viruses as it is of armies. At the very founding of America,...

Italian virologist said that open borders & fears over “racism” crippled Italy’s response to coronavirus. Professor of Virology and Microbiology at the University of Padova Dr. Giorgio Pal told CNN that measures imposing travel restrictions and border controls were taken too late due to fears over political correctness. “There was a proposal to isolate people coming from the epicenter, coming from China,” Pal told CNN. “Then it became seen as racist, but they were people coming from the outbreak.” We shouldn’t be racist that’s right, but also in a time like this, we have to avoid using racism on every...