Free Republic

Most working-age Americans who died of COVID-19 during the first year of the pandemic were so-called essential workers in labor, service and retail jobs that required on-site attendance and prolonged contact with others, according to a recently published study led by a University of South Florida epidemiologist. he study looks back on COVID-19 deaths in 2020 and affirms what many had already known or suspected — that Americans who could not work from home and who labored in low-paying jobs with few or no benefits, such as paid sick leave and health insurance coverage, bore the brunt of deaths during...

Vladimir Lenin allegedly said, "Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted." America's leftists have taken those words to heart and, since the 1930s, have assiduously winnowed their way into America's education system. The COVID lockdown, for all its destruction, may have ended up performing a huge service by exposing to parents just how bad the leftist toxin has grown in the last ten to fifteen years. The sea change in parental attitudes toward education is shown in the fact that, across America, public school enrollment is collapsing. In the...

The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the...

Shanghai on Tuesday announced it had reached “zero-Covid at the community level” status, but residents reportedly still feared that the city’s strict lockdown could continue. Health officials in the global financial hub announced on Tuesday that “zero Covid” status had been reached, meaning no cases were detected outside of designated quarantine facilities or neighborhoods with the most severe lockdowns, according to CNN.

Beijing residents rushed to supermarkets on Thursday (May 12) as Chinese officials tried to curb mounting panic over a rumour the capital would be placed under stay-at-home orders. The city has been trying to stamp out a wave of cases in recent weeks, closing subway stations and telling many residents to work from home, with hundreds of communities sealed off to contain cases. On Thursday there were rumours online that authorities were about to impose a strict lockdown, prompting many to rush to food stores and stock up. SNIP "I can't say for sure whether there will be a lockdown,...

No, the cowardly politicians who enabled foolish and unprecedented lockdowns do not deserve to blame the results on anything but themselves.In Joe Biden’s painful and inaccurate speech about inflation on Tuesday, he finally shifted from blaming racism for everything to blaming Covid for everything to now blaming “the supply chain” and “Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine” (that Biden baited Putin into) for everything.These “supply chain disruptions,” as everyone is painfully aware, are doing everything from starving babies to shooting up the price of everything, as Wednesday’s 8.3 percent annual inflation number affirmed again. They are also not random, and they’re...

The most recent macroeconomic figures show that the Chinese slowdown is much more severe than expected and not only attributable to the covid-19 lockdowns. The lockdowns have an enormous impact. Twenty-six of 31 China mainland provinces have rising covid cases and the fear of a Shanghai-style lockdown is enormous. The information coming from Shanghai proves that these drastic lockdowns create an enormous damage to the population. Millions of citizens without food or medicine and rising suicides have shown that the infamous “zero covid” policy often disguises mass population control and repression. It is easy to use the covid-19 lockdowns as...

Following two years of suffering under some of the strictest lockdown measures in the Western world, New Zealand will finally lift its Chinese coronavirus border restrictions in July, leftist Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Wednesday. New Zealand’s borders will be fully reopened on July 31st, two months before the government had previously planned as the economy inches closer to a recession.

Shanghai has once again tightened its draconian lockdowns in a fresh push to achieve “COVID zero” this month — just as China’s biggest city was starting to emerge from a month of strict anti-virus restrictions. Fresh stay-at-home orders were put in place in some of the city’s 16 districts over the weekend, despite new COVID cases continuing to fall.

If you get bored this weekend, you can watch UK election results roll in. Only highlights I know of: Conservative party not doing well in England, probably due to poor optics of having parties during lockdowns. Sinn Fein may take majority in NI over Brexit. This may eventually put Irish unity on the table. https://election.news.sky.com/

.@GovLarryHogan @LarryHogan speech to @Reagan_Library ... GOP “won’t win back the White House by nominating Donald Trump or a cheap impersonation of him" ...full video here: https://t.co/af2xrlyxWj pic.twitter.com/yhWBMuGT4r— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) May 5, 2022

The researchers broke the students into different groups based on how much time they had spent attending in-person school during 2020-21 — the academic year with the most variation in whether schools were open. On average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window. Some of those losses stemmed from the time the students had spent learning remotely during the spring of 2020, when school buildings were almost universally closed. And some of the losses stemmed from the difficulties of in-person...

Whenever the trucking market slows, truck drivers look for someone to blame. Normally, a slowdown is just a function of supply and demand. The market has too much dispatchable capacity compared to the total number of loads on any given day. This summer, the trucking market could have one of its steepest declines in recent years and there is an entity that deserves much of the blame – the Chinese Communist Party and its draconian and inhumane lockdowns.A Chinese containership. (Photo: ship-technology.com)While the motivations of the Chinese government are unclear, one thing is certain – anyone subjected to a Chinese...

What does this guy know? Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates says the world has not seen the worst of Covid yet. “We’re still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal,” Gates told the Financial Times. “It’s not likely, I don’t want to be a voice of doom and gloom, but it’s way above a 5 per cent risk that this pandemic, we haven’t even seen the worst of it.” Last year it was revealed that Pentagon scientists working in a secretive united created a microchip to be inserted underneath the...

The Yangshan Deepwater Container Terminal at the Port of Shanghai, where trade flows have slowed because of citywide COVID restrictionsA mixed bag of circumstances and time horizons are creating diverging narratives about whether shipping delays stemming from the shutdown of Shanghai and other Chinese cities are getting better or presage massive supply chain gridlock. There is no sign that Shanghai’s lockdown is easing anytime soon. Footage on social media shows steel fences being installed on public roads and inside residential compounds to keep people from traveling to other districts and moving in neighborhoods. On Monday, the Shanghai Health Commission reported...

The first human case associated with the H5 bird flu in the U.S. was detected in a Colorado man, just a few days after the same disease was reported in China. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shared information on the case with the public on Thursday, adding the “public health risk assessment remains low.” The CDC adds people who have job-related or recreational exposures to infected birds are at a higher risk of infection and should take appropriate precautions. But remember you should never believe CDC…

Tens of thousands of kids in the United Kingdom have been driven into clinical depression by coronavirus lockdowns, a study has found. Lockdowns hoping to curb the spread of the Chinese coronavirus have driven tens of thousands of kids in the United Kingdom to clinical depression, a study published on Wednesday has suggested.

The Next Ten BattlesIt is apparently much easier to tell the truth about state action the farther away it is from home. And hence even the New York Times seems alarmed at the covid lockdowns in Shanghai, and pretending as if nothing like that could happen here even though the whole practice of lockdown the world over was directly copied from the Wuhan model. “China is meddling with free enterprise as it hadn’t in decades,” says the paper. “The results are familiar to those old enough to remember: scarcity, and the rise of black markets.”The disruptions are especially difficult for...

Lockdowns in China are ravaging global supply chains as shipping containers pile up at ports and factories close their doors. Beijing’s aggressive action to curb the spread of COVID-19 is likely to further fuel inflation in the U.S., where companies are struggling to get products from their Chinese suppliers.

Hopes that the CCP might be easing its Shanghai lockdown were dashed this week as authorities loosened restrictions for manufacturers and others businesses, while mostly keeping restrictions on residential areas intact. Instead of winding down restrictions in Shanghai, authorities are now scrambling to suppress an outbreak in Beijing which they believe may have been spreading for as long as a week. The capital city reported 22 new local cases on Sunday, its highest daily tally this year. While the number of new cases would be considered inconsequential anywhere else, authorities have placed part of Beijing under high alert, cancelling classes...