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Coronavirus hospital admissions are expected to peak in Chicago, Illinois, at some point in the next two weeks. In an attempt to prevent the kind of medical supply shortages seen in New York City, average Chicagoans are racing to fulfil the need. On 16 March, in accordance with the state governor's order that all bars and restaurants stop serving customers in-house, Dimo's Pizza closed its dining room doors. "We can no longer serve by the slice," says owner Dimitri Syrkin-Nikolau. "There goes 70% of our revenue." Still, he agreed that the measures were necessary. He'd been following news about the...

Santa Clara County (California) Health Office has issued an order asking for the inventory of large amounts of personal protective equipment (PPE)/any ventilators in SCC. This ensures that the County knows what resources exist. If you have large amounts of PPE or any ventilators, please fill out the survey by April 15: www.sccgov.org/cv19ppe. Survey results are confidential. The situation with Santa Clara County beds, ICU, a Ventilators, and surge capacity does not look bad so far:

A team at MIT developed a ventilator that could be built with $100 dollars worth of parts — a fraction of the average $30,000 cost most machines take to manufacture, according to a report by SciTechDaily. The innovative design of the machine relies upon a bag-valve resuscitator, a piece of equipment found in bulk at most hospitals to help patients breathe, the report said. Ventilators are one of the most in-demand medical items at the moment amid a worldwide shortage due to the coronavirus. The team, MIT E-Vent, which consists of doctors, engineers, and computer scientists, decided to fervently revisit...

Baseball jersey fabric is going to the front lines of the fight against coronavirus. In an effort to help mitigate the national shortage of personal protective equipment that has become a pressing issue for healthcare workers and emergency personnel battling the COVID-19 outbreak, Fanatics, the company that manufactures the official uniforms for Major League Baseball, is taking the raw materials typically used in the creation of MLB jerseys and instead using them to create masks and hospital gowns. MLB and Fanatics are absorbing all costs associated with the endeavor. “We hope this effort can play a part in coming together...

Major supermarket chains are beginning to report their first coronavirus-related employee deaths, leading to store closures and increasing anxiety among grocery workers as the pandemic intensifies across the country. A Trader Joe’s worker in Scarsdale, N.Y., a greeter at a Giant store in Largo, Md., and two Walmart employees from the same Chicago-area store have died of covid-19, the disease the novel coronavirus causes, in recent days, the companies confirmed Monday. Though more than 40 states have ordered nonessential businesses to close and told residents to stay home to stem the spread of the virus, supermarkets are among the retailers...

President Trump has acknowledged that the federal stockpile of personal protective equipment is nearly depleted, and there are reports the Obama administration failed to replenish the federal stockpile of N95 masks after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009. USA Today fact-checked that claim and it didn’t turn out too well for Barack Obama — or Joe Biden.

China has tried to restore its image after lying to the world about the seriousness of its coronavirus outbreak, but its attempts at humanitarianism have turned out to be as slippery as its wet markets. After COVID-19 made its way to Italy, decimating the country’s significant elderly population, China told the world it would donate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to help Italy stop its spread. Reports later indicated that China had actually sold, not donated, the PPE to Italy. A senior Trump administration official tells The Spectator that it is much worse than that: China forced Italy to buy back...

The union that represents healthcare workers in California announced it had arranged the purchase of 39 million N95 masks for hospitals and government agencies that badly need the protective equipment. Among the intended recipients was Kaiser Permanente, which placed orders for 6 million masks. A week later, none of those masks have materialized, and Kaiser is cooperating with a federal fraud investigation into the deal, a spokesman for the health plan confirmed.

President Trump lead another Coronavirus task force briefing from the White House on Monday evening. The President was joined by Vice President Mike Pence, US Attorney General Bill Barr and others. Trump signed a second executive order to providing authority to address hoarding and price gouging that threatens the supply of medical supplies. Attorney General Bill Barr put hoarders on notice and said they will get a knock on the door if they are sitting on a large amount of supplies. “We have started to see some evidence of potential hoarding and price gouging,” said Barr. “So, earlier today the...

As I've mentioned in a previous post, my wife and I own a personal care home with almost 50 residents in Western Pennsylvania. We've been buying PPE supplies in bulk from Amazon for quite some time, but, this morning, my wife tried to order masks, gloves and sanitary supplies and, after almost an hour on a live chat with Amazon, discovered that we can no longer order from Amazon. Seems that Amazon is limiting the sale of PPE to hospitals and "government agencies."

The head of Florida's Division of Emergency Management has accused U.S. mask manufacturer 3M of shipping the critical protective equipment to foreign countries who outbid U.S. buyers -- even as hospitals and state officials desperately scramble to secure N95 protective masks for healthcare workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. Jared Moskowitz told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Thursday that he discovered that 3M distributors were prioritizing foreign buyers after they refused to sell him the essential equipment. "For the last several weeks, we have had a boiler room chasing down 3M authorized distributors [and] brokers representing that they sell the...

a behind the scenes look

Novel coronavirus / COVID-19 guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the USA Center for Disease Control (CDC) suggests that peoople around the world should stay approximately 6 feet apart. Unfortunately, according to MIT associate professor Lydia Bourouiba, “pathogen-bearing droplets of all sizes can travel 23 to 27 feet.” In the study published here in late March, 2020, Dr. Bourouiba showed that current guidelines for Social Distancing is based on models published in the 1930s. The video below shows a slow-motion sneeze, filmed for a study on the physics of sneezes and coughs by Dr. Bourouiba. The video shows...

COVID-19-positive train passenger was seen in a video spitting on another traveler in Thailand on Tuesday before he dropped dead. Anan Sahoh, 56, tested positive for the virus after he was discovered dead Tuesday on the train from Bangkok to the southern city of Narathiwat, Metro UK reported. Surveillance video shows the disturbing interaction on a train platform in Bangkok … the patient walking up to another man in line to buy tickets and hocking a loogie right in his grill! Video below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXrHI5C479c&feature=emb_title He then passed a mandatory temperature check to board the train, where he was seen vomiting...

Get ready to root for the New England Patriots. Seriously. In a remarkable story reported by the Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Beaton, the Patriots’ team plane—emblazoned with the team logo, Lombardi trophies and a gargantuan “6X” to commemorate the team’s Super Bowl wins—became the focus of a humanitarian effort that brought more than a million masks into the United States for the fight against COVID-19.

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams explains why the CDC and WHO do not recommend the general public wear masks and how doing so could increase your virus risk

A Russian military transport plane left an airfield outside Moscow and arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy airport in late afternoon on Wednesday. MOSCOW/WASHINGTON - Russia sent the United States medical equipment on Wednesday to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, a public relations coup for Russian President Vladimir Putin after he discussed the crisis with U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump, struggling to fill shortages of ventilators and personal protective equipment, accepted Putin's offer in a phone call on Monday. A Russian military transport plane left an airfield outside Moscow and arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy airport in...

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, revealed on Tuesday that White House coronavirus task force is seriously considering guidance that all Americans wear masks to help thwart the disease's spread. But Fauci also acknowledged that such a directive has been complicated by the nationwide dearth of personal protective equipment. "The idea of getting a much more broad, community-wide use of masks outside of the health care setting is under very active discussion at the task force. The CDC group is looking at that very carefully," Fauci told CNN. "The thing that has inhibited...

A Chinese government-backed property giant has secretly raided in bulk Australia’s supplies of masks, hand sanitiser, antibacterial wipes and essential medical supplies and shipped them back to China. The Greenland Group, which manages high-end real estate projects in Sydney and Melbourne, proactively drained Australian supplies of anti-coronavirus equipment, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. Three million surgical masks, 500,000 pairs of gloves and bulk supplies of sanitiser and wipes were bought up in Australia and other countries where Greenland operates. While the bulk purchases and shipping were perfectly legitimate, the goods shipped in bulk to China include the very items that...

VeriSign Inc. is selling its Network Solutions business, which provides Internet domain name registrations, to Pivotal Private Equity for approximately $100 million so it can focus on infrastructure services. VeriSign gained Network Solutions' registrar and registry businesses when it purchased the company in 2000. The registrar business, which offers services such as business e-mail, Web sites, hosting and Web presence, will go to Pivotal Private Equity, the company said Thursday. VeriSign will retain the registry business, which provides the backbone for the .com and .net domain names. VeriSign recently renamed the registry business VeriSign Naming and Directory Services and...