Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)

[brianscharp]

Looks like we're ramping up quickly. Must be part of the "winning" strategy. It'll take a couple of weeks to see if our disjointed efforts are successful at flattening out this nightmarish climb enough to avoid a total health system melt down. Buckle up.

[SamKellner]

No wonder why. What could have been such a distraction.

[brianscharp]

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/ ... ts-hope-so
Trump says he’s learned from the coronavirus. Let’s hope so.

Presidents don’t get a free pass if they fail to notice impending threats.
Trump has said several times that nobody knew a coronavirus could reach our shores. “It’s an unforeseen problem [that] came out of nowhere,” he said.

Except it wasn’t.

Every year, the director of national intelligence delivers a briefing on threats to national security. A warning about pandemics, including coronaviruses, has been part of that every year Trump has been in office.

If you want the federal government to be effective in a crisis, you need to give it the tools to act.
You’d think a Republican president from the business world would know that bureaucracies can be inefficient and slow-moving.

That’s why the Obama administration set up a White House office on health security in 2016 — to eliminate red tape and force feuding agencies to cooperate.

But in 2018, Trump’s then-national security advisor, John Bolton, abolished the office. When the coronavirus appeared in China last year, there was no White House health czar to coordinate a response.

“It would be nice if the office was still there,” Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said last week.

On Friday, Trump said he didn’t know anything about the office’s elimination. Asked whether he bore any responsibility, his answer was: “It’s a nasty question.”

https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus ... =social&ut
The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

Is this the worst outbreak you’ve ever seen?

It's the most dangerous pandemic in our lifetime.

We are being asked to do things, certainly, that never happened in my lifetime—stay in the house, stay 6 feet away from other people, don’t go to group gatherings. Are we getting the right advice?

Well, as you reach me, I'm pretending that I'm in a meditation retreat, but I'm actually being semi-quarantined in Marin County. Yes, this is very good advice. But did we get good advice from the president of the United States for the first 12 weeks? No. All we got were lies. Saying it’s fake, by saying this is a Democratic hoax. There are still people today who believe that, to their detriment. Speaking as a public health person, this is the most irresponsible act of an elected official that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. But what you're hearing now [to self-isolate, close schools, cancel events] is right. Is it going to protect us completely? Is it going to make the world safe forever? No. It's a great thing because we want to spread out the disease over time.

Flatten the curve.

By slowing it down or flattening it, we're not going to decrease the total number of cases, we're going to postpone many cases, until we get a vaccine—which we will, because there's nothing in the virology that makes me frightened that we won’t get a vaccine in 12 to 18 months. Eventually, we will get to the epidemiologist gold ring.

Is there in any way a brighter side to this?

Well, I'm a scientist, but I'm also a person of faith. And I can't ever look at something without asking the question of isn't there a higher power that in some way will help us to be the best version of ourselves that we could be? I thought we would see the equivalent of empty streets in the civic arena, but the amount of civic engagement is greater than I've ever seen. But I'm seeing young kids, millennials, who are volunteering to go take groceries to people who are homebound, elderly. I'm seeing an incredible influx of nurses, heroic nurses, who are coming and working many more hours than they worked before, doctors who fearlessly go into the hospital to work. I've never seen the kind of volunteerism I'm seeing.

I don't want to pretend that this is an exercise worth going through in order to get to that state. This is a really unprecedented and difficult time that will test us. When we do get through it, maybe like the Second World War, it will cause us to reexamine what has caused the fractional division we have in this country. The virus is an equal opportunity infector. And it’s probably the way we would be better if we saw ourselves that way, which is much more alike than different.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Thanks Bob !

Take care. Wish all Well !

Same to you Sam!!! Thanks very much for your continued service on the U.S. Hawks Board.

Thank you Bob for your "effort" since day one

The information you found and share with us, about the Virus , is important, and these videos that you found are the best. TY.

Thanks to you too Craig. The U.S. Hawks is a community effort of great people like Sam, Joe, Bill, Brian, yourself, and many others. Thanks for your continued contributions in this topic and others.

Looks like we're ramping up quickly. Must be part of the "winning" strategy. It'll take a couple of weeks to see if our disjointed efforts are successful at flattening out this nightmarish climb enough to avoid a total health system melt down. Buckle up.

No wonder why. What could have been such a distraction.

Good point Sam!! The impeachment trial was a colossal waste of time and resources.

Inevitable.png (200.44 KiB) Viewed 3500 times

Brian, your earlier video stated "CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC IS INEVITABLE". President Trump has a long and documented history of attempting to control our borders, but he has been continually undermined by other branches of government throughout his term.

Our involvement in this pandemic was indeed "inevitable" given the "we are the world" attitude of the left. If you want to play the "blame game", be sure your side is on solid ground before pointing fingers.

As for what President Trump "could have" or "should have" done, hindsight will always be 20/20. But even with 20/20 hindsight, I don't see any decisions that would have significantly altered the trajectory of this disease.

For example:

Steve_Padilla_Hospitalized.png (92.09 KiB) Viewed 3500 times

Councilman Steve Padilla was admitted to UC San Diego Thornton Hospital and placed in its intensive care unit after experiencing worsening symptoms, his daughter Ashleigh Padilla said in a statement.

What should President Trump have done to protect Councilman Steve Padilla?

[brianscharp]

I hope he is able to muster the discipline and compassion and selflessness to do better, to be better...our lives depend on it.

Anybody else notice even though there are fewer folks on stage, they're still at this date, not keeping 6' distance between them.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Anybody else notice even though there are fewer folks on stage, they're still at this date, not keeping 6' distance between them.

Good point Brian. There's plenty of "Do as I say, not as I do" going around:

As fo CNN, they are clearly a bunch of disgruntled "Never Trumpers":

"It's not political to point that out."

Who are they kidding? They're only pointing it out because it is political and is anti-Trump.

[Craig Muhonen]

https://www.immunology.org/public-infor ... es-viruses

[Bill Cummings]

The public will embrace medical marshal law. They may fail to respond
to the old wore out terror of 911 because the, “This day and age,” harangue
is losing traction after 19 years. The public servants have lately found a new emergency.
Will there soon be a maximum of 10 people that may assemble to protest their
government’s action on many issues? How long will the suspension of the Bill of Rights
be? Who gets to decide when marshal law should end or when the next emergency ends?

[brianscharp]

[Bob Kuczewski]

Good video Brian. Thanks.

No one wants to put a price tag on a human life, and yet we make choices every day that effectively do just that. The fact that we don't have a fully staffed emergency room on every street corner is evidence of those choices. We like to comfort ourselves that every life is priceless, but our actions sadly reveal a different truth.

On the Oz Report, Michael Grisham made a noteworthy comment:

For My Hang Gliding Friends and Family,

I hope you, your family, and loved ones are doing fine.

Here is a good article written in 2007 on Coronavirus:

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus as an Agent of Emerging and Reemerging Infection (PDF)
CLINICAL MICROBIOLOGY REVIEWS, Oct. 2007, p. 660–694 Vol. 20, No. 4

“The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb.”

While a global world economy provides a network to spread the pathogens, the only saviors will be the microbiology alchemists who can neutralize the virus through knowledge and DNA/RNA manipulation.

I think you can appreciate the article.

Michael

For reference, I've attached a copy of the document that Michael quoted (below). Michael's quote is on document page 683 (page 24 of the PDF). It's from the last paragraph before the acknowledgments and references. Here's that final paragraph with Michael's quote in bold:

SHOULD WE BE READY FOR THE REEMERGENCE OF SARS?

The medical and scientific community demonstrated marvelous efforts in the understanding and control of SARS within a short time, as evident by over 4,000 publications available online. Despite these achievements, gaps still exist in terms of the molecular basis of the physical stability and transmissibility of this virus, the molecular and immunological basis of disease pathogenesis in humans, screening tests for early or cryptic SARS cases, foolproof infection control procedures for patient care, effective antivirals or antiviral combinations, the usefulness of immunomodulatory agents for late presenters, an effective vaccine with no immune enhancement, and the immediate animal host that transmitted the virus to caged civets in the market at the beginning of the epidemic. Coronaviruses are well known to undergo genetic recombination (375), which may lead to new genotypes and outbreaks. The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored.