DeSantis says the system, which had been in place since 2013 when Gov. Rick Scott was in office, cost $40 million. The governor says he asked the IG to look into the initial contract for the website and to see why the state chose to spend that much taxpayer money on a system that could not handle even a small recession, much less an unprecedented pandemic that shuttered businesses and crippled the tourism industry in the state
Even before the COVID-19 outbreak hit our nation, Americans were exhausted by the ceaseless stream of ‘round-the-clock news. A poll released in February by the Pew Research Center found 66 percent of Americans were “worn out” by the sheer volume of news.
It’s no surprise, then, that Americans are having difficulty coping with the news’ now profoundly negative tone. Public consumption of large amounts of adverse news comes at a price. We know a steady diet of bad news is bad for us, but we’ve rarely seen the deleterious effects on such a grand scale as with media’s handling of the Wuhan virus.
From as far back as late January, when the president declared the coronavirus a public health emergency and began taking action, many in corporate media seem compelled to take the opposite view of just about anything he says, even when it’s so obviously wrong. A cynical person might think many in the media would rather politically injure the president with massive amounts of negative press than provide viewers urgently needed information about a deadly pandemic.
After becoming aware of the coronavirus outbreak, why did China continue to allow flights from Wuhan to other parts of the world? And why did China buy an estimated 2.2 billion masks between Jan. 24 and the end of February? A new lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt may help us learn more.
The Missouri suit seeks to hold the CCP accountable for the mass sickness, death and devastating economic harm that it has wrought through its deception regarding the virus’ existence and severity, as well as its suppression of critical public health information.
Would you agree to buy a new motor vehicle without knowing the price? Of course not. Your options are many — sedan, convertible, sports car, SUV, minivan, pickup truck, etc. in many different sizes with different features, including different safety features. Most people do not buy the “safest” vehicle because of both price and the fact that other vehicles may have features they value more.
Yet, when it comes to options regarding how to deal with the COVID-19 virus, most governors give the people no or, at best, few options. People voluntarily engage in all sorts of risky sports — many of which are much more likely to kill anyone under 65 than COVID-19 (as I described in my column last week). Less than 100 people (out of a population of 328,000 million Americans) under age 24 have died from the virus. It is much more dangerous for them to ride an electric scooter or walk across the street, yet the government has shut down almost all schools in the United States for a virus that is not going to kill the students.
Media giant Disney saw its profit drop by more than 90 percent in the second quarter of its fiscal year, as the coronavirus pandemic has hamstrung all of the company's areas of business.
Disney's revenue went up 21 percent from a year ago, largely due to its acquisition of certain Fox assets such as FX. But, the company's profit plummeted 91 percent from $5.43 billion last year to $475 million this year, according to The New York Times.
One-time items excluded, profit per-share dropped from $1.61 to 60 cents, a decline of 63 percent. These figures are far from the $17.8 billion in revenue and per-share earnings of 88 cents that analysts had predicted
The coronavirus that has exploded into a pandemic has almost certainly been circulating for several months longer than public health experts first suspected, masked by asymptomatic cases or illnesses incorrectly diagnosed.
Scientists believe the first known case of a patient contracting the coronavirus happened in mid-November, in a 55-year-old resident of China's Hubei province. That was six weeks before the World Health Organization's (WHO) surveillance network picked up reports of a cluster of atypical pneumonia cases in Wuhan, the province's largest city.
There are increasing signs that the virus had begun its global spread long before it was identified. French scientists on Monday published the results of a study that found coronavirus present in samples given by a resident of a Paris suburb who was tested Dec. 27, four days before the Wuhan cluster was identified.
Pfizer and the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech announced that their potential coronavirus vaccine began human trials in the United States on Monday. If the tests are successful, the vaccine could be ready for emergency use here as early as September.
The two firms are jointly developing a vaccine candidate based on genetic material known as messenger RNA, which carries the instructions for cells to make proteins. By injecting a specially designed messenger RNA into the body, the vaccine could potentially tell cells how to make the spike protein of the coronavirus without actually making a person sick.
Because the virus typically uses this protein as a key to unlock and take over lung cells, the vaccine could train a healthy immune system to produce antibodies to fight off an infection. The technology also has the advantage of being faster to produce, and tends to be more stable than traditional vaccines, which use weakened virus strains.
Johns Hopkins University said Tuesday that a leaked FEMA document featuring charts projecting nearly double the current daily coronavirus death toll by the end of May is not a "final version."
The charts used data from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The document was intended to illustrate scenarios, including relaxing restrictions on businesses, travel and social distancing that has brought the economy to a standstill in recent weeks. The information was intended to highlight what might cause significant increases in COVID-19 cases and deaths throughout the United States, the statement said.
"These preliminary analyses were provided to FEMA to aid in scenario planning — not to be used as forecasts — and the version published is not a final version," the school said in a statement. "These preliminary results are not forecasts, and it is not accurate to present them as forecasts."
Researchers at Utrecht University, Erasmus Medical Center and Harbour BioMed (HBM) today reported that they have identified a fully human monoclonal antibody that prevents the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus from infecting cultured cells. The discovery, published online today in Nature Communications, is an initial step towards developing a fully human antibody to treat or prevent the respiratory disease COVID-19 caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.
The COVID-19 pandemic has spread rapidly across the globe infecting more than 3.3M people worldwide and killing more than 235,000 people so far.
"This research builds on the work our groups have done in the past on antibodies targeting the SARS-CoV that emerged in 2002/2003," said Berend-Jan Bosch, Associate Professor, Research leader at Utrecht University, and co-lead author of the Nature Communications study. "Using this collection of SARS-CoV antibodies, we identified an antibody that also neutralizes infection of SARS-CoV-2 in cultured cells. Such a neutralizing antibody has potential to alter the course of infection in the infected host, support virus clearance or protect an uninfected individual that is exposed to the virus."
Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the largest government stimulus measure in American history, at a cost of roughly $2 trillion. The biggest chunk of money was up to $500 billion that can be used for bailouts for large corporations, many of which have access to private capital, and their shareholders. This is the opposite of the broad-based relief to individuals and small businesses that’s most needed. The pandemic struck everyone. When government singles out industries, it injects political favoritism into a process that must avoid it.
Moreover, these bailouts turn America’s economic system on its head. Large corporations are typically financed and governed by sophisticated investors. Those investors rightly benefit from corporate profits in prosperous times; they should bear the losses when times are tough. It is fundamentally unjust to pass that burden to ordinary taxpayers who are themselves struggling.
We cannot have a system where corporate gains are private and losses are socialized.
CNBC reported last week that banking giant Wells Fargo was “stepping away from the market for home equity lines of credit because of uncertainty tied to the coronavirus pandemic.” As always, what Wells Fargo is doing could only surprise an odd subset of society gulled by the Federal Reserve. To anyone else, Wells’s actions are logical. The economy’s on lockdown, which means the ability of borrowers to pay monies back is highly limited.
It’s all a reminder that the Fed’s interest rate machinations aren't very consequential. For one, it can create money, not credit. Credit is a consequence of production. No one borrows money as much as they borrow what money can be exchanged for. Money serves no purpose without production first, which means it’s a consequence as opposed to an instigator.
Second, while the Fed can buy credible interest-bearing instruments from banks with an eye on liquefying the banks, there’s already a liquid market for the assets held by financial institutions. Furthemore, assuming the Fed pushes dollars into banks, they're but a tiny fraction of total credit. What the Fed provides won’t overwhelm the broad rush away from risk among credit
The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday said it plans to borrow nearly $3 trillion in the second quarter of 2020 - more than five times larger than the previous record - as the federal government spends at a frantic pace to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus on the U.S. economy.
Monday’s estimate is $3.055 trillion more than the original target for the quarter issued in early February, when it was still unclear whether the coronavirus would spread widely in the United States. At that time, it appeared as though the federal government would pay down $56 billion of debt in the current quarter, leading Treasury to forecast a negative estimate for new net marketable debt in the period.
Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday said the White House is looking to wind down its coronavirus task force by Memorial Day or early June so that federal agencies can manage the response in a “more traditional manner.”
“I think we’re having conversations about that and about what the proper time is for the task force to complete its work and for the ongoing efforts to take place on an agency-by-agency level. And we’ve already begun to talk about a transition plan with FEMA,” Mr. Pence told reporters, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency...
Mr. Pence said discussions about disbanding the task force are a reflection of “tremendous progress we’ve made as a country.”
"There are times ... where safety first is wise and prudent. You don't drive 55 when there's an ice storm. You adjust, you re-calibrate, you take the temperature of the room and you adjust your behavior. It's called homeostatic risk, risk equilibrium. We're all hard-wired to adapt and adjust our behavior to the circumstances around us. There are times when putting safety above all things makes absolute sense, but there has never been a time where arbitraging everything else out of the equation, and venerating safety to the point that nothing else is even allowed to be discussed, there's never been a point in our history, at least as I understand it, where that's made a lick of sense," Mike (Rowe) said.
I do not have any expertise in COVID-19. From what I can tell, I am reflective of the vast majority of people, and hence we are all facing a time of significant uncertainty.
What I do know is that in the face of uncertainty it is good to have diverse options. Just as you want a diversified portfolio of investments because you will be ruined if you put all of your money in one thing and it tanks, when you are not sure what will work you want several possible solutions to exist.
The good news for American education is that it is both decentralized, and diverse options exist.
Within public schooling, local control means that districts can respond to their unique local situations. Schools all over the Seattle area can close while Albuquerque’s stay open, and schools can try lots of measures short of lengthy closure to mitigate the coronavirus threat. Of course, local districts face a lot of state and federal mandates, especially about annual testing and related accountability mechanisms, and how those will be handled is stickier.
Perhaps more important than decentralization of government schools is that our charter, private, and homeschooling sectors—and even some traditional districts—have been able to be incubators of sometimes very different ways of delivering education. We may well need to tap into these new mechanisms at greater scale if brick‐and‐mortar schooling is substantially disrupted. This will certainly mean more schooling occurring in homes, perhaps controlled entirely by parents. It will very likely mean more online content delivery as traditional public schools try to quickly transition from in‐person to electronic teaching. The latter will not be easy, but thanks to our having embraced at least modest diversity in education there are already online models operating at scale to provide some blueprint.
