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Sunday, January 26, 2020
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #878
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Saturday, January 25, 2020
This Is How China Is Hiding The True Number Of Coronavirus Deaths
As the world's cortisol and stomach acid levels rise every hour in parallel with the number of officially reported Coronavirus infections (and deaths), which as of Saturday morning was roughly 1,400...Source: Johns Hopkins GIS and Data.
... the world has an unpleasant flashback to 2003 when for weeks Beijing would lie and hide the full extent of the SARS epidemic to avoid risking a social panic. To be sure, this time China has done its best to pretend it has learned from the past and it is so transparent, even President Xi Jinping warned that the country is facing a "grave situation", and that the spread of the deadly virus is accelerating after holding a special government meeting on the Lunar New Year public holiday.
After staying largely silent in public about the outbreak since it first emerged in central China last month, Xi on Saturday convened a special meeting of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, calling for a more centralized response to the epidemic and asserting personal responsibility in addressing the crisis.
"When an epidemic breaks out, a command is issued. It is our responsibility to prevent and control it," Xi said, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. He called for the new high-level committee to "address concerns within and outside the country,” indirectly referencing mounting global concern about the epidemic, which Mr. Xi described as a “grave situation” that was accelerating. “We definitely can win the battle to contain the epidemic,” he vowed.
That remains to be seen: as reported earlier, in China - which has put over 56 million people on lockdown quarantine - the coronavirus has killed at least 41 people and infected over 1,400 in China. Ominously, a UK researcher predicted that the Coronavirus would infect over 250,000 people in China in under two weeks, which has sparked a renewed fear that China will once again try to underrepresent the true severity of the diseases until it is too late.
A patient at the Zhongnan Hospital of China’s Wuhan University
The problem is that even as China theatrically pretends to be so forthright about the extent of the epidemic - if only to avoid panic and chaos over allegations it is again hiding the full impact of the disease - it is doing precisely that, and now we know just how it is doing that: instead of putting down coronavirus as the cause of death for an unknown number of Wuhan casualties, China's coroners and hospitals merely ascribe death to "viral pneumonia", case closed.
Here's how the WSJ describes this treacherous "bait and switch":
A 53-year-old fitness trainer died on Wednesday after checking into a hospital in Wuhan a little more than a week earlier, said his niece. His family had expected the death certificate to reflect the deadly coronavirus, because as his condition deteriorated, his doctors told his family he was suffering from an untreatable virus in his lungs.
Instead, it recorded “severe pneumonia” as the cause of death, she said. The relatives of two other people who died in separate hospitals in Wuhan this week also described similar situations, saying the causes of death had been given as “viral pneumonia.”
Why did the hospital do this? Because as the relatives of all three now dead people said, the deceased hadn’t been included in China’s official count of 41 deaths attributed to coronavirus.
And that's how China is suppressing the full extent of nCoV's lethality, and keeping the mortality rate of the coronavirus artificially low: “There are likely to be many times more cases in Wuhan than officially confirmed,” said Neil Ferguson, a disease modeler at Imperial College London, who echoed the forecast of Jonathan Read, and estimated as many as 4,000 people may have been infected in Wuhan. “Clearly, the hospitals are overwhelmed.”
What's worse is that if there are indeed 4,000 injected already, then the previously discussed catastrophic forecast of 250,000 cases by Feb 4 may be overly optimistic by half.
The official numbers are far lower of course: on Saturday morning, local time, the number of confirmed global infections had risen to at least 1,438, nearly doubling from the previous day. Comically, China has said it would hold officials accountable for any delays or omissions in reporting cases: so far such threats appear to have had precisely zero impact on anyone.
Others have confirmed as much: as the WSJ reports, "some Chinese media with reporters on the ground in Wuhan have said they have found cases that weren’t included in...
Others have confirmed as much: as the WSJ reports, "some Chinese media with reporters on the ground in Wuhan have said they have found cases that weren’t included in...
A Virologist Who Visited Wuhan, China Says Coronavirus is “Out of Control”
A top virologist who was involved in the response to SARS says he has visited Wuhan, China and believes that the coronavirus is “out of control.”
Dr. Guan, the director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infections Diseases at the University of Hong Kong, told the Globe and Mail, “I’ve experienced so much and I’ve never felt scared before, but this time I’m scared.”
Guan also warned that the scale of the infection may be “10 times higher than SARS” and left Wuhan fearing that “the epidemic situation was out of control.”
The doctor warned that quarantine measures imposed by authorities may not go far enough.
“When these people returned to their hometowns, they took the virus to all parts of the country,” he said.
Yesterday we highlighted video footage out of Wuhan that showed victims of the virus collapsing on the streets.
20 million Chinese citizens are now under quarantine across 13 cities due to the outbreak.
There have been 830 confirmed cases of the virus within China with further cases confirmed in Thailand, the US, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Singapore.
The virus has claimed 26 lives so far, mostly elderly people with existing illnesses.
As we highlighted yesterday, a biosafety level 4 laboratory that studies the “world’s most dangerous pathogens” is based in Wuhan, leading some to speculate whether the virus was accidentally released.
However, officials say the source of the outbreak was...
America's Great Policy innovator: Donald Trump
Trump was faced with a true crisis at our southern border. Humanitarian policies were being exploited like never before. Human smugglers and left-wing activists realized there was no need to sneak across our border; if a migrant showed up and claimed political asylum and a fear of persecution in their home country, we would release them to an American community until a hearing could be held.
America has a history of taking in persecuted people on humanitarian grounds. But our goodwill was abused by those seeking to game our system. Tens of thousands of people began to show up at our border with no legitimate claim of political persecution. They were released into American towns, and most never returned for a hearing at all. These were mostly people fleeing poverty and seeking a better life for their families. It’s hard to blame them for trying, but our system cracked to the breaking point under this abuse. Huge caravans of migrants were overrunning border crossings, and American officials had no real tools to address the crisis. The net effect was a nearly open border. Some on the left want that. The vast majority of Americans don’t.
Trump pushed his team to come up with new policies to address the crisis. They were hampered by the fact that too many Democrats in Congress were not interested in finding a solution. Legislation was out of the question. Using executive actions and agreements with other countries, the Trump team has implemented a number of policy innovations that have taken us out of this crisis.
The Remain in Mexico program, launched in January 2019, requires that asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for the entire duration of their immigration court proceedings. This policy eliminates the possibility of “catch and release,” where migrants are able to escape into the interior of our country after claiming asylum.
“Metering” is a policy in which migrants who reach a port of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border must put their names on a list and wait their turn to request asylum. While this policy predates the Trump administration, Trump is the first president to implement metering on a consistent basis, since April 2018. Like Remain in Mexico, metering is effective at controlling the number of migrants who inundate U.S. immigration officials every day, and it prevents catch and release.
The Trump administration also entered into asylum deals with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — with the Guatemala deal the only one so far to be implemented. This mandates that migrants who pass through a “third” country must apply for asylum in that country before the U.S., or else be subject to removal to that country. Flights from the U.S. to Guatemala have already begun, and so far, nearly every single individual who’s been involved has opted to return home instead of staying put in Guatemala and seeking protected status there. This supports the administration’s argument that many of these asylum claims were not legitimate.
The Prompt Asylum Claim Review process, which can process and deport asylum-seekers at an extremely fast rate, was launched this past October. Instead of undergoing an asylum review process that could take months, migrants subjected to review can be processed in just days.
Finally, the Interior Repatriation Initiative was first introduced in 2012, but had been mostly shelved until it was recently relaunched with Mexico. It deports Mexican nationals crossing illegally into the United States deep into the Mexican interior, making illegal reentry into the U.S. that much harder.
The results of these policy innovations have been truly dramatic. Detention facilities that were shockingly overcrowded now have space. Customs and Border Protection officials conducted over...
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