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April 2020

Why is Queens the Hotspot of Hotspots in the Nation’s Coronavirus Crisis? by Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/03/why-is-queens-the-hotspot-of-hotspots-in-the-nations-coronavirus-crisis/

While failing to offer an honest explanation about how this disease continues to consume New York City, Cuomo nonetheless is demanding the rest of the country surrender to tyrannical and punitive government “cures” to do what he did not.

According to reports, the death toll from coronavirus-related illness in the United States, according to some sources, reached 6,000 on Thursday. The country remains in lockdown and the economy is in freefall after the White House warned this week that between 100,000 to 200,000 people will die in the United States over the next few months from the Wuhan flu.

The country’s main hotspot remains New York City. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is holding daily press briefings to riff about how we are “all in this together,” whine about the dearth of critical supplies his administration failed to secure as the crisis unfolded overseas, and wisecrack with his brother. Nearly half of all U.S. fatalities have occurred in New York state, according to tracking reports.

Cuomo insists that New York is the “tip of the spear” of COVID-19 cases; it’s only a matter of time, Cuomo predicts, before the rest of the country is under siege by the lethal virus.

But New York is not the tip of the spear—it is the spear.

As I detailed here, Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio failed to prepare for the inevitable spread of coronavirus until it was too late. There were warning signs dating back to January that the disease would sweep through certain areas of the city, endangering the lives of health care workers, state residents and people across the country.

“F***ing Swede” by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15808/fing-swede

In Gothenburg, a criminal gang of youths forced their victim to kiss the gang leader’s feet, while they filmed him. After that, they stamped on his face until he passed out. — Expressen, October 1, 2019.

“It is a way to show your power. They want to dominate places. They do that by putting fear in other youths.” — Thomas Petterson, analyst for the Gothenburg police, Expressen, August 31, 2019.

“Even little girls aren’t safe… The gangs have gained respect, as it is called. This means that they have taken over certain neighborhoods…” — Ingrid Björkman, Jan Elfverson, Jonathan Friedman and Åke Wedin, in the book, Exit Folkhemssverige (“Exit the Swedish Welfare State”), 2007.

“Previously, gang rapes were virtually unknown in Sweden. But since the 1980s, they have steadily increased. Since 1995, they have quadrupled. In 1999, 35 gang rapes were recorded in Stockholm alone. Today, the media reports every week or every two weeks on such violent crimes.” — Ingrid Björkman, Jan Elfverson, Jonathan Friedman and Åke Wedin, in the book, Exit Folkhemssverige.

A new kind of crime is making the headlines in Sweden, in Swedish known as förnedringsrån. Förnedring means “humiliation” and rån means “robbery.” The victims of these “humiliation robberies” are almost always children or teenagers. As previously reported by Gatestone Institute:

“The number of children who rob other children has increased by 100% in only four years, according to a new study by Swedish police… In 2016, there were 1,178 robberies against children under 18 years of age. In 2019, the number had increased to 2,484. The number of violent crimes where the suspect is a child under 15 years of age has also gone up dramatically: In 2015, there were 6,359 reported violent crimes where the suspect was a child under 15. In 2019, that number had increased to 8,719 reported violent crimes”.

Welcome Back, Plastic Bags By Kyle Smith *********

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/welcome-back-plastic-bags/

They’re better, cheaper, and safer than reusable cloth bags. Liberals hate that.

Single-use plastic bags are a miracle of modern technology. Cheap, light, convenient, and ubiquitous, they provide an elegant solution to a problem. If you recycle them, as most people do, and put your rubbish in them, that creates a net reduction in carbon emissions compared with buying the heavier, thicker garbage bags sold in stores. Best of all, they’re sanitary.

Cue up a head-spinning headline: San Francisco has just banned the use of reusable tote bags and switched back to single-use plastic bags to help fight the spread of the coronavirus. In New Hampshire, on March 21, Governor Chris Sununu signed an executive order to the same effect. Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker followed suit on March 25. A Maine ban on plastic bags was due to take effect on April 22 but has just been pushed back until next year.

Whoever could have warned us that cloth tote bags were unhygienic? Well, there was this New York Post columnist who wrote, six years ago, “Reusing that Earth-friendly tote gradually turns it into a chemical weapon” and noted that plastic-bag bans were associated in one study with a 46 percent increase in death from food-borne illnesses. Cloth tote bags are inconvenient, they’re eco-unfriendly (more carbon emissions than single-use plastic, unless you use them more than 14 times, which people tend not to do), and oh, by the way, they’re deadly.

Teachers Urge Government To Reopen Schools Before Students Learn To Think For Themselves

https://babylonbee.com/news/teachers-warn-parents-arent-properly-equipped-to-indoctrinate-children

U.S.—Teachers at government schools have raised their concerns that the recent closure of their institutions will have a damaging effect on students. In particular, the nation’s educators are worried that the longer the schools are closed, the more likely it is that students will begin thinking for themselves, learn life skills away from the government school system, and realize how much more they learn at home.

“We must reopen as soon as possible — before they regain their ability to have independent thoughts,” said New York 4th-grade teacher Ms. Jenny Mudd. “This is an urgent crisis. We realize we have to do our part to prevent the spread of the virus, but we must also prevent the spread of unapproved ideas. There’s a balance there.”

“Reopen the schools before it is too late.”

Sure enough, studies have already shown a strong correlation between everyone being homeschooled and a concerning spike in independent thought. Students who have been away from the government school system for even a week stop feeling depressed and anxious all the time and even show a shocking increase in the ability to form thoughts and ideas not approved by the government.

Teachers have further pointed out that parents aren’t properly equipped to indoctrinate their children with government propaganda. “I went to school for eight years to be able to do this,” said Portland kindergarten teacher Ms. Pinkerton. “Parents just don’t have the experience of stuffing kids’ heads full of a statist worldview seven hours a day like I do.”

Trump Derangement Syndrome Is Immune To The Coronavirus — And The Facts John Merline

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/04/trump-derangement-syndrom-is-immune-to-the-coronavirus-and-the-facts/

Even as China’s role in creating the COVID-19 crisis becomes more clear, the left is trying to blame President Donald Trump for the resulting deaths. None of it makes sense, and all of it is beneath contempt at a time when the country is still at war with this invisible enemy.

On Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN’s “State of the Union” that “The president’s denial at the beginning was deadly. His delay in getting equipment to where it’s needed is deadly … As the president fiddles, people are dying.”

Even as Pelosi was uttering this shameless screed, intelligence officials were putting the finishing touches on a report showing how China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak and has been underreporting how many contracted the disease and the number of deaths.

When that report became public, Vice President Mike Pence noted that “What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.”

State Department immunologist Dr. Deborah Birx added that “The medical community interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected.”

Virus Experts’ Early Statements Belie ‘Prescient’ Portrayal . By Kalev Leetaru

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/03/virus_experts_early_statements_belie_prescient_portrayal_142845.html

As predictions of the coronavirus’ impact have grown more dire and the White House has belatedly acknowledged the pathogen’s repercussions on the nation, the media have increasingly sought to portray the administration as out of touch with early warnings from medical experts about the coming storm. A closer look at the public statements of those very same experts during the early weeks of the outbreak reveals that the administration’s initial reassurances were largely aligned with the assessments of the medical community.

Today Anthony Fauci is held up by the media as a national hero of the pandemic response and the only reason to listen to a White House coronavirus briefing. Yet, rewind the clock back to January and his public statements essentially mirrored those of the administration.

On Jan. 21, he emphasized that it was unclear whether the virus could spread from person to person: “Is it a continual spread? Is it sustained? We’re not quite sure yet.” A University of Minnesota expert offered that “this is one of those inflection moments in outbreak history where we have enough information to be very concerned, but not enough information to say this is going to be an international crisis.”

In a Jan. 23 Journal of the American Medical Association podcast, Dr. Fauci repeatedly downplayed the virus’ potential impact on the U.S., noting that all five cases here were travelers from China. He also noted that due to limited testing in China, the number of infections was likely much higher than official counts, meaning that the death rate of the virus was likely much lower than feared.

Asked whether the U.S. might contemplate city-wide shutdowns like those China was enacting at the time, Fauci replied, “There’s no chance in the world that we could do that to Chicago or to New York or to San Francisco, but they’re doing it.  So, let’s see what happens.”

France’s Coronavirus Death Toll Jumps as Nursing Homes Included by John Irish

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-04-02/frances-coronavirus-death-toll-jumps-to-nearly-5-400-as-nursing-homes-included

PARIS (Reuters) – The coronavirus death count in France surged to nearly 5,400 people on Thursday after the health ministry began including nursing home fatalities in its data.

The pandemic had claimed the lives of 4,503 patients in hospitals by Thursday, up 12% on the previous day’s 4,032, said Jerome Salomon, head of the health authority. A provisional tally showed the coronavirus had killed a further 884 people in nursing homes and other care facilities, he added.

This makes for a total of 5,387 lives lost to coronavirus in France – an increase of 1,355 over Wednesday’s cumulative total – although data has not yet been collected from all of the country’s 7,400 nursing homes.

“We are in France confronting an exceptional epidemic with an unprecedented impact on public health,” Salomon told a news conference.

The country’s broad lockdown is likely to be extended beyond April 15, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said on Thursday, extending a confinement order to try and deal with the crisis that began on March 17.

The government was racing to try to ensure it can produce or procure itself certain medications needed to treat coronavirus patients as stocks were running low, Philippe told TF1 TV, echoing concerns across Europe as the pandemic places a huge strain on hospitals in Italy, Spain and elsewhere.

China’s deadly coronavirus-lie co-conspirator — the World Health Organization By Nicholas Eberstadt and Dan Blumenthal

https://nypost.com/2020/04/02/chinas-deadly-coronavirus-lie-co-conspirator-the-world-health-organization/

The fog of war obscures much about the novel coronavirus pandemic. But two facts seem absolutely certain. First, China’s Communist authorities have lied, concealed and misled about the origins of the epidemic and the toll of the virus in China. Second, the World Health Organization has acted as Beijing’s handmaid.

The result: The global toll of the tragedy will be much greater than it need have been.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the Beijing regime lies about the epidemic: It lies about, well, ­everything. From economic data to air pollution figures, the Communist Party doctors information to protect and promote itself.

Naturally, in the face of a grave national-health threat, the incentive for dissembling was tremendous. So Beijing spun and suppressed information about the outbreak and impact of the coronavirus.

Independent Chinese journalists have detailed the Wuhan coverup: They report that a Chinese lab isolated and identified the strange new virus last December — but that the authorities ­ordered it to stop its work, get rid of its specimens and keep quiet. It took almost another month for the government to acknowledge that a SARS-like contagion, spread by human contact, was exploding in Hubei province.

The Time has Come for some Answers about the Coronavirus Pandemic By Steve McCann

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/the_time_has_come_for_some_answers_about_the_coronavirus_pandemic.html

How much does the general public really know about the Chinese Coronavirus?  What is the death rate solely attributable to the virus?  Of those that have died, how many had serious underlying conditions?  Do the reported deaths include those who died of other ailments but had also contracted the virus?  What is the actual age breakdown of fatalities?  The CDC claims that this virus is extraordinarily contagious; how much of a threat to spread the virus to others are those who are asymptomatic (have the virus but report no symptoms) yet are still contagious?

Since the Chinese Communist Party has refused to fully share their actual experience with the world, including the death toll, one has to turn to other sources.  There are presently two primary sources that can be analyzed: Italy and New York City.

As of April 1, 2020, Italy had recorded 13,100 deaths (4.3% of its recorded cases).  By far the highest number in the world, if China’s extremely dubious 3,300 deaths can be believed.  87% of all the deaths in Italy have occurred among those over 70.

It is generally acknowledged that not only does Italy have the oldest median population in Europe but also among the unhealthiest due to smoking and air pollution in Northern Italy, the epicenter of their coronavirus outbreak.  Further, its medical care system is among the worst in Europe and overstretched even in the best of times.

As to how they have categorized the death toll, Professor Walter Ricciardi, Advisor to the Italian Ministry of Health: