True… but in wartime desperate measures can be called for. If governors are so dense they don’t understand the need for stay-at-home orders, they will be too dense to be pushing back against a federal government that’s sick of dealing with fools. Not that I expect rational actions from this administration any more…
“And 1 in 8 Americans haven’t visited a doctor in the past year, meaning that some may have health conditions and not know it.”
I’m surprised this number isn’t higher, actually.
New York hospital system says more than 400 employees have coronavirus
Northwell Health, the largest health care system in the state of New York, told CNN that about 470 employees have tested positive for Covid-19.
Northwell Health spokesperson Terence Lynam said the hospital system has had more than 2,400 Covid-19 patients in their hospitals, with an additional 3,600 hospitalized patients who were either waiting to be tested or waiting for results. ICUs are currently 85% full.
The company employs about 72,000 people. CNN
China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says
China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.
The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said.
The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.
Communications staff at the White House and the Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
“The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming,” Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday on CNN. “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.
While China eventually imposed a strict lockdown beyond those of less autocratic nations, there has been considerable skepticism toward China’s reported numbers, both outside and within the country. The Chinese government has repeatedly revised its methodology for counting cases, for weeks excluding people without symptoms entirely, and only on Tuesday added more than 1,500 asymptomatic cases to its total.
Stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province have driven public doubt in Beijing’s reporting.
Republican lawmakers in the U.S. have been particularly harsh about China’s role in the outbreak. Enhancing Beijing’s role in the pandemic could be politically helpful to President Donald Trump, who has sought to shift blame for the U.S. outbreak away from his administration’s delays in achieving widespread testing for the virus and mobilizing greater production of supplies such as face masks and hospital ventilators.
“The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, said in a statement after Bloomberg News published its report. “Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime.”
Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to the outbreak, said Tuesday that China’s public reporting influenced assumptions elsewhere in the world about the nature of the virus.
“The medical community made – interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” she said at a news conference on Tuesday. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”
China isn’t the only country with suspect public reporting. Western officials have pointed to Iran, Russia, Indonesia and especially North Korea, which has not reported a single case of the disease, as probable under-counts. Others including Saudi Arabia and Egypt may also be playing down their numbers.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has publicly urged China and other nations to be transparent about their outbreaks. He has repeatedly accused China of covering up the extent of the problem and being slow to share information, especially in the weeks after the virus first emerged, and blocking offers of help from American experts.
“This data set matters,” he said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. The development of medical therapies and public-health measures to combat the virus “so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired,” he said.
“I would urge every nation: Do your best to collect the data. Do your best to share that information,” he said. “We’re doing that.”
@4kids4us, Yes, I got that you were in agreement that boaters shouldn’t be out and were just reporting the complaints of others. 
The guy who backed into one of his own divers was operating a new boat, larger than his previous one. Under normal circumstances he might have had time to take it out a few times to get a feel for it before using it for a dive trip but he was trying to skirt the new restrictions by claiming he had a waiver as a commercial operator.
Florida does not have “zero social distancing.” There’s actually a lot of distancing and self-isolating going on. And numerous individual counties and cities have instituted “stay at home” orders, that just hasn’t been mandated at a state level.
I think the confirmed cases count is off and only makes it appear Florida’s at the bottom of the curve. I suspect Florida’s much further along the curve and cases are - as they do - growing exponentially. But without testing, there’s not only no way to know but it’s hard to convince people that this is the case.
Dutch Scientists Find a Novel Coronavirus Early-Warning Signal
Dutch scientists were able to find the coronavirus in a city’s wastewater before Covid-19 cases were reported, demonstrating a novel early warning system for the pneumonia-causing disease.
The so-called SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is often excreted in an infected person’s stool. Although it’s unlikely that sewage will become an important route of transmission, the pathogen’s increasing circulation in communities will increase the amount of it flowing into sewer systems, Gertjan Medema and colleagues at the KWR Water Research Institute in Nieuwegein said on Monday.
They detected genetic material from the coronavirus at a wastewater treatment plant in Amersfoort on March 5, before any cases had been reported in the city, located about 50 kilometers (32 miles) southeast of Amsterdam. The Netherlands confirmed its first Covid-19 case on Feb. 27 and discovered health workers had fallen ill with the infection in a southern part of the country days later – a sign that it was spreading in the community.
Coronavirus Lurking in Feces May Reveal Hidden Risk of Spread
“It is important to collect information about the occurrence and fate of this new virus in sewage to understand if there is no risk to sewage workers, but also to determine if sewage surveillance could be used to monitor the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in our communities,” Medema, the institute’s principal microbiologist, and co-authors said in a paper released ahead of peer review. “That could complement current clinical surveillance, which is limited to the Covid-19 patients with the most severe symptoms.”
It’s the first report of detection of SARS-CoV-2 in sewage, they said.
Wastewater surveillance is a well established method of detecting poliovirus and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as well as the use of illicit and prescription medications.
Sewage surveillance could also serve as early warning of the emergence and re-emergence of Covid-19 in cities, the Dutch scientists said.
“The detection of the virus in sewage, even when the Covid-19 prevalence is low, indicates that sewage surveillance could be a sensitive tool to monitor the circulation of the virus in the population,” they said.
“third — contrary to what’s appearing on social media — the earlier advice was based on the best science available then, not because the masks were in short supply.”
Of course, this is likely false. It does not pass the sniff test or Occam’s Razor.
I saw a few people kayaking on the Intracoastal in Florida yesterday. Usually it is too dangerous to venture out too far in a kayak, with all the lunatics and their powerboats out there.
There were a few pleasure boats out there still, though, even down here in Palm Beach County. Friends in north Florida (Jacksonville area) have been out on their center console most days for the last few weeks.
Some of the cruises that are still on the water departed early March. For example, Zaandam departed on March 7. However, at the time, the Diamond Princess had docked in Japan, and the Grand Princess was waiting to dock in the US. There were beginning to be high profile event cancellations, such as SXSW the day before. But there were also reassuring statements at the time from prominent leaders like:
March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 6: “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test.”
March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on Coronavirus.”
March 10: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
The cases in Florida are going up very rapidly each day. On March 20 Florida had only 510 cases. On the 25th there were 1977 and the next day 2484. On the 27th it had 3198. On the 29th 4950. On the 31st there were 6741. Those are only official cases.
I’m sure there are more. That’s 5th in the nation for national totals, so comparing only to NY doesn’t give the broad view of how much of a hot spot Florida has turned into in a short time. The average number of days from a person getting it to dying is 14 according to one study but it can be faster or slower. The current numbers are not going to tell you the current situation because people don’t come down with it for 1-3 weeks or maybe longer in rare cases and those who get it and are going to pass away are not going to die for at least some days longer with an avg being 14. That means what we see now in official numbers is what the situation was some weeks ago. The numbers for where your state or anywhere is now will show in another 3 - 5 weeks and I do not think those numbers will be at all comforting. I do home that the fatality rate is lower there due to temps and humidity but I’m not counting on that.
Anyone who let the beaches stay open and spring breakers to come and did nothing while this spread, who didn’t stop that boat with almost 4000 from getting off without any testing pretty recently, who isn’t issuing a stay home stay safe recommendation is an idiot with numbers like Florida has. He is causing deaths that don’t have to happen. How many people would have to die for you to take this seriously? Waiting for that number whatever that number is, will be waiting far too long because this is causing exponential growth.
One of my kids works in a hospital where even thought they don’t treat coronavirus patients they have had some cases. She has co-workers who are currently waiting for test results after falling ill, but no matter what kind of contact they’ve had with those awaiting results (cleaning up vomit, helping them to their car, working at the same work station) staff who have not displayed symptoms are not being tested or told to self-isolate. I think they just can’t cover staffing needs if they do.
Staffing is going to get horrible in places with a rash of cases. In some places medical staff are already working to the point of exhaustion plus they’re stressed by the possibility that they could take the virus home to their families.
On February 28th. Nancy Pelosi had a huge crowd with Cameras and news reporters following her around packed Chinatown in SF. Yes. One month ago. It was packed.
Her message was to tell everyone to come out here and visit Chinatown. Shop and eat. It’s open and show your support.
This was to push back on the Chinese travel ban that many in the media and here are conveniently forgetting they opposed as racist. Tweets are being deleted across twitter.
Those who admire her and admonish trump for mixed messaging, despite the January China ban and other countries having the travel ban and global advisories -we need to question her too. Or give everyone a break from the accusation game and political gamesmanship.
I don’t blame her either.
As stated by Deborah Brix and is being glossed over - The experts, including her, misread Chinese data and The Who didn’t see human to human transmission. Which turns out to be a Chinese lies knowing they had community spread in late November.
That lie is responsible for thousands of deaths and lack of equipment. Especially outside the USA. England only has 8000 ventilators nationwide. We have over 200000. And growing quickly.
African counties have 3 for the whole country.
The cruise ship people should be helped. They are elderly and vulnerable. Important in Fresno but not the in US bay? Are we refusing to help others who traveled on planes. Or went on spring break? No of course not.
In France, wearing a face-covering mask in public has been illegal since 2011.
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/ta/ta0524.asp
@MYOS1634 thank you. She’s ok now. I’m glad your safe as well. Be careful though.
Cuomo is doing a great job of leading through this crisis. He seems to be uniquely skilled to do just that.
The best leader in the time of crisis is not necessarily the best person to avoid the crisis, or the best person to lead the recovery. Different mindsets and skills.
I’m so glad she’s better, @privatebanker. That’s very good news.
Yes, you are right. It is just that he was a super spreader and having just one super spreader in any area is not good. I live within the big red circle that started to form after he became a super spreader and am not that fond of what the map looks like as a result of that spread. I remember looking the map of Wuhan and the surrounding areas and feeling so sorry for those people and now I’m in the big red circle here, at home a couple months later. I think the virus was spreading around all sorts of places, especially places like NYC with international travel. I think that boat that docked in NJ in February so close to NYC had a pretty good chance of being one of the early ways the virus started to spread in NY. That situation was handled very poorly.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that he will issue an order applying coronavirus-forced social and economic limitations statewide.
The order will instruct residents across the state that unless they are engaged in “essential services” they need to “stay close to home,” the governor said.
The governor said the statewide order will follow the definitions of “essential services” as defined by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He said their will be some modifications patterned after Miami-Dade County rules the governor said addresses other vital needs like pet care products.
So far, such restrictions have only been applied to urban areas, like Southeast Florida, which have been the location of the greatest number of infections.
DeSantis had adamantly resisted imposing statewide business constraints despite growing calls form state and federal lawmakers in the past week.
He said Wednesday that he changed his mind after President Trump extended the national economic shutdown on Tuesday for another 30 days.
“That’s a national pause,” DeSantis said, adding that the decision made it sensible “to make this move now.”
At the end of the day only YOU can be responsible for your own safety. Wash your hands, don’t touch your face, and personally social distance yourself and you are 99%+ safe. These idiot beach goers can’t hurt you unless you let them…
NYS numbers:
83,713 positive cases, up by 7,917
tests run yesterday 15,694 (50.4% came back positive)
12,226 currently hospitalized (1,297 new hospitalizations yesterday)
3,022 current ICU patients (312 patients were moved to ICU yesterday)
6,142 patients discharged (+1,167) 
1,941 deaths (+391) 
local cases:
NYC 47.4K (+4.3K)
Westchester 10.6K (+0.7K)
Nassau 9.5K (+1K)
Suffolk 7.6K (+0.9K)
Rockland 3.3K (+0.5K)
Orange 1.7K (+0.2K)