Coronavirus News (276)

Kamala Harris Knows How to Win Elections Make a sharp shift to the center.  The campaign has largely shrunk down from grand ideological issues to two practical problems: How to get rid of Donald Trump. How to beat Covid-19. ..................  First, Democratic primary voters decided that beating Trump was more important than the revolution. Second, the pandemic hit. ............ Third, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris decided to run a professional campaign. Instead of trying to please those of us who consume large amounts of media, they have ruthlessly and effectively focused their campaign on the Exhausted Majority — people who are disgusted by and semidetached from politics in working-class homes in the Midwest, in retirement communities in Florida, in suburban cul-de-sacs everywhere. ..............   Her first answer on Covid-19 was the most ingenious of the evening, in that it hit Trump from the right. ........... She said that in January, Trump denied self-reliant families the information they needed to keep themselves safe. ............  turned questions about the Supreme Court fight into a conversation about protecting Obamacare. .......... The three supporters she name-checked were Colin Powell, Cindy McCain and John Kasich. ............  When she was asked directly about the Green New Deal, she immediately reminded voters that Joe Biden wouldn’t ban fracking ..............  once in office it is nearly impossible to rally support for issues and plans you didn’t take to the American people during the fall 

Rest Better With Light Exercises Stretching and meditative movement like yoga before bed can improve the quality of your sleep and the amount you sleep. Here is a short and calming routine of 11 stretches and exercises. ........  a 37 percent increase in the rates of clinical insomnia among adults in China from before the peak of the pandemic. .......... Exercise can reduce the amount of time it takes to fall asleep and the amount of time spent awake at night     

A $52,112 Air Ambulance Ride: Coronavirus Patients Battle Surprise Bills Congress was close to a solution before getting hit with millions of dollars of ads from private-equity firms. Then the pandemic struck.

Coronavirus: WHO backflips on virus stance by condemning lockdowns  stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method” of the coronavirus. ...........  “Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer” ........ “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.” ............   “Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. … Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.” ...........  Melbourne’s lockdown has been hailed as one of the strictest and longest in the world. In Spain’s lockdown in March, people weren’t allowed to leave the house unless it was to walk their pet. In China, authorities welded doors shut to stop people from leaving their homes. The WHO thinks these steps were largely unnecessary. ........... lockdowns were doing “irreparable damage.” .......... and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection   

Coronavirus News (275)

The world recorded more than 1 million new cases in the last three days, and India’s total infections passed 7 million.  The number of new cases is growing faster than ever. Deaths and hospitalizations in some countries are also beginning to rise. The pandemic has sickened more than 37 million people and more than one million people have died globally ..............   Russia on Saturday also set a one-day record of 12,673 new cases. Argentina, which has seen more than 90,000 new cases in the past seven days, is a problem zone in South America, as are Brazil and Colombia. ........... and the Northeast is seeing early signs of a resurgence. 

Trump claims he is now immune to the coronavirus and unable to spread it. Twitter labels his post misleading.  he received cutting-edge combination treatment: remdesivir, an antiviral medication; dexamethasone, a steroid only recently shown to reduce death rates in severe cases; and an experimental cocktail of monoclonal antibodies, designed to turn back the virus shortly after infection. 

Regeneron’s C.E.O. says its promising Covid-19 treatment must be rationed

Across much of Europe, the virus is running wild again.  “This time is different,” he said, “as we are now going into the colder, darker winter months.” 

In Nepal, where hospital beds are few, thousands of Covid-19 patients just stay home — until they can’t.  Coronavirus infections have surpassed 100,000, about a third of which are currently active. ........ Cases in Nepal are increasing sharply, with a record 5,008 new infections recorded on Saturday. The Health Ministry counts fewer than 400 patients in intensive care, but even that has left I.C.U.s overflowing. Frontline doctors have also been infected, raising fears that health institutions’ staffing will be hollowed out. ............  To avoid system collapse, the government has asked Covid-19 patients to stay in home isolation — with the possibility of imprisonment if they venture outside — and to go to hospitals only if their condition turns critical. Almost 16,000 infected patients are in home isolation .............. But by the time infected people become seriously ill, it may be too late. ................. some patients had died in ambulances while searching for I.C.U. beds, others in home isolation, and still others while waiting for I.C.U. beds in isolation wards. More than 600 people have died in Nepal since the pandemic began, a relatively low death rate but one that is likely to rise since the explosion in cases was so recent. ................. darker days are yet to come.” 

Despite derision from Senate Republicans, the White House hasn’t given up trying to make a relief deal. skeptical Senate Republicans would follow President Trump’s lead if Ms. Pelosi and Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, could reach a deal. ......... “Republicans want to do it — we’re having a hard time with Nancy Pelosi,” Mr. Trump said on Sunday, speaking on Fox News. “We’re ready to go. We’re all ready to go. We can’t get Nancy Pelosi to sign the documents.” It was unclear what documents he was referring to. ...............    repurpose funds from the lapsed Paycheck Protection Program as negotiations continued 

The Northeast Held the Virus in Check. Now Cases Are Inching Up Again. The Northeast, devastated by the coronavirus in the spring and held up as a model of infection control by summer, is now seeing early signs of a second wave. ............  and much of the Northeast had successfully tamped down transmission of the virus with physical distancing and masking, as much of Europe had done. “The point is, once you let up on the brake, then eventually, slowly, it comes back” .............  Some 2,800 people are in a hospital in the region, accounting for 8 percent of the hospitalizations nationwide. Those figures are tiny compared with the spring, when tens of thousands of people in the Northeast were hospitalized on any given day, and morgues were running out of body bags. .............   “Places like New York and other states in the Northeast could have more of the classic second wave phenomenon” ............  “Pretty much everybody expects things to get somewhat worse.” ..........  The air turned suddenly chilly in the past few weeks ........... the virus seems to have inexplicably spread all around the county. ............. a city that has the largest school district in the country.   

Coronavirus News (274)

July Is the New January: More Companies Delay Return to the Office From Ford to Microsoft, white-collar companies are increasingly extending working from home through next summer. ...........  and acknowledged the inevitable: The pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon. .............  as the coronavirus shatters work norms and upends assumptions about where workers need to be to achieve maximum productivity ............ “The reality is hitting that, ‘There won’t be a vaccine as I expected very quickly. This is going to be my life, and I’d better learn how to do this.’” ........... likened the situation to waiting at an airport terminal for a flight that is continually delayed ..........   Much of corporate America is now following the lead of Silicon Valley tech companies like Google and Facebook. They were among those that allowed employees to work from home even before the pandemic hit in full force in March. Since then, Facebook has set the tone in planning for permanent remote work .............  announcing the June 2021 return date to employees prompted a “collective sigh of relief inside the company” .......... Remote work has been productive ... and people like not having to commute. But a mix of in-person and remote is probably the most popular option for employees when life returns to normal ... because they also miss the social interaction of an office space. ........... Zoom “is not the same thing, and it’s exhausting,” Ms. Burke said. “By 7 o’clock last night, I was Zoomed out.” .........  digital work is often simpler for people to conduct via laptops and teleconferences than by being on site .............  how productive its employees have been remotely   

Trump’s False Claims as He Resumes His Rallies After Hospitalization In Florida, the president made a series of inaccurate claims about his election opponent, the coronavirus pandemic, the Nobel Peace Prize and Cuba, among other topics.  

Vaccine, Chaos, Confusion It’s tempting to look at the first vaccine as President Trump does: an on-off switch that will bring back life as we know it. .......... But vaccine experts say we should prepare instead for a perplexing, frustrating year. .............  The first vaccines may provide only moderate protection, low enough to make it prudent to keep wearing a mask. .......... Each company is running its own trial, comparing its jab with a placebo. .......... some wanted to test a number of vaccines all at once, against each other — what’s known as a master protocol. ........... Some researchers, including Dr. Fauci, advocated a design much like the W.H.O.’s. ............ The authorization of a vaccine will depend on how much protection the vaccine provides in the Phase 3 trial — what scientists refer to as its efficacy. In June, the F.D.A. set 50 percent efficacy as the target for a coronavirus vaccine. ..............  Operation Warp Speed was on track to have up to 700 million doses of various vaccines by March or April — enough, he said, for “all Americans who wish to get it.” .......... “We’ll have to continue to use a mask for some of these vaccines” ..........   a group of older people could all have strokes shortly after being vaccinated 

Chinese President Xi Jinping urges push towards hi-tech independence Xi says self-reliance is essential because the country is ‘on the cusp of unprecedented changes’ Comments come ahead of address to mark Shenzhen Special Economic Zone milestone

Coronavirus News (273)

Is Vietnam the Next ‘Asian Miracle’? The country is making autocratic capitalism work unusually well. ........ Using mass texts, TV ads, billboards, posters and loudspeakers, the government exhorted the nation’s 100 million citizens to identify carriers and trace contacts, contacts of contacts, even contacts of contacts of contacts. Rapid isolation of outbreaks has kept Vietnam’s death rate among the four lowest in the world — well under one death per million people. .........  Containing the pandemic allowed Vietnam to quickly reopen businesses, and it is now expected to be the world’s fastest growing economy this year. .........  Even more impressive, its growth is driven by a record trade surplus, despite the collapse in global trade. ........... After World War II the “Asian miracles” — first Japan, then Taiwan and South Korea, most recently China — grew their way out of poverty by opening to trade and investment and becoming manufacturing export powerhouses. ............  Even as global trade slumped in the 2010s, Vietnam’s exports grew 16 percent a year, by far the fastest rate in the world, and three times the emerging-world average. ............  While other emerging countries spend heavily on social welfare in an effort to appease voters, Vietnam devotes its resources to its exports, building roads and ports to get goods overseas and building schools to educate workers. .................. Over the last five years, foreign direct investment has averaged more than 6 percent of G.D.P. in Vietnam, the highest rate of any emerging country. Most of it goes to building manufacturing plants and related infrastructure, and most of it now comes from fellow Asian countries, including South Korea, Japan and China. The old miracles are helping to build the new one..................  Average annual per capita income in Vietnam has quintupled since the late 1980s to nearly $3,000 per person, but the cost of labor is still one half that of China, and the work force is unusually well educated for its income class. That skilled labor is helping Vietnam move “up the ladder,” perhaps faster than any rival, to manufacture increasingly sophisticated goods. Tech surpassed clothing and textiles as Vietnam’s leading export in 2015, and accounts for most of its record trade surplus this year. .................   Vietnam is also a trend-bending, Communist champion of open borders, a signatory to more than a dozen free trade agreements ........... is making autocratic capitalism work unusually well, through open economic policies and sound financial management. ........... Vietnam has sustained strong growth so far, largely free of the classic excesses, like large government deficits or public debts.  

If Amy Coney Barrett Were Muslim It’s not hard to imagine how conservatives would smear her religious beliefs. ........... I’m a practicing Muslim living through an administration that campaigned for a Muslim ban. My community has endured two decades of hazing after the Sept. 11 attacks, and our loyalty is still deemed suspect. I would never wish that kind of judgment on a person of another faith. 

Today our Board approved up to $12b in financing to support developing countries with the purchase and distribution of #COVID19 #vaccines, tests, and treatments. This builds on our emergency response programs already reaching 111 countries https://t.co/coPQFGmLU0

— World Bank (@WorldBank) October 13, 2020

 Mitch McConnell’s Mission of Misery Why Senate Republicans won’t help Americans in need. ........  I keep seeing news reports saying that the Trump administration is “pivoting” on economic stimulus. But Donald Trump has been reversing positions so frequently that it looks less like a series of pivots than like a tailspin. .............  the best guess is that for the next three-plus months — that is, until President Joe Biden takes office (highly likely, though not certain) with a Democratic Senate (more likely than not, but definitely not a sure thing) — there will be little or no aid for the millions of families, thousands of businesses and many state and local governments on the brink of disaster. .............. most Senate Republicans .... They’re willing to cover for Trump’s unprecedented corruption; they’re apparently unbothered by his fondness for foreign dictators. But spending money to help Americans in distress? That’s where they draw the line. .............  Lindsey Graham declared that emergency unemployment benefits would be extended “over our dead bodies” (actually 215,000 other people’s dead bodies, but who’s counting?). ............ And McConnell — whose state benefits from far more federal spending than it pays in taxes — derided proposed aid to states as a “blue state bailout.” ......... it’s hard to think of any major G.O.P.-approved fiscal legislation in the past two decades that didn’t redistribute income upward. ............. And that’s why Republicans are unwilling to provide desperately needed aid to economic victims of the pandemic. They aren’t worried that a relief package would fail; they’re worried that it might succeed, showing that sometimes more government spending is a good thing. Indeed, a successful relief package might pave the way for Democratic proposals that would, among other things, drastically reduce child poverty.

Coronavirus News (272)

Scientists Confirm Nevada Man Was Infected Twice With Coronavirus  The cases underscore the importance of social distancing and wearing masks even if you were previously infected with the virus, and they raise questions about how the human immune system reacts to the virus. ........ The patient originally tested positive for the virus in April and had symptoms including a cough and nausea. He recovered and tested negative for the virus in May. But at the end of May, he went to an urgent care center with symptoms including fever, cough and dizziness. In early June, he tested positive again and ended up in the hospital. ............  "The second infection was symptomatically more severe than the first" .........  In theory, the body's immune system should make antibodies after the first infection that help it combat the virus more effectively if the person is exposed to the same virus again. ...............  "they may have been exposed to a lot higher levels of the virus the second time around" .......... or the immune response from the first infection might be making the disease worse rather than better. ........... One of the biggest outstanding questions is how widespread reinfection might be. ....... about 90% of people who have experienced "a clear, symptomatic infection" have the antibodies to fight off another infection, "perhaps for about a year." ...........  cases of people being infected multiple times could have implications for the efficacy of a coronavirus vaccine ...... The virus can deploy proteins to get in the way of the immune response, whereas a vaccine has none of those proteins, she explains. "The good thing about a vaccine is that it can induce much better immunity, a much longer lasting immunity, than the natural exposure to the the virus"

In a First, New England Journal of Medicine Joins Never-Trumpers Editors at the world’s leading medical journal said the Trump administration “took a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.”  .........   The world’s most prestigious medical journal has never supported or condemned a political candidate. Until now. ............ The N.E.J.M.’s editors join those of another influential publication, Scientific American, who last month endorsed Mr. Biden, the former vice president. ............ “When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.” .......... The Trump administration, he said, had demonstrated “a continuous, reckless disregard of truth.”

How Are You Coping With the Coronavirus? As the disease continues to spread, we would like to hear what people are doing to handle an outbreak in their community.  

Coronavirus News (271)

Where to start with Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in literature  “Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings is a [theme] that has remained central to her.” .......... “It is terrible to survive/ as consciousness/ buried in the dark earth” ...........  “You who do not remember/ passage from the other world/ I tell you I could speak again: whatever/ returns from oblivion returns/ to find a voice.” ...............  “Long ago, I was wounded. I lived/ to revenge myself/ against my father, not/ for what he was — /for what I was: from the beginning of time,/ in childhood, I thought/ that pain meant/ I was not loved./ It meant I loved.” ............... “Today, when I woke up, I asked myself/ why did Christ die? Who knows/ the meaning of such questions?” 

The WHO's director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said a lack of leadership from global powers was prolonging the coronavirus pandemic as he called on the world's biggest economies to 'step up' https://t.co/dSKOm2ap9K

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) October 12, 2020

Covid virus ‘survives for 28 days’ in lab conditions The virus responsible for Covid-19 can remain infectious on surfaces such as banknotes, phone screens and stainless steel for 28 days .........  However, the experiment was conducted in the dark. UV light has already been shown to kill the virus. ......... SARS-Cov-2 survived for less time at hotter temperatures than cooler temperatures; it stopped being infectious within 24 hours at 40C on some surfaces. ....... stayed longer on smooth, non-porous surfaces than on porous materials such as cloth, which was found not to carry any infectious virus past 14 days. ......... "the chance of transmission through inanimate surfaces is very small". He said studies that suggested a significant risk had been designed with "little resemblance to real-life scenarios".  ..........  The experiments were, however, carried out in virus friendly conditions - in a dark room with stable temperatures and humidity  

 भ्रष्टाचारको कुरा बाहिर बोलेपछि ठूलो कम्पन आएको छ : भट्टराई

ओली, प्रचण्ड र देउवाले नौ अर्ब खाएको प्रमाण दिन सक्छुः डा. भट्टराई

५३ बर्ष अमेरिकामा बसेर पनि नेपाली भएरै बिते सुरुमा अमेरिका आउनेमध्येका सुखदेव शाह शाह सन् १९६७ मा पानीजहाज चढेर अमेरिका आएका थिए । जतिबेला अमेरिकाभरमा नै नेपालीहरुको संख्या औंलामा गन्नसकिने थियो । ....... प्रवासमा बसेर नेपालको राजनीतिमा आफ्नो औकात खोज्ने हैन बरु त्यहाँको राजनीति सुधार गर्न लागेकाहरुलाइ सकेको सहयोग गर्नुपर्ने उहाँको शिक्षा सबैले ग्रहण गर्नुपर्छ ।’ 

कोरोनामुक्त सांसद श्रेष्ठको सुझाव- 'काठमाडौंमा २५ दिन कडा लकडाउन नगरे अवस्था भयावह हुन्छ'  

भुसाल आए, भट्टराई आए फुस्सा !

Special report George Floyd’s America Examining systemic racism and racial injustice in the post-civil rights era 

Catch up on the latest in the saga of stimulus talks.

Coronavirus News (270)

The Problem Is in the Internet’s Bones  It was as if the Interstate System of highways had been built using volunteer road crews, working without a map. No one present at the 1969 creation of the network that later became the internet imagined that this niche Pentagon project — built as a research tool for a small group of academic computer scientists — would one day become the backbone of the global economy. ...........   he has little patience for tech’s free-market mythmaking or for the gauzy abstractions — cloud, mobile, search, social — used to describe its products. ............  the difficulties inherent in having a global network born in and governed by America. ..............  The American government spied on its citizens and allowed the internet’s insecurities to be exploited by hackers. China, busily building up its tech infrastructure as our own system frays, is willing to take surveillance and industrial espionage even further. “This is the world that advertising capitalism has built” ............   “a world in which our expectations of any kind of private life are disappearing, and leaving us feeling disempowered against both our major corporations and our governments.” ............ Keenly aware of the intrusive track record of the national security state, Ball is reluctant to lean too hard on the government for answers. Instead, he argues, “we need to become systems thinkers” who recognize that Big Tech is only one piece of a larger whole. ................  we need to change our institutions as well as our thinking. As Ball’s evidence makes clear, a sharp power imbalance between public and private sectors is at the root of our problems. We are overdue for a systemic correction. 

Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times  For a sweeping, provocative and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution. 

The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts A dispute between a small group of scholars and the authors of The New York Times Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society. ...........  they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not.” .............  The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different. .............  whether Americans, from the Founders to the present day, are committed to the ideals they claim to revere .....................  slavery’s legacy still shapes American life ..............   If you think anti-black racism still shapes American society, then you are in agreement with the thrust of the 1619 Project ...............  Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles? ............  Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize .................  “what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” ........... “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain. .............  millennia in which human slavery was accepted around the world ............ the Revolution was kindled in New England, where prewar anti-slavery sentiment was strongest .........  the original Constitution did give some ironclad protections to slavery without mentioning it.” ............  the authors’ pessimism that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black Americans toward a more perfect union. ............  Every essay tracing racial injustice from slavery to the present day speaks to the endurance of racial caste. And it is this profound pessimism about white America that many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling. ............ “the Neo-Confederate world view” that the “South actually won the Civil War by weaving itself into the fabric of post war society so it can then discredit the entire American enterprise.” ........... “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country” .......... anti-black racism is a more intractable problem than most Americans are willing to admit. ........... “I think one would be very hard-pressed to look at the factual record from 1619 to the present of the black freedom movement and come away with any conclusion other than that most of the time, black people did not have a lot of allies in that movement,” Hannah-Jones told me. “It is not saying that black people only fought alone. It is saying that most of the time we did.” ........ something that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way. So I support the 1619 Project as kind of a cultural event, ............ history is not objective .......... Both Du Bois and the Dunning School saw themselves as having reached the truth by objective means. But as a target of the Dunning School’s ideology, Du Bois understood the motives and blind spots of Dunning School scholars far better than they themselves did. .......... “We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race,” Du Bois wrote, “and who will not deliberately encourage students to gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a lie.” ......... much of American history has been written by scholars offering ideological claims in place of rigorous historical analysis. But which claims are ideological, and which ones are objective, is not always easy to discern.