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Category: Health

Mountains of food wasted as coronavirus scrambles supply chain

Mountains of food wasted as coronavirus scrambles supply chain

The Guardian reports: Billions of dollars worth of food is going to waste as growers and producers from California to Florida are facing a massive surplus of highly perishable items. As US food banks handle record demand and grocery stores struggle to keep shelves stocked, farmers are dumping fresh milk and plowing vegetables back into the dirt as the shutdown of the food service industry has scrambled the supply chain. Roughly half the food grown in the US was previously…

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How did America end up with nurses wearing garbage bags?

How did America end up with nurses wearing garbage bags?

Susan B. Glasser writes: On Saturday, March 21st, while Donald Trump was tweeting about the “Chinese virus” and circulating praise for the “great job we’ve done,” Eric Ries received a phone call from another Silicon Valley C.E.O. His friend Jeff Lawson, of the firm Twilio, told Ries that, to deal with the rapidly escalating coronavirus crisis, the White House was recruiting tech executives to help. Ries—the founder and C.E.O. of a new company, the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and the author…

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What Trump’s Covid-19 tsar, Peter Navarro, lacks in expertise, he invents

What Trump’s Covid-19 tsar, Peter Navarro, lacks in expertise, he invents

The Guardian reports: The rise of Peter Navarro – the man put in charge of marshalling emergency US production of medical equipment in the midst of a pandemic – is in many ways a classic story of the Trump era. The 70-year-old White House trade adviser was first recruited by Trump because he wrote a string of books about the Chinese strategic threat – one called Death by China – despite having spent almost no time in the country and…

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How coronavirus felled the global economy in 100 days

How coronavirus felled the global economy in 100 days

Larry Elliott writes: It is New Year’s Eve 2019 and around the world stock markets are closing for business on a high note. Shares in the US are up by almost 30% on the year, those in Japan by 18%. Even in Britain, where the mood has been dampened by months of Brexit uncertainty, the FTSE 100 has risen by 12%. Overall, it had been the best year for stocks since 2009 and traders saw no real reason why the…

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How Europe failed the coronavirus test

How Europe failed the coronavirus test

Politico reports: They could have known. They should have prepared. They didn’t listen. Europe, in early April, remains the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic — where the outbreak, uncontrolled, morphed into catastrophe. Nearly 50,000 dead. More than 600,000 infected. And the devastation is far from over. The world’s largest economy is paralyzed. The planet’s most open societies are frozen in fear — with the Continent’s treasured freedoms blamed for accelerating the spread of the most pernicious contagion to afflict humankind…

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In battling the coronavirus, will ‘optimistic bias’ be our undoing?

In battling the coronavirus, will ‘optimistic bias’ be our undoing?

Unless danger is flashing before us, we view risks through rose-colored glasses. slavemotion/iStock via Getty Images By Marie Helweg-Larsen, Dickinson College As the coronavirus has fanned across the globe, some people have been more complacent about the risk of contracting the virus than others. On March 21, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was apoplectic after photographs emerged of New Yorkers congregating in parks, apparently ignoring mandates for social distancing. “It’s insensitive, it’s arrogant, it’s self-destructive, it’s disrespectful and it has…

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Trump’s daily briefings are hurting him more than helping, aides and allies increasingly believe

Trump’s daily briefings are hurting him more than helping, aides and allies increasingly believe

The New York Times reports: In his daily briefings on the coronavirus, President Trump has brandished all the familiar tools in his rhetorical arsenal: belittling Democratic governors, demonizing the media, trading in innuendo and bulldozing over the guidance of experts. It’s the kind of performance the president relishes, but one that has his advisers and Republican allies worried. As unemployment soars and the death toll skyrockets, and new polls show support for the president’s handling of the crisis sagging, White…

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Intelligence briefing for the White House warned of coronavirus ‘cataclysmic event’ as early as November

Intelligence briefing for the White House warned of coronavirus ‘cataclysmic event’ as early as November

ABC News reports: As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting. Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with…

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Demographics of death: Why black Americans are at higher risk for coronavirus

Demographics of death: Why black Americans are at higher risk for coronavirus

  Yesterday, Covid-19 became the leading cause of death in America. CNN reports on its disproportionate impact on African Americans: Black Americans have more existing medical issues, less access to health care, and are more likely to work in unstable jobs — all factors that have made the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately hurt blacks more. While everyone is susceptible to Covid-19, black Americans are at higher risk, Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said during an appearance on CBS This Morning on…

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Coronavirus is now spreading across rural America

Coronavirus is now spreading across rural America

The New York Times reports: With 42 states now urging people to stay at home, the last holdouts are the Republican governors of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas. Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota has suggested that the stricter measures violated personal liberties, and she said her state’s rural character made it better positioned to handle the outbreak. “South Dakota is not New York City,” Ms. Noem said at a news conference last week. But many rural…

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The best hopes for a coronavirus drug

The best hopes for a coronavirus drug

The Atlantic reports: Twenty-nine. That’s the number of proteins the new coronavirus has, at most, in its arsenal to attack human cells. That’s 29 proteins to go up against upwards of tens of thousands of proteins comprising the vastly more complex and sophisticated human body. Twenty-nine proteins that have taken over enough cells in enough bodies to kill more than 80,000 people and grind the world to a halt. If there is a way—a vaccine, therapy, or drug—to stop the…

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Boris Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus – but they were slow to sound the alarm

Boris Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus – but they were slow to sound the alarm

Reuters reports: It was early spring when British scientists laid out the bald truth to their government. It was “highly likely,” they said, that there was now “sustained transmission” of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom. If unconstrained and if the virus behaved as in China, up to four-fifths of Britons could be infected and one in a hundred might die, wrote the scientists, members of an official committee set up to model the spread of pandemic flu, on March 2….

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New Zealand isn’t just flattening the curve. It’s squashing it

New Zealand isn’t just flattening the curve. It’s squashing it

The Washington Post reports: It has been less than two weeks since New Zealand imposed a coronavirus lockdown so strict that swimming at the beach and hunting in bushland were banned. They’re not essential activities, plus we have been told not to do anything that could divert emergency services’ resources. People have been walking and biking strictly in their neighborhoods, lining up six feet apart outside grocery stores while waiting to go one-in-one-out, and joining swaths of the world in…

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Politicians and public figures return to medical careers to help coronavirus effort

Politicians and public figures return to medical careers to help coronavirus effort

The Guardian reports: An Irish prime minister, a French film director and a Hungarian MEP are among the public figures who are resurrecting their medical careers to fight the coronavirus pandemic. They are part of a small, growing group of people in politics, the arts and sports who are becoming doctors again to help health care systems under unprecedented strain. Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s taoiseach, has offered to work one day a week as a doctor as his country braces for…

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How Andrew Cuomo became the most prominent Democrat of the Covid-19 crisis

How Andrew Cuomo became the most prominent Democrat of the Covid-19 crisis

The Guardian reports: It’s rare for a single US state governor to get so much attention it even rivals the president during a historical national crisis – but that’s exactly what New York’s Andrew Cuomo is experiencing. Cuomo, the technocratic three-term governor who’s had to deal with the state hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, has emerged as the most prominent Democrat in charge of fighting the virus, filling a role many felt former vice-president Joe Biden should be occupying….

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As Trump played down the risks, his own trade adviser warned in January about the danger of a pandemic

As Trump played down the risks, his own trade adviser warned in January about the danger of a pandemic

The New York Times reports: A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death. The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that…

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