Sorry it has taken me so long to get to your region.
I will work my way down the continent:
"Hidden toll: Mexico ignores wave of coronavirus deaths in capital" by Azam Ahmed New York Times, May 8, 2020
MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government is not reporting hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths from coronavirus in Mexico City, dismissing anxious officials who have tallied more than three times as many fatalities in the capital than the government publicly acknowledges, according to officials and confidential data reviewed by The New York Times.
The tensions have come to a head in recent weeks, with Mexico City alerting the government to the deaths repeatedly, hoping it will come clean to the public about the true toll of the virus on the nation’s biggest city and, by extension, the country at large, but that has not happened. Doctors in overwhelmed hospitals in Mexico City say the reality of the epidemic is being hidden from the country. In some hospitals, patients lie on the floor, splayed on mattresses. Elderly people are propped up on metal chairs because there are not enough beds, while patients are turned away to search for space in less-prepared hospitals. Many die while searching, several doctors said.
I'm not going to downplay the overcounts or go over the top on the undercounts because the pre$$ is destroying itself:
"As the number of COVID-19 patients in Massachusetts hospitals slowly ticks down, another grim metric — somewhat under the radar — has steadily been going up. That’s the case fatality rate, the percentage of deaths among known COVID-19 patients. It stands at about 6.6 percent, up from 1.6 percent on April 1. This increase may seem alarming, but it does not mean the disease is getting deadlier. Here [is the only thing] to know about this number: Will we ever know the true mortality rate of COVID-19 in Massachusetts? Probably not. Not only do we not know exactly how many people were infected, but it appears we don’t know how many deaths are due to COVID-19. Early statistical studies on excess mortality — the number of deaths above what is normal for a certain time period ― suggest that some coronavirus deaths are going uncounted, but, in time, the data will get better, and so will the estimates. Antibody tests may provide decent numbers for how many people were actually infected. Studies on excess mortality will be refined to yield a more accurate death toll......"
They are “never going to be able to accurately calculate it,” are the dodgy f**kers, and I am at my Wit's End, readers! That was the last straw!
“It’s like we doctors are living in two different worlds, ” said Dr. Giovanna Avila, who works at Hospital de Especialidades Belisario Domínguez. “One is inside of the hospital with patients dying all the time, and the other is when we walk out onto the streets and see people walking around, clueless of what is going on and how bad the situation really is.”
Was quiet up here.
Mexico City officials have tabulated more than 2,500 deaths from the virus and serious respiratory illnesses that doctors suspect are related to COVID-19, the data reviewed by the Times shows, yet the federal government is reporting about 700 in the area, which includes Mexico City and the municipalities on its outskirts.
Nationwide, the federal government has reported about 3,000 confirmed deaths from the virus, plus nearly 250 suspected of being related, in a country of more than 120 million people, but experts say Mexico has only a minimal sense of the real scale of the epidemic because it is testing so few people. Only 0.4 of every 1,000 people in Mexico are tested for the virus — by far the lowest of the dozens of nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which average about 23 tests for every 1,000 people.
Looks like Mexico doesn't want to go along with the global government.
The government says Mexico has been faring better than many of the world’s largest countries, and on Monday its COVID-19 czar estimated that the final death toll would be around 6,000 people.
“We have flattened the curve,” Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the health ministry official who has become the face of the country’s response, said this week, but the government did not respond to questions about the deaths in Mexico City. It also denied repeated requests by the Times over the course of three weeks to identify all deaths related to respiratory illnesses since January, saying the data was incomplete.
Is he an evil liar like Fauci?
One former health secretary, José Narro Robles, has accused Lopez-Gatell of lying to the people of Mexico, and some state governments are beginning to draw similar conclusions: that, much like Mexico City found, the data presented by the government does not reflect reality.
That's true everywhere, and is that when he gave Trump a call?
Official counts in many countries have understated the number of deaths during the pandemic, especially where limited testing has prevented the virus from being diagnosed, a Times review of mortality data has found. In Ecuador, six times more people have died than official figures reflect, the data show. In Italy, the overall increase in deaths in March was nearly twice official counts.
It is the EXACT OPPOSITE, readers!
One big reason for the competing death tolls in Mexico has to do with way the federal government is testing, vetting, and reporting the data. The official results include a two-week lag, people familiar with the process say, which means timely information is not available publicly.
That's when the print copy died.
In Mexico City, the doubts started a month ago, when the city’s mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, began to suspect that federal data and modeling on the epidemic were flawed, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Oh, NO!
The mayor of Mexico City is SHEINBAUM!??
She had already instructed her staff to call every public hospital in the Mexico City area to ask about all confirmed and suspected COVID-19 deaths, the people said. In the last week, that effort found that the deaths were more than three times what the federal government reported.
The disagreements have taken place largely behind the scenes, as Sheinbaum, who declined to comment for this article, has been loath to publicly embarrass President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, her close political ally. The city and the federal government continue to work together on a number of fronts, including getting ventilators, but the data from Mexico City calls into question the federal government’s grasp of the crisis in the country.
You might want to take a deep breath now.
“That is shocking,” said Fernando Alarid-Escudero, who has a PhD in health decision sciences and who developed an independent model in collaboration with scientists at Stanford University to chart the curve of the epidemic in Mexico. “If that is the case, and we are not really capturing all those people who eventually die, we are not getting a sense of the picture. We are way underestimating the magnitude of the epidemic,” he added.
In Tijuana, hospitals are already overwhelmed. Doctors and nurses across the country have held public protests against the lack of protective gear, and several hospitals along the border have suffered outbreaks of the virus among medical personnel. Federal officials have been scrambling to buy respirators, long after seeing the outbreaks grip China, Europe, and the United States.
More worrisome, they say, are the many deaths absent from the data altogether, as suggested by the figures from Mexico City, where the virus has struck hardest of all. Some people die from acute respiratory illness and are cremated without ever getting tested, officials say. Others are dying at home without being admitted to a hospital — and are not even counted under Mexico City’s statistics.
--more--"
After being prodded by the US to restart industrial plants, "Mexican health officials on Tuesday reported the country’s largest single-day jump in COVID-19 case numbers, with 1,997 new cases and 353 deaths, bringing the total to more than 38,000 confirmed cases and almost 4,000 deaths. Officials have acknowledged the actual number of infections is many times that. Mexico has done relatively little testing, with about 120,000 tests reported so far in a country of almost 130 million....."
Related:
"As Mexico moves toward a gradual reactivation of its economy Monday, the number of new coronavirus infections grows higher every day, raising fears of a new wave of infections that other countries have seen after loosening restrictions. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is straddling the issue, telling the public that the fight against the virus depends on continued social distancing in many places while describing how other areas will begin to return to work Monday. López Obrador said Friday: “In these days we have to be more careful, not relax the discipline, don’t trust ourselves.” The comments came on the same day the government clarified guidelines for the construction, mining, and automotive industries to return to work Monday. The next two weeks will serve as a period to formalize their protocols to keep workers safe, but if they do so and get approval they can open any time before June 1. There were 2,409 new COVID-19 test confirmations Thursday, the first time that number has exceeded 2,000 in one day. “We are at the moment of the fastest growth in new cases,” said Assistant Health Secretary Hugo López-Gatell. “This is the most difficult moment.” Health officials have said the real number of infections is far higher. Mexico has a lower rate of testing for the virus than any of the world’s largest economies, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development."
It's in the hands of the governors now:
"Local governments across Mexico pushed back Monday against President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s call to reopen the economy in some 300 townships that do not have active cases of coronavirus, with leaders saying they preferred to wait until June before resuming normal activities. Mexico, which has reported nearly 50,000 total cases and some 5,000 deaths, has seen a steep climb in new infections. Front-line doctors fear that a premature reopening could lead to a second wave of infections — a scenario that recently played out in Chile and Guatemala, where governments had to roll back reopening plans, but López Obrador has been pushing to reactivate the economy. In addition to opening virus-free communities, his health advisers have said that the mining, construction, and automotive industries could resume operations as early as Monday."
I will get to Guatemala shortly, after the Mexican president resumes travel by flying commercial.
"In Mexico, it’s not just the coronavirus that is claiming lives. The country’s health system is killing people as well. Years of neglect had already hobbled Mexico’s health care system, leaving it dangerously short of doctors, nurses, and equipment to fight a virus that has ravaged far richer nations. Now, the pandemic is making matters much worse, sickening more than 11,000 Mexican health workers — one of the highest rates in the world — and depleting the already thin ranks in hospitals. Some hospitals have lost half their staff to illness and absenteeism. Others are running low on basic equipment, like heart monitors. The shortages have had devastating consequences for patients, according to interviews with health workers across the country. Several doctors and nurses recounted dozens of preventable deaths in hospitals — the result of neglect or mistakes that never should have happened. Patients die because they’re given the wrong medications, or the wrong dose, health workers say. The protective gloves at some hospitals are so old that they crack the moment they’re slipped on, nurses say. People are often not sedated properly, then wake up and yank out their own breathing tubes, hospital employees say."
That's a problem in the U.S., too.
Here's a quick stop in Guatemala before moving on:
"Guatemala’s president questioned his country’s relationship with the United States, revealing frustration over its continuing to send deportees infected with COVID-19 to a country struggling to manage the crisis. “This of allies with the United States isn’t true,” President Alejandro Giammattei said Thursday. “Guatemala is an ally of the United States, but the United States is not Guatemala’s ally. They don’t treat us like an ally.” Giammattei is the first of the region’s leaders to speak out against the US policy that has sent thousands of deportees back to their countries since the pandemic began. Guatemala has confirmed 119 deportees arrived with COVID-19 from the United States. The country has suspended the deportation flights on several occasions after infected passengers were detected, but resumed them after assurances from US authorities."
The fear of virus has turned deportees into pariahs, and exporting the coronavirus is reckless so as the world comes to halt amid pandemic, so do migrants.
Time to hit the beach at the tip of South America:
"Venezuelan officials said they foiled an early morning attempt by a group of armed mercenaries to invade the country in a beach landing on speedboats Sunday, killing eight attackers and arresting two more. Socialist party chief Diosdado Cabello said that two of the attackers were interrogated by authorities. Cabello said it was carried out by neighboring Colombia with United States backing in a plot to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro. Both countries have repeatedly denied earlier Venezuelan allegations of backing for military plots against the socialist government. “Those who assume they can attack the institutional framework in Venezuela will have to assume the consequences of their action,’’ said Cabello, adding that one of the detained claimed to be an agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Authorities said they found Peruvian documents, high-caliber weapons, satellite phones, uniforms and helmets adorned with the US flag. Interior Minister Nestor Reverol described the attackers as “mercenary terrorists” bent on destabilizing Venezuela’s institutions and creating ‘‘chaos.’’
Does Bay of Pigs ring a bell?
"Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó on Monday denied having anything to do with a former Green Beret who claimed responsibility for a deadly beach invasion aimed at arresting socialist leader Nicolás Maduro. The government, meanwhile, said it has mobilized more than 25,000 troops to hunt for other rebel cells. Guaidó said in a statement that he has “no relationship nor responsibility for any actions” taken by the US war veteran, Jordan Goudreau, who repeated assertions that Guaidó had a contract with his security company. The three-time Bronze Star US combat veteran claims to have helped organize a seaborne raid from Colombia early Sunday on the Venezuelan coast, which the government said it foiled, killing eight insurgents and arresting two others. He said the operation had received no aid from Guaidó or the US or Colombian governments. Goudreau said by telephone Monday that 52 other fighters — including two US veterans — had infiltrated Venezuelan territory and were in the first stage of a mission to recruit membersof the security forces to join their cause. “That’s going to take time,” Goudreau said. “The ultimate goal has never changed — it’s to liberate Venezuela.”
The only difference between Kennedy and Trump is Trump has disowned the orphans and blamed Colombia:
"Avianca Holdings SA, one of the biggest carriers in Latin America, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after travel bans led the Colombian airline to ground its fleet. Avianca, which counts United Airlines Holdings and Kingsland Holdings as stakeholders, filed for protection from creditors in the Southern District of New York. Court papers listed as much as $10 billion in liabilities and the same amount in assets. Avianca cited the impact of the pandemic in a statement Sunday, adding that it intends to keep operating during reorganization. “Avianca is facing the most challenging crisis in our 100-year history,” it said, citing the pandemic. In late March, the company offered unpaid leave to the majority of its 21,000 employees and delayed filing its annual report until June."
Yeah, the Venezuelans grounded the Colombian air force, which then fled to the mountains of Peru:
"When tourists from Mexico, China, and Britain became the first COVID-19 fatalities in Cusco, Peru, it seemed as if the onetime capital of the Inca Empire might be headed for a significant outbreak. Nestled in a picturesque Andean valley, the high-altitude city of 420,000 residents, the gateway to the cloud forest citadel of Machu Picchu, receives more than 3 million international visitors per year — many from pandemic hot spots, including the United States, Italy, and Spain. Yet since those three deaths, between March 23 and April 3, at the start of Peru’s national lockdown, there has not been another COVID-19 fatality in the entire Cusco region, even as the disease has claimed more than 4,000 lives nationally. Infections have also remained low. Just 916 of Peru’s 141,000 cases come from the Cusco region, meaning its contagion rate is more than 80 percent below the national average. The relative dearth of cases and deaths in the internationally connected but high-elevation region has prompted speculation here that the coronavirus gets soroche, the Quechua word for altitude sickness. Similar results have been seen elsewhere in the Andes, and in Tibet. Scientists warn that the apparent pattern might not last, but the as-yet-unexplained phenomenon has them intrigued. Researchers are starting to investigate a possible relationship between the coronavirus and altitude. In one peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Respiratory Physiology & Neurobiology, researchers from Australia, Bolivia, Canada, and Switzerland looking at epidemiological data from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Tibet found populations living above 3,000 meters (9,842 feet) reported significantly lower levels of confirmed infections than their lowland counterparts. They found that Tibet’s infection rate was ‘‘drastically’’ lower than that of lowland China, three times lower in the Bolivian Andes than in the rest of the country, and four times lower in the Ecuadoran Andes."
I'm feeling short of breath as they slam the cell shut:
"Prisoners in Peru staged a riot to protest their precarious living conditions following the deaths of several fellow inmates from the coronavirus, but the revolt in itself proved fatal, with nine prisoners winding up dead, authorities said. Authorities said Tuesday the inmates were shot to death during a clash with authorities at the Miguel Castro Castro prison in Lima a day earlier. Who fired the deadly shots was under investigation. Hundreds of inmates gathered around the bodies of two of the dead in a common space of the prison late Monday afternoon. Images taken by the Associated Press show one of the deceased prisoners was surrounded by candles and placed next to a cross and an illustration of Jesus Christ that is venerated in Peru. “Right to life,” read a large sign created by the prisoners with black cloth and white letters. “We want to live but outside these walls.” Peru’s overcrowded jails have been hard hit by the coronavirus: At least 13 prisoners have died and more than 500 have been infected. More than 100 workers have also fallen ill. Throughout Latin America, prisons are notoriously overcrowded, violent, and dominated in large part by gangs or corrupt officials. Overall there are 1.5 million inmates in the region’s jail cells. Peru has nearly 30,000 confirmed cases total of COVID-19, the second-highest number of infections in the region following Brazil. Health authorities say 782 have died."
The question now is where to go once you escape?
Only one place left to go:
"As coronavirus strikes prisons, hundreds of thousands are released" by Ernesto Londoño and Manuela Andreoni New York Times, April 26, 2020
RIO DE JANEIRO — Prisons around the world have become powerful breeding grounds for the coronavirus, prompting governments to release hundreds of thousands of inmates in a mad scramble to curb the spread of the contagion behind bars.
The pandemic has also set off prisoner rebellions as angry inmates call new attention to chronic problems in corrections systems in many countries, including overcrowding, filth, and limited access to health care.
In Brazil, which has one of the largest and most overloaded prison systems, inmates have recorded videos behind bars threatening to kill guards unless the government moves swiftly to improve their conditions.
In Colombia, a prison riot last month by inmates concerned about catching the virus left 23 prisoners dead, and Friday in a penitentiary in Buenos Aires, inmates angered by the lack of virus protection rioted for nine hours, climbing on the roof, burning mattresses, and displaying a banner that read “We refuse to die in prison.”
Since the virus plunged virtually every country into crisis mode last month, United Nations specialists on detention, the World Health Organization, and human rights activists have urged governments to reduce their prisoner populations swiftly.
“In many countries, detention facilities are overcrowded, in some cases dangerously so,” Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement. “The consequences of neglecting them are potentially catastrophic.”
At least 125 countries hold more prisoners than their correctional systems were designed for, including 20 that have more than two times the number of inmates they’re equipped to secure, according to the World Prison Brief, a database kept by the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at the University of London.
The virus’s ease of spreading behind bars became clear in February, when at least 555 inmates in China were infected at facilities in Hubei, Shandong, and Zhejiang provinces. In response, the government dismissed several wardens for their failure to prevent the outbreak, forbade prison visits, and required guards at several facilities to remain at their posts for weeks. Five prisons in Hunan designated a building within each facility to isolate infected prisoners and guards. Inmates in a Shandong prison were taken to hotels for quarantine after a prison guard returning from Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first reported, infected other guards and inmates.
As the virus quickly spread across borders in the following weeks, officials in many countries suspended prison visits but struggled to impose social-distancing measures in teeming wards.
Iran, which has been one of the hardest-hit countries, in mid-March temporarily released roughly 85,000 detainees, including some political prisoners, but human rights advocates have also criticized Iran for what they call its harsh suppression of inmates who have protested their risk of infection. Bachelet said Wednesday that Iran may have accelerated executions of prisoners on death row who joined some of those protests. This month, Turkey’s Parliament passed a law authorizing the temporary release of 45,000 prisoners. Indonesia has released at least 30,000. Thousands of prisoners, including some migrants, have also been released in the United States.
I'm sure they have nothing to do with the mayhem in the cities, and wouldn't take advantage of the situation.
In Brazil, officials reported four deaths, 104 confirmed coronavirus cases, and 145 suspected ones among prisoners as of Sunday. The country says it has released about 30,000 prisoners, but that figure is not significantly higher than the typical release rate, according to experts. Specialists say the scope of the problem in Brazil is unclear because only 682 of the country’s more than 773,000 prisoners have been tested. Drauzio Varella, a doctor who has studied and written books about the health care needs of prisoners in Brazil, said a disproportionate number suffer from serious conditions, including diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. “Prisons in Brazil often have double or triple the capacity they were built for, with people sleeping on the floor,” he said. “One person coughing can infect everyone else.” To prevent transmission of the virus, officials in Brazil have suspended visits from relatives and lawyers and sought to step up hygiene measures at federal and state prisons.
While Brazilian judges have approved thousands of early-release petitions, top Justice Ministry officials have said it would be a mistake to release prisoners en masse, arguing that would create risks to public safety. Prisoner advocates say it is more risky for the inmates to remain in prisons.
Finally, some sanity in this world (others are releasing prisoners while we are kept imprisoned in our homes).
Pastoral Carcerária Nacional, a Christian organization that supports prisoners and their families, said many relatives of the incarcerated have been barred from providing them with food and hygiene items. “Prisoners get the bulk of material support from what their families can bring, because the food they are given inside is terrible and scarce,” said Sister Petra Silvia Pfaller, the group’s coordinator. “Even before the pandemic they were already going hungry.”
That is unacceptable, but it is only going to get worse.
Vincent Ballon, the top specialist on detention issues at the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the coronavirus crisis should prompt governments across the world to reconsider the laws and policies that have led to overcrowded and poorly run prisons in the first place. “We hope that this will be an opportunity to rethink deprivation of liberty, especially things like pretrial detention and immigration detention,” he said.
Every time they mention an "opportunity" to push some agenda under the cover of COVID I get sick.
Mário Guerreiro, who heads the National Council of Justice, a monitoring group in Brazil with oversight of the country’s prison system, said the pandemic had made glaringly clear the shortcomings of that system, which has grown exponentially in recent decades without a commensurate investment to build capacity.
Brazil has the world’s third-largest prison population, behind the United States and China, according to the World Prison Brief. Overcapacity average in Brazilian prisons is 168 percent. “Brazil has prisons where humanitarian conditions are tantamount to concentration camps,” Guerreiro said. “It’s a humanitarian crisis.”
I will work my way down the continent:
"Hidden toll: Mexico ignores wave of coronavirus deaths in capital" by Azam Ahmed New York Times, May 8, 2020
MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government is not reporting hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths from coronavirus in Mexico City, dismissing anxious officials who have tallied more than three times as many fatalities in the capital than the government publicly acknowledges, according to officials and confidential data reviewed by The New York Times.
The tensions have come to a head in recent weeks, with Mexico City alerting the government to the deaths repeatedly, hoping it will come clean to the public about the true toll of the virus on the nation’s biggest city and, by extension, the country at large, but that has not happened. Doctors in overwhelmed hospitals in Mexico City say the reality of the epidemic is being hidden from the country. In some hospitals, patients lie on the floor, splayed on mattresses. Elderly people are propped up on metal chairs because there are not enough beds, while patients are turned away to search for space in less-prepared hospitals. Many die while searching, several doctors said.
I'm not going to downplay the overcounts or go over the top on the undercounts because the pre$$ is destroying itself:
"As the number of COVID-19 patients in Massachusetts hospitals slowly ticks down, another grim metric — somewhat under the radar — has steadily been going up. That’s the case fatality rate, the percentage of deaths among known COVID-19 patients. It stands at about 6.6 percent, up from 1.6 percent on April 1. This increase may seem alarming, but it does not mean the disease is getting deadlier. Here [is the only thing] to know about this number: Will we ever know the true mortality rate of COVID-19 in Massachusetts? Probably not. Not only do we not know exactly how many people were infected, but it appears we don’t know how many deaths are due to COVID-19. Early statistical studies on excess mortality — the number of deaths above what is normal for a certain time period ― suggest that some coronavirus deaths are going uncounted, but, in time, the data will get better, and so will the estimates. Antibody tests may provide decent numbers for how many people were actually infected. Studies on excess mortality will be refined to yield a more accurate death toll......"
They are “never going to be able to accurately calculate it,” are the dodgy f**kers, and I am at my Wit's End, readers! That was the last straw!
“It’s like we doctors are living in two different worlds, ” said Dr. Giovanna Avila, who works at Hospital de Especialidades Belisario Domínguez. “One is inside of the hospital with patients dying all the time, and the other is when we walk out onto the streets and see people walking around, clueless of what is going on and how bad the situation really is.”
Was quiet up here.
Mexico City officials have tabulated more than 2,500 deaths from the virus and serious respiratory illnesses that doctors suspect are related to COVID-19, the data reviewed by the Times shows, yet the federal government is reporting about 700 in the area, which includes Mexico City and the municipalities on its outskirts.
Nationwide, the federal government has reported about 3,000 confirmed deaths from the virus, plus nearly 250 suspected of being related, in a country of more than 120 million people, but experts say Mexico has only a minimal sense of the real scale of the epidemic because it is testing so few people. Only 0.4 of every 1,000 people in Mexico are tested for the virus — by far the lowest of the dozens of nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which average about 23 tests for every 1,000 people.
Looks like Mexico doesn't want to go along with the global government.
The government says Mexico has been faring better than many of the world’s largest countries, and on Monday its COVID-19 czar estimated that the final death toll would be around 6,000 people.
“We have flattened the curve,” Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the health ministry official who has become the face of the country’s response, said this week, but the government did not respond to questions about the deaths in Mexico City. It also denied repeated requests by the Times over the course of three weeks to identify all deaths related to respiratory illnesses since January, saying the data was incomplete.
Is he an evil liar like Fauci?
One former health secretary, José Narro Robles, has accused Lopez-Gatell of lying to the people of Mexico, and some state governments are beginning to draw similar conclusions: that, much like Mexico City found, the data presented by the government does not reflect reality.
That's true everywhere, and is that when he gave Trump a call?
Official counts in many countries have understated the number of deaths during the pandemic, especially where limited testing has prevented the virus from being diagnosed, a Times review of mortality data has found. In Ecuador, six times more people have died than official figures reflect, the data show. In Italy, the overall increase in deaths in March was nearly twice official counts.
It is the EXACT OPPOSITE, readers!
One big reason for the competing death tolls in Mexico has to do with way the federal government is testing, vetting, and reporting the data. The official results include a two-week lag, people familiar with the process say, which means timely information is not available publicly.
That's when the print copy died.
In Mexico City, the doubts started a month ago, when the city’s mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, began to suspect that federal data and modeling on the epidemic were flawed, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Oh, NO!
The mayor of Mexico City is SHEINBAUM!??
She had already instructed her staff to call every public hospital in the Mexico City area to ask about all confirmed and suspected COVID-19 deaths, the people said. In the last week, that effort found that the deaths were more than three times what the federal government reported.
The disagreements have taken place largely behind the scenes, as Sheinbaum, who declined to comment for this article, has been loath to publicly embarrass President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, her close political ally. The city and the federal government continue to work together on a number of fronts, including getting ventilators, but the data from Mexico City calls into question the federal government’s grasp of the crisis in the country.
You might want to take a deep breath now.
“That is shocking,” said Fernando Alarid-Escudero, who has a PhD in health decision sciences and who developed an independent model in collaboration with scientists at Stanford University to chart the curve of the epidemic in Mexico. “If that is the case, and we are not really capturing all those people who eventually die, we are not getting a sense of the picture. We are way underestimating the magnitude of the epidemic,” he added.
In Tijuana, hospitals are already overwhelmed. Doctors and nurses across the country have held public protests against the lack of protective gear, and several hospitals along the border have suffered outbreaks of the virus among medical personnel. Federal officials have been scrambling to buy respirators, long after seeing the outbreaks grip China, Europe, and the United States.
More worrisome, they say, are the many deaths absent from the data altogether, as suggested by the figures from Mexico City, where the virus has struck hardest of all. Some people die from acute respiratory illness and are cremated without ever getting tested, officials say. Others are dying at home without being admitted to a hospital — and are not even counted under Mexico City’s statistics.
--more--"
After being prodded by the US to restart industrial plants, "Mexican health officials on Tuesday reported the country’s largest single-day jump in COVID-19 case numbers, with 1,997 new cases and 353 deaths, bringing the total to more than 38,000 confirmed cases and almost 4,000 deaths. Officials have acknowledged the actual number of infections is many times that. Mexico has done relatively little testing, with about 120,000 tests reported so far in a country of almost 130 million....."
Related:
"As Mexico moves toward a gradual reactivation of its economy Monday, the number of new coronavirus infections grows higher every day, raising fears of a new wave of infections that other countries have seen after loosening restrictions. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is straddling the issue, telling the public that the fight against the virus depends on continued social distancing in many places while describing how other areas will begin to return to work Monday. López Obrador said Friday: “In these days we have to be more careful, not relax the discipline, don’t trust ourselves.” The comments came on the same day the government clarified guidelines for the construction, mining, and automotive industries to return to work Monday. The next two weeks will serve as a period to formalize their protocols to keep workers safe, but if they do so and get approval they can open any time before June 1. There were 2,409 new COVID-19 test confirmations Thursday, the first time that number has exceeded 2,000 in one day. “We are at the moment of the fastest growth in new cases,” said Assistant Health Secretary Hugo López-Gatell. “This is the most difficult moment.” Health officials have said the real number of infections is far higher. Mexico has a lower rate of testing for the virus than any of the world’s largest economies, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development."
It's in the hands of the governors now:
"Local governments across Mexico pushed back Monday against President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s call to reopen the economy in some 300 townships that do not have active cases of coronavirus, with leaders saying they preferred to wait until June before resuming normal activities. Mexico, which has reported nearly 50,000 total cases and some 5,000 deaths, has seen a steep climb in new infections. Front-line doctors fear that a premature reopening could lead to a second wave of infections — a scenario that recently played out in Chile and Guatemala, where governments had to roll back reopening plans, but López Obrador has been pushing to reactivate the economy. In addition to opening virus-free communities, his health advisers have said that the mining, construction, and automotive industries could resume operations as early as Monday."
I will get to Guatemala shortly, after the Mexican president resumes travel by flying commercial.
"In Mexico, it’s not just the coronavirus that is claiming lives. The country’s health system is killing people as well. Years of neglect had already hobbled Mexico’s health care system, leaving it dangerously short of doctors, nurses, and equipment to fight a virus that has ravaged far richer nations. Now, the pandemic is making matters much worse, sickening more than 11,000 Mexican health workers — one of the highest rates in the world — and depleting the already thin ranks in hospitals. Some hospitals have lost half their staff to illness and absenteeism. Others are running low on basic equipment, like heart monitors. The shortages have had devastating consequences for patients, according to interviews with health workers across the country. Several doctors and nurses recounted dozens of preventable deaths in hospitals — the result of neglect or mistakes that never should have happened. Patients die because they’re given the wrong medications, or the wrong dose, health workers say. The protective gloves at some hospitals are so old that they crack the moment they’re slipped on, nurses say. People are often not sedated properly, then wake up and yank out their own breathing tubes, hospital employees say."
That's a problem in the U.S., too.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Here's a quick stop in Guatemala before moving on:
"Guatemala’s president questioned his country’s relationship with the United States, revealing frustration over its continuing to send deportees infected with COVID-19 to a country struggling to manage the crisis. “This of allies with the United States isn’t true,” President Alejandro Giammattei said Thursday. “Guatemala is an ally of the United States, but the United States is not Guatemala’s ally. They don’t treat us like an ally.” Giammattei is the first of the region’s leaders to speak out against the US policy that has sent thousands of deportees back to their countries since the pandemic began. Guatemala has confirmed 119 deportees arrived with COVID-19 from the United States. The country has suspended the deportation flights on several occasions after infected passengers were detected, but resumed them after assurances from US authorities."
The fear of virus has turned deportees into pariahs, and exporting the coronavirus is reckless so as the world comes to halt amid pandemic, so do migrants.
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Time to hit the beach at the tip of South America:
"Venezuelan officials said they foiled an early morning attempt by a group of armed mercenaries to invade the country in a beach landing on speedboats Sunday, killing eight attackers and arresting two more. Socialist party chief Diosdado Cabello said that two of the attackers were interrogated by authorities. Cabello said it was carried out by neighboring Colombia with United States backing in a plot to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro. Both countries have repeatedly denied earlier Venezuelan allegations of backing for military plots against the socialist government. “Those who assume they can attack the institutional framework in Venezuela will have to assume the consequences of their action,’’ said Cabello, adding that one of the detained claimed to be an agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Authorities said they found Peruvian documents, high-caliber weapons, satellite phones, uniforms and helmets adorned with the US flag. Interior Minister Nestor Reverol described the attackers as “mercenary terrorists” bent on destabilizing Venezuela’s institutions and creating ‘‘chaos.’’
Does Bay of Pigs ring a bell?
"Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó on Monday denied having anything to do with a former Green Beret who claimed responsibility for a deadly beach invasion aimed at arresting socialist leader Nicolás Maduro. The government, meanwhile, said it has mobilized more than 25,000 troops to hunt for other rebel cells. Guaidó said in a statement that he has “no relationship nor responsibility for any actions” taken by the US war veteran, Jordan Goudreau, who repeated assertions that Guaidó had a contract with his security company. The three-time Bronze Star US combat veteran claims to have helped organize a seaborne raid from Colombia early Sunday on the Venezuelan coast, which the government said it foiled, killing eight insurgents and arresting two others. He said the operation had received no aid from Guaidó or the US or Colombian governments. Goudreau said by telephone Monday that 52 other fighters — including two US veterans — had infiltrated Venezuelan territory and were in the first stage of a mission to recruit membersof the security forces to join their cause. “That’s going to take time,” Goudreau said. “The ultimate goal has never changed — it’s to liberate Venezuela.”
The only difference between Kennedy and Trump is Trump has disowned the orphans and blamed Colombia:
"Avianca Holdings SA, one of the biggest carriers in Latin America, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after travel bans led the Colombian airline to ground its fleet. Avianca, which counts United Airlines Holdings and Kingsland Holdings as stakeholders, filed for protection from creditors in the Southern District of New York. Court papers listed as much as $10 billion in liabilities and the same amount in assets. Avianca cited the impact of the pandemic in a statement Sunday, adding that it intends to keep operating during reorganization. “Avianca is facing the most challenging crisis in our 100-year history,” it said, citing the pandemic. In late March, the company offered unpaid leave to the majority of its 21,000 employees and delayed filing its annual report until June."
Yeah, the Venezuelans grounded the Colombian air force, which then fled to the mountains of Peru:
"When tourists from Mexico, China, and Britain became the first COVID-19 fatalities in Cusco, Peru, it seemed as if the onetime capital of the Inca Empire might be headed for a significant outbreak. Nestled in a picturesque Andean valley, the high-altitude city of 420,000 residents, the gateway to the cloud forest citadel of Machu Picchu, receives more than 3 million international visitors per year — many from pandemic hot spots, including the United States, Italy, and Spain. Yet since those three deaths, between March 23 and April 3, at the start of Peru’s national lockdown, there has not been another COVID-19 fatality in the entire Cusco region, even as the disease has claimed more than 4,000 lives nationally. Infections have also remained low. Just 916 of Peru’s 141,000 cases come from the Cusco region, meaning its contagion rate is more than 80 percent below the national average. The relative dearth of cases and deaths in the internationally connected but high-elevation region has prompted speculation here that the coronavirus gets soroche, the Quechua word for altitude sickness. Similar results have been seen elsewhere in the Andes, and in Tibet. Scientists warn that the apparent pattern might not last, but the as-yet-unexplained phenomenon has them intrigued. Researchers are starting to investigate a possible relationship between the coronavirus and altitude. In one peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Respiratory Physiology & Neurobiology, researchers from Australia, Bolivia, Canada, and Switzerland looking at epidemiological data from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Tibet found populations living above 3,000 meters (9,842 feet) reported significantly lower levels of confirmed infections than their lowland counterparts. They found that Tibet’s infection rate was ‘‘drastically’’ lower than that of lowland China, three times lower in the Bolivian Andes than in the rest of the country, and four times lower in the Ecuadoran Andes."
I'm feeling short of breath as they slam the cell shut:
"Prisoners in Peru staged a riot to protest their precarious living conditions following the deaths of several fellow inmates from the coronavirus, but the revolt in itself proved fatal, with nine prisoners winding up dead, authorities said. Authorities said Tuesday the inmates were shot to death during a clash with authorities at the Miguel Castro Castro prison in Lima a day earlier. Who fired the deadly shots was under investigation. Hundreds of inmates gathered around the bodies of two of the dead in a common space of the prison late Monday afternoon. Images taken by the Associated Press show one of the deceased prisoners was surrounded by candles and placed next to a cross and an illustration of Jesus Christ that is venerated in Peru. “Right to life,” read a large sign created by the prisoners with black cloth and white letters. “We want to live but outside these walls.” Peru’s overcrowded jails have been hard hit by the coronavirus: At least 13 prisoners have died and more than 500 have been infected. More than 100 workers have also fallen ill. Throughout Latin America, prisons are notoriously overcrowded, violent, and dominated in large part by gangs or corrupt officials. Overall there are 1.5 million inmates in the region’s jail cells. Peru has nearly 30,000 confirmed cases total of COVID-19, the second-highest number of infections in the region following Brazil. Health authorities say 782 have died."
The question now is where to go once you escape?
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Only one place left to go:
"As coronavirus strikes prisons, hundreds of thousands are released" by Ernesto Londoño and Manuela Andreoni New York Times, April 26, 2020
RIO DE JANEIRO — Prisons around the world have become powerful breeding grounds for the coronavirus, prompting governments to release hundreds of thousands of inmates in a mad scramble to curb the spread of the contagion behind bars.
The pandemic has also set off prisoner rebellions as angry inmates call new attention to chronic problems in corrections systems in many countries, including overcrowding, filth, and limited access to health care.
In Brazil, which has one of the largest and most overloaded prison systems, inmates have recorded videos behind bars threatening to kill guards unless the government moves swiftly to improve their conditions.
In Colombia, a prison riot last month by inmates concerned about catching the virus left 23 prisoners dead, and Friday in a penitentiary in Buenos Aires, inmates angered by the lack of virus protection rioted for nine hours, climbing on the roof, burning mattresses, and displaying a banner that read “We refuse to die in prison.”
Since the virus plunged virtually every country into crisis mode last month, United Nations specialists on detention, the World Health Organization, and human rights activists have urged governments to reduce their prisoner populations swiftly.
“In many countries, detention facilities are overcrowded, in some cases dangerously so,” Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement. “The consequences of neglecting them are potentially catastrophic.”
At least 125 countries hold more prisoners than their correctional systems were designed for, including 20 that have more than two times the number of inmates they’re equipped to secure, according to the World Prison Brief, a database kept by the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at the University of London.
The virus’s ease of spreading behind bars became clear in February, when at least 555 inmates in China were infected at facilities in Hubei, Shandong, and Zhejiang provinces. In response, the government dismissed several wardens for their failure to prevent the outbreak, forbade prison visits, and required guards at several facilities to remain at their posts for weeks. Five prisons in Hunan designated a building within each facility to isolate infected prisoners and guards. Inmates in a Shandong prison were taken to hotels for quarantine after a prison guard returning from Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first reported, infected other guards and inmates.
As the virus quickly spread across borders in the following weeks, officials in many countries suspended prison visits but struggled to impose social-distancing measures in teeming wards.
Iran, which has been one of the hardest-hit countries, in mid-March temporarily released roughly 85,000 detainees, including some political prisoners, but human rights advocates have also criticized Iran for what they call its harsh suppression of inmates who have protested their risk of infection. Bachelet said Wednesday that Iran may have accelerated executions of prisoners on death row who joined some of those protests. This month, Turkey’s Parliament passed a law authorizing the temporary release of 45,000 prisoners. Indonesia has released at least 30,000. Thousands of prisoners, including some migrants, have also been released in the United States.
I'm sure they have nothing to do with the mayhem in the cities, and wouldn't take advantage of the situation.
In Brazil, officials reported four deaths, 104 confirmed coronavirus cases, and 145 suspected ones among prisoners as of Sunday. The country says it has released about 30,000 prisoners, but that figure is not significantly higher than the typical release rate, according to experts. Specialists say the scope of the problem in Brazil is unclear because only 682 of the country’s more than 773,000 prisoners have been tested. Drauzio Varella, a doctor who has studied and written books about the health care needs of prisoners in Brazil, said a disproportionate number suffer from serious conditions, including diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. “Prisons in Brazil often have double or triple the capacity they were built for, with people sleeping on the floor,” he said. “One person coughing can infect everyone else.” To prevent transmission of the virus, officials in Brazil have suspended visits from relatives and lawyers and sought to step up hygiene measures at federal and state prisons.
While Brazilian judges have approved thousands of early-release petitions, top Justice Ministry officials have said it would be a mistake to release prisoners en masse, arguing that would create risks to public safety. Prisoner advocates say it is more risky for the inmates to remain in prisons.
Finally, some sanity in this world (others are releasing prisoners while we are kept imprisoned in our homes).
Pastoral Carcerária Nacional, a Christian organization that supports prisoners and their families, said many relatives of the incarcerated have been barred from providing them with food and hygiene items. “Prisoners get the bulk of material support from what their families can bring, because the food they are given inside is terrible and scarce,” said Sister Petra Silvia Pfaller, the group’s coordinator. “Even before the pandemic they were already going hungry.”
That is unacceptable, but it is only going to get worse.
Vincent Ballon, the top specialist on detention issues at the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the coronavirus crisis should prompt governments across the world to reconsider the laws and policies that have led to overcrowded and poorly run prisons in the first place. “We hope that this will be an opportunity to rethink deprivation of liberty, especially things like pretrial detention and immigration detention,” he said.
Every time they mention an "opportunity" to push some agenda under the cover of COVID I get sick.
Mário Guerreiro, who heads the National Council of Justice, a monitoring group in Brazil with oversight of the country’s prison system, said the pandemic had made glaringly clear the shortcomings of that system, which has grown exponentially in recent decades without a commensurate investment to build capacity.
Brazil has the world’s third-largest prison population, behind the United States and China, according to the World Prison Brief. Overcapacity average in Brazilian prisons is 168 percent. “Brazil has prisons where humanitarian conditions are tantamount to concentration camps,” Guerreiro said. “It’s a humanitarian crisis.”
That is a VERY SERIOUS CHARGE!
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Related:
"The spreading specter of the coronavirus is shaking Latin America’s notoriously overcrowded, unruly prisons, threatening to turn them into an inferno. The Puente Alto prison in downtown Santiago had the largest of Latin America’s largest prison virus outbreaks so far, with more than 300 reported cases. The prison’s 1,100 inmates are terrified. Social distancing is hard to practice in jail. “They are all in contact with each other,” said prison nurse Ximena Graniffo. Latin America’s prisons hold 1.5 million inmates, and the facilities are often quasi-ruled by prisoners themselves because of corruption, intimidation, and inadequate guard staffs. Low budgets also create ideal conditions for the virus to spread: There is often little soap and water and cell blocks are crowded. National officials have reported close to 1,400 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among inmates and prison staff. The worst hit has been Peru, with 613 cases and at least 13 deaths."
Brazil is the hot spot:
"Is Brazil the next big hot spot as other nations ease up?" by David Biller and Marcelo de Sousa Associated Press, April 27, 2020
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil is emerging as potentially the next big hot spot for the coronavirus amid President Jair Bolsonaro’s insistence that it is just a ‘‘little flu” and that there is no need for the sharp restrictions that have slowed the infection’s spread in Europe and the United States.
Bolsonaro should know better. Anyone who questions COVID comes down with it!
As some US states and European countries moved gradually Monday to ease their limits on movement and commerce, the intensifying outbreak in Brazil — Latin America’s biggest country, with 211 million people — pushed hospitals to the breaking point and left victims dead at home.
“We have all the conditions here for the pandemic to become much more serious,’’ said Paulo Brandão, a virologist at the University of Sao Paulo.
Brazil officially reported about 4,500 deaths and almost 67,000 confirmed infections, but the true numbers there, as in many other countries, are believed to be vastly higher given the lack of testing and the many people without severe symptoms who haven’t sought hospital care.
Some scientists said more than 1 million in Brazil are probably infected, and the crisis could escalate as the country heads into winter, which can worsen respiratory illnesses. The country’s health ministry said that the system for accounting for deaths has captured all but a few cases.
Worldwide, the death toll neared 210,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. The number of dead in the United States topped 55,000. Italy, Britain, Spain, and France accounted for more than 20,000 deaths each.
That is what the simulations said, anyway.
Bolsonaro has disputed the seriousness of the coronavirus and said people need to resume their lives to prevent an economic meltdown, but most state governors in the country have adopted restrictions to slow the spread and pushed people to stay at home.
He is in the same position as Trump!
In mid-April, Bolsonaro fired his popular health minister after a series of disagreements over efforts to contain the virus, replacing him with an advocate for reopening the economy. Residents protested, leaning out their windows to bang pots and pans.
Here we applaud the fraudsters in the medical field.
Medical officials in Rio de Janeiro and at least four other major cities have warned that their hospital systems are on the verge of collapse or too overwhelmed to take any more patients.
Officials in Sao Paulo — the largest city in South America, in a tightly packed metropolitan area of over 21 million residents, many of them living in poverty — have issued death certificates over the past two weeks for 236 people who succumbed at home according to the SAMU paramedic service.
Doesn't mean they died of COVID.
Manaus, an Amazon city of 1.8 million, recorded 142 deaths on Sunday, the most yet. In the main cemetery, workers have been digging mass graves. Brazil’s funeral industry warned last week that the city was running out of coffins and ‘‘there could soon be corpses left on corners.”
Good Lord, the place will look and smell like Ecuador!
--more--"
Oh, yeah, don't drink the water, either.
Related:
"Brazil’s president named men considered close allies to head the Justice Ministry and Federal Police on Tuesday just hours after the Supreme Court authorized an investigation into the outgoing justice minister’s allegations that the president had tried to interfere illegally with the police agency. President Jair Bolsonaro appointed André Mendonça, an evangelical pastor who has served as attorney general since 2019, to replace former minister Sérgio Moro, and Alexandre Ramagem to serve as director general of the Federal Police. Ramagem, who had been director of Brazil’s intelligence agency ABIN and oversaw security for Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign, has been photographed in the past with Bolsonaro’s sons. His closeness with the Bolsonaro family has prompted concern among critics that he would give them undue preferential treatment. Leftist lawmaker Marcelo Freixo said Tuesday on Twitter he has filed suit to annul the nomination. Supreme Court Justice Celso de Mello said in a decision Monday that the Federal Police have 60 days to question Moro, whose angry resignation last week pitched the administration into turmoil, with allegations the president wanted access to police information at a time when his sons were reportedly under investigation....."
They going to impeach him for what Biden did?
--more--"
Related:
"The spreading specter of the coronavirus is shaking Latin America’s notoriously overcrowded, unruly prisons, threatening to turn them into an inferno. The Puente Alto prison in downtown Santiago had the largest of Latin America’s largest prison virus outbreaks so far, with more than 300 reported cases. The prison’s 1,100 inmates are terrified. Social distancing is hard to practice in jail. “They are all in contact with each other,” said prison nurse Ximena Graniffo. Latin America’s prisons hold 1.5 million inmates, and the facilities are often quasi-ruled by prisoners themselves because of corruption, intimidation, and inadequate guard staffs. Low budgets also create ideal conditions for the virus to spread: There is often little soap and water and cell blocks are crowded. National officials have reported close to 1,400 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among inmates and prison staff. The worst hit has been Peru, with 613 cases and at least 13 deaths."
Brazil is the hot spot:
"Is Brazil the next big hot spot as other nations ease up?" by David Biller and Marcelo de Sousa Associated Press, April 27, 2020
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil is emerging as potentially the next big hot spot for the coronavirus amid President Jair Bolsonaro’s insistence that it is just a ‘‘little flu” and that there is no need for the sharp restrictions that have slowed the infection’s spread in Europe and the United States.
Bolsonaro should know better. Anyone who questions COVID comes down with it!
As some US states and European countries moved gradually Monday to ease their limits on movement and commerce, the intensifying outbreak in Brazil — Latin America’s biggest country, with 211 million people — pushed hospitals to the breaking point and left victims dead at home.
“We have all the conditions here for the pandemic to become much more serious,’’ said Paulo Brandão, a virologist at the University of Sao Paulo.
Brazil officially reported about 4,500 deaths and almost 67,000 confirmed infections, but the true numbers there, as in many other countries, are believed to be vastly higher given the lack of testing and the many people without severe symptoms who haven’t sought hospital care.
Some scientists said more than 1 million in Brazil are probably infected, and the crisis could escalate as the country heads into winter, which can worsen respiratory illnesses. The country’s health ministry said that the system for accounting for deaths has captured all but a few cases.
Worldwide, the death toll neared 210,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. The number of dead in the United States topped 55,000. Italy, Britain, Spain, and France accounted for more than 20,000 deaths each.
That is what the simulations said, anyway.
Bolsonaro has disputed the seriousness of the coronavirus and said people need to resume their lives to prevent an economic meltdown, but most state governors in the country have adopted restrictions to slow the spread and pushed people to stay at home.
He is in the same position as Trump!
In mid-April, Bolsonaro fired his popular health minister after a series of disagreements over efforts to contain the virus, replacing him with an advocate for reopening the economy. Residents protested, leaning out their windows to bang pots and pans.
Here we applaud the fraudsters in the medical field.
Medical officials in Rio de Janeiro and at least four other major cities have warned that their hospital systems are on the verge of collapse or too overwhelmed to take any more patients.
Officials in Sao Paulo — the largest city in South America, in a tightly packed metropolitan area of over 21 million residents, many of them living in poverty — have issued death certificates over the past two weeks for 236 people who succumbed at home according to the SAMU paramedic service.
Doesn't mean they died of COVID.
Manaus, an Amazon city of 1.8 million, recorded 142 deaths on Sunday, the most yet. In the main cemetery, workers have been digging mass graves. Brazil’s funeral industry warned last week that the city was running out of coffins and ‘‘there could soon be corpses left on corners.”
Good Lord, the place will look and smell like Ecuador!
--more--"
Oh, yeah, don't drink the water, either.
Related:
"Brazil’s president named men considered close allies to head the Justice Ministry and Federal Police on Tuesday just hours after the Supreme Court authorized an investigation into the outgoing justice minister’s allegations that the president had tried to interfere illegally with the police agency. President Jair Bolsonaro appointed André Mendonça, an evangelical pastor who has served as attorney general since 2019, to replace former minister Sérgio Moro, and Alexandre Ramagem to serve as director general of the Federal Police. Ramagem, who had been director of Brazil’s intelligence agency ABIN and oversaw security for Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign, has been photographed in the past with Bolsonaro’s sons. His closeness with the Bolsonaro family has prompted concern among critics that he would give them undue preferential treatment. Leftist lawmaker Marcelo Freixo said Tuesday on Twitter he has filed suit to annul the nomination. Supreme Court Justice Celso de Mello said in a decision Monday that the Federal Police have 60 days to question Moro, whose angry resignation last week pitched the administration into turmoil, with allegations the president wanted access to police information at a time when his sons were reportedly under investigation....."
They going to impeach him for what Biden did?
"As virus cases surge, Brazil starts to worry its neighbors" by Almudena Calatrava and Michael Weissenstein Associated Press, April 30, 2020
BUENOS AIRES — Brazil’s virtually uncontrolled surge of COVID-19 cases is spawning fear that construction workers, truck drivers, and tourists from Latin America’s biggest nation will spread the disease to neighboring countries that are doing a better job of controlling the coronavirus.
Brazil, a continent-sized country that shares borders with nearly every other nation in South America, has reported more than 70,000 cases and more than 5,000 deaths, according to government figures and a tally by Johns Hopkins University — far more than any of its neighbors. The true number of deaths and infections is believed to be much higher because of limited testing.
The country’s borders remain open, there are virtually no quarantines or curfews, and President Jair Bolsonaro continues to scoff at the seriousness of the disease.
So he is going the Sewidish route, good for him!
The country of 211 million people surpassed China — where the outbreak began — in the official number of COVID-19 deaths this week, prompting Bolsonaro to say: “So what?’’
“I am sorry,’’ the far-right president told journalists. “What do you want me to do?”
In Paraguay, soldiers enforcing antivirus measures have dug a shallow trench alongside the first 800 feet of the main road entering the city of Pedro Juan Caballero from the neighboring Brazilian city of Punta Porá, to prevent people from walking along the road from Brazil and disappearing into the surrounding city. Paraguay has fewer than 250 confirmed coronavirus cases and its borders have been closed since March 24, with enforcement particularly focused on the largely open frontier with Brazil.
Argentine officials say they are particularly worried about truck traffic from Brazil, their top trading partner. In provinces bordering Brazil, Argentina is working to set up secure corridors where Brazilian drivers can access bathrooms, get food, and unload products without ever coming into contact with Argentines. “Brazil worries me a lot,” Argentine President Alberto Fernández told local news outlets Saturday. “A lot of traffic is coming from Sao Paulo, where the infection rate is extremely high, and it doesn’t appear to me that the Brazilian government is taking it with the seriousness that it requires.”
Remember Argentina from a couple of years ago?
Trump navigated the G-20 by dodging friends and being chased by legal troubles as the government in Seoul was keen to show progress in its peace process with Pyongyang despite the twin tirade being an example of how relations between Pyongyang and Washington have soured in recent months since the high point of President Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un -- which was good because I no longer want peace of any kind! We should be landing on their damn beaches tomorrow!
He did get a NAFTA deal while he was there, although Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, cast doubt on the likelihood that the deal could be passed without significant new assurances from Mexico that labor standards in the agreement will be strictly enforced.
Meanwhile, China’s president signed new trade deals with Argentina on Sunday as the Asian giant expands its growing role in Latin American economies. Presidents Mauricio Macri of Argentina and Xi Jinping of China announced the more than 30 agriculture and investment deals during a state visit following the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires. The deals include an agreement to export Argentine cherries to China and an expansion of a currency swap. China is among Argentina’s top export markets, especially for agricultural commodities that are the engine of its economy," while the United States is relying solely on economic isolation through sanctions to get what it wants.
Enough remini$cing.
Thirty workers recently crossed from Brazil to the Uruguayan border city of Rio Branco to help build a cement plant. Four tested positive for the virus, prompting Uruguay to quarantine the whole crew.
Officials in some Uruguayan border towns have discussed setting up “humanitarian corridors” through which Brazilians could safely leave the country.
Even socialist Venezuela, where the health system has been in a yearslong state of collapse, has said it’s worried about neighboring Brazil.
“I’ve ordered the reinforcement of the frontier with Brazil to guarantee an epidemiological and military barrier,’’ President Nicolás Maduro said on state television last week.
Bolivia’s government, a right-wing ally of Bolsonaro’s, declined to comment on its neighbor’s anti-virus measures, but Defense Minister Fernando López promised this month to strongly enforce the closure of the border.
“If we keep being flexible on the border, our national quarantine will be useless,’’ he said.
--more--"
Going to have to turn back then:
"In Brazil, the streets of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are usually packed on May Day with workers taking part in marches demanding higher pay and better benefits, but they were quiet Friday because of lockdown orders prohibiting the gatherings. From the capital of Brasilia, President Jair Bolsonaro reiterated his belief that sweeping measures imposed by governors and mayors to close all but essential businesses in the country with the most Latin American COVID-19 deaths are more damaging than the coronavirus. “I would like everyone to go back to work, but it is not me who decides this. It is the governors and the mayors,” said Bolsonaro, who has also likened the coronavirus to “a little flu.” Brazil, which was very slow to institute lockdown measures, is now emerging as Latin America’s coronavirus epicenter with more than 5,900 deaths.The bustling Amazon city of Manaus is running out of coffins. The national funeral home association has pleaded for an urgent airlift of coffins from Sao Paulo, 1,700 miles away, because Manaus has no paved roads connecting it to the rest of the country."
I'm really starting to like Bolsonaro.
"In Europe, parks are reopening, and people are taking back the streets. Australia has announced plans to jump-start tourism. Restrictions are easing in the United States, but while much of the world is negotiating the terms of reopening, Brazil, which has nearly 11,000 dead and become the world’s latest coronavirus hot spot, still cannot find a way to properly shut down. In hard-hit urban centers such as Rio de Janeiro, people still pack the streets. The boardwalks are still populated by beachgoers, including the elderly. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is still downplaying the threat, declaring last week he would celebrate this weekend with a massive barbecue. Following pushback, he rode a water scooter instead. Rather than unifying the country against one common threat, the response is further dividing this deeply polarized society. Bolsonaro, whose instinct has been to do nothing, has deferred to state governors, who in turn have punted the responsibility of implementing the strictest measures to municipalities. The result has been a confederacy of conflicting and contradictory measures that change not only by state and city but also by city section. In the early days, much of the country adhered to broadly adopted containment policies. People avoided gathering in groups. Nonessential businesses closed. Most stayed home unless it was absolutely necessary. Now, as the pandemic begins stretching into its third month, those measures are increasingly being ignored."
I'm glad to the Brazilians have some sense.
"Latin America’s outbreaks now rival Europe’s" by Anatoly Kurmanaev, Manuela Andreoni, Letícia Casado and Mitra Taj New York Times, May 12, 2020
Deaths doubled in Lima, rivaling the worst month of the pandemic in Paris. They tripled in Manaus, a metropolis tucked deep in Brazil’s Amazon — a surge similar to what London and Madrid endured.
In Guayaquil, a port city in Ecuador, the sudden spike in fatalities in April was comparable to what New York City experienced during its worst month: More than five times the number of people died than in previous years.
As the coronavirus’s toll eased in New York and in European capitals, a devastating wave has struck cities in Latin America, one that rivals the worst outbreaks in the world, an analysis of mortality data by The New York Times has found.
I always look for a trash can when the NYT analyzes data.
Brazilian cities are resorting to mass graves to bury rows of stacked coffins. Hundreds of Ecuadoreans are still searching for the bodies of family members who went to hospitals and never returned, and while the catastrophes in Europe and the United States were closely monitored, playing out under intense international media scrutiny, much of Latin America’s pain is unfolding far from global view, under governments that can’t — or won’t — offer a full tally of the dead.
“We weren’t prepared for this virus,” said Aguinilson Tikuna, an indigenous leader in Manaus who has lost friends in the pandemic. “When this disease hit us, we locked ourselves in, locked our homes, isolated ourselves, but no one had the resources to buy masks, medicine. We lacked food.”
The Times measured the impact of the pandemic in major cities around the world by comparing the total number of people who have died in recent months against the average in each place over the past several years.
(Blog editor throws hands up in air)
The totals include deaths from COVID-19, as well as those from other causes, including people who could not be treated as hospitals that became overwhelmed with patients, and while no measure is perfect, the increase in deaths offers the most complete picture of the pandemic’s toll, demographers say.
In Latin America, the pandemic has been worsened by underfunded hospitals, lean support systems, and struggling economies with far fewer resources than in Europe or the United States.
Peruvian highways swelled with the biggest wave of internal migration in years as people fled to the countryside when jobs disappeared. Tens of thousands of Venezuelan refugees have been forced to walk back to their destroyed homeland because work in neighboring countries has become so scarce.
Why and how has Venezuela been destroyed?
The pandemic is hitting the region after a long economic stagnation, which led several countries, including Ecuador and Brazil, to slash health care budgets. These two countries are now seeing the worst death rates in the region.
“We cannot have health systems that only serve people who can afford it,” said Carina Vance, Ecuador’s former health minister. “As long as the person with the smallest income cannot access the most basic and essential health services, everyone is at risk.”
Facing the pandemic in the wake of China, Europe, and the United States brought an additional set of challenges. Exhausted local officials in Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil pointed to global test shortages and explained they were being outbid by richer nations on scarce medical supplies.
President Trump’s decision to freeze funding for the World Health Organization could hamper its relief efforts, which extend to particularly vulnerable countries like Venezuela and Haiti, and China, which extended multibillion-dollar loans to Latin America during the global financial crisis in 2008, has limited itself to sending a few shipments of protective gear and test kits.
Complicating the response further, the disease has hopscotched across the region, defying explanation. Relatively well-off Chile has been spared so far, but so has poorer Paraguay.
Peru’s government responded quickly with a strict lockdown, but deaths have spiked there, much as they have in Brazil and Mexico, where leaders underplayed the virus’s threat.
The Mexican government has not reported hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths from the coronavirus in Mexico City, obscuring the toll of the epidemic, according to officials and confidential data.
You can go back to the top of this post for a review.
Brazil, the region’s most populous nation, now has more than 11,519 dead from the virus, according to the official tally. That is one of the world’s highest death counts, but the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, continues to shrug off responsibility and deny the need for social distancing. The real figure in Brazil is likely much higher because of limited testing.
Reads like a broken record after a while, doesn't it?
The virus has been particularly hard on Manaus, a hot, humid, and remote metropolis of 2 million in the Amazon rainforest. The city recorded about 2,800 deaths in April, about three times as many as its historical average for the month. The increase is comparable to what Madrid experienced at the peak of its epidemic, from mid-March to mid-April, according to the Times analysis.
The outbreak in Manaus laid bare the consequences of Brazil’s deep economic inequality and polarized politics. Manaus has struggled to obtain the medical equipment it needs, said its mayor, Arthur Virgílio Neto. “We suffer from the absence of federal government,” said Virgílio, choking back tears. He has blamed the population’s lax compliance with the lockdown on Bolsonaro’s public disdain toward social distancing.
The delivery of supplies has been further complicated by logistics, since the region has few access roads and must rely on river or air transport to meet its needs, he said.
Why were countries above complaining about all the road traffic then?
In the city’s overcrowded cemeteries, gravediggers last month stacked coffins three layers deep in wide mass graves to meet the demand for burials. As hospitals collapsed under a deluge of patients, bodies filled their hallways. Around town, ambulances struggled to collect all those who never made it to the hospital and died at home.
Chilling and visceral imagery if real.
Manaus’s crisis is also raising concern for the hundreds of indigenous groups living in the surrounding forest. They often have little or no access to health care, and may be exposed to the virus as they flock to cities to get emergency cash transfers offered by the government or during encounters with illegal miners and loggers who enter their land.
Brazil’s chaotic response to the pandemic contrasts with the swift and efficient measures implemented in neighboring Peru. The country’s president, Martín Vizcarra, ordered one of the first national lockdowns in the continent, and sent police and military to the streets to catch any violators. Years of prudent economic stewardship allowed the country to roll out the region’s most comprehensive economic aid package, including cash transfers and affordable loans intended to help citizens stay home, but the reassurance many Peruvians felt has turned into resignation as the virus has swept through the country.
Mounting deaths last week forced a Peruvian hospital to pile bodies outside. Other hospitals had to treat patients outdoors because they did not have enough beds. Overall, Lima had about 6,200 deaths in April, or more than twice its historical average for that time period, and roughly equaling Paris’s death rate in its worst month under the pandemic.
That is reminiscent of the empty refrigeration trucks in New York City!
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Also see:
"Brazil’s health minister resigned on Friday after less than a month on the job in a sign of continuing upheaval in the nation’s battle with the COVID-19 pandemic and President Jair Bolsonaro’s pressure for the nation to prioritize the economy over health-driven lockdowns. Nelson Teich’s resignation was confirmed by the Health Ministry. The oncologist, a former health care consultant, took the job on April 17 under pressure to align the ministry’s actions with the president’s view that the economy must not be destroyed by restrictions to control spread of the virus. Officials say that more than 13,000 people have died of COVID-19 in Brazil, though some experts say the figure is significantly higher due to insufficient testing, and analysts say the peak of the crisis has yet to hit Latin America’s largest nation. Teich’s number two, General Eduardo Pazuello, who had no health experience until joining the ministry in April, will be the interim minister until Bolsonaro chooses a permanent replacement. Teich’s resignation comes one day after Bolsonaro told business leaders in a video conference he would ease rules for use of an antimalaria drug to treat people infected with the coronavirus. The outgoing health minister has frequently called the use of chloroquine “an uncertainty” in the fight against the virus, and this week warned of its side effects. The Health Ministry previously allowed the use of chloroquine only for coronavirus patients hospitalized in serious condition. At Bolsonaro’s urging, the country’s Army Chemical and Pharmaceutical Laboratory boosted chloroquine production in late March. The antimalarial drug was widely touted by President Trump as a treatment, but researchers last month reported no benefit in a large analysis of the drug or a related substance, hydroxychloroquine, in US hospitals for veterans. Last month, scientists in Brazil stopped part of a study of chloroquine after heart rhythm problems developed in one quarter of people given the higher of two doses being tested."
The stuff works! That's why they don't want you to have it, and what I noticed most was the PRINTED PHOTOGRAPH of PROTESTERS in SUPPORT of BOLSONARO was CUT for the web version!
It's WAR, people:
"‘This is war’: Virus charges beyond Latin American hot spots" by Gonzalo Solanoand Michael Weissenstein Associated Press, May 19, 2020
QUITO, Ecuador — Beyond the hot spots of Brazil and Mexico, the coronavirus is threatening to overwhelm Latin American cities large and small in an alarming sign that the pandemic may be only at the start of its destructive march through the region.
More than 90 percent of intensive care beds were full last week in Chile’s capital, Santiago, whose main cemetery dug 1,000 emergency graves to prepare for a wave of deaths.
In Lima, patients took up 80 percent of intensive care beds as of Friday. Peru has the world’s 12th-highest number of confirmed cases, with more than 90,000.
“We’re in bad shape,’’ said Pilar Mazzetti, head of the Peruvian government’s COVID-19 task force. “This is war.”
That's strange. A week earlier they were winning and in great shape!
In some cities, doctors say patients are dying because of a lack of ventilators or because they couldn’t get to a hospital fast enough. With intensive care units swamped, officials plan to move patients from capitals like Lima and Santiago to hospitals in smaller cities that aren’t as busy — running the risk of spreading the disease further.
Takes your breath away, doesn't it?
Latin American countries halted international flights and rolled out social distancing guidelines around the same time as the United States and Europe, delaying the arrival of large-scale infection, said Dr. Marcos Espinal, director of communicable diseases at the Pan American Health Organization. “Latin America was the last wave,” said Espinal, who previously worked at the World Health Organization.
Ugh!
He warned that authorities need to maintain antivirus restrictions even as the United States and Europe reopen. Some of the hardest-hit cities, like Lima and Santiago, imposed strict, early lockdowns, but officials have struggled to enforce them, whether among the wealthy who are used to flouting regulations or lower-income people who depend on day labor or selling things on the street to feed their families.
Latin America is the world’s most unequal region, a reality that Espinal said made it difficult to balance health and economic growth, with millions facing increased poverty during quarantines, curfews, and shutdowns.
A month after swamping the Ecuadorian coastal city of Guayaquil in one of the first serious blows to Latin America, COVID-19 is sickening thousands in the capital of Quito. “In terms of intensive care, we’re stripped bare,’’ city health secretary Lenín Mantilla said.
Quito has more than 2,400 confirmed infections, and Health Minister Juan Carlos Zevallos said he expected the peak to come toward the end of June. He assured citizens that the city was prepared and would avoid the fate of Guayaquil, where hundreds died at home, left in living rooms for days before overworked coroners could retrieve the bodies. Those who perished in hospitals in coastal cities were put in chilled shipping containers that served as makeshift morgues.
The number of deaths in Quito jumped alarmingly over the weekend, from 114 to 209, and doctors said they dreaded the coming days. “I have a 26-year-old woman next to me who walked in. Three hours later, she’s suffocating because we don’t have a respirator available,’’ said an intensive care doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to the media. “I think we’re getting to the point that you saw in Europe, where people died for lack of respirators.’’
Ecuador has banned most private car trips and imposed a 2 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily quarantine, but thousands of people can be seen buying from street vendors across the capital.
The worst-hit country in Latin America remains Brazil, which is third in the world for reported infections — at more than 250,000 — even with limited testing. More than 85 percent of intensive care beds are full in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.
Now, other countries are surging. Chile has imposed new restrictions in Santiago after cases doubled over the past week, to more than 34,000 in the country of 18 million.
Under the new restrictions, people will have to receive a police permit to leave home, with violators fined the equivalent of thousands of dollars. Essential workers are exempted.
“We’re on very, very thin ice,’’ said Claudio Castillo, a professor of public policy and health at the University of Santiago.
I suppose they know all about dictatorships, huh?
In Colombia’s Amazon region, cases have shot up in recent weeks, from 105 at the start of the month to 1,006 on Monday. The infections are concentrated in Leticia, a city on the Amazon river that borders both Brazil and Peru.
Locals believe it’s related to the increase in cases in Brazil’s Amazon. Even though Colombia’s president has militarized the border, many still cross. Residents often work in one country and live in the other.
Going to have to cut down all the trees to get at them.
Health workers also complain of limited access to testing and say they are overworked to the point of collapse.
In Mexico, intensive care occupancy is below 50 percent in most cities, although deaths have begun to overwhelm funeral homes and crematoriums in the Mexico City borough of Iztapalapa.
The occupancy rate is less than 50%?
WTF?
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Related:
"The coronavirus pandemic accelerated across Latin America on Friday, bringing a surge of new infections and deaths, even as curves flattened and reopening was underway in much of Europe, Asia, and the United States. The region’s two largest nations — Mexico and Brazil — reported record counts of new cases and deaths almost daily this week, fueling criticism of their presidents, who have slow-walked shutdowns in attempts to limit economic damage. Brazil reported more than 20,000 deaths and 300,000 confirmed cases, making it the third worst-hit country in the world by official counts. Experts consider both numbers undercounts due to the widespread lack of testing."
Also see:
"Brazilian police targeted a staunch opponent of President Jair Bolsonaro’s push to lift measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 in one of the world’s disease hot spots, searching the residence of the Rio de Janeiro state governor on Tuesday. The federal prosecutor´s office said in a statement that Governor Wilson Witzel, a former federal judge, was targeted by the 12 search-and-seizure warrants in Rio and Sao Paulo states. An ongoing investigation pointed to irregularities in contracts awarded for the construction of emergency field hospitals in Rio, and involved health officials, police said. Witzel has promised eight emergency field hospitals, but only one, near the Maracaná football stadium, has opened. He expressed indignation at what he called “an act of violence against the democratic state,” and accused Bolsonaro of being behind the operation. Bolsonaro has openly challenged many governors’ measures for containing the virus’s spread, with Witzel a primary target. He has accused the governors of inciting panic among the population with what he claims are excessive stay-at-home recommendations and restrictions on commerce that he says will wreck the economy and produce worse hardship than the virus."
Before continuing, I would suggest you watch this video and make up your own mind about Bolsonaro (he is a hero to me now).
That's why they want a pound of flesh out of him:
"First closure in Brazil, world’s top exporter, specter of more disruptions" by Tatiana Freitas Bloomberg News, May 28, 2020
Just as the United States is starting to crawl out of its meat crisis, the rapid spread of coronavirus is increasingly threatening production from Brazil, the world’s top beef and chicken exporter.
We are far from out of it, and prepare for famine soon.
JBS SA, the biggest global meat company, was ordered to shutter operations at a beef plant in the state of Rondonia after a judicial ruling. It’s the first closure for beef in the country due to the outbreak, ushering in what could be a new chapter of the crisis for Brazil’s meat industry.
The nation’s initial outbreaks and meat-plant shutdowns took place in the nation’s south, a poultry and pork production hub. Now, as the virus spreads quickly into the countryside, the industry’s capacity to keep beef production flowing is at stake. Meanwhile, chicken-exporting giant BRF SA is stepping up hiring as its chief executive warns of absenteeism and possible closure orders by local authorities as the virus spreads.
Increasing problems for Brazil could have major global ripple effects on meat supplies, especially as output is still constrained in the United States even as facilities start to reopen. The two nations account for more than half of the world’s meat trade. Persistent production disruptions could mean that more supplies go into domestic markets, leaving less for export. Outbreaks are also hampering output at European slaughterhouses, where more than 1,000 workers have contracted the disease.
I see several agendas at work here. The starvation and death of useless eaters, obviously, but beyond that, it is a stripping of the protein supply from men who must be the defenders of women and children, with rancid, lab-grown garbage to be put in its place.
To be sure, so far only a handful of plants have closed in Brazil and the country has avoided the types of major disruptions that were seen in the United States, where output was cut about 40 percent from normal levels during the worst parts of the crisis.
I love seeing the phrase to be sure in my paper, as it is used to concede the truth of something that conflicts with another point that one wishes to make.
The South American powerhouse is also introducing a new set of safety standards to protect supplies and workers, and producers including JBS, BRF, and Marfrig Global Foods SA are enacting increased safety measures.
Only two plants are currently ordered to be shut: one JBS chicken plant in Santa Catarina state and the beef plant in Rondonia, but there are some concerns that things could get worse as Brazil becomes the new global virus hot spot, with cases spiking to the second-highest in the world and the pandemic reaching small towns in the countryside. Reports of infections at meat plants have started to tick up, including in northern states.
The printed Globe cut off the web fat.
On Monday, Marfrig Global Foods SA said 25 workers at a plant in Mato Grosso state tested positive and at least one worker died. The company was ordered by a labor judge in the state to increase distancing between employees, a move that will limit operational capacity.
What will that do to the food supply?
In Tocantins state, 55 workers from Minerva SA’s Araguaina plant were removed from operations after testing positive, the company said last week. The beef exporter decided to test all 730 workers at the unit. JBS has been ordered to test all its employees at its shuttered beef facility in Sao Miguel do Guapore, Rondonia, according to a filing shared by the state’s labor prosecutor’s office. The closure came after the company saw halts at two of its chicken plants in the nation’s south. Only one remains closed.
In a response to a request for comment, JBS said its workers’ health is a priority and that it’s adopting strict protocols to prevent COVID-19 contamination. The company didn’t comment on the situation of Sao Miguel do Guapore plant specifically. The plant in Sao Miguel do Guapore employs about 950 workers and had 29 confirmed coronavirus cases as of May 25. That represents 60 percent of the cases in the city of 25,000 residents, according to the labor prosecutor Helena Romera, who requested the plant closure. ‘‘We have seen fast growth in coronavirus reports in the municipality in recent days, and we realized that a great part of them were JBS workers,’’ she said in a telephone interview. ‘‘Given the gravity of the situation, we decided to request the closure.’’
Virus outbreaks in US slaughterhouses forced a wave of closures last month that led to a glut of animals and a more than doubling of domestic wholesale pork and beef prices. Plants started to reopen this month, following an executive order from President Trump.
They were in the MILLIONS, dear readers, and they were KILLED without being processed for food!
Operations have continued to be limited by worker absenteeism as virus cases keep increasing. US cattle slaughter rates are still down about 13 percent from a year ago, and for hogs it’s 15 percent. While the price rally has eased, wholesale beef is still up about 84 percent since the start of the year, with pork about 33 percent higher.
BRF is stepping up hiring in Brazil to guard against labor issues. The company now plans to hire 5,000 versus 2,000 previously, CEO Lorival Luz said Wednesday in a webinar sponsored by Valor Economico newspaper. Chicken prices in the country may rise amid falling production in the coming months, he said. Luz also warned that local authorities may keep mandating plant closures. All BRF plants are currently operating, while the Lajeado unit was closed for a week earlier this month by a judge’s ruling.
The intervention of state and local authorities in Brazil would partly mirror the United States. While there were no hard rulings prompting American plants to shut, the closures started to ramp up after governors intervened with public pressure to halt operations amid outbreaks. That has since stopped following Trump’s executive order to keep the facilities running.
We would rather starve like an Indian.
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Related:
"South American countries on Monday began easing COVID-19 restrictions even as the region hurtles toward its viral peak, disregarding the example set by European nations that were battered earlier by the virus. Some of Brazil’s hardest-hit cities, including the jungle metropolis Manaus and coastal Rio de Janeiro, are starting to allow more activity. Bolivia’s government authorized reopening most of the country, and the government of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro unwound restrictions. Ecuador’s airports were resuming flights and shoppers returning to some of Colombia’s malls. Rolling back measures runs counter to Europe’s approach of waiting for the worst to pass before resuming activity, and South America trails much further behind on its viral curve. The executive director of the World Health Organization’s emergencies program, Mike Ryan, expressed concern over South America’s climbing contagion, telling reporters Monday that the region had become an “intense zone of transmission for this virus,” which had not yet reached its peak. Data from the WHO’s Pan American Health Organization shows the region’s seven-day rolling average of new cases continues rising, due in large part to Brazil, which accounts for more than half the total."
The Brazilians have other concerns now:
"In Brazil, hundreds of people gathered in front of the Rio de Janeiro state government palace to protest crimes committed by the police against black people in Rio’s working-class neighborhoods."
They good news is a Brazilian retailer acquired Boston fintech Airfox, the company offers digital banking services and targets customers who don’t have access to traditional banks.
I'm really getting off course and lost at see until, wait, an ISLAND:
"Before the coronavirus, sudden life-threatening ailments among tourists, fishermen, and others on the Galapagos Islands were considered so rare that hospitals didn’t have a single intensive care unit bed. Now, officials are racing to equip medical teams on the remote islands with breathing machines while also trying to stanch an economic crisis that has left many of the 30,000 residents jobless. The island chain’s famous isolation is now heightening its hardship. For seven weeks now, not a single tourist has arrived at the UNESCO World Heritage site that inspired Charles Darwin. Ecuador is among Latin American nations hit hardest by COVID-19, and authorities on the Galapagos believe their first cases probably came from Guayaquil, the coastal city where hospitals turned away patients and the dead were left in homes for days. There are now 107 cases in the Galapagos, including about 50 crew members still aboard the Celebrity Flora, a luxury ship operated by a subsidiary of Royal Caribbean Cruises."
Time to get back on board and sail east.
Don't forget to wash your hands:
"Lack of water fuels fears of virus spread; 3B worldwide lack clean water to wash hands" by Farai Mutsaka Associated Press, May 23, 2020
HARARE, Zimbabwe — Such choices underscore the challenges of preventing the spread of the coronavirus in slums, camps, and other crowded settlements around the world where clean water is scarce and survival is a daily struggle.
Some 3 billion people, from indigenous communities in Brazil to war-shattered villages in northern Yemen, have nowhere to wash their hands with soap and clean water at home, according to the charity group WaterAid. It fears that global funding is being rushed toward vaccines and treatments without “any real commitment to prevention.”
Everyone is thir$ty so get in line for your loot!
Definitively linking COVID-19 cases to water access isn’t easy without deeper investigation, said Gregory Bulit with UNICEF’s water and sanitation team, “but what we know is, without water, the risk is increased.”
They are going to start calling every single death COVID if they have not already!
Die of thirst, COVID!
In the Arab region alone, about 74 million people don’t have access to a basic hand-washing facility, the United Nations says.
Nearly a decade of civil war has damaged much of Syria’s water infrastructure, and millions must resort to alternative measures. In the last rebel-held territory of Idlib, where the most recent military operations displaced nearly 1 million people, resources are badly strained. Yasser Aboud, a father of three in Idlib, said he has doubled the amount of water he buys to keep his family clean amid virus fears. He and his wife lost their jobs and must cut spending on clothes and food to afford it.
US government not funding him?
In Yemen, five years of war left more than 3 million people displaced with no secure source of water, and there are growing fears that primitive sources such as wells are contaminated, and in Manaus, Brazil, 300 families in one poor indigenous community have water only three days a week from a dirty well.
No mention of the cholera epidemic in Yemen.
“Water is like gold around here,” said Neinha Reis, a 27-year-old mother of two. To wash their hands, they depend on donations of hand sanitizer. Reis and most of the other residents have fallen ill with symptoms similar to those of COVID-19 in the past month.
It certainly is, beneath only oxygen to breathe.
Across Africa, where virus cases are closing in on 100,000, more than half of the continent’s 1.3 billion people must leave their homes to get water, according to the Afrobarometer research group.
That is something most Americans can not imagine, and rumors are the taps will be turned off at some point.
Where it is made available via trucks or wells, the long lines of people could become ‘‘potentially dangerous breeding grounds for the virus,” said Maxwell Samaila, program manager with the aid group Mercy Corps in Nigeria.
In rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where most have to travel up to three hours for water, ‘‘you have 200 people touching the [well] handle one after the other,” said Bram Riems, an adviser on water, sanitation, and hygiene with Action Against Hunger.
At an open area surrounded by filthy apartment blocks in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, women in orange T-shirts ticked off names of people fetching water from a row of communal taps that Doctors Without Borders provided in poor suburbs. Many services in the country have collapsed, along with its economy.
Kuda Sigobodhla, a hygiene promotion officer for the aid group, said training sessions had been organized before the outbreak arrived in Zimbabwe so that water distribution points did not become epicenters of contagion. One man shouted about social distancing but only a few seemed to listen. A hand-washing bucket was available, but most did not use it.
To encourage hand washing in some parts of Africa, aid groups are using measures such as placing mirrors and soap at makeshift taps. “We know people like to look at themselves when they wash their hands, so putting a mirror helps,” said Riems, of Action Against Hunger. His organization is piloting the project in Ethiopia, where only a third of the population has access to basic water services.
Meanwhile, investment in water and hygiene has been precariously low.
“Of 51 major announcements of financial support from donor agencies to developing countries, only six have included any mention of hygiene,” WaterAid has said of COVID-19 emergency funding from governments and aid groups in the past two months.
The rapacious capitali$t looting has taken its toll.
Africa alone needs an annual investment of $22 billion, according to the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa, an initiative of the Group of 20 most-developed countries and international financial institutions, but the investment by African governments and external financiers hovers around $8 billion to $10 billion, it said.....
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At least all the locusts cleared out.
Related: COVID Found in Africa
See:
"Africa’s coronavirus cases have surpassed 100,000, said the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday as the continent with many fragile health systems has not yet seen the high numbers of other parts of the world. More than 3,100 people have died from COVID-19 across the continent of 1.3 billion people. The African continent has seen roughly the same number of new cases in the past week as the week before, said John Nkengasong, Africa CDC director, on Thursday, adding that “we hope that trend continues.”
Time to hunt down the viru$:
"Manhunts have begun after hundreds of people, some with the coronavirus, fled quarantine centers in Zimbabwe and Malawi while authorities worry they will spread COVID-19 in countries whose health systems can be rapidly overwhelmed. In Malawi, more than 400 people recently repatriated from South Africa and elsewhere fled a center at a stadium in Blantyre, jumping over a fence or strolling out the gate while police and health workers watched. Police and health workers told reporters they were unable to stop them as they lacked adequate protective gear. At least 46 escapees had tested positive for the virus. Some of those who fled told reporters they had bribed police, and in Zimbabwe, police spokesman Paul Nyathi said officers were “hunting down” more than 100 people who escaped from centers where a 21-day quarantine is mandatory for those returning from abroad. Both Zimbabwe and Malawi have fewer than 200 confirmed cases but regional power South Africa, where many in both countries go to seek work, has more than 25,000. South Africa has the most cases in Africa, where the continent-wide total is nearly 125,000."
"South Africa says it has a backlog of nearly 100,000 unprocessed tests for the new coronavirus. A health ministry statement overnight put the backlog as of Monday at 96,480. The ministry says “this challenge is caused by the limited availability of test kits globally.” It says priority is being given to processing tests from patients admitted to hospitals and health workers. South Africa has conducted more tests for the virus than any other country in Africa — more than 655,000 — and has more confirmed cases than any other country on the continent, with 27,403. The ministry says one of the latest people to die in South Africa was an employee with the National Health Laboratory Services."
It's starting to look like genocide in Rwanda, too.
Better flee to Nigeria:
"The Nigerian government says it still hasn’t received ventilators from the United States a month after President Trump promised to send hundreds to the West African country. Trump said last week 1,000 ventilators had been provided to Nigeria, but the country’s information minister, Lai Mohammed, says, “To the best of my knowledge, they have not arrived. When they do arrive, it will be made public.”
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them, and there are other ways of getting back the money:
Federal authorities suspect vast fraud network is targeting US unemployment systems
Suzi LeVine, the commissioner of Washington state’s Employment Security Department, and investigators from the US Secret Service said they had information suggesting that the scheme was coming from a well-organized Nigerian fraud ring and could result in “potential losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to a memo obtained by The New York Times, and look what flared up all of a sudden:
"A fresh outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus has flared up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that was already contending with the world’s largest measles epidemic, as well as the coronavirus. Congo’s health ministry said that the new Ebola outbreak has killed four people, and infected at least two more, in Mbandaka, a city of 1.2 million people on the country’s western side. A fifth person died Monday, according to UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children. Less than two months ago, Congo was about to declare an official end to an Ebola epidemic on the eastern side of the country that had lasted nearly two years and killed more than 2,275 people. Then, with just two days to go, a new case was found, and the outbreak could not be declared over, but officials say it is in its final stages. It is unclear how Ebola emerged in Mbandaka, which is about 750 miles west of the nearly-vanquished outbreak on the country’s eastern edge. Congo (formerly known as Zaire) is the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa, and has been under travel restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Reported cases of the coronavirus have so far been mostly in the capital, Kinshasa, also in the country’s west. Congo has reported 3,049 cases of the coronavirus, including 71 deaths, but testing is limited, so it is impossible to know the true scale of the outbreak. More than 350,000 people have been infected with measles in the country since January 2019, and more than 6,500 have died. The five people who died included a 15-year-old girl, according to UNICEF.
That's where the print copy died.
Dr. Matshidiso Rebecca Moeti, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa, wrote on Twitter that although the new outbreak of Ebola posed a challenge, the WHO, along with Congo’s health ministry and the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was ready to tackle it. “With each experience we respond faster and more effectively,” Moeti wrote. Two other patients were being treated in the isolation unit of a city hospital. Ebola causes fever, bleeding, weakness, and abdominal pain, and kills about half of those it infects. It is transmitted through contact with sick or dead people or animals, and is named for the Ebola River, in Congo, where it was first identified, in 1976. The largest known outbreak of Ebola erupted in 2014 in the West African countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and killed more than 11,000 people, but since then, researchers have developed vaccines and treatment methods that can limit transmission of the disease. This is not the first time that Ebola has hit Mbandaka, an equatorial port city on the Congo River. An outbreak in May 2018 resulted in at least 54 cases and 33 deaths in the area, but the WHO delivered more than 7,500 doses of an Ebola vaccine to Congo, and the outbreak in Mbandaka was quickly brought under control. It was declared over on July 24 of that year. In eastern Congo, ongoing violence and insecurity that has forced people to flee their homes has also made it difficult to end the epidemic. By comparison, the western Équateur Province, where the new Ebola cases have emerged, is relatively safe and stable. There have been many outbreaks of Ebola in Congo over many years, and most have been resolved relatively quickly. The government imposed travel restrictions between the country’s provinces in response to the coronavirus outbreak, which may now also help limit the spread of Ebola from Mbandaka."
As you can see, the death rate far exceeds the less than 1% COVID fatalities.
An Ebola treatment center in Mangima, Democratic Republic of the Congo (Finbarr O'Reilly/The New York Times/File 2019)
The article was accompanied with a FILE PHOTO?
Time to start heading north again.
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"The body of a missing Mexican congresswoman from the western state of Colima has been found in a hidden grave more than a month after armed men abducted her, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Wednesday. López Obrador expressed his condolences to the family of Anel Bueno, a 38-year-old legislator from his Morena party. Armed men took Bueno on April 29 while she was promoting health measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in Ixtlahuacán, Colima. The president said one suspect was in custody. The Colima state prosecutor’s office said in a statement Wednesday that the lawmaker’s body was found in a grave with the bodies of three men. The bodies were found Monday, but the remains of the lawmaker were not identified until Tuesday. Additional genetic testing of the lawmaker’s remains was planned."
"President Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela’s opposition, led by Juan Guaidó, have agreed to measures for battling the new coronavirus to be overseen by international health workers, a first step in years toward cooperation between bitter political rivals for the benefit of the country. While focused narrowly on the pandemic response, specialists said Wednesday the agreement opens a window of hope for tackling Venezuela’s overarching political stalemate that has left the once-wealthy oil nation in deepening economic and social crisis. The one-page agreement signed June 1 says both sides will work in coordination to find funds for fighting the virus."
"A former Ecuadorian president has been detained after authorities raided his home Wednesday and found a gun and medical supplies including masks as part of a wider probe into corruption during the pandemic. Prosecutors and police charged into the home of Abdalá Bucaram, 68, in Guayaquil, the coastal city that became one of the earliest cities in Latin America to see a sudden surge in COVID-19 infections. Investigators said the raid was conducted in connection with an ongoing probe into suspected embezzlement at a large public hospital. Bucaram was detained after authorities found an unlicensed gun, in addition to some 5,000 masks and 2,000 coronavirus test kits. Bucaram was elected president in 1996 and ousted by Congress less than six months later for “mental incapacity.”
Are you paying attention, President Trump?
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Related:
"South American countries on Monday began easing COVID-19 restrictions even as the region hurtles toward its viral peak, disregarding the example set by European nations that were battered earlier by the virus. Some of Brazil’s hardest-hit cities, including the jungle metropolis Manaus and coastal Rio de Janeiro, are starting to allow more activity. Bolivia’s government authorized reopening most of the country, and the government of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro unwound restrictions. Ecuador’s airports were resuming flights and shoppers returning to some of Colombia’s malls. Rolling back measures runs counter to Europe’s approach of waiting for the worst to pass before resuming activity, and South America trails much further behind on its viral curve. The executive director of the World Health Organization’s emergencies program, Mike Ryan, expressed concern over South America’s climbing contagion, telling reporters Monday that the region had become an “intense zone of transmission for this virus,” which had not yet reached its peak. Data from the WHO’s Pan American Health Organization shows the region’s seven-day rolling average of new cases continues rising, due in large part to Brazil, which accounts for more than half the total."
The Brazilians have other concerns now:
"In Brazil, hundreds of people gathered in front of the Rio de Janeiro state government palace to protest crimes committed by the police against black people in Rio’s working-class neighborhoods."
They good news is a Brazilian retailer acquired Boston fintech Airfox, the company offers digital banking services and targets customers who don’t have access to traditional banks.
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I'm really getting off course and lost at see until, wait, an ISLAND:
"Before the coronavirus, sudden life-threatening ailments among tourists, fishermen, and others on the Galapagos Islands were considered so rare that hospitals didn’t have a single intensive care unit bed. Now, officials are racing to equip medical teams on the remote islands with breathing machines while also trying to stanch an economic crisis that has left many of the 30,000 residents jobless. The island chain’s famous isolation is now heightening its hardship. For seven weeks now, not a single tourist has arrived at the UNESCO World Heritage site that inspired Charles Darwin. Ecuador is among Latin American nations hit hardest by COVID-19, and authorities on the Galapagos believe their first cases probably came from Guayaquil, the coastal city where hospitals turned away patients and the dead were left in homes for days. There are now 107 cases in the Galapagos, including about 50 crew members still aboard the Celebrity Flora, a luxury ship operated by a subsidiary of Royal Caribbean Cruises."
Time to get back on board and sail east.
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Don't forget to wash your hands:
"Lack of water fuels fears of virus spread; 3B worldwide lack clean water to wash hands" by Farai Mutsaka Associated Press, May 23, 2020
HARARE, Zimbabwe — Such choices underscore the challenges of preventing the spread of the coronavirus in slums, camps, and other crowded settlements around the world where clean water is scarce and survival is a daily struggle.
Some 3 billion people, from indigenous communities in Brazil to war-shattered villages in northern Yemen, have nowhere to wash their hands with soap and clean water at home, according to the charity group WaterAid. It fears that global funding is being rushed toward vaccines and treatments without “any real commitment to prevention.”
Everyone is thir$ty so get in line for your loot!
Definitively linking COVID-19 cases to water access isn’t easy without deeper investigation, said Gregory Bulit with UNICEF’s water and sanitation team, “but what we know is, without water, the risk is increased.”
They are going to start calling every single death COVID if they have not already!
Die of thirst, COVID!
In the Arab region alone, about 74 million people don’t have access to a basic hand-washing facility, the United Nations says.
Nearly a decade of civil war has damaged much of Syria’s water infrastructure, and millions must resort to alternative measures. In the last rebel-held territory of Idlib, where the most recent military operations displaced nearly 1 million people, resources are badly strained. Yasser Aboud, a father of three in Idlib, said he has doubled the amount of water he buys to keep his family clean amid virus fears. He and his wife lost their jobs and must cut spending on clothes and food to afford it.
US government not funding him?
In Yemen, five years of war left more than 3 million people displaced with no secure source of water, and there are growing fears that primitive sources such as wells are contaminated, and in Manaus, Brazil, 300 families in one poor indigenous community have water only three days a week from a dirty well.
No mention of the cholera epidemic in Yemen.
“Water is like gold around here,” said Neinha Reis, a 27-year-old mother of two. To wash their hands, they depend on donations of hand sanitizer. Reis and most of the other residents have fallen ill with symptoms similar to those of COVID-19 in the past month.
It certainly is, beneath only oxygen to breathe.
Across Africa, where virus cases are closing in on 100,000, more than half of the continent’s 1.3 billion people must leave their homes to get water, according to the Afrobarometer research group.
That is something most Americans can not imagine, and rumors are the taps will be turned off at some point.
Where it is made available via trucks or wells, the long lines of people could become ‘‘potentially dangerous breeding grounds for the virus,” said Maxwell Samaila, program manager with the aid group Mercy Corps in Nigeria.
In rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where most have to travel up to three hours for water, ‘‘you have 200 people touching the [well] handle one after the other,” said Bram Riems, an adviser on water, sanitation, and hygiene with Action Against Hunger.
At an open area surrounded by filthy apartment blocks in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, women in orange T-shirts ticked off names of people fetching water from a row of communal taps that Doctors Without Borders provided in poor suburbs. Many services in the country have collapsed, along with its economy.
Kuda Sigobodhla, a hygiene promotion officer for the aid group, said training sessions had been organized before the outbreak arrived in Zimbabwe so that water distribution points did not become epicenters of contagion. One man shouted about social distancing but only a few seemed to listen. A hand-washing bucket was available, but most did not use it.
To encourage hand washing in some parts of Africa, aid groups are using measures such as placing mirrors and soap at makeshift taps. “We know people like to look at themselves when they wash their hands, so putting a mirror helps,” said Riems, of Action Against Hunger. His organization is piloting the project in Ethiopia, where only a third of the population has access to basic water services.
Meanwhile, investment in water and hygiene has been precariously low.
“Of 51 major announcements of financial support from donor agencies to developing countries, only six have included any mention of hygiene,” WaterAid has said of COVID-19 emergency funding from governments and aid groups in the past two months.
The rapacious capitali$t looting has taken its toll.
Africa alone needs an annual investment of $22 billion, according to the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa, an initiative of the Group of 20 most-developed countries and international financial institutions, but the investment by African governments and external financiers hovers around $8 billion to $10 billion, it said.....
--more--"
At least all the locusts cleared out.
Related: COVID Found in Africa
See:
"Africa’s coronavirus cases have surpassed 100,000, said the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday as the continent with many fragile health systems has not yet seen the high numbers of other parts of the world. More than 3,100 people have died from COVID-19 across the continent of 1.3 billion people. The African continent has seen roughly the same number of new cases in the past week as the week before, said John Nkengasong, Africa CDC director, on Thursday, adding that “we hope that trend continues.”
Time to hunt down the viru$:
"Manhunts have begun after hundreds of people, some with the coronavirus, fled quarantine centers in Zimbabwe and Malawi while authorities worry they will spread COVID-19 in countries whose health systems can be rapidly overwhelmed. In Malawi, more than 400 people recently repatriated from South Africa and elsewhere fled a center at a stadium in Blantyre, jumping over a fence or strolling out the gate while police and health workers watched. Police and health workers told reporters they were unable to stop them as they lacked adequate protective gear. At least 46 escapees had tested positive for the virus. Some of those who fled told reporters they had bribed police, and in Zimbabwe, police spokesman Paul Nyathi said officers were “hunting down” more than 100 people who escaped from centers where a 21-day quarantine is mandatory for those returning from abroad. Both Zimbabwe and Malawi have fewer than 200 confirmed cases but regional power South Africa, where many in both countries go to seek work, has more than 25,000. South Africa has the most cases in Africa, where the continent-wide total is nearly 125,000."
"South Africa says it has a backlog of nearly 100,000 unprocessed tests for the new coronavirus. A health ministry statement overnight put the backlog as of Monday at 96,480. The ministry says “this challenge is caused by the limited availability of test kits globally.” It says priority is being given to processing tests from patients admitted to hospitals and health workers. South Africa has conducted more tests for the virus than any other country in Africa — more than 655,000 — and has more confirmed cases than any other country on the continent, with 27,403. The ministry says one of the latest people to die in South Africa was an employee with the National Health Laboratory Services."
It's starting to look like genocide in Rwanda, too.
Better flee to Nigeria:
"The Nigerian government says it still hasn’t received ventilators from the United States a month after President Trump promised to send hundreds to the West African country. Trump said last week 1,000 ventilators had been provided to Nigeria, but the country’s information minister, Lai Mohammed, says, “To the best of my knowledge, they have not arrived. When they do arrive, it will be made public.”
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them, and there are other ways of getting back the money:
Federal authorities suspect vast fraud network is targeting US unemployment systems
Suzi LeVine, the commissioner of Washington state’s Employment Security Department, and investigators from the US Secret Service said they had information suggesting that the scheme was coming from a well-organized Nigerian fraud ring and could result in “potential losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to a memo obtained by The New York Times, and look what flared up all of a sudden:
That's where the print copy died.
Dr. Matshidiso Rebecca Moeti, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa, wrote on Twitter that although the new outbreak of Ebola posed a challenge, the WHO, along with Congo’s health ministry and the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was ready to tackle it. “With each experience we respond faster and more effectively,” Moeti wrote. Two other patients were being treated in the isolation unit of a city hospital. Ebola causes fever, bleeding, weakness, and abdominal pain, and kills about half of those it infects. It is transmitted through contact with sick or dead people or animals, and is named for the Ebola River, in Congo, where it was first identified, in 1976. The largest known outbreak of Ebola erupted in 2014 in the West African countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and killed more than 11,000 people, but since then, researchers have developed vaccines and treatment methods that can limit transmission of the disease. This is not the first time that Ebola has hit Mbandaka, an equatorial port city on the Congo River. An outbreak in May 2018 resulted in at least 54 cases and 33 deaths in the area, but the WHO delivered more than 7,500 doses of an Ebola vaccine to Congo, and the outbreak in Mbandaka was quickly brought under control. It was declared over on July 24 of that year. In eastern Congo, ongoing violence and insecurity that has forced people to flee their homes has also made it difficult to end the epidemic. By comparison, the western Équateur Province, where the new Ebola cases have emerged, is relatively safe and stable. There have been many outbreaks of Ebola in Congo over many years, and most have been resolved relatively quickly. The government imposed travel restrictions between the country’s provinces in response to the coronavirus outbreak, which may now also help limit the spread of Ebola from Mbandaka."
As you can see, the death rate far exceeds the less than 1% COVID fatalities.
An Ebola treatment center in Mangima, Democratic Republic of the Congo (Finbarr O'Reilly/The New York Times/File 2019)
The article was accompanied with a FILE PHOTO?
Time to start heading north again.
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NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"The body of a missing Mexican congresswoman from the western state of Colima has been found in a hidden grave more than a month after armed men abducted her, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Wednesday. López Obrador expressed his condolences to the family of Anel Bueno, a 38-year-old legislator from his Morena party. Armed men took Bueno on April 29 while she was promoting health measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in Ixtlahuacán, Colima. The president said one suspect was in custody. The Colima state prosecutor’s office said in a statement Wednesday that the lawmaker’s body was found in a grave with the bodies of three men. The bodies were found Monday, but the remains of the lawmaker were not identified until Tuesday. Additional genetic testing of the lawmaker’s remains was planned."
"President Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela’s opposition, led by Juan Guaidó, have agreed to measures for battling the new coronavirus to be overseen by international health workers, a first step in years toward cooperation between bitter political rivals for the benefit of the country. While focused narrowly on the pandemic response, specialists said Wednesday the agreement opens a window of hope for tackling Venezuela’s overarching political stalemate that has left the once-wealthy oil nation in deepening economic and social crisis. The one-page agreement signed June 1 says both sides will work in coordination to find funds for fighting the virus."
"A former Ecuadorian president has been detained after authorities raided his home Wednesday and found a gun and medical supplies including masks as part of a wider probe into corruption during the pandemic. Prosecutors and police charged into the home of Abdalá Bucaram, 68, in Guayaquil, the coastal city that became one of the earliest cities in Latin America to see a sudden surge in COVID-19 infections. Investigators said the raid was conducted in connection with an ongoing probe into suspected embezzlement at a large public hospital. Bucaram was detained after authorities found an unlicensed gun, in addition to some 5,000 masks and 2,000 coronavirus test kits. Bucaram was elected president in 1996 and ousted by Congress less than six months later for “mental incapacity.”
Are you paying attention, President Trump?
