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| From The New York Times |
Well, I'm not holding my breath - yesterday I was on the phone forever firming up upcoming Dr. appointments. The good news is that it is a go for my knee cortisone shots for the end of this week up at SRS (oh great I'll be able to walk), no eye appointment until July (so I'm still practically blind) and the hernia operation is still on hold. But the shocker - and the reason I am not holding my breath is because on one of those calls where I was finally able to get through, I said to the receptionist, "God did you hear what Trump said about bleach, lysol and sunlight?" "Oh right", she said, "did that come from CNN?" I gasped . That alone is why I hope Frank Bruni is correct. How many more millions of Trump fans had this very same reaction, despite the proof positive ?
Poor little Paris is not adjusting to her anti-biotics - actually she is, her tiredness is a by product of these, and her major operation is scheduled for the end of May. The mother cat (not Susan) who we call "Momie" has moved her kittens again somewhere outside- we can hear them, but can't find them.
~~~~~
Here is that New York Times report:
Injections of Bleach ? Beams of light ? Trump Is Self-Destructing Before Our Eyes
By, Frank Bruni
“And he’s going to get re-elected.”
"Not a day goes by without several friends — Republicans as well as Democrats — saying that to me. It’s the blunt coda to a bloated recitation of Donald Trump’s failures during this pandemic. It’s a whimper of surrender following a scream of disbelief.
Tens of thousands of Americans die; what does the president do? Spreads bad information. Seeds false hope. Reinvents history, reimagines science, prattles on about his supposed heroism, bellyaches about his self-proclaimed martyrdom and savages anyone who questions his infallibility. In lieu of leadership, grandstanding. In place of empathy, a snit. And he’s going to get re-elected.
With that refrain we perform a spiritual prophylaxis. We prepare for despair.
But somewhere along the way, we started to confuse a coping mechanism with reasoned analysis. We began to treat a verbal tic as inevitable truth.
It isn’t. While Trump may indeed be careening toward four more years, it’s at least as possible that he’s self-destructing before our eyes.
Maybe a toasty beam of sunlight is all that we need to wipe out the coronavirus? What if we just injected disinfectant into our veins? He floated both of those fantasies on Thursday, when he might as well have stepped up to the lectern in a tin foil hat. They’re the ramblings of a dejected, disoriented and increasingly desperate man.
As Katie Rogers and Annie Karni reported in The Times, the president feels isolated and embattled and is panicked that he’ll lose to Joe Biden in November. That state of mind, they wrote, prompted his executive order to halt the issuing of green cards, which is precisely the kind of base-coddling measure that he resorts to “when things feel out of control.”
He can read the polls as well as the rest of us can, and they show that while he stands there nightly in the White House briefing room and blows kisses at himself, Americans aren’t blowing kisses back.
A month ago there was much ado about a slight uptick in Trump’s job-approval numbers. But the real story was the slightness: Past presidents had experienced greater bumps during crises, when Americans tend to rally around their leader. For Trump there was no such rallying — just a grudging, incremental benefit of the doubt.
A fleeting one, too. His uptick quickly took a downturn, reuniting him with his anemic norm. According to the polling average at FiveThirtyEight as of late Friday afternoon, 52.5 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance. Only 43.4 percent approve.
True, his favorability ratings weren’t any better in 2016 — in fact, they were worse — and he got to the White House regardless. But the dissonance of that victory could be explained partly by what he represented: a protest against the status quo. Now he is the status quo, and voters have had a chance to sample the disruption that he pledged. It tastes a lot like incompetence.
Other numbers tell an even scarier story for Trump. In all three of the battleground states that enabled his Electoral College victory three and a half years ago, he’s currently behind Biden — by 6.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in Michigan and 2.7 in Wisconsin, according to the averaging of recent polls by RealClearPolitics. That website also puts him behind by 3.2 points in Florida, a state he won in 2016 and must win again.
Wisconsin alone should terrify Trump. In 2018, the Republican governor was ousted by a Democrat. So were the Republican lieutenant governor and attorney general. Then, this month, Wisconsin voters replaced a conservative incumbent on the state’s Supreme Court with a liberal challenger, her victory not just surprising but resounding. There’s no way to spin that in Trump’s favor.
According to monthly polling by Gallup, the percentage of Americans who indicated satisfaction with the way things were going in the country plummeted to 30 percent in mid-April from 42 percent in mid-March. Only twice before in the past two decades has there been a one-month decline that precipitous.
Maybe this drop was less a referendum on Trump’s stewardship than a recognition of the coronavirus’s devastation. But maybe not: Surveys reveal that a significant majority of Americans believe that he acted too late to stem the virus’s spread. He’s also out of step with most Americans’ appraisal of what will and won’t be safe in the immediate future.
Amid Trump’s dizzyingly mixed messages, he has rooted for a return to some semblance of normalcy around May 1 and has chided a few governors for overzealous lockdowns. But in a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that was released on Wednesday, only 12 percent of Americans said that the social-distancing and shelter-in-place directives where they live went too far, while more than double that number — 26 percent — said that the precautions weren’t stringent enough. Sixty-one percent said that they were on the mark.
In a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, 65 percent of Americans said it could take until June or later for gatherings of 10 people or more to be safe. And in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll, only 22 percent of Americans supported the protesters who have been demanding an end to their states’ restrictions, while 60 percent opposed them. President Trump has egged those protesters on.
Is he following some gut instinct or just flailing? I vote for the latter. Lately he has contradicted himself at a whole new pace and to a whole new degree, and he has undercut his own party’s talking points.
As Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman reported in The Times, Republicans have developed a strategy to evade any responsibility for Trump’s response to the pandemic by blaming and demonizing China. “But there is a potential impediment to the G.O.P. plan — the leader of the party himself,” Martin and Haberman wrote, noting that Trump has “muddied Republican efforts to fault China” by continuing to curry favor with President Xi Jinping. That tack certainly complicates Republicans’ efforts to paint Biden as a stooge of the Chinese. They can’t succeed with their new nickname for him, Beijing Biden, if Tiananmen Trump rings truer.
Also, Trump’s most optimistic pronouncements about imminent deliverance from the current misery represent a bigger gamble than the many others he has taken. If he’s wrong, there’s not going to be any hiding it. If he’s reckless, the toll is Americans’ very lives.
I know, I know: He’s Trump. He carries the secret weapon of his spectacular shamelessness, which means that he’ll resort to ploys and lies that even the most unscrupulous of his opponents wouldn’t attempt. He’ll destroy what he must so long as he gets to rule over the wreckage.
And the usual laws of nature don’t apply to him. He was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the crotch. Didn’t matter. He got nearly three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. Still he won. If he wasn’t exactly found guilty of elaborate coordination with the Russians, he was certainly shown to be open to it. Onward he rolled, and he kept rolling past his gross abuse of power in dealing with Ukraine and his richly deserved impeachment for it.
He’s Houdini, he’s Scheherazade, he’s all the escape artists of history and fiction rolled into one and swirled with golden-orange topping. He’s lucky beyond all imagining. But here’s the thing about luck: It runs out.
There’s incessant talk of how fervent his base is, but the many Americans appalled by him have a commensurate zeal. For every Sean Hannity, there’s a Rachel Maddow. For every Kellyanne Conway, a George Conway. She and her ilk may be wily in their defense of the president. He and his tribe are even better in their evisceration of him.
And what of the diaspora of refugees from the Trump administration: people like Rick Bright, the government scientist who says he was just stripped of his leading role in the search for a coronavirus vaccine because he wouldn’t parrot Trump’s cockamamie talking points? I predict that as November nears, more and more exiles will speak out, sharing alarming accounts of life inside the president’s hall of mirrors. Trump in turn will mutter about the “deep state,” but the phrase won’t fly when he’s left with such a shallow pool of charlatans around him — and when he’s making such a repellent fool of himself.
Don’t tell me that his nightly briefings are just a new version of the old stadium rallies; their backdrop of profound suffering makes them exponentially harder to stomach. Americans who take any comfort from them were Trump-drunk long ago. The unbesotted see and hear the president for what he is: a tone-deaf showman who regards everything, even a mountain of corpses, as a stage."
~~~~~
This next opinion piece is almost a week old, and some things have changed. Before that however, there are many people who believe we are simply not receiving the correct numbers of COVID-19 infections or deaths here locally and across the nation. This is being done on purpose it has been said, for political reasons.
I am not entirely convinced that is the case. Even now as we speak, cases have been discovered in California very early in February which were not initially reported as COVID-19 related deaths. Unknowingly, they were reported as atypical pneumonias, or organ failures. But it wasn't just California:
"The CDC acknowledged in a statement updated today that many deaths due to COVID-19 may have been misclassified as pneumonia deaths in the absence of proper testing. Reported deaths due to pneumonia spiked in March in several states, including Florida, New York, and Washington—a trend that has long been recognized by public health experts as signs that COVID-19 was already spreading undetected in the large parts of the US population.
Speaking to The New York Times in early April, Geraldine Ménard, the chief of general internal medicine at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans, said that staff had recorded “a ton of patients with pneumonia” earlier in the year. “I remember thinking it was weird. I’m sure some of those patients did have it. But no one knew back then.”
~ From The Scientist: If link doesn't come up, google in the title.
First U.S. Covid-19 deaths Happened Weeks Earlier Than Thought
by, Catherine Offord
:So, I don't want to jump the gun on this one. If I am wrong, I am wrong...but so far, I do not believe that I am wrong. It could very well be the same as what Mexico experienced, and not an intentional hiding of the data for political purposes.
"The CDC acknowledged in a statement updated today that many deaths due to COVID-19 may have been misclassified as pneumonia deaths in the absence of proper testing. Reported deaths due to pneumonia spiked in March in several states, including Florida, New York, and Washington—a trend that has long been recognized by public health experts as signs that COVID-19 was already spreading undetected in the large parts of the US population.
Speaking to The New York Times in early April, Geraldine Ménard, the chief of general internal medicine at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans, said that staff had recorded “a ton of patients with pneumonia” earlier in the year. “I remember thinking it was weird. I’m sure some of those patients did have it. But no one knew back then.”
~ From The Scientist: If link doesn't come up, google in the title.
First U.S. Covid-19 deaths Happened Weeks Earlier Than Thought
by, Catherine Offord
:So, I don't want to jump the gun on this one. If I am wrong, I am wrong...but so far, I do not believe that I am wrong. It could very well be the same as what Mexico experienced, and not an intentional hiding of the data for political purposes.
Rosarito Beach from what we can see for the most part, has been complying with people wearing masks and staying home. We heard and saw from Zeta just a few days ago that east Tijuana is not. Hopefully, they will zoom in on some of the other Muncipalities like Ensenada and further down south of Ensenada - areas like Camalu, Colonet, San Quintin, etc.which is mainly rural.
From what we see and are hearing from people who actually are Health Service Providers, the workloads are stressful and hectic, and they see rough seas ahead. Note how many of the Health Service Providers have become infected by the virus nationally and locally.
We are also very concerned over the Maqs which are still in operation where people working them have become infected, yet the Maqs stay open.
We are also very concerned over the Maqs which are still in operation where people working them have become infected, yet the Maqs stay open.
But, as you read this upcoming piece, keep in mind that in the United States we also have this pressure in many States and within the general population to relax lock down orders. And as Americans we were sold down the river by Trump for dismissing Pandemic advise and studies and Agencies, not to mention allowing the national health supplies (so called stockpiles) to dwindle down to nearly nothing while he and his billionaire friends received massive tax breaks.
The key in both countries is to have federally funded tests for everyone, abundant medical supplies, to be completely reinforcing of small businesses which have had to shut down and individuals who have been laid off and strong leadership. Can I say this ? I think right now, Governor Jaime Bonilla and his team mates are doing the best they can humanly do under the given circumstances, and not just for political purposes. I believe he really cares. I cannot say that about Trump the cold fish, at all. Okay, so Zeta can rip me, but that is how I feel. Some of my Mexican friends roll their eyes at me already, what's new?
~ From Zeta:
Por, Adela Navarro Bello
As more tests are applied to check for coronavirus infections, and that is a measure with which Governor Jaime Bonilla Valdez seems to agree, the cases increase considerably. The worst, they say, is yet to come. It will arrive in the first week of May, and for which about 12 days remain.
In Baja California, and this has been well documented, the infrastructure of the health system is not the best nor is it in conditions that are no longer optimal, but rather equipped or supplied to face the pandemic that, like insecurity, has plagued the northern border of Mexico.
The state hospitals were already ill before they got worse when their capacities to care for patients with COVID-19 or those that without confirming their case are classified as atypical pneumonias were exceeded.
But in Baja California, the Governor has not decreed the mandatory use of the mouth mask when in public, which other institutions in the entity such as the United States Consulate in Mexico have suggested, nor has it determined additional measures now that it is official. Mexico entered Phase 3 of the pandemic, which means a greater community dispersion of the coronavirus COVID-19.
In none of the five municipalities, and of course in the state, has a curfew been determined. The closings of companies have been at discretion. For example, stores such as Coppel or Electra are still open, because they have financial institutions, but in department stores where food, cleaning supplies and other household goods are sold, such as Walmart, Costco, Soriana, the areas where they have been closed They sell household appliances, clothing, or personal items, as if those items were not required in the contingency to cope with quarantine, such as supplying a clothes washer, for example. In these stores, in addition, measures have been taken that the Government has not mandated, as in Costco, which only allows access to people who wear gloves or face masks,in addition to providing sanitizers and antibacterial towels.
It is understood that "the objective" of the Government is to avoid that certain areas remain crowded, but also many of these companies have chosen to only allow access to make purchases to 50 people at the same time, one leaves and one enters, in addition to maintaining consumers in lines that keep a healthy distance. These actions, however, are not being considered by the Baja California authorities, which punish companies with partial closings, and benefit others with full openings.
Quarantine has not been adopted by Baja Californians, and governments have not contributed to a more aggressive campaign to keep people at home. That only one member of the family goes out to feed and the rest remain safe from infections on public roads. According to the mobility index that Google developed, in this state, only 22 percent decisively reduced their mobility.
And that is seen in the streets that are quite crowded with cars with one, two or more occupants, and while the established restaurants have closed and some serve ready-made food either through a home delivery service or pick them up personally , many remain open and serving diners at any time of the day, causing crowds in small establishments.
The Mayor of Mexicali, Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda, and her Cabildo, approved a week ago fines for those who celebrate parties in their homes, due to the concentrations of people that continued to take place despite the quarantine and the recommendation of the healthy distance. This has not happened in the other large city of Baja California and the one that concentrates the most cases of COVID-19 infections, such as Tijuana. In this border city, on the morning of Sunday, April 19, four people were injured at a party and one was killed. Among those who saved their lives but were injured was a policeman from the State Security Guard, the same ones who have been entrusted to watch the streets to verify that the people who transit do so because they carry out an essential activity and not because they are loitering.
To such action, supervise through the State Police that citizens do not leave their homes without just cause, evidently not supported by some members of the state corporation, the Governor has called it "a touch of conscience", so as not to interfere with this at the curfew.
Namely, only two municipalities in the country have decreed a curfew, to limit or restrict public activities for a certain period or time, in this case with the aim of containing the spread of the virus. No Governor has done so, although there have been those who have forced the use of the mask when the population is in public places, while others have chosen to carry out tests to detect positive cases and act accordingly to prevent dispersal. isolating them from the start.
In Baja California, according to the Secretary of Health, as of April 7, 700 tests had been performed out of 1,500 that reached the state, even so the entity ranks third in infections in the country. This poor reaction will be understood when knowing that, for example, in San Diego, California, neighboring Tijuana county, to date 34 thousand 920 tests have been performed, 2,343 positive cases and 87 deaths have been collected.
But even without hospital capacity, without sufficient evidence to check the population and isolate it in case of infections, and already in a Phase 3, in Baja California the State Government has not intensified social measures to prevent the spread of the virus that as expected it will be fatal. They persist in the healthy distance and in a quarantine that nothing else has permeated, in addition to discretionary closings and absurd comparisons such as "demonstrating" that there are more deaths from heart disease or cancer than from COVID-19 infection, and that such cases They have not stopped the economy or social life.
For this reason, given the intense mobility of the population in the state, particularly in Mexicali and Tijuana, Baja California is in need of measures to contain, as far as possible, community dispersion. It is not just about giving food supplies, but also that the Government helps by establishing the social, security, health and economic conditions to stay at home. If the hospitals are already overwhelmed, it would be time to isolate the population to reduce infections. Let's see when.
~~~~~
A Look At The Local Drug War Stats All Reports From Zeta.
(Note; Ensenada & points south will require a full blog)
~ Rosarito Beach:
From Zeta: Multi-homicide in Rosarito Beach: Six are dead, 5 men and 1 woman.
"Between April 1 and 25, 25 homicides have been committed in Playas de Rosarito, 53 so far in 2020, and 86 murders in the seven months of the administration of Mayor Araceli Brown."
Masacre en Rosarito; Suma 83 Homicidios en Primeros y Meses del Tricenio
Por, Gerardo Andrade
"Five men and a woman were shot inside a house in Playas de Rosarito, where neighbors reported, drugs were used and sold .
According to information provided by staff of the Secretariat of Citizen Security of Playas de Rosarito, at 8:15 am on Saturday, April 25, a complainant reported that there was a person lying at the entrance of a house in the alley Manuel L. Ponce , in the La Ladrillera neighborhood, but the shots were heard the night before. (La Larilla is close to the Puerto Nuevo area.)
Residents of the La Ladrillera neighborhood, informed ZETA that it was during the night of Friday, April 24, when the detonations were heard, however, because there was a dense layer of mist, it was difficult to locate where the shooting had occurred.
It was not until Saturday morning that a neighbor, who preferred to omit his name, saw a man lying in the house and called the emergency number 911, said he did not know him.
He regretted that this area of the fifth municipality has become commonplace to hear firearm detonations and see people who are engaged in the sale of drugs without the authorities doing anything about it.
"There (house where the six people were killed) they were dedicated to selling drugs, I did not know them, but it was obvious (the consumption and sale of drugs), I even saw the police several times, but they were still there, the property belonged to a man, but he could no longer evict them (addicts), ”said the neighbor.
Another resident of the area who was interviewed by ZETA, stated that when he left his house he saw the patrols outside the house where the multihomicide occurred, he immediately sensed the homicide, but never imagined that there would be six victims.
“What's more, once I saw a girl who come with her baby and I scolded her, because she was obviously going to get high. Many people came to get high, "said the resident.
They also pointed out that the robberies have increased in the houses of the La Ladrillera neighborhood in recent weeks, a fact that is attributed to more presence of people who use drugs.
Regarding the crime scene, the first municipal agents to arrive confirmed that at the entrance of the house, made of wood, attached to a mobile home, was the corpse of a "elderly" man, lying, who had an impact of bullet, which is the reason why they requested the assistance of paramedics of the Red Cross.
The same uniformed men entered the house to carry out an inspection and found “five dead people piled up, who could be seen multiple bullet impacts”, then they notified the State Attorney General's Office (FGE).
According to the FGE, at 9:30 a.m. on April 25, elements of the State Investigation Agency (AEI) arrived at the scene to carry out the processing of the crime scene, who confirmed that several percussion casings of Long guns, five male and one female victim, who had not yet been identified as of Saturday afternoon.
Between April 1 and 25, 25 homicides have been committed in Playas de Rosarito, 53 so far in 2020, and 86 murders in the seven months of the administration of Mayor Araceli Brown."
~~~~~
~ Tijuana:
~ From Zeta:
Matan a Honduereno; 145 Homicidios Durante Abril en Tijuana
"So far this April, 145 intentional homicides have been registered in Tijuana, totaling 620 in these first four months of the year"
"On the night of Friday, April 24, a man was shot dead inside a grocery store, located on the Soldado José A. Caballero road, in the Valle Verde neighborhood of Tijuana.
It was at 10:35 p.m. that a report of a possible armed attack and an injured person as a result of this was received via C4. Upon arrival, the authorities realized that it was a male person without vital signs and with several injuries caused by a firearm projectile in the back.
The victim was identified as Marvin Adalberto Duarte, 21 years old and originally from Honduras. In the place, 7 .9 mm caliber bushings were also located.
So far this April, 145 intentional homicides have been registered in Tijuana, totaling 620 in these first four months of the year. On Friday the 24th, three homicides were registered, in different parts of the city.
At 21:35 of the same 24, the lifeless body of an unidentified man was found abandoned on public roads. The discovery was near Caoba street in the La Joya subdivision, very close to the second access to Playas de Tijuana.
The man did not carry identification, according to the authorities, he is estimated to be between 25 and 30 years old, and had two injuries caused by a firearm, one in the head and the other in the left arm.
At 10:35 p.m., a 49-year-old man identified as Miguel Ángel Morales Sandoval died at the Bethel clinic. According to the authorities' report, the victim suffered an armed attack in the Terrazas del Valle neighborhood when he was in the company of another man, who was also injured but was transferred to another hospital in the city."
~~~
The COVID-19 Local and National Stats:The most recent and up to date reports will be available late tonight or tomorrow morning (04/26), particularly where they break down the Municipalities of Baja California, so let's wait for those.
~~~~~~
~ Carlos Alvarez reported this development on Zeta today, and it is not good news:
~ From WHO:
"Immunity Passports" In The Context of COVID-19"
Scientific Brief
~~~~~
And Zeta has reported that the Rolling Stones have recorded a new song regarding COVID-19 -
I need to listen to it first before I post it. I just hope the Stones give any money they make off of this to all countries who need supplies and help. UPDATE: Posted it on the sidebar.
Take care everyone.
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