The Declaration of Independence states that everyone has certain “unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The problem is, the last two don't matter if you don't have the first one. That's the point here.
Intoducing for The Cleveland Browns, Quarterback Deshawn "The Predator" Watson. He will also be the one to choose your next head coach.
The Declaration of Independence states that everyone has certain “unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Good thing that was never made into law because we put people to death all the time.
An acquaintance of mine had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital.
His wife was not allowed to enter the building because they are limiting to sick people only.
He was saved and spent time in the ICU. Eventually moved to a regular room for further recovery. His wife waited anxiously for update calls from the hospital on his condition.
He died alone in that hospital yesterday, of Corona, and his wife of 50 years in inconsolable.
Good Lord that's awful!
But Trump and Fox News have said over and over again, it's a Democratic Hoax....
I don't know if this man could have been saved by quicker/Sooner action on the part of Trump. But anyone with a brain would know that his chances may have been better.
Are you directing that at me because you think I'm a Trump supporter?
And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul. - John Muir
You can ask the churches to close but you can't make them.
Most have wisely chosen to close.
The very First Amendment to our Constitution...
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I heard Cuomo say this and wondered if that means he's sitting on ventilators while people are dying. Sounds like he is sitting on supplies that hospitals need. I wish I had heard what led to this statement but I missed that.
He is stock piling for the future need in a week or two. He is asking for 40,000 ventilators. They dont need 40,000 today but they might in two weeks. Think of it as sending ammunition to a war front they dont just shot it off for no reason when they get it, its stock piled for when they need it. If they dont have it when they need it that would be a problem.
So, why didn't NY buy them back in 2015? Why did Oxiris Barbot, NYC health commissioner, tell the city to go out and celebrate in January? Ride the subway, ....
The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed.
As the coronavirus spreads, the collapse of the project helps explain America’s acute shortage.
Thirteen years ago, a group of U.S. public health officials came up with a plan to address what they regarded as one of the medical system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators.
The breathing-assistance machines tended to be bulky, expensive and limited in number. The plan was to build a large fleet of inexpensive portable devices to deploy in a flu pandemic or another crisis.
Money was budgeted. A federal contract was signed. Work got underway.
And then things suddenly veered off course. A multibillion-dollar maker of medical devices bought the small California company that had been hired to design the new machines. The project ultimately produced zero ventilators.
That failure delayed the development of an affordable ventilator by at least half a decade, depriving hospitals, states and the federal government of the ability to stock up. The federal government started over with another company in 2014, whose ventilator was approved only last year and whose products have not yet been delivered.
Today, with the coronavirus ravaging America’s health care system, the nation’s emergency-response stockpile is still waiting on its first shipment. The scarcity of ventilators has become an emergency, forcing doctors to make life-or-death decisions about who gets to breathe and who does not.
The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis.
“We definitely saw the problem,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 to 2017. “We innovated to try and get a solution. We made really good progress, but it doesn’t appear to have resulted in the volume that we needed.”
The project — code-named Aura — came in the wake of a parade of near-miss pandemics: SARS, MERS, bird flu and swine flu.
Federal officials decided to re-evaluate their strategy for the next public health emergency. They considered vaccines, antiviral drugs, protective gear and ventilators, the last line of defense for patients suffering respiratory failure. The federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile had full-service ventilators in its warehouses, but not in the quantities that would be needed to combat a major pandemic.
In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services established a new division, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, with a mandate to prepare medical responses to chemical, biological and nuclear attacks, as well as infectious diseases.
In its first year in operation, the research agency considered how to expand the number of ventilators. It estimated that an additional 70,000 machines would be required in a moderate influenza pandemic.
The ventilators in the national stockpile were not ideal. In addition to being big and expensive, they required a lot of training to use. The research agency convened a panel of experts in November 2007 to devise a set of requirements for a new generation of mobile, easy-to-use ventilators.
In 2008, the government requested proposals from companies that were interested in designing and building the ventilators.
The goal was for the machines to be approved by regulators for mass development by 2010 or 2011, according to budget documents that the Department of Health and Human Services submitted to Congress in 2008. After that, the government would buy as many as 40,000 new ventilators and add them to the national stockpile.
The ventilators were to cost less than $3,000 each. The lower the price, the more machines the government would be able to buy.
Companies submitted bids for the Project Aura job. The research agency opted not to go with a large, established device maker. Instead it chose Newport Medical Instruments, a small outfit in Costa Mesa, Calif.
Newport, which was owned by a Japanese medical device company, only made ventilators. Being a small, nimble company, Newport executives said, would help it efficiently fulfill the government’s needs.
Ventilators at the time typically went for about $10,000 each, and getting the price down to $3,000 would be tough. But Newport’s executives bet they would be able to make up for any losses by selling the ventilators around the world.
“It would be very prestigious to be recognized as a supplier to the federal government,” said Richard Crawford, who was Newport’s head of research and development at the time. “We thought the international market would be strong, and there is where Newport would have a good profit on the product.”
Federal officials were pleased. In addition to replenishing the national stockpile, “we also thought they’d be so attractive that the commercial market would want to buy them, too,” said Nicole Lurie, who was then the assistant secretary for preparedness and response inside the Department of Health and Human Services. With luck, the new generation of ventilators would become ubiquitous, helping hospitals nationwide better prepare for a crisis.
The contract was officially awarded a few months after the H1N1 outbreak, which the C.D.C. estimated infected 60 million and killed 12,000 in the United States, began to taper off in 2010. The contract called for Newport to receive $6.1 million upfront, with the expectation that the government would pay millions more as it bought thousands of machines to fortify the stockpile.
Project Aura was Newport’s first job for the federal government. Things moved quickly and smoothly, employees and federal officials said in interviews.
Every three months, officials with the biomedical research agency would visit Newport’s headquarters. Mr. Crawford submitted monthly reports detailing the company’s spending and progress.
The federal officials “would check everything,” he said. “If we said we were buying equipment, they would want to know what it was used for. There were scheduled visits, scheduled requirements and deliverables each month.”
In 2011, Newport shipped three working prototypes from the company’s California plant to Washington for federal officials to review.
Dr. Frieden, who ran the C.D.C. at the time, got a demonstration in a small conference room attached to his office. “I got all excited,” he said. “It was a multiyear effort that had resulted in something that was going to be really useful.”
In April 2012, a senior Health and Human Services official testified before Congress that the program was “on schedule to file for market approval in September 2013.” After that, the machines would go into production.
Then everything changed.
The medical device industry was undergoing rapid consolidation, with one company after another merging with or acquiring other makers. Manufacturers wanted to pitch themselves as one-stop shops for hospitals, which were getting bigger, and that meant offering a broader suite of products. In May 2012, Covidien, a large medical device manufacturer, agreed to buy Newport for just over $100 million.
Covidien — a publicly traded company with sales of $12 billion that year — already sold traditional ventilators, but that was only a small part of its multifaceted businesses. In 2012 alone, Covidien bought five other medical device companies, in addition to Newport.
Newport executives and government officials working on the ventilator contract said they immediately noticed a change when Covidien took over. Developing inexpensive portable ventilators no longer seemed like a top priority.
Newport applied in June 2012 for clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to market the device, but two former federal officials said Covidien had demanded additional funding and a higher sales price for the ventilators. The government gave the company an additional $1.4 million, a drop in the bucket for a company Covidien’s size.
Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business.
Some Newport executives who worked on the project were reassigned to other roles. Others decided to leave the company.
“Up until the time the company sold, I was really happy and excited about the project,” said Hong-Lin Du, Newport’s president at the time of its sale. “Then I was assigned to a different job.”
In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.
The government agreed to cancel the contract. The world was focused at the time on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The research agency started over, awarding a new contract for $13.8 million to the giant Dutch company Philips. In 2015, Covidien was sold for $50 billion to another huge medical device company, Medtronic. Charles J. Dockendorff, Covidien’s former chief financial officer, said he did not know why the contract had fallen apart. “I am not aware of that issue,” he said in a text message.
Robert J. White, president of the minimally invasive therapies group at Medtronic who worked at Covidien during the Newport acquisition, initially said he had no recollection of the Project Aura contract. A Medtronic spokeswoman later said that Mr. White was under the impression that the contract had been winding down before Covidien bought Newport.
In a statement Sunday night, after the article was published, Medtronic said, “The prototype ventilator, developed by Newport Medical, would not have been able to meet the specifications required by the government, nor at the price required.” Medtronic said that one problem was that the machine was not going to be usable with newborns.
It wasn’t until last July that the F.D.A. signed off on the new Philips ventilator, the Trilogy Evo. The government ordered 10,000 units in December, setting a delivery date in mid-2020.
As the extent of the spread of the new coronavirus in the United States became clear, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, revealed on March 15 that the stockpile had 12,700 ventilators ready to deploy. The government has since sped up maintenance to increase the number available to 16,660 — still fewer than a quarter of what officials years earlier had estimated would be required in a moderate flu pandemic.
Last week, the Health and Human Services Department contacted ventilator makers to see how soon they could produce thousands of machines. And it began pressing Philips to speed up its planned shipments.
The stockpile is “still awaiting delivery of the Trilogy Evo,” a Health and Human Services spokeswoman said. “We do not currently have any in inventory, though we are expecting them soon.”
As I said before this whole situation sucks, but closing down the whole country is a mistake.
The stock market lost nearly 12 trillion dollars....you just dont go back to everyday life from that. This isn't going to be "back to normal" when this virus is over. As I said before, half the small businesses forced to close will never reopen. Your looking st potentially a 30% unemployment rate when their lockdown is over.
The stimulus will actually hurt us because it devalues the dollar. The market always corrects and that correction will be a massive expulsion of assets, 401k dry, savings accounts empty, high personal credit, high unemployment rate, and millions losing their homes.
I personally dont think Great Depression levels of economic despair is worth it. It's too late to do anything about it of course, we over reacted big time. A few months down the road are going to realize what im talking about.
The rich are not losing 12 trillion, it will be the everyday American. Shutting down most of your economy and putting 44 million Americans out of work with a potential 32% unemployment rate isn't something we will just come back from quickly if at all. We are cutting off our head to save our arm, its assigned but government incompetence at every level is the cause, a few months from now they will need more taxes because they got no money but half the pop wont have any jobs to be taxed.
There is a happy medium they could have taken so our economy wouldnt be in the trash but they completely blew it.
There is a happy medium they could have taken so our economy wouldnt be in the trash but they completely blew it.
Totally blew the testing. If testing was mobilized in December of 2019 when trump learned of this virus. The economy would be fine probably the best economy of all time. Huge economy would be happening right now. Everyone would love trump, our hero.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Thomas Jefferson.
I don't blame governors for locking down. The wasted time is on the administration collectively, not just Trump. But we don't really know what the testing would have changed to this point because you had to convince Americans to stay home or at minimum to take this seriously, that is still not happening everywhere.
And I personally think that a death rate in the millions would have crashed or shut the economy down anyway. So at least this way they saved some lives... hopefully.
The only thing I really put on Trump in all of this are his misleading comments and lies. He's an intentionally ill informed Potus that does not believe in science that contradicts his own idiotic beliefs. Trying to oversimplify this or spin it to be less dangerous than it is was a huge mistake. Other missteps like prematurely announcing a medicine that might help, trying to schedule a return to normal based on feelings, and outright ignoring the experts at the beginning were also huge mistakes. The best thing he could have done was be honest and let Americans know what was coming as soon as they knew. Then allowing us to see what was going on in china and wrapping around it coming here, we may have scrambled and been better prepared. At a minimum we would trust that Trump and company had done all they could and he would not be taking this much heat.
As I said before this whole situation sucks, but closing down the whole country is a mistake.
We hunker down, giving them time to develop a treatment that keeps us from dying.
We can not stay closed until the Vaccine arrives because we would no longer have a Nation to return to.
If they don't develop a treatment soon, we will have to go out there and face the risk. 2+ percent of us will then die. Perhaps we will go out in waves so as not to overwhelm healthcare.
Throughout history, only the strongest survive these Plagues. They then go on until the next one.
An acquaintance of mine had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital.
His wife was not allowed to enter the building because they are limiting to sick people only.
He was saved and spent time in the ICU. Eventually moved to a regular room for further recovery. His wife waited anxiously for update calls from the hospital on his condition.
He died alone in that hospital yesterday, of Corona, and his wife of 50 years in inconsolable.
Good Lord that's awful!
But Trump and Fox News have said over and over again, it's a Democratic Hoax....
I don't know if this man could have been saved by quicker/Sooner action on the part of Trump. But anyone with a brain would know that his chances may have been better.
I think we can leave politics out of the responses to personal losses of friends and family. We are all well aware of the political actions and none of that is more important than our support for each other in a time of loss. Just saying.
You are right,, My bad..
#GMSTRONG
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Daniel Patrick Moynahan
"Alternative facts hurt us all. Think before you blindly believe." Damanshot
You can ask the churches to close but you can't make them.
Most have wisely chosen to close.
The very First Amendment to our Constitution...
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Human sacrifice is still a crime.
Intoducing for The Cleveland Browns, Quarterback Deshawn "The Predator" Watson. He will also be the one to choose your next head coach.
Well maybe make it so anyone that is found to have contracted the virus after attending a mass service as these, is not given priority when it comes to treatment?
If the healthcare facilities are having to start make decisions on who gets care and who doesn't , then use this type of thing as a variable in that decision.
We don't have to agree with each other, to respect each others opinion.
Captain of US aircraft carrier pleads for help as coronavirus cases spread onboard: ‘Sailors do not need to die’
The captain of a U.S. aircraft carrier deployed to the Pacific Ocean has pleaded with the Pentagon for more help as a coronavirus outbreak aboard his ship continues to spread, officials said Tuesday. Military officials said dozens of sailors have been infected.
In a four-page letter, first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday, Capt. Brett E. Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt laid out the dire situation unfolding aboard the warship, with more than 4,000 crew members, and what he said were the Navy’s failures to provide him with the proper resources to combat the virus by moving sailors off the vessel.
“We are not at war,” Crozier wrote. “Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our sailors.”
The carrier is currently docked in Guam.
The crisis aboard the Roosevelt played out like a slow-moving disaster and highlights the dangers to the Pentagon if the coronavirus manages to infiltrate some its most important assets, such as bomber fleets, elite Special Operations units and the talisman of U.S. military power, aircraft carriers.
In a statement, a Navy official said that the commanding officer of the Roosevelt “alerted leadership in the Pacific Fleet on Sunday evening of continuing challenges in isolating the virus.”
“The ship’s commanding officer advocated for housing more members of the crew in facilities that allow for better isolation,” the statement said. “Navy leadership is moving quickly to take all necessary measures to ensure the health and safety of the crew of USS Theodore Roosevelt, and is pursuing options to address the concerns raised by the commanding officer.”
A senior Navy official on Sunday sought to play down the urgency of the situation on the Roosevelt, saying that while it was unfortunate, most of the reported symptoms at that point among the sickened sailors and other crew members had been mild.
Last week, Thomas B. Modly, the acting Navy secretary, told reporters that three cases of the virus had been reported aboard the Roosevelt, marking the first time a U.S. Navy ship had announced a coronavirus infection at sea.
Fifteen days earlier, the ship made a port call in Da Nang, Vietnam.
Modly defended the ship’s decision to dock in Vietnam despite the spread of the virus through Asia. He said that, at the time, coronavirus cases in Vietnam were less than 100 and located in the north of the country, around Hanoi. Port calls for U.S. Navy ships have since been canceled.
Maj. Gen. Jeff Taliaferro, the vice director of operations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged Monday that there had been media reports about coronavirus aboard the Roosevelt, but declined to go into details for security reasons, he said.
But, echoing a line that the military has consistently taken during the course of the pandemic, Taliaferro insisted that the Roosevelt can nonetheless perform its missions. If the Roosevelt had to sail immediately, Taliaferro told reporters on a conference call, it was “ready to sail.”
Florida police are setting up highway checkpoints to enforce the state's coronavirus quarantine. Offenders could be jailed for 60 days.
Drivers entering Florida from neighboring states are being funneled through interstate checkpoints as authorities seek to crack down on the spread of the coronavirus, the state's department of transportation said.
All travelers are asked a series of questions, according to the local CBS News affiliate KENS, with those arriving from places like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Louisiana forced to give contact information during their required 14-day self-quarantine.
In some cases, drivers posted photos of videos of massive traffic jams soon after the checkpoints were enacted Sunday as cars wait to enter the state. There are currently no federal warnings against domestic travel except for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut residents who aren't part of "critical infrastructure" activities.
Individuals arriving from the New York City area or Louisiana are subject to a $500 fine or 60 days in jail if they break the order to self-quarantine.
Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slammed what he called "reckless" travelers from New York who defied local stay-at-home orders for causing an outbreak in his state.
"You're having people be reckless and cause problems for other communities," DeSantis said.
"I think people have realized that the epicenter of this thing has shifted," DeSantis said of the virus. "Now the epicenter worldwide really is New York City. We're really rooting for New York to get through it," he continued. "But what's happened is — and it's a problem for Florida — once the shelter-in-place was issued, people started fleeing the city."
Florida has yet to issue a statewide shelter-in-place order, but many local cities and counties are taking it upon themselves to institute lockdowns as the number of US cases continues to grow.
Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, who was the first person in Miami-Dade County to test positive for the novel coronavirus, has urged DeSantis to issue such an order.
Suarez told Business Insider that it's "hard to second-guess" DeSantis' reluctance to follow other states in instituting a shelter-in-place order given that about a third of the state's counties don't have any confirmed COVID-19 cases, "but I personally would."
As of Monday morning, there were 143,532 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the US, easily the largest in the world. In Florida, at least 50 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.
It's almost as if the federal government and corporate hospitals wish to spread the message everything is okay instead of telling us the truth doesn't it?
Intoducing for The Cleveland Browns, Quarterback Deshawn "The Predator" Watson. He will also be the one to choose your next head coach.
Corporate hospitals having to muzzle their doctors or face the wrath of trump.
It’s sad the only way this guy wants to lead is if everyone kisses his ass.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Now, IF that is Gov. Cuomo..............and it was posted on the 28th of March and it certainly seems he's talking about about covid 19, yet we hear about refrigerated semi truck trailers loading up bodies - 1 article I read said FEMA sent 85 trailers to NYC........
What's going on?
To me, it LOOKS like Cuomo, but I'm no expert on facial id.
The background rooms......for quarantine/isolation have no ceilings on them.
No joke seems pretty self explanatory People are dying on ventilators. The system needs a stock pile for when they are overloaded. I am pretty sure I have already explained this maybe you have reading comprehension problems. He is in the Javits center it is set up for future use for non virus hospitalization. So main hospitals can fight the virus.
It has a picture of Cuomo, in the exact same shirt as the video I posted above.
In the article, he's talking about not having enough ventilators, and trying to buy them from China.......17,000 of them.
What's the real scoop?
The real scope is we need ventilators and he is getting them were he can. Whats so difficult about understanding that? He was setting up the javits center in the clip and photo. he held many press conferences there.
You can ask the churches to close but you can't make them.
Most have wisely chosen to close.
The very First Amendment to our Constitution...
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
As I said before this whole situation sucks, but closing down the whole country is a mistake.
We hunker down, giving them time to develop a treatment that keeps us from dying.
We can not stay closed until the Vaccine arrives because we would no longer have a Nation to return to.
If they don't develop a treatment soon, we will have to go out there and face the risk. 2+ percent of us will then die. Perhaps we will go out in waves so as not to overwhelm healthcare.
Throughout history, only the strongest survive these Plagues. They then go on until the next one.
No joke seems pretty self explanatory People are dying on ventilators. The system needs a stock pile for when they are overloaded. I am pretty sure I have already explained this maybe you have reading comprehension problems. He is in the Javits center it is set up for future use for non virus hospitalization. So main hospitals can fight the virus.
Thank you. I'm asking questions, and you go right to questioning my reading comprehension.
People are dying on vents? Got it. Hospitals overwhelmed? Okay. Yet the gov. is saying they have a stockpile of vents available? Just not using them yet because they aren't needed. He's griping about not getting them from the fed. gov't., yet he's not even using the ones they have?
And I've read the hospitals are overloaded already. So why not use the vents they have in stock? Yet, some of the pictures I've seen have been from Italy....I also saw photos of new york hospital with no waiting line, as we've been told they all have.
Read a yahoo article today about a guys experience with covid 19 - in new york city. He described how he went to a hospital - un named of course, and his walk past rows and rows and rows of people that had it, before he got to his room. ?? And the great care he got, but dammit, he couldn't remember the doctors name, even though he remembered asking the doctor his name multiple times. And, of course, the source was anonymous, as was the hospital, as was the doctor.
So, they have vents in store, but they are waiting to use them until it gets worse? I thought vents were reusable.
Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slammed what he called "reckless" travelers from New York who defied local stay-at-home orders for causing an outbreak in his state.
"You're having people be reckless and cause problems for other communities," DeSantis said.
Where was this badass when the beaches and bars were crammed full of people during spring break?
And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul. - John Muir
