10,000 Deaths, Brit Prime Minister on Oxygen
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
Vol. 9, No. 79
Pandemic: As the US crossed the benchmark of 10,000 coronavirus deaths, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was checked into intensive care in a London hospital suffering with the disease. He’s reported to be on oxygen.
New York may be reaching the peak of its crisis and more relief money might be coming from Congress while President Trump delivered another wild and misleading briefing session.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the trusted voice on the pandemic, said the number of hospital admissions and intubations in New York had seemed to level off, “So we just got to realize this is an indication, despite all the suffering and the death that has occurred that what we have been doing has been working.”
Hospitals and medical workers are still having terrible trouble getting the supplies they need, and an inspector general’s report from Health and Human Services confirming that set off the President late yesterday.
Answering a question, Trump said, “It’s just wrong. Did I hear the word ‘inspector general,’ really? It’s wrong.”
Trump asked, “Could politics be entered into that?” but when he was reminded that the report was released by his own administration, Trump “Well where did he come from, the inspector general? What’s his name?”
Well, his name is Ann Maxwell, the assistant inspector general for evaluation and inspections, and Christi Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general, who was promoted in January under the Trump administration. Their study involved contact with 323 hospitals.
When told by ABC’s Jonathan Karl that Grimm has served the previous administration, Trump went off. “Oh, you didn’t tell me that. Oh, I see. You didn’t tell me that, Jon. You didn’t tell me that. Did serve in the previous administration. You mean the Obama administration? Thank you for telling me that. See, there’s a typical fake news deal.”
Trump then called Karl “a third rate reporter” and said, “You will never make it.”
Karl is president of the White House Correspondents Association.
Pressed again by another reporter about the unavailability of coronavirus testing, Trump lashed out that states and hospitals are supposed to do testing and, “Listen, we’re the federal government. We’re not supposed to stand on street corners doing testing.”
The Numbers: Deaths in the United States jumped again by more than a thousand yesterday, but the pandemic in New York City is easing a bit.
This morning the US has 368,449 cases and 10,993 deaths. New York State has more than a third of US cases with 4,758 deaths, 3,485 of them in New York City.
The Army Corps of Engineers is building 22 field hospitals and alternate care sites in 18 states
The global fatality rate is about six percent with 1,359,398 cases and 75,945 deaths.
Now Hear This: Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly boarded the aircraft carrier USS Roosevelt and delivered a speech trashing the ship’s dismissed captain for going around the chain of command to get help dealing with the coronavirus aboard ship.
“If he didn’t think, in my opinion, that this information wasn’t going to get out into the public, in this day and information age that we live in, then he was either A, too naive or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this,” Modly said about Capt. Brett Crozier.
Crozier had pleaded with his commanders to get sailors off his ship as the virus spread on board. After he left, he was diagnosed with the virus himself.
Modly admitted that he didn’t mind Crozier speaking up, only that his memo about the virus went public and embarrassed the Navy. Sailors could be heard on a recording of Modly speech protesting and shouting, “He was only trying to help us,” but Modly said, “It was betrayal.” He went on, “And I can tell you one other thing: because he did that, he put it in the public’s forum, and it’s now become a big controversy in Washington, DC, and across the about a martyr CO, who wasn’t getting the help he needed.”
So that’s it. they just didn’t want anyone to know.
The Bulletin Board: In a harbinger of what may come with elections, the conservative majority on Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court, rejected the Democratic governor’s attempt to postpone in-person voting in their presidential primary and local elections to be held today. Republican leaders tend to think that when fewer people vote, the better they do.— Stocks surged yesterday on news that the coronavirus may be peaking in some of the world’s hotspots. The S&P 500 was up 7.3 percent and the Dow Jones up 7.73 percent. The Dow finished at 22,679.99, far off its record high earlier this year of 29,551. — Australia’s highest court overturned the sexual abuse conviction of 78-year-old Cardinal George Pell, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic leader ever found guilty in the church’s pedophilia scandal. The judges ruled that the charges were “unreasonable or cannot be supported by the evidence.” The critical testimony of a choirboy who accused Pell was never made public.
The Obit Page: Honor Blackman, the knockout judo expert who played “Pussy Galore” opposite Sean Connery in the 1964 James Bond movie “Goldfinger,” has died at age 94.
Blackman had other roles in movies and television, but she and the name of her Bond character left an indelible mark. She could wear a sweater like no other woman. Her family said, she had “an extraordinary combination of beauty, brains, and physical prowess”. — Hall of famer Al Kaline, who broke into the big leagues at 18 with the Detroit Tigers at the beginning of a Hall of Fame career, has died at 85. He was so young the first day he showed up at the ball park a security guard wouldn’t let him in.
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