Author: Keith Preston

All Posts by Keith Preston

6 Mild Symptoms of Coronavirus You Shouldn’t Ignore, According to Doctors Reply

Health and Medicine • Tags:

An immediate problem that I see with this article is that the “symptoms” of COVID-19 appear to be becoming more and more numerous, and more and more identical to those of routine illnesses. This is precisely what happened with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. It got to where someone was given a diagnosis of “AIDS” if they had an “AIDS-defining disease,” with the list of such diseases becoming longer and longer (there are currently 22 “AIDS-defining diseases). People were being diagnosed with “AIDS” without ever having an HIV test (particularly in poor areas like African countries where testing was cost-prohibitive), and even in developed countries, people would be diagnosed with “AIDS” or as “HIV positive” either without tests or after having multiple tests with inconsistent results. There were also many cases of “false positives.” There is also evidence that the medical/pharmaceutical industry killed an entire generation of HIV patients with AZT. So, yes, scumbag though he is, Rush Limbaugh is correct when he says we shouldn’t trust medical and scientific experts as though what they say is divine revelation.

By Korin Miller

Prevention

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has made the symptoms of COVID-19 crystal clear: fever, cough, and shortness of breath. But as more and more people develop the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus, experts are seeing a wide range of symptoms in patients—and they tend to overlap with the common cold, flu, and even allergies.

The CDC maintains those big three are the symptoms of novel coronavirus, but the World Health Organization (WHO) has a more extensive list that includes 14 different symptoms detected in people with mild cases of COVID-19. That’s a big deal, since “most people infected with the COVID-19 virus have mild disease and recover,” per a February report of a joint World Health Organization-China mission. In fact, that report found that 80% of confirmed patients had mild to moderate disease.

So, which coronavirus symptoms should you be paying closer attention to—and what should you do if you think you may be infected? Here’s what doctors want you to know.

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For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power Reply

Anarchism/Anti-State, Police State/Civil Liberties

By Selam Gebrekidan

New York Times

LONDON — In Hungary, the prime minister can now rule by decree. In Britain, ministers have what a critic called “eye-watering” power to detain people and close borders. Israel’s prime minister has shut down courts and begun an intrusive surveillance of citizens. Chile has sent the military to public squares once occupied by protesters. Bolivia has postponed elections.

As the coronavirus pandemic brings the world to a juddering halt and anxious citizens demand action, leaders across the globe are invoking executive powers and seizing virtually dictatorial authority with scant resistance.

Governments and rights groups agree that these extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. States need new powers to shut their borders, enforce quarantines and track infected people. Many of these actions are protected under international rules, constitutional lawyers say.

But critics say some governments are using the public health crisis as cover to seize new powers that have little to do with the outbreak, with few safeguards to ensure that their new authority will not be abused.

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Why the progressive movement is suddenly torn over AOC Reply

Activism, Electoralism/Democratism, Strategy • Tags:

For those who ever thought Alexandria was a serious radical or revolutionary, remember that she was an intern for Ted Kennedy, memorialized (as opposed to celebrating) the death of John McCain, and has never taken positions any more “radical” than do-gooder reformist and SJWish ones. She has never had anti-imperialism as a core focus of her politics, not even on the level of a moderate anti-interventionist like Tulsi Gabbard. She has never had much interest in class politics beyond conventional welfare statism. Her “Green New Deal” is, at best, an effort to shift the focus of state-capitalism/crony-capitalism away from Big Oil toward Big Green. And she seems to subscribe to the standard SJW paradigm on “social issues.” At what point has she ever called for dismantling, the overthrow of the ruling class, or global anti-imperialism? Nowhere, as far I can tell.

By Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein

Politico

Soon after her upset primary victory against a Democratic Party boss in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez traveled to St. Louis to prove her victory wasn’t a one-off by campaigning for Cori Bush, who was similarly taking on a longtime Democratic congressman.

“What I’m asking for you to do is to support my sister, Cori Bush,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a rally. “It is so important what we did, we just came off of this win in New York, but people were trying to say, ‘It’s just one place.’”

Bush lost that race but is challenging Rep. William “Lacy” Clay again in an August primary. She has more money and higher name recognition, and earned the endorsement of Bernie Sanders. But Ocasio-Cortez isn’t helping Bush this time.

After her victory in 2018, Ocasio-Cortez encouraged progressives to follow in her footsteps and run for Congress with the backing of the left-wing group Justice Democrats, even if it meant taking on powerful incumbents. Sixteen months later, the Missouri primary isn’t the only one Ocasio-Cortez is steering clear of.

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Coronavirus forces San Francisco to put homeless into hotels Reply

Economics/Class Relations, Health and Medicine • Tags: , ,

The news ain’t all bad.

By Nathan Frandino, Shannon Stapleton, Katie Paul and Stephen Nellis

Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The coronavirus crisis is beginning to do something the city of San Francisco has been unable to accomplish for years – move homeless people off the streets and into shelters, including some of the city’s now-empty hotels.

Faced with the prospect the virus could rip through the nearly 10,000 people who live on the streets or in shelters, city officials are securing 4,500 rooms for those who need to self-quarantine. The rooms would also be for homeless residents who need to isolate themselves and cannot be sent back into the community without risking infecting others.

The hotels may additionally house high-risk individuals among the 19,000 people living in single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings with shared kitchens and bathrooms who similarly cannot self-isolate.

At least 160 people who either tested positive for the coronavirus or were awaiting results were being referred to hotels as of March 25, city officials said.

“The hospitals will not discharge them to the street,” said Trent Rhorer, executive director of the city’s Human Services Agency. “They’ll only discharge people who are able to self-quarantine.”

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Axios editor blames ‘conservatives on Twitter’ for how certain red states have responded to COVID-19 Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Health and Medicine • Tags:

By Becket Adams

Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei holds conservative and right-wing media responsible for how certain red states have responded to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Congratulations, Rush Limbaugh. You are the first person in history to rule as the unofficial governor of multiple U.S. states. Stacey Abrams must be so jealous.

VandeHei’s remarks came Thursday amid a broader discussion ripping into Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who announced recently that he just learned that asymptomatic victims of the virus are as contagious as those who are obviously ill, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who only recently issued a “stay-at-home” order for the Sunshine State.

“What you’re seeing here, and this is a bigger problem for society, is information inequality,” VandeHei said during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “Like, why did DeSantis do what he did? Why did Georgia wait so long?”

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What Will Happen When Red States Need Help? Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Health and Medicine • Tags:

By Peter Nicholas

CNN

It shouldn’t be all that remarkable when two leaders talk in a crisis. On Sunday morning, President Donald Trump got on the phone with Mayor Bill de Blasio to discuss what New York City needs to survive a white-hot outbreak that is only getting worse. De Blasio asked him to send more ventilators and military personnel, warning that in a week’s time, the health-care system could be overwhelmed.

Yet with these particular leaders at this particular point in history, it is remarkable. Until recently, de Blasio told me, none of his calls to the upper reaches of the White House were returned. Two weeks ago, the Democratic mayor said publicly that Trump was “betraying” his native city by not sending more life-saving medical equipment. Ever sensitive to criticism, Trump said, in turn: “I’m not dealing with him.”

Defeating a pandemic is hard enough, but Trump has introduced another layer of complexity: He has personalized the battlefield. He calls COVID-19 “the invisible enemy,” but he also seems fixated on the visible variety—all Democratic leaders, who in his view have been insufficiently grateful for the federal government’s response. A stray complaint about equipment shortages invites a public feud with the man controlling the spigot. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” the president said at a news conference last week.

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How we can combat coronavirus and political division at the same time (opinion) Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Health and Medicine • Tags:

By Julia A. Minson

CNN

If you are like me, you have had several encounters with friends, neighbors and relatives who, in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, behaved in some way that almost made your blood boil.

These could range from general assertions that we are “overreacting,” to concrete plans to take that vacation or hold that birthday party because “It’ll be ok.” This perspective violates the scientific consensus supported by most of the medical and public health community — and is contributing to putting lives at risk by helping to spread the pandemic.

Even people who wholeheartedly agree with the scientific consensus have sometimes responded in unhelpful and dangerous ways, including hoarding face masks, toilet paper and even guns.

What do you do when in the midst of a life-threatening, economy-destroying, terror-inducing public health crisis people around you seem to disregard their government — or behave in otherwise irrational ways?

Most responses I have seen involve condescending and ever-less-patient explanations of why the person in front of you is wrong; public shaming, often on social media, often in ALL CAPS; and gradual escalation into eye-rolling and raised voices. It doesn’t help that, according to a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on March 14, the attitudes and beliefs about coronavirus have become politicized: for example, while 68% of Democrats believe that coronavirus is a serious threat to the health of their family, only 40% of Republicans think so.

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Even in states hit harder by the coronavirus, views of the outbreak correlate to partisanship Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Health and Medicine • Tags:

By Philip Bump

Washington Post

One of the interesting and alarming aspects of the steady spread of the coronavirus across the country is the extent to which views of the pandemic differ by political party. Republicans consistently report less concern about the virus and that they’re taking fewer actions meant to slow the virus’s spread.

This partisan difference is clearly in part a function of President Trump’s approach to the emergence of the virus, an approach that has only sporadically deviated from unrealistically optimistic predictions and assessments of the administration’s efforts. It may also be a function of geography: Three-quarters of the coronavirus cases in the United States were confirmed in blue states. The virus has been slower to emerge in more rural states, which tend to vote more heavily Republican, though even smaller states are seeing exponential growth in confirmed cases.

This raises an interesting question. Are Republicans more skeptical of the effects of the virus because they’re Republicans or because they live in places where the virus isn’t as prevalent?

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The pandemic is dividing blue cities from their red states Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Health and Medicine

By Ronald Brownstein

CNN

The struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic has opened a new front in the long-running conflict between blue cities and red states.

Across a wide array of states with Republican governors, many of the largest cities and counties — most of them led by Democrats — moved aggressively to limit economic and social activity. State officials, meanwhile, refused to impose the strictest statewide standards to fight the virus.

A chorus of big-city officials in red states from Florida, Georgia and Mississippi to Texas, Arizona and Missouri urged their governors to establish uniform statewide rules, arguing that refusing to do so undercut their local initiatives by increasing the risk the disease would cluster in neighboring areas — from which it could easily reinfect their populations.

On Tuesday afternoon, after weeks of complaints from local officials and medical officials, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statewide order restricting social interactions to essential activities (albeit with some conspicuous exceptions). Others have followed suit.

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Partisan reaction to uneven COVID spread Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Health and Medicine • Tags:

By Dante Chinni

NBC News

WASHINGTON — The spread of the COVID-19 virus has not occurred evenly around the country. Urban areas, such as New York City, have been harder than rural locales and that difference in impacts follows some of the deep partisan political splits in the country.

Democrats and Republicans seem to be experiencing the coronavirus differently and that may be playing a role in how they see the pandemic – at least for now.

As of Friday this week, there were more than 102,000 confirmed cases of the virus in the United States and roughly 1,700 counties had at least one confirmed case, according to data from USAFacts, which is updating maps of virus data daily. But look at those numbers through the prism of the 2016 election and they are hitting Democratic-leaning counties much harder.

About 77 percent of those confirmed cases were in the 490 counties that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. And the overwhelming majority of those Clinton counties, 81 percent, had at least one case. Meanwhile, there were more than 2600 counties that voted for President Trump in 2016, but they hold only 19 percent of the cases. On the whole, only 50 percent of those Trump counties have a single case.

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Partisanship is the strongest predictor of coronavirus response Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Health and Medicine • Tags:

By David Roberts

Vox

The US is a land divided. Americans have sorted themselves into opposing factions, with different values, sources of authority, and shared understandings. In some ways, there is no longer any meaningful US “public,” but rather two publics that want and believe different things.

The current state of deep polarization in the US is the subject of a great deal of discussion and research right now, including in an excellent new book by my colleague Ezra Klein. One aspect of it that I have highlighted in a number of posts (start here) is what I call America’s epistemic crisis. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with knowledge and how we come to know things; the crisis is that, as a polity, we have become incapable of learning or knowing the same things, and thus, incapable of acting together in a coherent fashion.

I have been wondering when that epistemic crisis might spiral out into a full-fledged political crisis. I wondered if it might happen around the Mueller investigation, or when Trump sent 5,000 troops to the southern border to stop a phantom migrant invasion, or when Trump was impeached.

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In states’ coronavirus response, a red/blue divide Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Health and Medicine • Tags:

By Jess Bidgood

Boston Globe

It was Saturday night on a main street in the South, but locals described something odd: One side of the street was almost normal, if quiet, with restaurants serving dinner and groups of young people milling around. The other side of the street looked practically vacant.

“There was no foot traffic on the left side,” recalled business owner Janet Atwell, 51.

Both sides of State Street are in cities called Bristol, but the left side is Virginia, the right side is Tennessee and the yellow line down the middle of the road is both a state border and a new frontier in this country’s uneven response to the coronavirus outbreak that often is breaking down along partisan lines.

The different scenes on either side of the pavement reflected the differing pace of the two state’s governors as they seek to contain the pandemic. On that Saturday night on March 21, Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia, a Democrat, had established stricter limits on public gatherings than Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee, a Republican. Since then, both governors have banned dining inside restaurants and public gatherings of more than 10 people, but Northam has ordered a larger swath of nonessential businesses to close.

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Rush Limbaugh: Don’t Trust ‘Deep State’ Health Experts About Covid! Reply

Health and Medicine, Religion and Philosophy

Contra Kyle, Rush is not wrong to say that we should question medical and scientific authorities. Historically, there are plenty of examples of the medical and scientific establishment being not only wrong but complicit in systems of tyrannical political authority (e.g., eugenics, Lysenkoism, the “racial hygiene” policies of the Third Reich, Chinese organ harvesting). See Foucault’s work in this area or Thomas Szasz’s critique of the “therapeutic state.” Where Rush goes wrong is with the selectively of the authorities that he criticizes.

Report: 78% of American Corporations Living Stimulus to Stimulus Reply

Economics/Class Relations

It’s interesting how these parody sites like the Hard Times, the Onion, and the Babylon Bee are now the most honest and accurate forms of journalism.

By Zach Russell

The Hard Times

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Commerce issued a concerning report this morning, finding that 78% of American corporations are barely scraping by and living stimulus to stimulus, sources laying naked atop a tiger pelt confirmed.

“It’s dire straits for hard-working legal entities in America, with many businesses struggling to dole out even a cool million in fun money to execs like me,” commented Royal Caribbean’s CEO Richard Fain while holding back tears as he opened a safe hidden behind a painting that was only half full of gold and ivory. “Corporations have already done everything we can to cut operating expenses — we slashed health benefits, reinvested our employees’ 401k accounts into stock buyback plans for our board members, and it’s still not enough. Hell, American Airlines euthanized half their flight crew, but Uncle Sam just pulls his purse strings tighter, sliding us mere single-digit billions: proof the federal government doesn’t give two shits about struggling Ltd’s. We have sharks and huge tanks to buy, damn it!”

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