China Holds Navy Drills in Pacific as U.S. Aircraft Carriers Hit by Coronavirus; China Claims Zero Infections in Its Military

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By Newsweek. The Chinese navy recently launched a series of naval drills to shore up its coastal capabilities in the Pacific, a region where China’s goals frequently clash with those of the United States.

The move comes as U.S. aircraft carriers suffered from outbreaks of the novel coronavirus disease that has already infected hundreds of sailors.

The People’s Liberation Army deployed Type 22 missile boats to the East Sea for four days of live-fire exercises late last month involving warfighting scenarios that an unnamed military expert told the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper on Thursday were designed to boost the vessels’ coast combat skills. Maneuvers also reportedly involved countermine, damage control and rescue operations.

The Type 22 fleet, dubbed “HOUBEI-class wave-piercing catamaran missile patrol boats” by the Pentagon, is designed to use stealth and speed to overcome much larger targets such as aircraft carriers, the premier symbol of U.S. power projection across the globe. In the Pacific, the U.S. has deployed aircraft carriers and advanced naval assets to challenge China’s vast territorial claims. (Read more from “China Holds Navy Drills in Pacific as U.S. Aircraft Carriers Hit by Coronavirus” HERE)

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China Claims Zero Infections in Its Military

By VOA News. While militaries around the world are seeing their soldiers fall victim to the coronavirus, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the world’s largest standing army, claims it remains virus-free.

“China Confirms No Cases of Coronavirus Infection in Military,” said a headline in an official military publication on March 3. There has been no public update on military infections since.

In addition to its 2 million-strong active-duty military troops, the country also has an 800,000-strong armed police force. During the height of the crisis, tens of thousands of soldiers, medics and support personnel were deployed into some of the most infected areas of China, including Wuhan, to fight on the front lines. (Read more from “China Claims Zero Infections in Its Military” HERE)

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Hospital Stops Hydroxychloroquine Treatment Over Major Cardiac Risk; NIH Begins Trial to Test Hydroxychloroquine for Treating COVID-19

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By Newsweek. A hospital in France has had to stop an experimental treatment using hydroxychloroquine on at least one coronavirus patient after it became a “major risk” to their cardiac health.

The University Hospital Center of Nice (CHU de Nice) is one of many hospitals trialing hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 patients. It announced it had been selected for the trial on March 22. A statement from the hospital said it was testing four experimental treatments, one of which included hydroxychloroquine. It hoped to establish its effectiveness and side effects of this and the other treatments being tested.

In an interview with the French daily newspaper Nice-Matin, Professor Émile Ferrari, the head of the cardiology department at the Pasteur hospital in Nice, said the side effects had already been identified, with some patients having to stop treatment because of the risk posed.

He said electrocardiogram recordings of patients involved with the trial were being constantly monitored. An ECG measures electrical activity in the heart, and represents this on a graph as a QT interval. Ferrari said these recordings are interpreted and, if anomalies are reported, treatment is stopped. (Read more from “Hospital Stops Hydroxychloroquine Treatment Over Major Cardiac Risk” HERE)

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NIH Begins Trial to Test Hydroxychloroquine for Treating COVID-19

By Reuters. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on Thursday it was testing anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19, days after several U.S. doctors said they were using the drug on infected patients without evidence that it worked.

The use of the decades-old drug, which has been touted by President Donald Trump as a potential weapon against COVID-19, has soared as the United States has quickly become the epicenter of the pandemic.

The study will evaluate the safety and the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and be conducted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH. (Read more from “NIH Begins Trial to Test Hydroxychloroquine for Treating COVID-19” HERE)

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China Expert: ‘I Don’t Know Why Anyone Takes China’s Epidemic Numbers Seriously’; Beijing Unnerved by Alleged U.S. Attempts to Undermine Chinese Communist Party Legitimacy

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By Fox News. Steven Mosher, author of “Bully of Asia,” joined “The Ingraham Angle” Tuesday to discuss China’s alleged coronavirus disinformation campaign and the numbers they are providing of cases and deaths.

“I don’t know why anyone takes China’s epidemic numbers seriously. The Chinese authorities have lied from the beginning of this outbreak. They don’t just fudge the numbers. They make them up out of whole cloth,” Mosher said. “You know, in Wuhan they tell us that from the beginning to the end of the epidemic in Wuhan, it’s not over yet by the way, that 2,535 died. Well, I think the number is more like 50,000. And let me tell you how I get that number. I get that number because the crematory ovens were going for 60 days and we estimate they were disposing of about a thousand corpses a day. That’s 60 thousand people.” . . .

Mosher called the push by China to change the narrative a “massive effort.”

“This is a massive effort on the part of China. It’s not just a few Twitter accounts. It’s thousands and thousands,” Mosher said, noting that the media failed to pick up any negative China stories. “And yet every Chinese embassy, every Chinese media outlet, including Hong Kong Phenix Television, which was in the press conference yesterday with President Trump, they’re all touting the Chinese, the great Chinese success in controlling the coronavirus epidemic when they haven’t controlled it at all. And they spread it around the world.” (Read more from “China Expert: ‘I Don’t Know Why Anyone Takes China’s Epidemic Numbers Seriously'” HERE)

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Beijing Unnerved by Alleged U.S. Attempts to Undermine Chinese Communist Party Legitimacy

By Washington Examiner. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent criticisms of China’s early response to the coronavirus pandemic have flustered Chinese officials, according to U.S. officials and analysts, following a series of rebukes that Beijing regarded as an attempt to split the Chinese Communist Party from the majority of Chinese people.

“That’s the CCP acknowledging that they view that issue as a third rail, and the U.S. should accept the propaganda framework that the party is China and China is the party,” Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Executive Director Marion Smith told the Washington Examiner. “The fact that the regime is so absurdly sensitive about this point reveals their existential dependence on a facade of legitimacy.”

Smith’s assessment came in response to recent Chinese complaints that the State Department is “attempting to drive a wedge between the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people.” That allegation came from a senior Chinese diplomat who began by protesting Pompeo’s crackdown on China’s state-run media operations in the United States but shifted to boasting about Beijing’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and the Party’s membership rolls.

“Faced with the horrific spread of COVID-19, the CPC and the Chinese government put people’s life and health as the first priority and left no patients behind,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters Friday. . .

That’s a sign of “arrogance,” though perhaps not anxiety, according to American observers. “I don’t see it so much as being worried as it is arrogance, but it does indicate that some of those comments have hit close to home,” a senior U.S. official told the Washington Examiner. “It is absolutely critical to the survival of the Chinese Communist Party that they maintain the illusion that they somehow embody and speak for the Chinese people.” (Read more from “Beijing Unnerved by Alleged U.S. Attempts to Undermine Chinese Communist Party Legitimacy” HERE)

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As Coronavirus Fears Grow, Doctors and Nurses Face Abuse, Attacks; Nurses Told Not Wear Scrubs Outside of Hospital Due to Abuse Over Coronavirus Fears

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By Washington Post. It’s hard enough being a doctor in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. But Sanjibani Panigrahi, a psychiatrist at a government hospital in western India, now finds her own neighbors turning against her.

“We are sure you have corona,” one woman recently shrieked at her, she says, — part of a torrent of abuse from residents at her apartment complex. “We will not allow you in the building.”

In some cities, health-care workers are earning standing ovations for the long, life-risking hours they’re putting in to battle the coronavirus. But in others, they’re facing discrimination and even attacks. (Read more from “As Coronavirus Fears Grow, Doctors and Nurses Face Abuse, Attacks” HERE)

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NSW Nurses Told Not Wear Scrubs Outside of Hospital Due to Abuse Over Coronavirus Fears

By ABC News. Nurses and midwives across NSW are being told to not wear their scrubs outside hospital in the wake of several healthcare workers reporting being assaulted and spat on by members of the public.

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard today lambasted the “unacceptable” behaviour of people who abused medical professionals because they believed they were spreading coronavirus. . .

The NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association (NMA) reported workers were being told by hospital administrators to not wear their uniforms to work after a spate of incidents.

One intensive care nurse at Royal North Shore hospital, the NMA said, was assaulted after boarding a train while wearing her scrubs, while another was screamed at in Coles when she stopped on her way home to get dinner. (Read more from “NSW Nurses Told Not Wear Scrubs Outside of Hospital Due to Abuse Over Coronavirus Fears” HERE)

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France Struggles With ‘Chilling’ COVID-19 Data From Nursing Homes; Italy Considers How to Move on After Coronavirus Peak

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By Politico. Even though older people are most at risk of developing COVID-19, French health authorities have struggled to get data on the spread of the coronavirus from a key source: nursing homes.

Weeks into the epidemic and shortly after a new reporting system was implemented, health officials raised concerns with Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s office about the difficulties they face with private care facilities for the elderly, according to internal emails seen by POLITICO.

At least 3,237 people have died from COVID-19 in the country’s nursing homes since early March, according to the most recent official statistics published Tuesday. That was an increase of 820 from the day before and brings France’s death toll to over 10,000. . .

The number of deaths in nursing homes is “objectively chilling,” said Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas, the prime minister’s head of Cabinet, in an email dated Sunday to Aurélien Rousseau, head of the Regional Health Agency (ARS) for the Paris region. (Read more from “France Struggles With ‘Chilling’ COVID-19 Data From Nursing Homes” HERE)

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Phase Two: Italy Considers How to Move on After Coronavirus Peak

By Al Jazeera. Nearly a month after a nationwide lockdown was implemented to prevent the spread of the virus that was ravaging through Italy’s north, there are government discussions and public debate about moving to “phase two” – a period during which citizens will have to learn to live with the virus and one which could risk another outbreak.

Italy is in the unfortunate position of being two to three weeks ahead of other European countries in fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

While figures suggest that the measures have achieved some level of success in slowing the rate of infection, it is likely they will remain in place over the coming Easter period, usually a time for gathering and celebration. . .

The Italian civil protection agency said the number of new infections had begun to decrease. But the daily recorded death toll remains high, 604 on Tuesday.

“Comforting data include the number of people who are admitted to hospital, which gives us a more accurate indication of how the epidemic is evolving compared with other data,” Matteo Villa, who has been crunching statistics for the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, told Al Jazeera. (Read more from “Phase Two: Italy Considers How to Move on After Coronavirus Peak” HERE)

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New Wuhan Horror: Witness Claims Coronavirus Victims Burned Alive!; Time to Put China on Lockdown for Its Dishonesty Amid Coronavirus Crisis

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By WND. Coronavirus patients in the Chinese city where the pandemic originated, Wuhan, were put in body bags and burned alive at a funeral home, Radio Free Asia reported.

A source close to the funeral industry surnamed Ma claimed that some crematories have stopped working after running day and night, sometimes cremating several bodies at once.

Ma said reports have emerged of people restrained and forced into body bags when they were still moving.

“One old lady was saying that they put one guy into … a body bag when he wasn’t even dead yet, and took him off to the crematorium because there was no way of saving him,” the source said.

“Some people are saying that … there are video clips of screams coming from funeral homes, from inside the furnaces … which tells us that some people were taken to the funeral homes while they were still alive.” (Read more from “New Wuhan Horror: Witness Claims Coronavirus Victims Burned Alive!” HERE)

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Time to Put China on Lockdown for Its Dishonesty Amid Coronavirus Crisis

By USA Today. There are many lessons to be learned from the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. But one is already clear: China needs to be isolated from the civilized world until its behavior improves. We are in the current situation, with deaths and economic devastation worldwide, because China handled this outbreak with its trademark mixture of dishonesty, incompetence and thuggery. Were China a more civilized nation, this outbreak would have been stopped early, and with far less harm, inside and outside of China. . .

But wherever the virus came from, China’s response was inept, dishonest and utterly inconsiderate of the rest of the world. A competent, honest response would have placed the world on notice much earlier. A China that cared about the rest of the world would have halted flights abroad while this disease was spreading, instead of allowing its citizens to spread willy-nilly around the globe. (As Brian Kennedy writes: “China seems to have taken the position that if they were to suffer the coronavirus, so too was the United States and the rest of the world. What else is to explain the continuation of flights from China to the United States at the rate of some 20,000 passengers a day, until President Trump wisely shut them down?”) . . .

This calls for a response.

The response needs to be harsh enough to teach the Chinese government a lesson, which means pretty harsh, as they appear to still think they can brazen this out. Among other things, the United States — and ideally the world community at large — need to sharply reduce economic relations with China. In particular, no one should be relying on them for medicines, medical equipment and other vital goods. (China’s state news service threatened to plunge America into a “mighty sea” of coronavirus by withholding critical medications.) Chinese scientists should no longer have easy access to Western laboratories or universities. Chinese political leaders should no longer find it easy to travel the world. (Read more from “Time to Put China on Lockdown for Its Dishonesty Amid Coronavirus Crisis” HERE)

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COVID-19: How the Chinese Communist Party Criminally Orchestrated a Global Pandemic Holocaust

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The pandemic spread of COVID-19 has been guided by the Chinese Communist Party since the first cases emerged in China in early November; not December. The number of COVID-19 cases that China reported to the WHO (82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths) amounts to one of the greatest criminal deceptions in history. The true number of deaths in China from the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is likely up in the hundreds of thousands; if not millions. However, even before China begin erecting make-shift hospitals in Wuhan at the height of the outbreak, it was already attempting to rewrite the COVID-19 narrative that it had the epidemic well under control – despite the fact that it had detained and executed whistle-blowers who spoke out against the regime’s handling of the crisis. And despite the fact that the CCP had also let 5 million potentially-infected people slip out of Wuhan China before enforcing the lock-down. None of these people were screened for SARS-CoV-2 according to the Wall Street Journal.

But China’s criminal negligence with this outbreak goes even beyond this. The Chinese Communist Party sent it agents all over the globe to scour the world for face masks beginning in late December and January. Their goal was to buy up all the face masks they could find in bulk in Western nations and ship them back to China. This directive left Western nations vulnerable and basically defenseless – even woefully unprepared whenever the virus struck in full force. PPE procurement by China and Chinese nationals was happening all over the US, while most Americans were sound asleep or too busy engrossed in social media or sports to even notice what was transpiring around them. (Read more from “COVID-19: How the Chinese Communist Party Criminally Orchestrated a Global Pandemic Holocaust” HERE)

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China Outraged After Brazil Minister Suggests COVID-19 Is Part of ‘Plan for World Domination’

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China has demanded an explanation from Brazil after the far-right government’s education minister linked the coronavirus pandemic to Beijing’s “plan for world domination”, in a tweet imitating a Chinese accent.

In the latest incident to strain ties between the two nations, minister Abraham Weintraub insinuated China was behind the global health crisis.

“Geopolitically, who will come out stronger from this global crisis?” he wrote on Twitter Saturday. “Who in Brazil is allied with this infallible plan for world domination?”

In the original Portuguese, his tweet substituted the letter “r” with capital “L” – “BLazil” instead of “Brazil,” for example – in a style commonly used to mock a Chinese accent.

China’s embassy in Brazil condemned Weintraub’s “absurd and despicable” tweet, calling it “highly racist”. “The Chinese government expects an official explanation from Brazil,” tweeted ambassador Yang Wanming. (Read more from “China Outraged After Brazil Minister Suggests COVID-19 Is Part of ‘Plan for World Domination'” HERE)

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Food Prices Are Surging After Virus Upends Supply Chains

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By Northwest Georgia News. As the coronavirus pandemic penetrates more deeply into global supply chains, prices for key staples are starting to soar in some parts of the world.

Rice and wheat — crops that account for about a third of the world’s calories — have been making rapid climbs in spot and futures markets. For countries that rely on imports, this is creating an added financial burden just as the pandemic shatters their economies and erodes their purchasing power. In Nigeria, for example, the cost of rice in retail markets soared by more than 30% in the last four days of March alone.

It’s unclear what the biggest drivers were for the retail prices, whether it was a trickle-down effect from grain futures or local logistical choke points or panic buying, or a combination. . .

There are also signs that price gains could be making their way to consumers for some foods in the U.S. Wholesale egg prices rose to a record as grocers boosted orders by as much as six times normal volumes. Beef also surged, though some of the gains have eased in the last week.

Wheat and rice are the world’s most consumed food crops. Staple-crop prices have a long history of fueling political instability. During the spikes of 2011 and 2008, there were food riots in more than 30 nations across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. (Read more from “Food Prices Are Surging After Virus Upends Supply Chains” HERE)

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As COVID-19 Spreads, Commodity Markets Rumble

By Mongabay. . .Across the world, countries are virtually shutting down in hopes that severe restrictions on movement and commercial activity inside their borders will slow the spread of the disease. The economic impact of these measures has already led some economists to predict a crisis to follow that could rival the 2008 recession — or worse.

Commodity markets are already starting to feel the squeeze, as producers anticipate an economic downturn that could last for months or longer. And economists say it may only be the beginning.

“It is obviously a little early to tell,” Sven Wunder, principal scientist at the European Forest Institute, said in an email to Mongabay. “Just one month ago, we were still at all-time US stock markets highs. But we could well see a game-changing 1929 type of watershed moment for the world economy.”

Economic crises have historically had a major impact on the environment. Reduced demand for commodities like timber, vegetable oil, and beef can alleviate pressure on forests, and extractive industries are less likely to invest in exploration or new projects during a recession. The precipitous decline in oil prices this year, for example, has already cut exploration budgets in Brazil by 20%.

So far, the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on commodity markets have been mixed. The price of timber dropped by nearly half in March on expectations of a slowdown in construction, and palm oil is down by nearly 15% since the beginning of 2020, partly due to a dramatic decline in oil prices that has reduced demand for biofuels. On April 2, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said that food prices have dropped overall, including a 12% decline in the vegetable oil price index. (Read more from “As COVID-19 Spreads, Commodity Markets Rumble” HERE)

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China’s First Confirmed COVID-19 Case Traced Back to November

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The first case of someone in China suffering from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, can be traced back to November 17, according to government data seen by the South China Morning Post.

Chinese authorities have so far identified at least 266 people who were infected last year, all of whom came under medical surveillance at some point.

Some of the cases were likely backdated after health authorities had tested specimens taken from suspected patients.
Interviews with whistle-blowers from the medical community suggest Chinese doctors only realized they were dealing with a new disease in late December. . .

According to the government data seen by the Post, a 55 year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to have contracted Covid-19 on November 17.

From that date onwards, one to five new cases were reported each day. By December 15, the total number of infections stood at 27 – the first double-digit daily rise was reported on December 17 – and by December 20, the total number of confirmed cases had reached 60. (Read more from “China’s First Confirmed COVID-19 Case Traced Back to November” HERE)

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