Hawaii officials on Friday said they have confirmed the state's first case of the new coronavirus in a man who had been on a cruise ship from California to Mexico that had other infected passengers.

The man fell ill after flying home to Oahu from Mexico after the Grand Princess cruise that was scheduled Feb. 11-21, Deputy State Epidemiologist Sarah Kemble said. He did not have symptoms of the disease while he was traveling home, which means he wasn't at risk for transmitting the disease to others at the time, Kemble said.

Could the flu vaccine combat the coronavirus? That's the question President Donald Trump asked during a White house roundtable discussion between his coronavirus task force and pharmaceutical company executives on Monday (March 2).

His question was answered with a direct "no" from an executive.

The left-wing Hollywood celebrities are stoking public hysteria over the coronavirus, using social media to spread fear as well as disinformation about President Donald Trump’s response to the deadly global outbreak.

OFFICIALS have secretly arranged for 200 mobile morgues to be sent across the country.

Local authorities were emailed about the extra capacity for 15,000 bodies to help manage “peaks in demand”.

Entrepreneurial Russians looking to make a quick buck out of coronavirus fears are out of luck. Following concerns about stocks of medical supplies, the government has stepped in to thwart those trying to profit from the panic.

As the worldwide death toll now stands above 3,000, the Russian Ministry of Trade has temporarily prohibited the export of certain items, such as masks and protective suits, as the country seeks to keep the infection contained.

The ban, detailed on the website of the cabinet of ministers, covers a wide range of medical equipment ranging from bandages, to shoe covers, to disinfectant. The new rules will not affect supplies crossing the border for personal use or humanitarian aid, and will last until June 1. It comes on the same day that Germany introduced similar measures.

A poll has claimed that just one in five Germans are confident that Angela Merkel’s government can handle a widespread outbreak of the coronavirus.

The survey, which was conducted by polling firm INSA for German tabloid Bild, showed that close to half (44 per cent) of the German public said they do not trust Merkel’s government to have made all the necessary preparations for an outbreak.

While confidence in the government’s preparedness is higher among men than women, only 23 per cent of men trust in the ability of the government.

Though Gov. Ron DeSantis announced earlier Friday that Florida had no new cases of coronavirus, the Florida Department of Health said late Friday that two people had died from the contagion.

One of the deaths involved a patient with a previously unannounced case in Lee County. That case is considered presumptive positive as it has not yet been confirmed by the CDC. The other involved a man in his 70s in Santa Rosa County, which was announced on Thursday and is confirmed. Officials say the man from Santa Rosa County traveled internationally and had underlying health conditions.

There are also two new additional presumptive positive cases in Broward County.

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) this week released a survey showing that 44 percent of respondents said they have thought about suicide since joining the military, with only 10 percent saying they had thought about it prior to military service.

The top veteran advocacy organization’s 10th annual survey was issued over a three-week period in December and January to all IAVA member veterans and over 1,700 veterans responded.

Only 15 percent of those surveyed said the U.S. is making progress on combating military and veteran suicide. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said they personally know a post-9/11 veteran who has attempted suicide, up from 65 percent in 2019 and 54 percent in 2015.

Sixty-two percent of those polled said they personally know a veteran who has died by suicide, up from 59 percent in 2019, 45 percent in 2015, and 40 percent in 2014.

DESPITE A MASSIVE coronavirus-related public health crisis, an anti-Iran pressure group with close ties to the Trump administration is urging major pharmaceutical companies to “end their Iran business,” focusing on companies with special licenses — most often under a broadly defined “humanitarian exemption” — to conduct trade with Iran.

With a novel strain of coronavirus rapidly spreading around the world, Iran has been hit particularly hard, with 107 deaths and 3,515 infections recorded so far. Yet the pressure group, United Against Nuclear Iran, is carrying on with its campaign targeting medical trade with Iran despite the Trump administration’s special financial channels for humanitarian goods and medicine to reach the beleaguered country.

Health authorities in Russia’s capital have imposed a state of “high alert” and a series of new measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus, directing anyone returning from virus-stricken locales to self-isolate.
Returnees from trips abroad – namely from China, Iran, South Korea, Germany, France, Italy and Spain – have been asked to relay details of their travel to health officials, and to self-quarantine for a period of 14 days, according to a decree published on the Moscow mayor’s website on Thursday. That means forgoing work, studies and limiting visits to public places.

“The situation with coronavirus in the city is relatively calm… but, despite the measures taken, there is information about new cases,” Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin wrote in a blog post explaining the move.

SOURCE: BREITBART
French President Emmanuel Macron ordered the seizure of all stocks and future production of medical face masks in the face of a growing threat from Coronavirus, and a spate of looting of masks from medical facilities.

The China-origin Coronavirus, which has already killed a known 3,190 people worldwide is becoming more established in Europe, with worst-impacted nation Italy’s death toll standing at 79. Neighbouring France has seen a comparatively modest four deaths, but the French government hasn’t baulked at launching a series of sweeping measures under the guise of public health.

Several years back when everyone was freaking out about the H1N1 swine flu, health authorities promised a “miracle” vaccine that, in the end, was shown to be far more dangerous than the swine flu itself because it caused permanent brain damage. Well, now this same situation is happening all over again with the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19), with promised vaccines that will more than likely come with similar damaging adverse effects.

SOURCE: EUREK ALERT
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Young children from low-income homes whose mothers reported frequent use of toxic chemicals such as household cleaners were more likely to show delays in language development by age 2, a new study found.

In addition, the children scored lower on a test of cognitive development. These developmental delays were evident even when the researchers took into account factors such as the education and income of mothers, which are also linked to their children's language and cognitive skills.

The findings provide additional evidence of the need for pediatricians and other health care providers to counsel parents of young children to restrict their use of toxic household chemicals, said Hui Jiang, lead author of the study and senior research associate at The Ohio State University.

The US Could be the prime culprit behind Covid-2019 outbreak that hit China and then Iran, head of its elite Revolutionary Guards claimed, threatening that the virus will eventually be turned against those who unleashed it.

“It is possible that this virus is a product of a biological attack by America which initially spread to China and then to Iran and the rest of the world," Hossein Salami said on Thursday.

He vowed that Iran would "fight" the virus and cautioned that the illness "will return" to the United States, if Washington was indeed responsible for the outbreak.

The most commonly reported mainstream media account of the creation of the Coronavirus suggests that it was derived from an animal borne microorganism found in a wild bat that was consumed by an ethnic Chinese resident of Wuhan. But there appears to be some evidence to dispute that in that adjacent provinces in China, where wild bats are more numerous, have not experienced major outbreaks of the disease. Because of that and other factors, there has also been considerable speculation that the Coronavirus did not occur naturally through mutation but rather was produced in a laboratory, possibly as a biological warfare agent.

An Iranian specialist in infectious diseases and a member of the National Committee for Influenza, Dr Masoud Mardani expected that nearly 40 per cent of Iranians living in the capital, Tehran will be infected with the coronavirus.

Dr Mardani said in an interview with Iran newspaper that an infected person could transmit the virus to four people at the same time. Therefore it is expected that 30-40 per cent of Tehran’s population will be infected with the virus by March.

y all accounts, the outbreak of coronavirus in Iran poses a major existential threat that could overwhelm the healthcare system and other resources to combat the disease, which has been sweeping across the country like a tsunami.

At the same time, it has delivered a significant blow to the legitimacy of coercive US sanctions on Iran, giving them a new air of cruelty unsustainable by any civilisational standard. Unless the US government steps back from its “maximum pressure strategy” - at least for the duration of this epidemic - the sanctions regime is bound to be stigmatised in the world community as an art of dangerous cruelty, rather than a legitimate foreign policy tool.

"The worst is yet to come."

That's the self-explanatory title of Nomura's latest analysis assessing the consequences from the coronavirus pandemic, and which comes just two weeks after the Japanese bank issued its first preliminary assessment on the fallout from the global pandemic, which as readers will recall we found unduly optimistic. Well, a lot has happened since then, and as the report's title suggests, the outlook has deteriorated sharply.

In the bank's new base case, it revises down further its Q1 2020 GDP growth forecast for China to 0% y-o-y, and for the world to 0.9%. While Nomura still envisages a V-shaped global recovery in Q2 in its new base case, it now has a “U” in its new "bad scenario" and a downright depressionary “L” (non) recovery in the new severe scenario.

Buckle up. We’re not riding on a smooth superhighway. These roads are extremely bumpy and rough.

Public health agencies and the press are casting out a blizzard of confusing terms:

presumptive cases, infected persons, asymptomatic persons, confirmed cases, containment measures, persons connected to persons who are infected…

It is my understanding that, now, the CDC is lumping together presumptive cases and confirmed cases, and calling them: CASES.

British supermarkets are prepared for food riots if panic buying becomes widespread in the worst-cast scenario of a coronavirus pandemic, a retail expert has said.

Former Tesco supply chain director Bruno Monteyne said a major outbreak of the virus would result in 'panic buying, empty shelves and food riots' but that at this stage retailers would revert to 'feed the nation' status to avoid anyone going hungry.

It came as Boris Johnson tried to reassure Britons he would 'keep the country fed' and urged people to refrain from stockpiling essentials as photos circulated of empty shelves in supermarkets.

However, despite the demand on food retailers, it was a different picture elsewhere. High streets and shopping centres were today seen largely deserted as shoppers stayed at home - partly over concerns about catching the disease.

Two more coronavirus cases are now confirmed in New York City. Importantly, the origin of these cases cannot be found, meaning it’s almost certainly a local, sustained outbreak in NYC. This means NYC infections are about to explode. “Neither patient has a connection to travel nor any of the other local individuals diagnosed with COVID-19,” tweeted Mayor Bill de Blasio.

– The State of Texas has now confirmed a Houston resident as positive for the coronavirus. A secondary positive test is currently pending. The Texas DSHS says the case is “travel related” and did not originate in Texas. It’s unknown how many other people in Houston were exposed before this patient was identified as infected.

– The first case has now been identified in Nevada.

– New Jersey now has its first positive case for coronavirus. It’s a male in his 30s, demonstrating yet again that the coronavirus can strike anyone at any age, not just the elderly.

Pakistan's farmers are struggling to combat the worst locust plague in nearly three decades as insect swarms decimate entire harvests in the country's agricultural heartlands and send food prices soaring.

Heavy rains and cyclones sparked 'unprecedented' breeding and the explosive growth of locust populations on the Arabian peninsula early last year, according to the United Nations.

The insects have since fanned out and wreaked havoc on farms from East Africa to India before making their way into Pakistan from the desert on the country's southwestern border with Iran.

Several people stationed at the 110 Creil airbase outside Paris have fallen ill with coronavirus, the French military confirmed, with the base effectively being placed on lockdown. Defense Minister Florence Parly confirmed on Friday that a number of coronavirus cases have been registered at the military facility, located to the North of the French capital, RT reported.

“We have to understand, we are in the midst of a global epidemic,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a press conference, “the most dangerous of these epidemics in the last 100 years."

An exclusive private school in Stockholm, which counts Swedish royalty among its pupils, closed on Thursday after a pupil tested positive for the coronavirus, the royal court said.

Attended by Princess Estelle, granddaughter of King Carl XVI Gustaf and second in line to the throne, the Campus Manilla school draws its pupils from Sweden’s wealthiest families.

“They have had a pupil at the school who has tested positive for the coronavirus, that’s the reason they closed the school,” the court’s press secretary Johan Tegel told Reuters.

Today I finished tweaking the first draft of a pandemic projection model that simulates the spread of the coronavirus in the United States. The assumptions of the model are explained here, and you will find they are extremely conservative (using R0 value of just 1.82, for example).

The model’s predictions are nothing short of apocalyptic if the virus is allowed to spread without restraint across the United States. According to the model, there will be 2.16 million dead Americans by July 4th if domestic travel is not aggressively halted very soon (see the full projections below). This is not a prediction, since I believe that state governments and the federal government will intervene long before July 4th to declare, essentially, medical martial law.

That is now the only remaining option to stop the spread. It must be done soon. It may already be too late to prevent millions from getting infected.

There are now 226 confirmed coronavirus infections across America, meaning my projections over the last two weeks have been overly optimistic. In truth, the coronavirus epidemic in America is exploding faster than I feared. (It seems like only yesterday that Trump was confident there were only “15 cases” in America that would fade quickly.)

Reye’s syndrome is a rare disorder that causes brain and liver damage. Although it can happen at any age, it is most often seen in children.

Reye’s syndrome usually occurs in children who have had a recent viral infection, such as chickenpox or the flu. Taking aspirin to treat such an infection greatly increases the risk of Reye’s.

A team of scientists created a vaccine that may have been able to prevent the deadly coronavirus outbreak, but they were never able to get funding to commence clinical trials, experts told Congress on Thursday.

Dr Peter Hotez, co-director of the Centre for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital, testified before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee as health officials confirmed at least 160 cases of the Wuhan coronavirus in at least 17 states across the country.

“We had the vaccine ready to go," the doctor told lawmakers about a vaccine his team developed to protect against a strain of coronavirus in 2016, but "by then nobody was interested in a coronavirus vaccine."

All five remaining instruments on NASA's venerable Voyager 2 spacecraft are back to gathering science data after power overuse in late January interrupted the probe's operations.

NASA made the announcement yesterday (March 3), over a month after the incident occurred. Troubleshooting for the spacecraft is a slow process because of its distance from Earth; it takes 17 hours for each command to reach the probe and for data indicating its efficacy to reach engineers.

An Iranian military leader has suggested that the coronavirus is not a naturally occurring disease, and that it is a manmade bioweapon cultivated and released against China and Iran by a ‘hostile state’.

Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, an Iranian officer in charge of the country’s Civil Defense Organization claimed Tuesday that “A study of the consequences of the virus in terms of tolls or the extent of the epidemic and the type of media propaganda over this issue that is aimed at increasing fear and panic among people strengthens the speculations that a biological attack has been launched against China and Iran with economic goals.”

Strongly hinting that the the virus is a bio-attack by the US, Jalali told Iranian Fars News Agency, state media, that he is seeking “laboratorial investigations and comparing the genome of the primary virus and the new genomes” to confirm his theory.

SOURCE: MAC SLAVO
As Americans scramble to prepare themselves for the possibility that the coronavirus outbreak becomes a pandemic, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is also preparing. FEMA is “aware of the gravity of the situation” and ready to assist in a coronavirus response.

FEMA officials are preparing for an “infectious disease emergency declaration” by the president that would allow the agency to provide disaster relief funding to state and local governments, as well as federal assistance to support the coronavirus response, according to agency planning documents reviewed by NBC News.

The International Housewares Association calls off a show that brings nearly 60,000 people who book more than 47,000 room nights at area hotels.

'We hold these truths to be self-evident: all men and women are created, by the, you know the, you know the thing,' the gaffe-prone former vice president said.

Former Vice President Joe Biden spoke to supporters in Los Angeles on Tuesday, following a string of early Super Tuesday victories in states including Massachusetts, Minnesota, Virginia and North Carolina.

Biden hailed House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), whose endorsement of Biden proved instrumental to the former vice president’s landslide victory in the South Carolina primary over the weekend.

His staggering victory in the Southern state could be what has given Biden the burst of momentum seen in the early Super Tuesday nominating contests.

Yonhap reports that South Korea has reported 438 new cases of the novel coronavirus, bringing the national total to 5,766. Most of the new cases were identified in the southeastern Daegu, a city of 2.5 million and the epicenter of the outbreak.

As of Thursday morning in Seoul, the death toll had climbed to 35, mostly elderly patients with underlying illnesses.

So far, roughly 60% of SK cases have been linked to a branch of the Shincheonji church in Daegu.

Beijing Ditan Hospital affiliated to the Capital Medical University said on March 4 that the first patient with novel coronavirus pneumonia complicated with encephalitis was discharged from the hospital on February 25.

Chinese scientists studying the new coronavirus have found two new primary strains of the disease - one of which appears to be far more aggressive.

The researchers, from Peking University's School of Life Sciences, discovered a milder "S-type" strain, and an "L-type" which is highly infectious and currently accounts for around 70% of cases, according to The Telegraph. The researchers cautioned that their preliminary findings looked at a limited number of cases (103), and that follow-up studies with larger data sets are needed to better understand the virus's evolution.

A genetic analysis of the coronavirus found in a man who tested positive in the United States on January 21 also showed that it's possible to be infected with both strains.

A seafood market at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak has been demolished two months after it was closed down, according to journalist Jennfer Zeng.

For a while now I have been hearing it said that Americans are “in a panic” over the coronavirus outbreak in the US, and that mainstream media outlets are “feeding the fear”. This is an odd conclusion to come to and something worth noting, because the truth is mostly the opposite. For the past couple of months the WHO, the CDC and even Donald Trump have been dismissing Covid 19 as nothing much to worry about. The WHO actually still refuses to call it a pandemic even though the virus meets all of their own criteria.

In the United States and throughout the Western World there is public distrust of public authorities and distrust among the public of one another. Public authorities who do not like “conspiracy theories” do a lot to generate them.

We can see the public’s distrust of public authorities in the negligent response to the coronavirus. The refusal of public authorities to stop incoming flights from infected countries has brought the dangerous virus into the Western World where inaction has so far prevailed.

Many virologists and other experts have criticized the inaction for seriously endangering the public. I recently posted some of the expert statements made to public health authorities. See:

Residents of a Washington county where 31 people have tested positive for coronavirus and nine people have died are being advised to work from home to avoid possible exposure to the killer strain.

Public health officials in King County, which includes Seattle and is home to over 2.2 million people, have urged local businesses to allow employees to telecommute for the next three weeks in an effort to curb the COVID-19 outbreak.

They are also recommending that higher-risk groups - including people over the age of 60, pregnant women and people with underlying health conditions or weakened immune systems - stay home and away from large social gatherings.

An office of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the state of Washington has been closed for two weeks after an employee fell ill with COVID-19. The employee had apparently contracted the virus after visiting a relative at a nursing facility which is experiencing an outbreak of COVID-19.

Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf made the announcement at the beginning of his congressional testimony on Tuesday. Wolf revealed that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office in Tukwila in King County, Washington will be closed for 14 days after an employee had contracted the virus. The employee had previously visited the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington where a number of cases of the coronavirus (COVID-19) have been reported.

The continued effort to overthrow President Maduro does not seem to produce the intended results for the perpetrators, but rather sends signals of desperation. The regime change plotters may be wishing to achieve what they did in Bolivia. But that is not likely to happen anytime soon. That must cause some political frustration in Washington and of course more resistance in Caracas.

Iran's First Vice President has reportedly contracted coronavirus as the death toll soared to 92 today, exceeding Italy's, with the worsening contagion prompting the regime to cancel Friday prayers.

Tehran announced total infections rose to 2,922 on Wednesday and it was said the country's most senior VP, Eshaq Jahangiri, was the latest high-profile figure to contract the disease.

Iranians were told Friday prayers - deeply significant in the Islamic Republic - were to be cancelled in the capital and in other areas after the death toll became the highest from the virus outside mainland China.

Microsoft Corp on Wednesday joined the growing number of US companies asking employees to work from home in order to limit exposure to the spreading coronavirus outbreak, as it responded to cases near its Seattle headquarters and in California.

Microsoft asked many of its employees in the Seattle region near its headquarters and the San Francisco Bay Area to work from home if possible until March 25.

"Taking these measures will ensure your safety and also make the workplace safer for those that need to be onsite," Executive Vice President Kurt DelBene told employees in a blog post.