Covid 19 Pandemic By Country

"Universities have justified calling students back to campuses for educational purposes, but some experts say there is a less-exalted motivation: institutions need the money. More than in many other countries, universities in the United States have increasingly come to rely on tuition income and fees, including payments for housing and meals, to stay afloat, according to higher-education researcher Kevin McClure at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Higher-education consultants SimpsonScarborough, based in Alexandria, Virginia, surveyed more than 900 incoming first-year students in July and found that 40% might put off attending university, potentially slashing tuition income. And for universities that opt to hold only virtual classes, revenue from dining halls, housing, gyms, parking and other facilities that charge fees will drop precipitously. University presidents have been projecting massive budget shortfalls: $96 million at Boston University in Massachusetts, $100 million at University of Wisconsin Madison, $120 million at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, $375 million at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Although the US Congress allocated $14.25 billion in emergency spending for universities and colleges earlier this year, that is much too little to fill the financial holes that they face. And so the economic pressure to reopen, retain students, and get bodies into residence halls and cafeterias is intense. “Had universities been provided with resources that would have allowed them to shut down in the fall and operate virtually, I think every single one of them would have done it,” McClure says."

"At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, president Martha Pollack announced that the campus would be reopening because mathematical modelling suggested that there would be fewer COVID-19 cases that way. If the campus were kept closed, many students would still live in shared housing in and around Ithaca, a survey found. These students would drive an outbreak of some 7,200 cases, according to a model created by operations researcher Peter Frazier and his colleagues. That could be mitigated if the students were on campus and being tested regularly. In that scenario, the model predicts just 1,200 cases. Others question Cornell’s rationale. Inglesby says universities should tell students from outside the area to stay at home, rather than tailoring a plan around their desire to show up. “That’s not making decisions in the right order,” he says. Cornell sociologist Kim Weeden pointed out in a tweet that the survey was carried out in late spring, when cases were declining — and it didn’t poll the parents of students. “Whoever is footing the bills may have quite different ideas on the subject,” she wrote. Frazier says that merely urging students, many of whom have already signed leases, to stay at home would be a toothless request. And although fewer students might show up than planned to do so in May, his model still suggests keeping them on campus, where testing can be required, is safest overall. “The conclusion that residential is safer than online is really, really, robust to the number of students returning,” he says."

"In May, participants in a meeting of the Association of Independent Colleges & Universities in Massachusetts teamed up to model COVID-19’s spread on campuses. The resulting analysis suggests that outbreaks can be prevented during an 80-day shortened semester if students are tested every 2 days, even if the tests don’t catch every case. The cost would be about $470 per student. In response, a number of universities, including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, plan to test their residential students multiple times per week. They also plan to isolate students who test positive, and to trace their contacts. Researchers who are advising universities say that models are imperfect, but they remain one of the few scientific tools available to guide reopening decisions. “There is going to be no clinical trial; we have to model this,” says Rochelle Walensky, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and a co-author of the analysis of potential COVID-19 campus spread. She is also a member of the Harvard reopening committee, and says she has spoken to “many university opening committees”."

"The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is able to test all its 50,000 students, 2,800 faculty members and 8,200 staff twice a week with its own saliva polymerase-chain-reaction test, which costs just $10 a pop. Students will get a notification on the Safer in Illinois app, and then head to one of 50 kiosks on campus. “You walk up, you swipe your card, you dribble into a tube, you drop it into a bag and you are done — and within 3 hours it is in your phone,” says chemist Martin Burke, who helped design the test. Those who don’t get tested won’t be able to access campus buildings. “This is 2020, not 1918. We don’t want to just revert to the methodologies from back then,” says Burke. “How do we leverage the tremendous power of modern science? We can crush this thing.”"

"At the University of California, Irvine, campus managers will keep an eye on how crowded buildings are, using a system that has been under development for years with a grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. As students’ phones and laptops search for Wi-Fi signals in buildings, they generate ‘probe events’ that will be used to estimate how many people are in each area. A dashboard alerts managers to overcrowding, which can then be addressed by putting up signs, moving furniture around or giving students a stern talking-to. In the future, students might also get an alert if they have shared space with a person known to have COVID-19. The system strips away IP addresses and other identifying info, but students who are still unhappy about having their data collected can opt out. Sharad Mehrotra, a computer scientist who leads the project, says it will help the university limit transmission of COVID-19. “When the pandemic started and things were locked down, the responsibility of handling the situation largely resided with the government,” says Mehrotra. “But as things open up, the responsibility shifts to the community. It shifts to individuals, but also to organizations. What roles organizations can play has not been settled yet.”"

"Almost all plans for a physical return to campus include masks, social distancing and bans on social gatherings, potentially removing the core motivation for many students to attend in person. Two of the biggest American football conferences, the Big Ten and Pac-12, announced on 11 August that they won’t play this autumn, in what many see as a sign that most collegiate sports will be postponed until at least next spring. Some researchers say it will be difficult to stop informal gatherings and off-campus parties, no matter how many apps students download or pledges they sign. Many question whether it is realistic to expect young people in the most intensely social phase of their lives to follow rules to the letter. Less than 60% of the students SimpsonScarborough surveyed said they were willing to “avoid social events and parties with more than 10 people”. McClure has strong doubts about the autumn. “Never in my lifetime have I seen the level of compliance that is being expected for this to work.”"

"Traditional migration push factors like insecurity and economic conditions continue to push individuals north to the United States. While we are addressing illegal migration through a network of initiatives, we are concerned that during a pandemic this poses a more specific threat to the migrants, the communities they transit, to U.S. border communities, and to our officers and agents who encounter migrants when they enter the United States. To mitigate this threat we instituted enhanced restrictions at our borders, limited travel to only essential travelers and implemented a Center for Disease Control (CDC) order that protects Americans from COVID-19."

"COVID-19 is the most recent and deadly, in a list of infectious diseases that have threatened the lives of Americans. We have seen unprecedented impact to life, health, and public safety from COVID-19 and taken action to prevent our healthcare system from being overburdened from COVID-19 patients. DHS was at the forefront mitigating threat and we took decisive action to restrict air and sea travel from disease hot-spots, close our land borders to non-essential travel, provide lifesaving PPE to Americans, prevent fraudulent PPE from entering our supply chains, and identify fraudsters who are trying to exploit this situation for their own personal gain."

"The domestic situation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic creates an environment that could accelerate some individuals’ mobilization to targeted violence or radicalization to terrorism. Social distancing may lead to social isolation, which is associated with depression, increased anxiety, and social alienation. Similarly, work disruptions, including unexpected unemployment and layoffs, can also increase risk factors associated with radicalization to violence and willingness to engage in acts of targeted violence."

"According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention... Americans, regardless of age group, are far more likely to die of something other than COVID-19. Even among those in the most heavily impacted age group (85 and older), only 11.1 percent of all deaths since February 2020 were due to COVID-19."

"COVID-19 has shown us the tip of the iceberg of the lack of health equity. Socio-economic status, food security, affordable housing, access to childcare and health care, systemic racism and discrimination all contribute to disparities in the effects of COVID-19 and other diseases."

"Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!"

"If you look at the therapeutics, which I’m taking right now, some of them, and others are coming out soon that are looking like, frankly, they’re miracles, if you want to know the truth, they’re miracles. People criticize me when I say that, but we have things happening that look like they’re miracles, coming down from God."

"Am I going out like Stan Chera?"

"I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school, this isn’t the let’s-read-a-book school. And I get it and I understand it and it’s a very interesting thing and I’m gonna be letting you know about it."

"Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!"

"I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!"

"REPEAL SECTION 230!!!"

"We know that we could have done better. China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay. These measures were severe but effective, essentially eliminating transmission at the point where the outbreak began and reducing the death rate to a reported 3 per million, as compared with more than 500 per million in the United States. Countries that had far more exchange with China, such as Singapore and South Korea, began intensive testing early, along with aggressive contact tracing and appropriate isolation, and have had relatively small outbreaks. And New Zealand has used these same measures, together with its geographic advantages, to come close to eliminating the disease, something that has allowed that country to limit the time of closure and to largely reopen society to a prepandemic level. In general, not only have many democracies done better than the United States, but they have also outperformed us by orders of magnitude."

"Bob Woodward’s second book on Donald Trump commanded attention when it was released in September 2020. Based upon seventeen conversations the president freely undertook with America’s most famous investigative journalist,[3] as well as discussions with administration officials and Republicans in Congress. Rage turned the COVID-19 story upside down when it reported Trump’s recorded declaration on March 19, 2020 that he had known from the start that a pandemic was going to savage America, but he publicly denied it for months, he said, to prevent panic. Many people apparently believed Trump because the explanation was so utterly damning to him it seemed he never would have made it up to protect himself. After all, he was confessing to being someone in a rooming house who discovered the building was on fire, and then told no one because he did not want the victims to panic. So the sheer idiocy of the rationalization, oddly enough, gave it verisimilitude. But one can find a straighter explanation of the president’s behavior that fits him to a T. The “prevent panic” excuse was actually less damaging to Trump than the truth, which was that he had ignored a whole bucket of warnings for weeks about what was going to happen. He not only kept denying the “building” was on fire, he just let it burn away. And when the fire department came to the door, he sent it away."

"What Did the President Know and When Did He Know It? COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and the government, as it had some years earlier with the SARS virus, hid this from the rest of the world. But by December 31 China described mysterious “pneumonia” cases in Wuhan to the World Health Organization. The U.S. Center for Disease Control immediately tried to get more information from Chinese medical authorities, who stonewalled. The CDC nevertheless noticed the disease was quickly spreading, and by January 13 a case turned up in Thailand. The virus evidently could pass from person to person. So on January 18 the CDC instituted screening of all air passengers arriving from Wuhan in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. On this same day the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, telephoned Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida to explain how serious a threat the disease posed to the United States. Trump however proved uninterested and changed the subject. On January 21 a Seattle man recently returned from Wuhan became America’s first known COVID-19 patient and the next day Trump made his first statement on the disease, dismissing its importance: “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” When more cases appeared, he tweeted on January 24 “It will work out well.” But on January 28 Trump’s Chief Trade Advisor Peter Navarro sent a memo around the West Wing warning the virus could have very dire consequences. Azar phoned Trump again that day to warn him of the disaster afoot, and was again rebuffed. But that afternoon Trump met with the top officials of the National Security Council and was told the new coronavirus would be the biggest national security threat he would face in his presidency. That got his attention, but he still did nothing."

"I don’t think I’m contagious at all."

"All the king’s horses and all the king’s men in the Oval Office agreed that the United States had to keep persons from China from entering the country. Trump agreed, and that night he issued his “Travel Ban on China.” Trump has ladled glory on himself from stem to stern for issuing this proclamation, saying everyone in the room was against the travel ban but he insisted on it to protect the country. (It’s a good example of how he often lies by completely reversing the facts. Doing it that way takes very little mental effort.) Actually, it looks like the CDC packed the Oval Office with over a dozen Trump advisors to force him to take the matter seriously. Smaller groups could not penetrate his willful blindness.) Moreover, the “China ban” fits distinctly sideways with Trump’s story that he had lied to Americans to keep them from panicking. Declaring a travel ban, and insisting Americans returning from China be quarantined, definitely implies an invisible, spreading danger. Furthermore, if you believe Trump actually knew “all along” the country was in danger but played (COVID-19) down to prevent panic, why did he leave America unprotected when he could have quietly prepared the country for the pandemic heading its way? For example, the Department of Health and Human Services asked the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for $136 million at the end of January and at the beginning of February to combat the disease, and was refused both times. Later Trump would complain that the Obama administration had left the shelves bare of testing materials, respirators, and so on. If this were true, would restocking the shelves have induced panic? Hardly. As many governors and mayors learned later, the president did almost nothing, even “on the quiet,” to prepare the nation he led for the crisis ahead. I think instead that the “candid admission” to Woodward of lying about the danger from the start was just the best lie that Trump could hit upon to cloak his real motivation, which was even more damning, namely to keep the road to his re-election smooth and straight. He had planned from Day One to run on a flourishing national economy, and here his medical advisors were talking closures, quarantines, and self-isolations that would slow everything down to a crawl, and drive the re-election bus into the ditch. So he decided instead to tell the American people they were perfectly safe and life should continue as usual. As the infection spread and began overwhelming the healthcare system, he retreated to saying “Never mind, the virus will disappear once the weather warms up,” which he probably got from some fringe news source."

"As many have noted, Donald Trump has a startling inability to accept reality when he wants to believe something else, for reasons I tried to explain in Authoritarian Nightmare. He will seek out bizarre sources and toady yes-men to help him lie to himself. He wanted the virus to just go away, so he believed it would be killed by April warmth, or be cured by hydroxychloroquine, or destroyed by bleach, or be prevented by a vaccine that would be ready by October. And no sooner had he finally admitted how serious the situation was, he began pressuring states to “reopen” and return to normalcy, which some did to their sorrow. And he insisted on holding normal political re-election rallies and discouraging the wearing of masks and forcing schools to open in the fall and pushing poorly tested vaccines on the public to rejuvenate the economy and buoy his chances for re-election. Blaming China. President Trump needed a scapegoat as well as sacrificial lambs. He teed up China, saying he had secret evidence it had created the virus and then negligently allowed it to spread around the world. He had been deceived by China’s President Xi early on, he explained, who had assured him over the phone that the disease was under control. Trump called him on February 6, offering to send CDC scientists to China to help eradicate the disease. He thought Xi would agree to this previously rejected offer because he and the Chinese leader had a personal relationship. But Xi was uninterested. He did give the impression that everything was under control in China, according to Matt Pottinger, Deputy Director of the National Security Council who listened in on the call (Rage, pp. 241-243). But China had taken dramatic steps to control the disease. By February 6, Wuhan and the province it sat in had been isolated from the rest of China and locked down with stringent quarantine regulations for two weeks. Some 40,000 healthcare workers had been sent to the area, hospitals were being rapidly built, and the infection curve was flattening out. The Chinese government certainly did nothing to stop the spread of the disease abroad for a long time. But virologists around the world are virtually unanimous that COVID-19 evolved in nature, and was not manufactured in a laboratory. The United States became the world leader in coronavirus deaths not because Xi lied to Trump about how well China was containing the threat, but because Trump ignored for weeks and weeks the strongest warnings from his own experts to defend the country, and then most purposefully lied to the American people himself about what they should do. The blood is on his hands more than on anyone else’s, and deep down inside, beneath layers of excuses, denials, blame-shifting, and rationalizations, he probably knows it."

"...if you look at mortality rates it's up 95%, or 85%..."

"In a spring meeting, Birx seemed fixated on applying the lessons of HIV/AIDS in a small African nation to COVID-19 in the United States, says a CDC official who was present. “Birx was able to get data from every hospital on every case” in Malawi, the official says. “She couldn’t understand why that wasn’t happening in the United States” with COVID-19. Birx didn’t seem to see the difference between a slow-moving HIV outbreak and a raging respiratory pandemic. “[CDC Principal Deputy Director] Anne Schuchat had to say, ‘Debbi, this is not HIV.’ Birx got unhappy with that.”"

"My plan: we’re gonna crush the virus very quickly. It’s happening already. It’s happening. And Mexico is paying for the wall, by the way. You know that. I’ve been saying it. They hate to hear that. But they’re paying. We passed VA Choice."

"I’m OK with masks. I tell people, wear a mask. But just the other day they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it."

"Fauci is a disaster. People are tired of coronavirus. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots."

"We're not entering a dark winter, we are entering the final turn and the light at the end of the tunnel"

"We believe we can reduce overall healthcare costs. The pandemic has accelerated elements of our transformation."

"We’re rounding the turn,our numbers are incredible."

"COVID COVID COVID.. we are rounding the turn all they want to talk about is COVID by the way on Nov 4 you won't be hearing much more about it..Cases are up because we TEST TEST TEST"

"Out of what should be an incredibly positive story, [the IRS] just kept getting black eye after black eye after black eye"

"You know in Germany, if you have a bad heart and you’re ready to die, or if you have cancer and you’re going to be dying soon and you catch Covid, that happens: we mark it down to Covid. You know, our doctors get more money if somebody dies from Covid. You know that, right? I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is, they say, "I’m sorry, but you know everybody dies of Covid." But in Germany and other places, if you have a heart attack, or if you have cancer, you’re terminally ill, you catch Covid, they say you died of cancer, you died of a heart attack. With us? When in doubt, choose Covid. Now, it’s true. Now, they’ll say ‘oh, it’s terrible what he said’, but that’s true. It’s like $2,000 more."

"In late 2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first detected in China and has since caused a pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The first case of COVID-19 in New York City was officially confirmed on 1 March 2020 followed by a severe local epidemic1. Here, to understand seroprevalence dynamics, we conduct a retrospective, repeated cross-sectional analysis of anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike antibodies in weekly intervals from the beginning of February to July 2020 using more than 10,000 plasma samples from patients at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. We describe the dynamics of seroprevalence in an ‘urgent care’ group, which is enriched in cases of COVID-19 during the epidemic, and a ‘routine care’ group, which more closely represents the general population. Seroprevalence increased at different rates in both groups; seropositive samples were found as early as mid-February, and levelled out at slightly above 20% in both groups after the epidemic wave subsided by the end of May. From May to July, seroprevalence remained stable, suggesting lasting antibody levels in the population. Our data suggest that SARS-CoV-2 was introduced in New York City earlier than previously documented and describe the dynamics of seroconversion over the full course of the first wave of the pandemic in a major metropolitan area."

"The first seropositive samples in our study were already detected during the week of 23 February, one week before the first confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 in NYC was identified, which suggests that SARS-CoV-2 was probably introduced to the NYC area several weeks earlier than has previously been assumed. This would not be unexpected given the unique diversity and connectivity of NYC and the large numbers of travellers that were arriving from SARS-CoV-2-affected regions of the world in January and February 2020. The antibody titres of initial positive individuals were low, which is consistent with slower seroconversion of perhaps mild cases. Of course, we cannot exclude with absolute certainty that some of the lower positive titres are false positives as the initially low seroprevalence falls within the confidence intervals of the positive predictive value. Of note, the seroprevalence in the routine care group (as well as the urgent care group at the end of May, after the peak) falls significantly below the threshold for potential community immunity, which has been estimated by one study to require at least a seropositivity rate of 67% for SARS-CoV-24. On the basis of the population of NYC (8.4 million), we estimate that by the week ending 24 May, approximately 1.7 million individuals had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Taking into account the cumulative number of deaths in the city by 19 May (16,674—this number includes only officially confirmed, not suspected, COVID-19-related deaths), this suggests a preliminary infection fatality rate of 0.97% (with the assumption that both seroconversion and death occur with similar delays). This is in stark contrast to the infection fatality rate of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which was estimated to be 0.01–0.001%."

"In pre-ACA days, a bout with a virus might not have been considered a preexisting condition. That's because many people tend to recover quickly from viruses. But in a blog post last week, researchers at the Rand Corp. suggested that COVID-19 could be seen differently by insurers. "Given the chronic problems [which can include organ damage, fatigue and confusion] associated with some COVID-19 cases, it is possible that some insurers would place restrictions on anyone who had a confirmed case of COVID-19," wrote Carter C. Price, Rand's senior mathematician, and Raffaele Vardavas, a mathematician at Rand who specializes in infectious disease models. The researchers said that exclusion might also extend to people who didn't have a positive coronavirus test but did test positive for antibodies to the virus, which indicates they had it or were previously exposed. "While a mild case of COVID-19 might not be subject to a preexisting clause, that would be up to insurers to determine," said Karen Pollitz, senior fellow, health reform and private insurance at the Kaiser Family Foundation."

"Someone who developed anxiety and/or depression since the start of the pandemic might also be considered to have a preexisting condition. Twenty years ago, Kaiser surveyed health insurance underwriters and asked about a similar situation: a hypothetical applicant in perfect health except for "situational depression" following the death of a spouse. According to the survey, "in 60 applications for coverage, this applicant was denied a quarter of the time, and offered coverage with a surcharged premium and/or benefit exclusions 60% of the time." So both experts and consumers are concerned that invalidating the Affordable Care Act could mean that once again, individuals with preexisting conditions might not be covered — and such conditions could include COVID-19."

"If the CDC was worried about a shortage of ultra-cold freezers, it hasn’t happened yet. One company, Helmer, reached capacity and now can’t deliver new freezers until March but, for the most part, suppliers are delivering ultra-cold freezers in two to six weeks, said Behlim. Much like for vaccines, though, the distribution of ultra-cold freezers isn’t even across the country. One local Wisconsin hospital looked into acquiring freezers, said Size, but was told delivery would take two to three months. Larger hospitals with the budgets for multiple purchases come first, he said. “It’s another good example of how all our rural hospitals are at the end of a supply chain with less leverage to make important purchases,” he said. “It’s the wild west of the supply chain; that’s not how you fight a pandemic.”"

"Rural populations are precisely those that are vulnerable to Covid-19 and most in need of a vaccine, noted Morgan: “Hundreds of rural, small towns all across the U.S. have a higher percentage of elderly, low-income [residents], a higher percentage of the community with multiple chronic health issues.”"

"I don't think it's unlikely in the next week or two that we won't be having a million cases a week in this country."

"Please cancel these in-person dinners, @SpeakerPelosi & @kevinomccarthy to keep everyone safe from #covid19 - yourselves, your new members, servers, the Capitol police and all of their families and contacts. And, to show public health leadership."

"New Mexico is at the breaking point."

"We are in the worst moment of this pandemic to date. The situation has never been more dire. We are at the precipice and we need to take some action."

"The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept. #FreedomMatters #StepUp"

"New York City has reached the 3% testing positivity 7-day average threshold. Unfortunately, this means public school buildings will be closed as of tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 19, out an abundance of caution."

"We must fight back the second wave of COVID-19."

"I've never seen a particular situation during my professional experience anything like this..."

"I'm not convinced at all that we have enough information to know how to deal with this type of problem"