ROME (AP) — The scientific director of Italy’s leading infectious disease hospital says he’d like to hire Dr. Anthony Fauci should President Donald Trump remove him from the White House coronavirus task force.
Dr. Giuseppe Ippolito of Rome’s Lazzaro Spallanzani hospital wrote a letter released Wednesday to the Italian president and other officials, saying Italy should welcome Fauci with open arms. The country is the European epicenter of the pandemic, and Spallanzani treated Italy’s first patients.
Continue reading “Italian Hospital Offers To Hire Dr. Fauci If Trump Gives Him The Boot” →
GENEVA (AP) — Nations around the world reacted with alarm Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a halt to the sizable funding the United States sends to the World Health Organization. Health experts warned the move could jeopardize global efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic.
At a briefing in Washington, Trump said he was instructing his administration to halt funding for the WHO pending a review of its role “in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.” The United States is WHO’s largest single donor, contributing between $400 million and $500 million annually to the Geneva-based agency in recent years.
Continue reading “Trump’s Freeze On WHO Funding Sparks Global Condemnation” →
White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway erroneously asserted on Wednesday that the number 19 in COVID-19, which stands for the year in which the virus was discovered, stood for a strain of the disease.
Continue reading “Conway Mistakes ‘19’ In COVID-19 For Strain Of Virus While Accusing WHO Of Not Knowing Facts” →
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. retail sales plummeted 8.7% in March, an unprecedented decline, as the viral outbreak forces an almost complete lock down of commerce nationwide.
The deterioration of sales far outpaces the previous record decline of 3.9% that took place during the depths of the Great Recession in November 2008.
Continue reading “US Retail Sales See Record Drop As Coronavirus Shutters Stores” →
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) issued a scathing letter to her Democratic colleagues on Tuesday night that ripped into President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak roiling the country.
Continue reading “Pelosi Torches Trump’s Response To Outbreak, Says POTUS Caused ‘Unnecessary Death And Disaster’” →
President Donald Trump got his wish: The direct payment checks that many Americans will soon receive as part of the government’s COVID-19 relief package will bear Trump’s name on them.
Continue reading “Trump Manages To Get His Name Plastered Onto Direct Payment Checks” →
As you know, we’ve been focusing heavily on the ‘excess mortality’ question in the COVID19 pandemic across the world. Excess mortality is the number of deaths in a given region over a particular period of time which is in excess of the average number of deaths in previous years. We’ve looked closely at analyses from Italy and Spain which show dramatic discrepancies between the reported number of COVID19 fatalities and actual amount of excess mortality during the periods in question. In many cases, when this full excess mortality is calculated the number is two, three or even four times higher than the official COVID19 death toll.
What remains unknown in these other cases is how many of these additional deaths were ‘hidden’ COVID19 fatalities versus people who died as a result of the overall crisis but not the disease itself. This can range from an overwhelmed hospital system which creates a degraded level of care, to stress imposed by the totality of the crisis to people who do not seek medical attention for health crises they could have survived.
Continue reading “The Excess Mortality Question in the US Comes Into View” →
President Trump kicked off Tuesday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing by announcing that he will halt funding to the World Health Organization while a review is underway.
Trump accused the WHO, which is largely funded by the U.S., of “severely mismanaging and covering up” the spread of COVID-19.
“Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China’s lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death,” Trump said.
After Trump criticized the WHO for praising China’s transparency on COVID-19 during the briefing, he denied doing the same in a late January tweet saying that the U.S. “greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency.”
Follow along with the TPM staff below:
Important new numbers out this evening from New York City that for the first time allow us to take a preliminary look the city’s excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Josh Kovensky has pulled together the numbers.
