Free Republic

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Every day, grocery workers are restocking toilet paper, eggs, produce and canned goods as fast as the items fly off the shelves. They disinfect keypads, freezer handles and checkout counters as hundreds of people weave around them, sometimes standing too close for comfort amid the coronavirus pandemic. Some work for hours behind clear plastic barriers installed at checkout counters, bulwarks against sudden sneezes or coughs that can propel germs. They aren’t doctors or nurses, yet they have been praised for their dedication by Pope Francis, former U.S. President Barack Obama and countless people on social media,...

Major supermarket chains are beginning to report their first coronavirus-related employee deaths, leading to store closures and increasing anxiety among grocery workers as the pandemic intensifies across the country. A Trader Joe’s worker in Scarsdale, N.Y., a greeter at a Giant store in Largo, Md., and two Walmart employees from the same Chicago-area store have died of covid-19, the disease the novel coronavirus causes, in recent days, the companies confirmed Monday. Though more than 40 states have ordered nonessential businesses to close and told residents to stay home to stem the spread of the virus, supermarkets are among the retailers...

After all kinds of complaining that his state of New York needs ventilators, oh so many ventilators because there aren’t nearly enough in New York, has refused help from Remington when they offered to send ventilators to New York. But as we previously reported the Democrats in New York not up to the task of handling the Coronavirus threat. Now there are some conservative commentators who questioned how busy American hospitals actually are. On Twitter, photos and video clips purporting to show nearly empty hospital parking lots. More of t he same on a YouTube “citizen reporters” video. https://twitter.com/toddstarnes/status/1243302444970520578?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1243302444970520578&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fconservativeus.com%2Ftruth-or-fiction-citizen-reporters-go-out-and-record-videos-about-allegedly-empty-hospitals-in-coronavirus-epicenter%2F Todd...

One of the offshoots of being on the debate team in college, taking graduate level statistics as part of my masters and working as a lawyer, is an awareness of how one can make a case for practically anything, by playing around with evidence, numbers, analysis and language.  Coronavirus is a world-wide pandemic and should be taken seriously.  But the crisis should not be taken advantage of, nor should politicians manipulate definitions, data and diagnoses to achieve political aims.    Getting Down to Cases There is no such thing as a “case" of COVID-19. According to Merriam-Webster a “case”...

Tucker Carlson wanted to make clear on his show Friday night he respects Dr. Anthony Fauci, considers him an “impressive person,” and said he’s clearly an important expert to have in combatting coronavirus — but he criticized Fauci anyway for comments he has publicly made about the public health response. Fauci’s role on the coronavirus task force has received bipartisan praise, and Fauci himself recently appeared on Carlson’s show to talk about the positive impact of mitigation thus far. “We’ve interviewed Dr. Fauci respectfully on this program, and we’d gladly do that again if he came back, and he will...

We’re gonna need some better “experts.” – For the past three weeks now, President Donald Trump has allowed his team of “experts,” led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, to essentially destroy the nation’s economy based on the projections by a statistical model whose have varied dramatically from week to week, and which do not bear even the slightest resemblance to observed results on the ground. Friday morning, Dr. Fauci told an interviewer that he just can’t understand why the entire nation is not already in a lockdown stay-at-home situation. Meanwhile, in Texas, 101 counties that comprise an are about the size...

(Natural News) As cities all over America have placed stay-at-home orders in response to the coronavirus, high-end retailers are worrying about potential civil unrest. Several shops, including those in one of Hollywood’s most famous shopping districts, are taking measures to protect themselves against possible looters...Rodeo Drive isn’t the only high-end shopping district that’s seeing it stores board up due to fears of possible looting and civil unrest. Numerous photographs have popped up over Twitter, showing shopping districts in cities around the country such as Chicago, San Francisco and more boarding up their windows.

Many people believe we're under-counting the Covid-19 infection rate, but Italian data suggest we may be getting the death numbers wrong too.

White House coronavirus task force member Deborah Birx asks media to stop telling Americans that hospitals are running out of beds and ventilators, when it's not the case Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, is pleading with the media to stop frightening people worldwide with incorrect stories about supply shortages and hospitals enforcing universal "Do Not Resuscitate" orders. "Please, for the reassurance of people across the world ... there is no situation in the United States right now that warrants that kind of discussion right now," Birx said during the task force’s daily White...

For the past two days, New Yorkers have been dying at a rate of one every 17 minutes, according to the latest grim citywide statistics. On both Thursday and Friday, another 84 people died in the city from the coronavirus, as the number of positive cases and of those who are critically ill also climbed. The COVID-19 death toll in the city was 450 as of Friday evening, up from 366 reported fatalities in the morning. Total citywide coronavirus cases rose to 26,697, up 4.4 percent from the 25,573 reported in the morning. Mayor de Blasio warned Friday that critical...

There have been a few consistent points that many of those who post at American Thinker have been making. The main point is that the media are deliberately fomenting panic. They do this partly because that’s the nature of media (“if it bleeds it leads”) and partly because most members of America’s media are Trump haters. They would willingly send America into an economic nosedive if it meant routing Trump from the White House. Still, another thing we’ve been highlighting here is that media members are innumerates. They glom onto whatever large, scary, Trump-injuring numbers come their way, and...

The global economy is imploding, but it is difficult to care when there are people gasping for air. For the first time ever, the lines of worry on the faces of hedge fund managers occupy a smaller space in public consciousness than the blotchy indents on the faces of doctors and nurses shedding their surgical masks after yet another 48-hour shift. This is nothing short of radical. The virus, borderless and indiscriminate in its reach, isn't only contaminating our airways. It is unzipping our very way of life. Holding a mirror up to our bewildered faces, it dares us to...

Anna Jones* had just finished her shift at St. Rose Hospital in Las Vegas, where she works as an emergency-room nurse, when she received an email from her landlord labeled “Quick Action Needed.” Her landlord—a quiet, older woman who lived downstairs from Jones and her husband—informed her that she would need to vacate the premises within 24 hours. The reason, she said, was COVID-19.