Free Republic

As of Wednesday night, Italy is in chaos, as if they were at war. They’ve counted 1,800 new sick people in one day, more than 12,000 total infected and more than 800 dead; they’ve seen food shortages and prison riots with mass escapes and several deaths. Spain is has experiencing more than 2,000 cases and nearly 50 deaths as of Wednesday, making it the new health concern hotspot in Europe, along with France, where 33 people have already died and more than 1,700 are infected. Even the French minister of culture, Franck Riester, has tested positive for coronavirus. The stock...

A passenger who caught a JetBlue flight from New York to Palm Beach had reportedly been told he tested positive for coronavirus moments before the plane took off. Florida officials announced early on Thursday that a man had tested positive for the virus. Passengers were forced to remain on Flight 253 for two additional hours as the aircraft stood on the tarmac instead of proceeding to gate C12 at the Palm Beach International Airport. Another passenger on the plane claimed the man's wife told him they had been told of the result before take off. The flight landed at 8.53pm...

WASHINGTON — Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday that there has been "irresponsible rhetoric" from people who have downplayed the seriousness of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak. In an interview on the "TODAY" show, Savannah Guthrie asked what message Pence sends to people who aren't afraid of the coronavirus and think it's just politics and hype, quoting from President Donald Trump on Monday that the "fake news media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything to inflame the coronavirus situation." "Well, obviously there's been some irresponsible rhetoric," Pence said without directly naming Trump. Pence, the head of the president's...

The statewide death toll from the coronavirus climbed to 30 on Wednesday, after a third Snohomish County man died along with three others in King County, health officials said. The Snohomish County man, who is in his 80s, was one of three residents of the Josephine Caring Community in Stanwood who previously were confirmed to have the virus and were taken to a local hospital. No further details were available about the three additional King County deaths. So far, 26 people have died from COVID-19 in King County, three in Snohomish County and one in Grant County. The number of...

First it was the Russian Collusion Hoax, based upon nothing but a phony dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC in order to promote the media-fueled fever dream that Trump “colluded with Russia” to steal the election of 2016. Then it was the Ukrainian Quid Pro Quo Hoax, based upon a phone call between Trump and the President of Ukraine, leaked by a phony “whistleblower” and his phony informant, both of whom were carefully shielded from all scrutiny by the Democrat-Media Complex (DMC). The hoax was exposed when the transcript of the call showed no quid pro quo...

The University of Northern Colorado announced to its campus just after 6:15 p.m. Wednesday that, with growing concerns about COVID-19 in Colorado and elsewhere, the school will go fully online following Spring Break until April 5, and all in-person classes March 23 and 24 will be canceled. Campus will not close, per the letter. Travel has also been restricted both internationally and domestically. According to the letter, which was sent to the Greeley Tribune shortly after it arrived in campus inboxes Wednesday evening, all university-sponsored or affiliated international travel is suspended through June 30, and personal international travel is “strongly...

Coronavirus is a significant public health issue, but the response to it, in many quarters, has been hysterical. Events of various kinds are being canceled or modified: schools are closing or going online, the NCAA basketball tournaments will be played without fans in the stands, New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade has been canceled, countless businesses (like my old law firm) are closing their offices and telling employees to work from home. I think there are several reasons for this, beyond legitimate concerns about spreading the disease. First, a fear of liability that is probably misplaced. If other schools send...

Time to stay calm and continue on.... Yesterday's thread is here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3823193/posts

For many countries staring down fast-rising coronavirus case counts, the race is on to “flatten the curve.” The United States and other countries, experts say, are likely to be hit by tsunamis of Covid-19 cases in the coming weeks without aggressive public health responses. But by taking certain steps — canceling large public gatherings, for instance, and encouraging some people to restrict their contact with others — governments have a shot at stamping out new chains of transmission, while also trying to mitigate the damage of the spread that isn’t under control. The epidemic curve, a statistical chart used to...

In the last 48 hours, as the coronavirus has raced across the United States, the NBA has suspended its season, more than three dozen colleges and universities have kicked students off campus, President Trump has barred travelers from Europe from entering the country … and MLB, its season still two weeks away, has exposed some 100,000 people to a global pandemic. It’s time to cancel spring training.

A doctor who has been diagnosed with coronavirus has given an insight into the disease's daily symptoms on social media. Dr. Yale Tung Chen, 35, from Spain, who caught the infection while he was treating patients at Hospital Universitario La Paz in Madrid, has been sharing his experiences battling the illness with the pubic. The emergency physician has been sharing ultrasound scans of his lungs and listing his daily symptoms in an attempt to give the world a glimpse of how the illness takes over the body. Taking to Twitter the doctor wrote: 'Day 1 after #COVID diagnosis. Sore throat,...

Despite having had more time to prepare, most authorities in the US and EU are responding to the coronavirus spread with such ineffectual and wrong-minded measures that they're just making a terrible situation worse. In today's video, Chris walks through the 'gold standard' process for how a country should act to contain a pandemic like this. How many countries come anywhere close to this standard? Depressingly few. And he shows case after case after case of authorities -- at both the national and local levels -- pushing policies that endanger the public. Why is the official response to such a...

The country would face an economic hellscape if the government shutdown lasts "months or even years," as the president has suggested it might, experts tell NBC News. The doomsday scenario might be unlikely — the longest the federal government has ever shut down is 21 days, a record that will fall if the current closure lasts until Saturday — but it is chilling. "We'll be in no man's land," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told NBC News. If the worst were to happen, experts say the devastating impact would be widespread: •38 million low-income Americans lose food stamps...

At midterm, the once-dazzling political momentum of what conservatives enthusiastically called the Reagan Revolution has stalled. In the year ahead, President Reagan faces what his allies and advisers see as the most critical tests of his Presidency both at home and abroad. ''Historically, the third year is the one that makes or breaks a Presidency, and Ronald Reagan's third year is more critical for him than any President since World War II,'' said Richard Wirthlin, the President's longtime poll-taker and a fellow California Republican conservative. ''It's the year when people will judge the President not only by the goals he...

The startling finding means that experts may not be able to spot the massive space rock hidden in the annual Taurids meteor shower until it is too late. According to a group of researchers, one of the fragments could hit Earth in 2022, 2025, 2032 or 2039 during the annual meteor shower. The Taurids is a spectacular meteor shower that lights up the night skies every November. The meteor shower is the trail of debris left by the comet Encke. But the debris could be obscuring two asteroid chunks known as 2015 TX24 and 2005 UR that are potentially Earth-bound....

As a prepper and avid reader of post-apocalyptic fiction like One Second After, Alas Babylon, and Going Home, an EMP has long been on my mind as one of the most catastrophic threats we could face. After reading numerous reports from the Congressional EMP Commission, I figured that the reality of such a threat was a given. So when I recently wrote about making Faraday cages, imagine my surprise when I saw this comment: I appreciate the attempt to help people prepare for all kinds of disasters, but I’m going to have to throw a conversational bomb into this room,...

Arizona State University researchers have analyzed minerals around the supervolcano at Yellowstone National Park and have come to a startling conclusion. It could blow much faster than previously expected, potentially wiping out life as we know it.

Every object in our Solar System that takes the plunge from out beyond Neptune to our inner reaches, where the rocky planets lie, will become a comet. As it nears the Sun, its ices melt, creating the tails we associate with them, and also creating a debris path that can create meteor showers if they cross Earth's orbit. For thousands of years, the most consistent, spectacular meteor shower has been the Perseids, created by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. At its incredibly large size (26 kilometers across) and speed, it contains nearly 30 times the energy of the asteroid strike that wiped out...

In a recent column, I explained how the still-forming Trump administration is already doing serious harm to America’s longstanding global intelligence partnerships. In particular, fears that the White House is too friendly to Moscow are causing close allies to curtail some of their espionage relationships with Washington—a development with grave implications for international security, particularly in the all-important realm of counterterrorism. Now those concerns are causing problems much closer to home—in fact, inside the Beltway itself. Our Intelligence Community is so worried by the unprecedented problems of the Trump administration—not only do senior officials possess troubling ties to the Kremlin,...

A new report claims that Melania is living Donald’s dream, according to the viewpoint of Phillip Bloch, a friend and stylist to the Trump Family. Along with Bloch’s claims about Melania being unhappy, another Trump Family source claimed that Mrs. Trump is “miserable” about how her life turned out as the wife of a president. “Melania is unhappy with how her life ended up.” The publication points to many recent events that claim to be almost too much to bear for Melania, who is a “deeply private” person. As Melania spends most of her time at Trump Tower in New...