RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/corona-riot-china-lloyd-billingsley/

“Thousands of residents of the central Chinese province of Hubei gathered in angry protest on Friday,” Wong Siu-san and Lau Siu-fun of Radio Free Asia reported Friday, “amid a physical melee between their police force and that of neighboring Jiangxi province at a checkpoint on a bridge between the two.”

As Athan Vanderklippe of Canada’s Globe and Mail reported, “Violent clashes erupted on a bridge between China’s virus-stricken Hubei province and neighboring Jiangxi province, days after authorities relaxed an epidemic lockdown.” The confrontation came after “authorities in Jiangxi blocked entry to people from Hubei,” and according to the Communist Party’s People’s Daily, “the risk of sporadic cases and local outbreaks still exists.”

The next morning, March 28, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post were dodging a story they should have seen coming.

“Large-scale protests could break out in Wuhan, the epicenter of China’s coronavirus epidemic,” Yuichiro Okuma of KYODO News reported on March 25, “when a lockdown on the city ends next month, as residents unhappy with unprecedented restrictions on their movements vent their pent-up frustrations.” Wuhan had been on lockdown since January 23 and “the authorities have been lambasted for having tried to deliberately conceal information about infections at the beginning of the outbreak of the new coronavirus, first detected in Wuhan late last year.”

The riots exploded the line that China’s Communist Party has the coronavirus whipped, as proclaimed by World Health Organization boss Tedros Adhanom Ghegreyesus. On Friday he tweeted, “For the first time, #China has reported no domestic #COVID19 cases yesterday. This is an amazing achievement, which gives us all reassurance that the #coronavirus can be beaten.” In reality, the virus isn’t beaten in China, and the RFA report outlined the back story.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15741/sweden-culture-of-silence

“The interviewee realized that the conclusions would be politically unpopular, but had nevertheless written them… Other former employees have pointed out that it was clear that there were political reasons why they were pressured to change content in reports…” — Report by Linköping University about the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), “Can Brå be trusted?”

“One employee reported, among other things, that a director-general expressed that ‘there is a reality and a political reality’ when the director-general demanded that an employee change a report…” — Report by Linköping University, “Can Brå be trusted?”

“If results were not liked then censorship was used, correction of results, toning down results and highlighting other parts of [the] study that were not so sensitive or that could show positive results”. — Report by Linköping University, “Can Brå be trusted?”

“After I was hired at Brå, it took me a short time to understand that working at Brå is a big challenge. As an employee of Brå, you should write and think in a certain way. Brå is extremely controlled from the top. There are some people at Brå who control with an iron hand. If one were to be a little harsh then one could liken it to a sect. I don’t think they really understand what kind of culture they have created” — Another employee, from the report by Linköping University, “Can Brå be trusted?”

The report also found that Brå appears to strive to hire employees that will “act as obedient bureaucrats at an authority, rather than people who have accepted a researcher’s role”.

Meanwhile, Sweden continues its downward spiral.

A recent report published by Linköping University about the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), “Can Brå be trusted?” has claimed that Brå’s reports are politically biased.

According to Brå’s own website, “Brå is an agency under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice and a knowledge centre for the criminal justice system. The agency’s mandate is to contribute to the development of knowledge within the criminal justice system and the criminal policy area, as well as to promote crime prevention work. Brå is responsible for the official criminal statistics and other statistics, which includes producing, following, analysing, and reporting on criminality and the criminal justice system’s responses to crime”.

It is therefore crucial that Brå fulfill its obligations in a factual and objective manner, not least in the current environment, when Sweden is experiencing a veritable crime wave, including shootings, bombings and other gang-inspired violence that some commentators have likened to “war”.

According to the Linköping University report, the results of which were based primarily on interviews with former and current employees and managers of Brå, in addition to a number of former police chiefs and ministers of justice, Brå’s work is politically biased due to political pressure from the Ministry of Justice as well as the management of Brå. The report states:

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15821/coronavirus-how-progressive-ideology-led-to

A class action lawsuit filed on March 19 accuses the Spanish government — highly ideological by any standard, as the Communist coalition partner, Podemos, was founded with seed money from the Venezuelan government — of knowingly endangering public safety by encouraging the public to participate in more than 75 feminist marches, held across Spain on March 8, to mark International Women’s Day.

The Spanish government’s main point man for the coronavirus, Fernando Simón, claimed in a nationwide press conference that there was no risk of attending the rallies on March 8. “If my son asks me if he can go, I will tell him to do whatever he wants,” he said.

“Honestly, it seems to me a joke that the government has waited until today, clearly for political reasons, to make this announcement. The Socialist-Communist government has once again put its political interests above the common good. This gross negligence should lead to resignations. — Elentir, Contando Estrelas, March 9, 2020

The Spanish government, comprised of a coalition of Socialists and Communists, is facing legal action for alleged negligence in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The government is accused of putting its narrow ideological interests ahead of the safety and wellbeing of the public, and, in so doing, unnecessarily worsening the humanitarian crisis now gripping Spain, currently the second-worst afflicted country in Europe after Italy.

A class action lawsuit filed on March 19 accuses the Spanish government — highly ideological by any standard, as the Communist coalition partner, Podemos, was founded with seed money from the Venezuelan government — of knowingly endangering public safety by encouraging the public to participate in more than 75 feminist marches, held across Spain on March 8, to mark International Women’s Day. The nationwide rallies were aimed at protesting the government’s perennial bugbear: the alleged patriarchy of Western civilization.

Hundreds of thousands of people participated in those marches, and several high-profile attendees — including Spain’s deputy prime minister, as well as the prime minister’s wife and mother, and also the wife of the leader of Podemos — have since tested positive for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). It is unknown how many people were infected by the coronavirus as a result of the rallies.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/woody-allen-and-affirmative-action/

On March 7, the coronavirus death toll in Italy was 233. As of March 28, Italy’s coronavirus death toll was 10,023.

Some skeptics of “social distancing” have suggested that if most Americans had generally carried on with life as usual, the coronavirus would not present any greater threat than the seasonal flu or car crashes, each of which kill about 40,000 Americans a year. The fact that 10,000 people have died from the coronavirus in three weeks in Italy — a country with one-fifth the population of the United States — should dispel such wishful thinking.

And keep in mind that this is the death toll in Italy weeks after lockdowns were imposed — first within the region of Lombardy on February 21 (affecting only about 50,000 people) and then on March 9 for the entire country.

The spike in the daily death toll in Italy — a record 919 coronavirus deaths were recorded on March 27 alone — does not mean that the national lockdown is not working.

There is an average five-day delay between infection and appearance of symptoms and an average 18.5 days between the appearance of symptoms and death (for those who don’t survive).

The good news out of Italy is that the daily percentage growth of new cases has been decreasing:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/britains-creaking-national-health-system-gears-up-for-coronavirus-crisis-11585479601

EXCERPTS

LONDON—A vast convention center in east London is being turned into a sprawling hospital that can handle up to 4,000 patients. Thousands of retired nurses and doctors are being drafted back to work. The British army is delivering protective clothing to dozens of hospitals around the country.As the new coronavirus spreads here, Britain’s tightly funded National Health Service is taking drastic action to manage a crisis that some worry will overwhelm it.

How the NHS deals with an expected flood of patients will test whether a relatively low-cost, state-run health care system that is free at the point of delivery proves more resilient than its U.S. equivalent.The British system is limping into the crisis following 10 years of government belt tightening.

“This is a real problem at the moment,” said Chris Ham, a former director of strategy at Britain’s Department of Health. “The chickens are coming home to roost.” Already, doctors are complaining about a lack of protective clothing, with one NHS supplier reaching out to hardware stores to donate protective masks. The NHS is also struggling to ramp up mass testing for the coronavirus.

Going into the pandemic, U.K. hospital bed numbers had halved in three decades to 140,000, according to the King’s Fund, a health care charity.

More than 90% of hospital beds were occupied for all but four days of the 2017-18 winter, according to the British Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union. “It always runs right on the edge,” Mr. Edwards said.

The U.K. had 2.1 acute hospital beds—those where a patient receives treatment for severe injuries or illnesses—for every 1,000 inhabitants. That is among the lowest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to 2017 data, and compares with 2.4 beds per 1,000 in the U.S.