Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Interceptor7, Magnifico, annetteboardman, jck, and Besame. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Man Oh Man, wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
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Center for Public Integrity: The Government’s Secret Ventailator Stockpile is Nowhere Near Enough to Fight Coronavirus by Zachary Fryer-Biggs, Joe Wertz, and Liz Essely White
Only 16,600 ventilators.
That’s the total number of breathing machines that sit in the Strategic National Stockpile, the government reserve meant to fortify overwhelmed hospitals in a crisis. It’s a small supplement to the U.S. medical system’s estimated 160,000 or so ventilators — many already in use — and not nearly enough to help patients survive a severe outbreak of coronavirus infections, health experts say.
The previously unreported stockpile number, confirmed by a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services official who works with the reserve program, shows just how few ventilators are available to a national health system bracing for the full impact of the coronavirus.
The U.S. could have as many as 742,000 patients who need ventilators in a severe outbreak similar to the 1918 Spanish flu, according to a study by the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University, and more than 64,000 in a moderate outbreak.
New York City alone has said it needs an extra 15,000 ventilators, with Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeting at billionaire Elon Musk begging for his company to start making the medical devices — a sign of the desperation for the breathing machine crucial for combating a virus that targets lungs. New York state had more than 25,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus as of Tuesday.
Baltimore Sun: New viruses, short memories and the need for constant, global vigilance | COMMENTARY by Dan Rodricks
Every 25 to 30 years, the eminent virologist Robert Gallo has said, a gap occurs in the study of viruses, and the results are devastating. It’s one of the reasons why Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore, established the Global Virus Network, a collaboration of disease experts in 32 countries who share information and watch for trouble.
It’s also why Gallo is still on the job. He turned 83 on Monday, with no apparent plans for retirement. He worries. He worries that medical science is not attracting enough young, brilliant virologists. He worries most of all about gaps in human memory, about politicians and scientists forgetting what happens when there’s a lapse in vigilance.
An election might produce a regressive government that is skeptical of science and cavalier about funding research. A whole community of virologists might turn away from certain diseases that other health professionals have learned to control.
When it comes to the big picture of humans and viruses, Gallo offers a lot of bandwidth.
Washington Post: One continent remains untouched by the coronavirus: Antarctica by Adam Taylor and Stefano Pitrelli
One continent has not yet confirmed a case of the novel coronavirus. It’s a place of barren ice, where the all-consuming cold and darkness of winter is fast approaching.
Over the past few months, some 4,000 people from around the world have watched from Antarctica as the coronavirus pandemic, which began in Wuhan, China, swept around the globe, reaching all but its southernmost reaches.
“You’d better stay there, you’re safer there,” Alberto Della Rovere, leader of the 35th Italian expedition to Antarctica, said his colleagues at home told him via WhatsApp.
For now, they appear to be right. Even in normal times, only a limited number of people are allowed in and out of Antarctica, with medical workers screening for signs of influenza and other illnesses before arrival.
“Right now, this, Antarctica, is the safest place in the world,” Della Rovere said. “There are no outside contacts and we’re far away from any settlement.”
Buzzfeed: Opinion: A Lesson From The People Of Wuhan by Tricia Wang
Years ago, I walked the bustling streets of Wuhan as a Chinese American doing fieldwork on technology use among vulnerable populations. Back in January, when I started seeing footage of those streets silent and empty due to a city-wide quarantine to slow down the coronavirus outbreak, I went back into ethnographer mode. I worked with two of my former researchers, Shayla Qiu and Reginald Zhu, in Wuhan, to conduct virtual fieldwork to understand how people on the ground were responding to this crisis.
Through a series of interviews over WeChat, I discovered a very different story about Wuhan than what I was reading in Western media. While news reports here focused on the authoritarian, top-down measures the Chinese government used to slow the rate of infection — including the suppression of information and rapid construction of temporary hospitals — the story I found was one of totally invisible, yet highly sophisticated networks of localized cooperation. It wasn’t just top-down measures that successfully slowed the infections in Wuhan, it was also bottom-up, dynamic organizing in emergent, hyperlocal groups.
Neighbors were using social media to find food and medicine, support the sick, and help each other survive.
Dailly Beast: Trump to New York: You’ve Been Mean to Me, Drop Dead by Asawin Suebsaeng, Erin Banco, and Sam Stein
As the coronavirus pandemic has deepened, Democratic governors bearing the heaviest burdens are increasingly wary that if they complain too loudly about the federal response they will anger Donald Trump and risk losing critical support during a life-or-death crisis.
The latest evidence of the delicate, sometimes impossible, line that these governors have been forced to walk came on Tuesday, when the president took swipes at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo during a televised town-hall-style program with Fox News.
“I watched Gov. Cuomo [today] and he was very nice,” the president said of the man steering the state hardest hit by the virus. Cuomo had, moments earlier, conducted a press conference in which he scoffed at how insufficient the administration’s help in procuring ventilators had been.
“He had a choice…He refused to order 15,000 ventilators,” Trump said, referencing a recent column by Betsy McCaughey, a hardened Trump supporter and longtime healthcare-policy crusader on the right. “It says that he didn’t buy the ventilators in 2015 for a pandemic, established death panels and lotteries instead.”
Propublica: Doctors Are Hoarding Unproven Coronavirus Medicine by Writing Prescriptions for Themselves and Their Families by Topher Sanders, David Armstrong, and Ava Kofman
A nationwide shortage of two drugs touted as possible treatments for the coronavirus is being driven in part by doctors inappropriately prescribing the medicines for family, friends and themselves, according to pharmacists and state regulators.
“It’s disgraceful, is what it is,” said Garth Reynolds, executive director of the Illinois Pharmacists Association, which started getting calls and emails Saturday from members saying they were receiving questionable prescriptions. “And completely selfish.”
Demand for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine surged over the past several days as President Donald Trump promoted them as possible treatments for the coronavirus and online forums buzzed with excitement over a small study suggesting the combination of hydroxychloroquine and a commonly used antibiotic could be effective in treating COVID-19.
AlJazeera: India declares 21-day 'total lockdown' as coronavirus cases rise
India's 1.3 billion people will go under "total lockdown" for 21 days to combat the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, warning that anyone going outside risked inviting the virus inside their homes, and pledging $2bn to bolster the country's beleaguered healthcare system.
"From 12 midnight today [1830 GMT Tuesday], the entire country will be in lockdown, total lockdown," Modi said on Tuesday in a televised address, his second in a week.
"To save India, to save its every citizen, you, your family... every street, every neighbourhood is being put under lockdown," he said, putting nearly one-fifth of the world's population under lockdown.
India has lagged behind other nations in the number of COVID-19 cases, but there has been a sharp increase in recent days to 519 infections, including 10 deaths, according to the government.
DW: Mozambique: Dozens of bodies found in truck container
Sixty-four people believed to be migrants from Ethiopia were found dead in a freight container attached to a truck in central Mozambique, provincial migration authorities said on Tuesday.
A further 14 people were discovered alive. The cause of death remains unknown but authorities said initial investigations pointed to asphyxia — otherwise known as oxygen deprivation.
Provincial immigration spokesman Amelia Direito told local reporters that all 78 aboard the container were Ethiopian men and believed to have been headed for South Africa.
Police spokesman Orlando Mudumane announced: "Two people were detained in connection to the incident, the driver and a middleman, who contracted the driver to ferry these people."
Temperatures in the region are currently hovering around 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit).
BBC News: Last survivor of transatlantic slave trade discovered by Sean Coughlan
Hannah Durkin, at the University of Newcastle, had previously identified the last surviving slave captured in Africa in the 19th Century and brought to United States as a woman called Redoshi Smith, who died in 1937.
But she has now discovered that another former slave, Matilda McCrear, had lived three years later.
Matilda died in Selma, Alabama, in January 1940, at the age 83 - and her rebellious life story was the last living link with slaves abducted from Africa.
Her 83-year-old grandson, Johnny Crear, had no idea about his grandmother's historic story.
In the 1960s, he had witnessed violence against civil rights marchers in Selma, where protesters had been addressed by Dr Martin Luther King.
On discovering his grandmother had been enslaved, he told BBC News: "I had a lot of mixed emotions.
So...yeah...pretty dark day in the news.
Meteor Blades is hosting a Tuesday night owls thread tonight.
Everyone have a good evening!