With the American public already whipped into a panic by the coronavirus pandemic, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a new security bulletin warning that terrorists are likely to try to take advantage of it.
The DHS says they don’t have information on any active plots, but says the groups are spreading “misinformation” on the virus, and that attacks and incitement will continue to grow in the coming months.
From the terrorist perspective, existing fear can act as a multiplier for anything generated in the attacks, and the US government is so heavily caught up in coping with the virus, the DHS believes it may create opportunities for further attacks that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
As is always the case where DHS bulletins are concerned, the administration can well use this threat to try to justify more military offensives, stirring up more crises at a time that they could ill-afford to shoulder at this time. With the government already feeling so vulnerable, even the imagination of threats could have a deleterious impact.
Another damn feeding trough in the making. While this thing spreads out of control and people are dropping dead everywhere, these so called “leaders” of ours are busy fighting over money and power. Even the putative “health care” system is frantically trying to figure out the best ways to turn a buck and do as little as possible in return. When your overriding concern is money, everything else comes a distant second. The tone at the top is profit uber alles.
Here in the US, this virus has the potential to completely overwhelm the infrastructure in a hurry. We might be headed there now. In Italy, they are triaging people so aggressively that the elderly are being left to die without proper treatment.
At the same time we have the usual crop of boot licking swine lining up to agglomerate more wealth and power, while those with actual wealth and power already cashed out and headed to the bunker.
We have an unusually sick and depraved kakistocracy in play here.
Also, as a PSA, bleach doesn’t kill the virus. Ammonia and Alcohol are what’s needed
The virus is spreading, but people are not dropping dead worse than any other cold and flu year. Most hospitalizations would involve the elderly and immuno-compromised, the usual victims of upper respiratory illness.
This was already happening without COVID-19 hybrid-hoax, but certainly would artificially inflate the COVID-19 death rate.
Add to that, COVID-19 can be had alongside influenza and cold viruses, making the yearly influenza death rate a potential COVID-19 panic bonanza.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0901-houle-elderly-health-20150901-story.html
Italy and other Western nations have deliberately shortchanged spare medical capacity, that’s true. This is despite an aging population. Any bad cold and flu year was a potential disaster in the making without COVID-19 as a pretext.
What is happening in Italy and probably elsewhere to some lesser degree is geronticide, or senicide, killing off of the elderly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senicide
Keep an eye on your hospitalized elderly loved ones and make sure they get proper IV support that is not denied for any fatuous reason.
It targets lung and pulmonary function in a way that doesn’t lend itself to easy treatment. People have to be put on ventilators in order to rest their lungs and get oxygen. A ventilator is a very complicated device that requires a respiratory specialist to set each one up and from there carefully monitor it. The telemetry departments at hospitals are working massive overtime and are completely overwhelmed by just respiratory alone.
One thing to make sure people understand, is that this isn’t just an old person’s disease. The way it targets the respiratory system, it can kill anyone.
What you are describing appears to be Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome; the dreaded cytokine storm. ARDS is in fact a too-common outcome of severe cases of colds and flus and not something special made up for COVID-19.
[Hospitals are overwhelmed, because for years spare capacity has been cut back to save money. The conditions for a perfect pandemic storm were created by willful neglect.]
ARDS can kill both the young and the old. This is why hospitals often have a suite of ventilators in the first place. Every cold and flu season has such victims and many, even the young, may die. [However, the elderly are disproportionately affected.]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140227142250.htm
The only real defense is prevention with good hygiene and nutrition, followed by more of the same when sick.
Washing hands and not touching eyes, nose and mouth with unclean hands.
Vitamin D, C and zinc-copper in diet and/or supplementation.
The Chinese, facing shortages of drugs, reportedly used intravenous vitamin C in large doses to tame cytokine storms.
Vitamins and some minerals are critical immune regulators. They may not cure a cold, but the body is not a magical system that works without inputs.
http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n11.shtml
Scary stuff – but you were ALWAYS at risk during cold/flu season. Not just from COVID-19. Knapp even linked to this useful article; you may have already had COVID-19 and shrugged it off. Its just prevalent enough that the more vulnerable are getting symptomatic.
https://elemental.medium.com/did-you-have-coronavirus-without-knowing-it-d33bbce9e9e5
“Hospitals are overwhelmed, because for years spare capacity has been cut back to save money.”
If by “spare capacity has been cut back to save money” you mean “politicians wielding certificate of need laws have been used by dominant players to stop their competitors from building new facilities and augmenting old ones,” you’re absolutely correct.
Yes; that would be the case especially with private health services.
Government-run public health care is far more direct; they just cut the budget, roll up the beds, and withhold investment in new technologies. While unionized staff clamour and even strike for better wages and working conditions, which may or may not include better tech.
For example, the MRI, now used to clinically diagnose severe COVID-19 cases, is a standard technology for hospitals and even private practices in the U.S..
In Canada, MRIs can be rather exotic. There are private MRI clinics, which perhaps adds another dimension to the problem as their market depends on an artificial scarcity.
Apparently the latest trick is to get on a cancellation list to bypass Canadian medicare wait lists.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/wrha-wait-times-mri-preferential-1.4076439
MRI machines are pretty pricey, or at least used to be — the hospital our health insurance is affiliated with staffed and ran theirs 24/7 rather than buying more the last time I knew. The only time I had an MRI, I had to show up at some ungodly middle of the night hour, and was informed in advance that my co-pay would be charged whether I showed up or not.
I know there are private MRI clinics around here that run regular business hours — when my daughter was in a car wreck, she was sent to one by the car insurance company. I don’t know if the machine price has been coming down, or if they use a different kind of machine, or what.
Try this question, because the differences in opinion here, while educational, seem to divert from basic economy.
Isn’t it superior to have a bloated, redundant healthcare system, with way too many resources for the need, than a bloated redundant militancy system which serves noone, not even themselves ?
No one does; its a secretive industry. If you still worked for the military, you’d never know the cost. Ditto if you were on the health plan of a successful large U.S. corporation.
The secrecy around industry barriers protecting high MRI costs is fairly tight against a casual Google. Beyond maintenance and MRI technicians being expensive, patents may be overpriced. Anyone with a lock on some portion of this tech knows, its a gold mine.
However, the tech has been around long enough for both economy of scale and technological improvements to lower the price.
Theoretically, public not-for-profit health care could just have taxpayers eat the cost and reap the benefits of efficient diagnosis.
Whatever the barriers to getting an MRI in the U.S., Americans at least have them.
A private insurance system would seem to have the most incentive to bring costs down, but they are probably partnered into the MRI shakedown.
“A private insurance system would seem to have the most incentive to bring costs down”
True, but the technology wasn’t developed until the 1970s and 1980s, by which time health insurance in the un-socialized sector was either gone or going, replaced by state-regulated pre-paid healthcare (HMO/PPO).
“A ventilator is a very complicated device”
It’s an insanely simple device. It’s patient intubation/monitoring, equipment sterilization, etc. that are the bottlenecks.
My better half used to work in respiratory DME. A ventilator handles all 8 aspects of respiration and is the most sophisticated of all the assisted breathing apparatus. The tubes, sterilization, and monitoring equipment are necessary and should be considered part of the system.
We’ve had ventilators for a century. Just because your significant other used to work with Nike Air Jordans, that doesn’t mean Nike Air Jordans are the only shoes. And in a pinch, if you absolutely have to go out to get the newspaper and your Nike Air Jordans are in the wash, you put on your old slippers and get it done.
You can literally build a reasonably modern, but not quite as automated, ventilator with a trip to Best Buy, a trip to Lowe’s, and a trip to Auto Zone — and if we need more ventilators, more quickly than the market can deliver the top of the line models, and have to have candy-stripers watch them and yell for a nurse if they see a problem so that fewer nurses can supervise more patients, that’s exactly what we’ll do.
What the open source community has kludged together is NOT a ventilator. At best you can get a BIPAP going like that. Nice try son, but you don’t know what they hell you’re talking about.
I’m not your son, and I do know what I’m talking about. You’re confusing “Tesla” and “car.”
You’re the one who’s confused sonny boy. Get lost with your ignorant bullshit, I have no patience for a bunch of idiots who are still butthurt their ideology failed in the 19th century.
I have no patience with progressives either, but I don’t see how that’s relevant.
They’re making ventilators with parts from Home Depot now, btw.
Translation: Americans aren’t panicking enough! At least the half with any morals to go with smarts and wisdom.
Go figure.
Anyone seeing Canada going into full medical police nanny state mode under PM Spoiled Fratboy, entitlement-splaining with the CBC in full paternalistic condescension messaging mode, should figure – nope, not for us.
Terrorists would have loved to shut sown the U.S. economy. They didn’t have to lift a finger.
“Never let a crisis go to waste.” “Give us more money or the terrorists will win!”
This is the degeneracy of a dying empire.
The headline is correct. But the terrorists are the very people putting out the warning.
Keep an eye on what the US is doing abroad in their endless wars while the world is being distracted by the virus epidemic. What a good time for more atrocities in the name of corp. profits and keeping the world safe for Zionism.