Author: CensorBiz

Football leagues around the world have canceled soccer games for the foreseeable future as one of the measures to slow a rapid COVID-19 spread. But soccer, or football, as it is called in much of the world, continues to be played in Belarus where the number of confirmed infections is still relatively low.The country’s autocratic leader Alexander Lukashenko has dismissed the virus scare as overblown and has advised his people to continue business as usual, especially agriculture. Local media published photos of the Belarus president playing ice hockey.Top Belarusian football division, Vysheyshaya Liga, is run by the Belarusian Football Federation and currently includes 16 teams. The country has never excelled in soccer and has never qualified for the World Cup or the European football championships.But with sports fans around the world deprived of their favorite pastime, Belarus is getting attention and signing broadcasting contracts with a growing number of countries to carry their games. People in India and Israel, not just neighboring Russia, could soon become familiar with members of teams such as FC Minsk or Dinamo Minsk and their individual styles.Belarus soccer fans hope the exposure will inspire their teams to play better and qualify for the next UEFA (The Union of European Football Associations) champions league. UEFA Championship is also known as the European Cup.The spokesman for the Belarus Football Federation Aleksandr Aleinik said the organization is respecting the recommendations by the Sports Ministry.  “All those who are in contact with fans were given protective gloves,” he said. But images of fans from some of the games Saturday show very few wearing masks and some of them cheering without any shirts on.The outbreak of coronavirus in Italy has been especially deadly for the northern city of Bergamo. The unprecedented toll has been traced to a February football match in Milan. More than 2,000 fans traveled from Bergamo to Milan to watch the Atlanta vs. Valencia match at Milan’s San Siro Stadium February 19. As they chanted in the packed stadium it is believed they picked up the new coronavirus strain and took it home to Bergamo. Two days later, Italy confirmed the first case of locally transmitted COVID-19.  Six weeks later, Italy reported that the number of deaths from the coronavirus had topped 10,000. Bergamo is struggling to bury and cremate the number of bodies after several hundred people sometimes die in one day.   European football leagues have canceled local soccer matches until at least the end of April to help slow the rapid spread of COVID-19. The European championship has been postponed until the summer of 2021 because the domestic competition cannot be completed in time for this summer.Most European countries have locked their borders and ordered closures of schools and all but essential businesses. People are asked to stay at home, gather in very limited numbers, sometimes no more than two, and keep a distance from others when they have to go out. In some cases, governments have imposed strict measures such as curfews and mandatory quarantine.  But measures vary from country to country.  In Sweden, restaurants and bars in some cities seemed as lively this month as ever, with the government allowing people to choose how to protect themselves. Schools, day care centers, gyms and beauty salons remained open even as they closed in neighboring Denmark and Norway.  The government announced tougher measures last week after the number of infections and COVID-19 deaths suddenly soared.  But Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said you cannot legislate everything and that individuals also have to take responsibility.Some experts also say that it is counterproductive to impose measures that cannot be sustained for a long period of time. Meanwhile, ordinary people in countries hit by the virus may have to weigh daily the pros and cons of stepping out of the house for weeks or months yet to come.   
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A Democratic Party leader in western Missouri died Sunday after contracting COVID-19 as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the state exceeded 900 and the death toll reached 12.
The death of William “Al” Grimes, the Henry County Democratic Party chairman, was announced in a tweet from state Chairwoman Jean Peters Baker. It came after the Henry County Health Center in Clinton, about 60 miles (96.56 kilometers) southeast of Kansas City, announced that a man in his 70s had died.
“We will miss you, Al,” Peters wrote. “The stars will not shine as brightly.”
Peters said that Grimes, a Navy veteran, had been active in campaigns throughout eastern and central Missouri. He also ran for the Missouri House in 2014 and 2016.
Grimes was first hospitalized in Clinton before being transferred on March 8 to a Kansas hospital, The Kansas City Star reported.  His positive test for coronavirus was reported March 13, but he was among the state’s first confirmed cases.
His death was among two new deaths reported Sunday by the state Department of Health and Senior Services. There were no details about the other new death.
The number of coronavirus cases confirmed in Missouri rose by 65 from Saturday to 903, according to the department, but the increase of 8% was considerably lower than the 25% increase Saturday and the average daily increase of 45% over the past week.
For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, and death.
Meanwhile, a third St. Louis-area police officer tested positive for the coronavirus and was in isolation.
The St. Louis County Police Department said Saturday that one of its officers had contracted the virus, but the agency does not believe it happened while the officer was on duty. The department provided no other details.
The St. Louis County police said affected work areas and vehicles have been thoroughly cleaned and they don’t know of any other cases associated with the officers.
Two officers in the St. Louis city police force’s traffic division also have tested positive for the virus.
Also, Jim Edmonds, a broadcaster for baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals said he underwent tests at an area hospital for coronavirus after going to the emergency room. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the 49-year-old former outfielder said he has pneumonia and was awaiting the results of other tests. 
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Singer-songwriter Jan Howard, who had a No. 1 country hit “For Loving You” with Bill Anderson and wrote hits for others like Kitty Wells’ “It’s All Over But the Crying,” has died at age 91, according to the Grand Ole Opry.The Opry, of which she was a member for nearly 50 years, announced her death on Saturday.”Jan Howard was a force of nature in country music, at the Opry, and in life,” said Dan Rogers, the Grand Ole Opry’s vice president and executive producer, said in a statement. “We were all so lucky so many nights to hear her voice on stage and to catch up with her backstage. We’re all better for having had her in our lives.”The Missouri-born Howard had her first hit in 1960 with “The One You Slip Around With,” and had a string of others including “Evil on Your Mind” and “Bad Seed.”But she had her biggest success as a duo with Anderson, including “I Know You’re Married,” “Someday We’ll Be Together” and”For Loving You,” which spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart in 1967.She also wrote for others, including Wells’ song and Connie Smith’s hit “I Never Once Stopped Loving You.”Her most personal song was perhaps “My Son,” which she wrote as plea for her son Jimmy’s safe return from the Vietnam war. He was killed two weeks after its release in 1968. Another son later killed himself.Howard documented her triumphs and struggles in the 1987 autobiography “Sunshine and Shadow.”She is survived by her remaining son, two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. 
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Krzysztof Penderecki, an award-winning conductor and one of the world’s most popular contemporary classical music composers whose works have featured in Hollywood films like “The Shining” and “Shutter Island,” died Sunday. He was 86.In a statement emailed to The Associated Press, the Ludwig van Beethoven Association said Penderecki had a “long and serious illness.” He died at his Krakow home, the association said.The statement called Penderecki as “Great Pole, an outstanding creator and a humanist” who was one of the world’s best appreciated Polish composers. The association was founded by Penderecki’s wife, Elzbieta Penderecka, and the communique was signed by its head, Andrzej Giza.Penderecki was best known for his monumental compositions for orchestra and choir, like “St. Luke Passion” and “Seven Gates of Jerusalem,” though his range was much wider. Rock fans know him from his work with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.  A violinist and a committed educator, he built a music center across the road from his home in southern Poland, where young virtuosos have the chance to learn from and play with world-famous masters.  Culture Minister Piotr Glinski tweeted that “Poland’s culture has suffered a huge and irreparable loss,” and that Penderecki was the nation’s “most outstanding contemporary composer whose music could be heard around the globe, from Japan to the United States.””A warm and good person,” Glinski said in his tweet.Penderecki’s international career began at age 25, when he won all three top prizes in a young composers’ competition in Warsaw in 1959 — writing one score with his right hand, one with his left and asking a friend to copy out the third score so that the handwriting wouldn’t reveal they were all by the same person.He would go on to win many awards, including multiple Grammys, but the first prize he won was especially precious: It took him to a music course in Germany, at a time when Poland was behind the Iron Curtain and Poles couldn’t freely travel abroad.  In the late 1950s and the 1960s, Penderecki experimented with avant-garde forms and sound, technique and unconventional instruments, using magnetic tape and even typewriters. He was largely inspired by electronic instruments at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, which opened in Warsaw in 1957 and was where he composed.”In my works the most important is the form and it must serve the purpose,” Penderecki said in a 2015 interview for Polish state news agency PAP.He said he begins composing with a “graphic sketch of the entire work and then I fill in the white spaces,” he said.His 1960 “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” won him a UNESCO prize. Written for 52 string instruments, it can be described as a massive plaintive scream.In the 1970s, believing that avant-garde had been explored to the full, Penderecki embarked on a new path, writing music that, to many, sounds romantic and has the traditional forms of symphonies, concertos, choral works and operas. A Catholic altar boy who grew up in a predominantly Jewish environment, he was largely inspired by religious texts: Catholic, Christian Orthodox and Jewish.But his first opera, the 1969 “Devils of Loudun,” based on a novel by Aldous Huxley about the Inquisition, put him at odds with the Vatican, which called on him to stop the performances. He refused.Penderecki wrote music for various historical celebrations, and conducted around the world. Among the works are the 1966 “St. Luke Passion,” commissioned by West German Radio to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the Muenster Cathedral, and the 1996 “Seven Gates of Jerusalem” to mark 3,000 years of the titular city.  In 1967 he composed a major choral work, “Dies Irae,” known also as the “Auschwitz Oratorio,” in homage to the Holocaust victims.His second opera, “Paradise Lost,” based on the John Milton poem, seemed to reconcile him with the Catholic Church, and in 1979, he conducted a concert at the Vatican for Polish-born Pope John Paul II.In 1980, the leader of Poland’s Solidarity freedom movement, Lech Walesa, called him and commissioned a short piece that would honor Poles who lost their lives fighting the communist regime. Penderecki composed “Lacrimosa,” which led to the larger “Polish Requiem” that premiered in 1984 in Stuttgart.  Penderecki wrote for virtuosos and friends like violinists Isaak Stern and Anne-Sophie Mutter and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. In 2012 he recorded an album with Greenwood, Radiohead’s guitarist.”Because of the complexity of what’s happening — particularly in pieces such as ‘Threnody’ and ‘Polymorphia,’ and how the sounds are bouncing around the concert hall, it becomes a very beautiful experience when you’re there,” Greenwood said in a 2012 interview with The Guardian.Penderecki said at the time that Greenwood is a “very interesting composer” and that working with the guitarist made him see his own music from a new perspective.Greenwood tweeted Sunday to say “What sad news to wake to. Penderecki was the greatest – a fiercely creative composer, and a gentle, warm-hearted man. My condolences to his family, and to Poland on this huge loss to the musical world.”Penderecki’s rich, powerful, sometimes menacing music, especially in his early works, was used in Hollywood movies including Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” and William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist.”It was also a personal matter for Penderecki to have parts of the “Polish Requiem” used in the Polish World War II movie “Katyn” by Oscar-awarded director Andrzej Wajda, about the 1940 massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets. Penderecki’s much-loved uncle was killed in that massacre.  But Penderecki said his “greatest fascination in life” was not music — it was trees. Around his manor house, he arranged a scenic arboretum featuring the various kinds of trees and plants that he brought from the most distant corners of the world where his music was played.  “It takes generations to plant a garden,” he once said. “I will do it over some 40 years, but this garden is like an unfinished symphony. Something can always be changed, you can always add new trees, find new species.”Although he was a recluse, he liked to write music on a Baltic Sea beach in Jastrzebia Gora with his close family near him.Penderecki was born Nov. 23, 1933, in the southern Polish town of Debica. His maternal grandfather was German and his grandmother was Armenian. His father, a lawyer, loved to play the violin and instilled in his son a love of music.Penderecki studied violin and composition at the Krakow Conservatory, where on graduation in 1958 he was appointed a professor, and next a rector. From 1972-1978 he also taught at the Yale University School of Music.Penderecki won a number of Grammy Awards during the course of his career. The Recording Academy awarded him the special merit National Trustees Award in 1968. In 1988, he won a Grammy for the recording of his 2nd Concerto for Cello, with Rostropovich. Two more came 11 years later, for his 2nd Violin Concerto, “Metamorphosen,” written for and performed by Mutter, with Penderecki conducting. Most recently, a Grammy for best choral performance came in 2017 in recognition of the “Penderecki Conducts Penderecki” album.  He is survived by his second wife, Elzbieta, who as a girl was a piano student of his first wife Barbara, and by daughters Beata and Dominika and son Lukasz.His ashes will be buried in the National Pantheon, the crypt of Krakow’s St. Peter and Paul Church, according to the head of the pantheon’s foundation.The funeral is being postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
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A medical evacuation plane headed from the Philippines to Japan burst into flames Sunday at the end of the runway in Manila, killing all eight people aboard, officials said. “Unfortunately, no passenger survived the accident,” that involved a Lion Air flight the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA) said in a statement. The plane was carrying a patient along with a companion and medical staff to Haneda, Japan. “8 passengers consisting of a flight medic, nurse, doctor, three flight crew, one patient and its companion were on board,” Senator and head of the Philippine Red Cross Richard Gordon wrote on Twitter. Our fire and medic teams were already dispatched to NAIA Terminal 2 to respond to the plane crash incident involving Lion Air Flight RPC 5880. 8 passengers consisting of a flight medic, nurse, doctor, three flight crew, one patient and its companion were on board.— Richard J. Gordon (@DickGordonDG) March 29, 2020It was not immediately clear whether the patient was suffering from the novel coronavirus. Video from the scene shows a huge plume of smoke rising from the end of the runway. 
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The top U.S. government infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, predicted Sunday that 100,000 or more Americans could die from the coronavirus pandemic, 50 times the current death toll. Fauci told CNN that the U.S. could have “millions of cases” of COVID-19, a vast spread of the pandemic in the country, where officials now officially count 124,000 confirmed cases and 2,100 deaths, although both figures are rapidly increasing by the day. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Thomas Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University, both rebuffed suggestions by President Donald Trump that the advice to stay home and social distance with other people to prevent the spread of the coronavirus can be eased. Trump suggested last week that U.S. businesses would be “raring to go” by Easter Sunday in two weeks. Fauci said he would only support any easing of anti-coronavirus protections in lesser-impacted regions of the country if there is increased availability of testing to monitor those areas. But he said, “It’s a little iffy there” currently. A usually busy 7th Avenue is mostly empty of vehicles, the result of citywide restrictions calling for people to stay indoors and maintain social distancing in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19, March 28, 2020, in New York.Initial U.S. social distancing recommendations to slow the spread of the virus end Monday, but Inglesby told the “Fox News Sunday” show, “I don’t think we’ve had anywhere near enough time” for the restrictions to have an appreciable effect. “We must hold steady with social distancing.” The pace of the coronavirus toll in the U.S. has been frightening, with the first 1,000 deaths recorded over a month, and the second 1,000 over the last two days. President Donald Trump talks with host Bill Hemmer during a Fox News virtual town hall with members of the coronavirus task force, in the Rose Garden at the White House, March 24, 2020, in Washington.Trump suggested last week that the country can soon safely return to work while continuing to ”social distance ourselves and wash our hands.” Asked whether that would be a viable strategy, Inglesby said, “I don’t think so.” He said if the U.S. workforce, millions of whom are teleworking from home or furloughed by their employers, return too soon, the coronavirus will spread “widely and aggressively. We really should hold the course.” He said any relaxation of protections against the spread of the virus should be a “conditions-based decision.” Inglesby said “it’s not clear to me” when restrictions might have had enough of an effect to gradually return to normal life in the U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who is heading Trump’s coronavirus task force, told Fox News in a separate interview, that in the coming days he would “bring data to him” about the advance of the disease. “We’ll open up our country as soon as we can responsibly do so,” Pence said. While the number of the confirmed coronavirus cases is spiraling, Pence said it “should be encouraging to Americans” that of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been tested for the virus in the U.S. only 10% have tested positive. Trump on Saturday floated the idea of imposing a quarantine around the particularly hard-hit New York metropolitan area that includes parts of the states of New Jersey and Connecticut, but backed off the idea. Instead, health officials called on the millions who live in the megalopolis to continue to stay home and practice social distancing — staying at least two meters from other people.  Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy Vice President Mike Pence and Rep. Kevin Brady applaud President Donald Trump during then bill signing ceremony, March 27, 2020.Trump signed a congressionally approved $2 trillion stimulus package on Friday to boost the country’s economic fortunes from the significant damage wreaked by the coronavirus. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Fox said he would leave it “to the medical professionals” about how soon to fully reopen the country, but he said the cash infusion businesses and about 90% of American families could return the country to economic health again by the July-to-September period, even if the April-to-June period is rocky. Some economists are saying the U.S. has already fallen into a recession and could soon see a 20% unemployment rate and a 24% decline in the country’s economy, the world’s biggest. “I don’t know what these numbers are going to be,” Mnuchin said. But he predicted that within months there would be a “very large” growth in the country’s economy and “low numbers” in unemployment. “We are going to kill this virus,” he said. 
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Voters in Mali went to the polls Sunday to elect members of the 147-seat National Assembly.  The parliamentary election in the war-torn West African country, which should have taken place after President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s 2018 reelection, has been postponed several times since then out of security concerns. New members of the assembly are expected to emerge for the first time since 2013, when Rally for Mali, Keita’s party, gained a substantial majority.   Some 200,000 people displaced by the ongoing violence in northern and central Mali will not be able to vote, because “no mechanism has been established” to facilitate their participation, a government official said. The COVID-19 outbreak has figured in the persistent security fears about the vote. Late Saturday, the country announced its first coronavirus death with the number of infections rising to 18. The abduction Wednesday of the veteran opposition leader Soumaila Cisse has also contributed to such fears.     Cisse, 70, who has been runner-up in three presidential elections, was campaigning in the central area of the country at the time.  Cisse and six members of his team were kidnapped in an attack in which his bodyguard was killed. It is believed that Cisse and his entourage are being held by a jihadist group linked to al-Qaida.  Cisse’s Union for the Republic and Democracy urged supporters on Saturday to go to polling stations in even greater numbers. 
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Pope Francis is backing the U.N. chief’s call for a cease-fire in all conflicts raging across the globe to help slow the spread of the coronavirus. He also said his thoughts are with those constrained to live in groups, citing in particular rest homes for the elderly, military barracks and jails.During his traditional Sunday blessing, the pope called for ‘’the creation of humanitarian aid corridors, the opening of diplomacy and attention to those who are in situations of great vulnerability.’’He cited U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ appeal this past week for a global truce ‘’to focus together on the true fight of our lives’’ against the coronavirus.Francis, as he has throughout most of the coronavirus emergency due to bans on public gatherings, addressed the faithful from his private library in the Apostolic Palace, and not from a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square as is tradition. 
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Taiwan’s invitation to American journalists harassed by China to locate here instead would free them from government pressure but distance them from Asia’s hub for international news.Foreign minister Joseph Wu tweeted the invitation Saturday. He mentioned three media organizations whose reporters had been thrown out of China, apparently in response to U.S. curbs against journalists working for state-run Chinese media in the United States.“He said as that as New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post journalists face intensifying hostility in China, I would like to welcome you to be stationed in Taiwan, a country that’s a beacon of freedom and democracy,” ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou said, referring to Wu’s tweet.As Wall Street Journal reporters Julie Wernau embraces a colleague before her departure at Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, March 28, 2020.Unlike in China, in Taiwan foreign reporters are legally free to interview scholars, ordinary people and government officials without filing applications.Taiwan police seldom interrupt a journalist’s fieldwork, again unlike as in China, and the foreign ministry does not expel reporters over disagreements about their news coverage. China threw out three Wall Street Journal reporters in February because of the news organization’s headline calling China a “sick man of Asia” due to its COVID-19 outbreak.Those protections, typical of a democracy, however, come at the expense of distance from China, the epicenter for Asia news closely followed by American audiences. China was the source of COVID-19 in December. Over the past two years, it has captured attention for its role in the Sino-U.S. trade dispute.Americans, including those based in Taiwan, need visas every time they visit China unless transiting for three to six days in some of the larger cities. If discovered gathering news there without Chinese government permission, they could be expelled, and any China-based colleagues harassed.“It don’t think it’s easy for journalists to make their story if they are not on the ground in Beijing or Shanghai, but if Taipei can be an alternative choice when there’s a situation or scenario, that would be a good thing,” said Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan.        
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Italy, the European country hardest hit by the coronavirus, confirmed 10,023 people dead and 92,472 infected as of Saturday.Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte made the announcement Saturday evening in a joint appearance with Economy Minister Roberto Gualtieri.On a somewhat positive note, Conte said that on Saturday Italy also had more than 1,400 people who recovered, the highest number to date.Conte said that under the solidarity fund for the municipalities program, which has an advance payment of $4.8 billion, mayors will soon be issuing food vouchers for low-income and poor people facing challenges due to the lockdown of the country and the shutdown of nonessential factories and businesses. Many Italians have seen a drastic decrease of income.Relatives attend the funeral of a woman who died from the coronavirus disease, as Italy struggles to contain the spread of COVID-19 in Seriate, March 28, 2020.”With a Civil Protection order we will add to this fund (the solidarity fund for the municipalities) 400 million euros. We are distributing this fund to the municipalities, but they must use it to support poor people who cannot afford food shopping. With these 400 million that will be distributed to the 8,000 municipalities of our territory it will be possible to issue vouchers and to give food,” Conte said.Local municipalities are obliged to use the fund for food, medicines and other essential goods for citizens of the poorest segments of Italian society.Conte also said that if data collected show a decrease in the intensity of the coronavirus and if it is feasible, schools may open Friday.In Spain, the health ministry confirmed 832 deaths Saturday, bringing the total number of victims to 5,690.  The country has the highest death toll in Europe after Italy.Health authorities said Friday the country was getting closer to the peak of the virus outbreak. In the meantime, hospitals have surpassed their capacities and patients infected with coronavirus continue to arrive, which has forced medical personnel to accommodate them elsewhere.As of Saturday, France had 37,575 confirmed cases of infection and 2,314 deaths, with 319 new deaths in the last 24 hours, health authorities said.Sheep walk back to their shelter near the Mont-Saint-Michel, northwestern France, on March 28, 2020, during a lockdown in France aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19.French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said the country has not seen the worst yet, warning that the first 15 days of April will be crucial.”We must all together face a considerable challenge and make an intense effort. An effort that will endure because I want to tell you things with clarity, the fight has just begun. The first 15 days of April will be difficult, even more difficult than the 15 days that have just passed,” Philippe said.Meanwhile, Health Minister Olivier Veran said France had ordered more than a billion protective masks, mostly from China, as the country was running short of the much-needed item to fight the spread of COVID-19.In Germany the number of deaths has been relatively low, compared to other European countries. According to Die Zeit newspaper, Germany had 397 victims – a death rate below 1 percent — as of Saturday, and 53,340 people tested positive for the coronavirus.Experts believe that strict measures, extensive testing and a strong health care system have helped the country to deal more effectively to keep the death toll lower, while the number of infections is high.Germany has closed nonessential services and has banned public gatherings of more than two people until April 20. 
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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Saturday he was postponing the state’s April 28 presidential primary to June 23 as its number of coronavirus cases climbed to 53,339 and deaths to 728.“We have been behind this virus from day one. We are waiting to see what the virus does,” Cuomo said at a news conference. “You don’t win on defense. You win on offense. You have to get ahead of this.”The governor has become a leading national voice on the coronavirus pandemic as the state has accounted for roughly a third of the U.S. death toll and half the known cases.Cuomo said he asked pharmacies to begin delivering medications to homes free of charge. He also said President Donald Trump had approved the construction of four additional temporary hospital sites in New York City, adding 4,000 hospital beds.
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The hospital ship USNS Comfort departed from Norfolk, Virginia, Saturday en route to New York to assist with the coronavirus outbreak. President Donald Trump flew to Norfolk on Saturday as it set off. During a speech, he said is considering a two-week quarantine for the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to help officials contain the pandemic. VOA’s Carolyn Presutti has our story.
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Almost all American presidents have faced a crisis while in office, whether it’s a political scandal, natural disaster, economic calamity or terrorism. But not all have the misfortune of having to deal with epidemics and pandemics. Here are some of them and how historians view their performance.Woodrow Wilson – Spanish fluPresident Woodrow Wilson faced the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 that killed 20 million to 50 million people around the world while the United States was fighting in World War I.“Even though President Trump has talked about being at war with the pandemic, in the case of Wilson and the Spanish flu, the United States really was at war,” said Thomas Schwartz, professor of history at Vanderbilt University.FILE – President-elect Woodrow Wilson and President William Howard Taft laugh on the White House steps before departing together for Wilson’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., U.S. in March 1913.The war was the reason Wilson’s administration downplayed the crisis, from the moment the outbreak began until it eventually killed 675,000 Americans.
 
“Woodrow Wilson never made a public statement of any kind about the pandemic,” said John M. Barry, professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.
 
“It was an indication of Wilson’s intense focus on the war – that was all he cared about,” Barry said.
 
Like Britain, France and Germany, the U.S. kept the outbreak secret because it didn’t want to show weakness to the enemy. At the height of the outbreak, Wilson sent troops abroad packed into ships that were “cauldrons of virus transfers,” said Max Skidmore, political science professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of Presidents, Pandemics and Politics.Eventually a quarter of all Americans became infected, including several who worked at the White House. Many historians believe Wilson himself fell ill. Barry said that during negotiations ahead of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles in Paris, Wilson had “103, 104 fever, violent coughs, and other symptoms that were unique to the 1918 virus.”As states and cities began to order what we now know as social distancing – closing businesses and schools, banning public gatherings – Wilson’s administration continued to downplay the pandemic. Spain, a neutral party in the war, was the only country that reported casualty numbers accurately, hence the name Spanish flu, even though the flu did not originate there.
 Dwight Eisenhower – Asian flu      
 
The H2N2 virus was first reported in Singapore in February 1957 and reached the United States that summer.President Dwight D. Eisenhower was aware of the impending pandemic, Skidmore said, but he initially refused to start a nationwide government-supported vaccination program. “He had faith in the ability of free-market vaccines to take care of the impending crisis,” Skidmore said. “And as a result, the death rate was perhaps about doubled what it might have been otherwise.”FILE – President Dwight Eisenhower speaks during a news conference in Washington, Dec. 10, 1958.In August 1957, Eisenhower asked Congress for $500,000 in funding and authorization to shift an additional $2 million, if needed, to fight the outbreak. He set a goal of 60 million doses of vaccines, enough to vaccinate a third of the population, around 171 million at that time. By early November, about 40 million doses had been given, and the pandemic began losing steam.
 
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated the number of deaths from H2N2 at 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.
 Gerald Ford – Swine flu
 
Leaders are often faulted for downplaying crises, but Gerald Ford was accused by some of overreacting.Not long after a soldier died of a new form of flu in February 1976, the U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare announced that the virus could turn into an epidemic by fall.Scientists at the CDC thought it could be even deadlier than the 1918 flu strain. To avoid an epidemic, the CDC said at least 80 percent of the U.S. population would need to be vaccinated, leading Ford to sign emergency legislation for the National Swine Flu Immunization Program, in mid-April. Within a few months, close to 50 million Americans were vaccinated.FILE – U.S. President Gerald Ford rolls up his sleeve and receives a swine flu shot from White House physician Dr. William Lukash, Oct. 14, 1976.Ford took action quickly, but issues with the vaccine caused more problems in the end, Vanderbilt’s Schwartz said. Hundreds of people came down with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, after getting the flu shot.
 
“Ironically,” Skidmore said, “it was the sophistication of the government’s own monitoring system that led them to identify those cases and associate them with the vaccine.”
 
While Ford demonstrated the government’s efficiency in marshaling resources, his massive vaccination program, on top of other political blunders, contributed to Ronald Reagan’s attempt to wrest the Republican nomination from Ford in 1976. Ford lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter later that year.“The general consensus is that he was overreacting,” said Skidmore, who nevertheless lauded the president’s better-safe-than-sorry approach. “He seemed to be convinced, and I think correctly so in retrospect, that it would be far better to have a vaccine and no pandemic, then to have a pandemic and no vaccine.”By the time immunizations began in October, a large outbreak had failed to emerge, and swine flu became known as the pandemic that never was. The experience contributed to the hesitance of some Americans to embrace vaccines, even now.
 Ronald Reagan – the AIDS crisisThe Reagan administration FILE – President Ronald Reagan gestures during a White House East Room news conference, May 22, 1984 in Washington.Reagan’s approach was “certainly not a model for future presidents,” Schwartz said. Part of this is because in the early phase of the outbreak, most of the victims were either homosexuals or drug addicts, groups outside Reagan’s conservative coalition.Despite American gay men showing signs of what would later be called AIDS as early as 1978, Reagan did not publicly use the word “AIDS” until September 17, 1985, well into his second term.“Reagan simply failed to recognize the severity of the AIDS epidemic,” Skidmore said. Reagan also believed that government was the problem, not the solution, so his predisposition was to diminish its role even in crises, Skidmore added.In April 1987, Reagan declared AIDS “public health enemy No. 1.” He allocated $766 million for AIDS research and education, to be increased to $1 billion in fiscal 1988. But he advised sexual abstinence instead of methods of protection.“Let’s be honest with ourselves,” Reagan said. “AIDS information cannot be what some call ‘value neutral.’ After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons?”By the end of Reagan’s presidency in 1989, the United States had suffered 89,343 AIDS-related deaths.
 George W. Bush – AIDS crisis and SARS
 
President George W. Bush has received applause from both Republicans and Democrats for the commitment he made to help fight HIV/AIDS globally and particularly in Africa.His success contrasted with the mixed legacy of his father, George H.W. Bush. During his time in office, the elder Bush signed two important pieces of legislation — the Americans with Disabilities Act, which protected people with HIV and AIDS from discrimination, and the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act, which provided funding for AIDS treatment. But some see a lack of urgency on the part of the administration and criticize Bush for refusing to change a policy that blocked people with HIV from entering the United States.FILE – President George W. Bush, with first lady Laura Bush, makes a statement on World AIDS Day at the White House in Washington, Dec. 1, 2008 in Washington.In 2003, the George W. Bush administration created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), an initiative to address the global epidemic.“PEPFAR was probably one of the best things in his presidency,” Barry said. “It got pretty much universal applause.”Since its inception, PEPFAR has provided more than $80 billion for HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention and research, making it the largest global health program in history focused on a single disease. It is widely credited with having helped save millions of lives, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa.In April 2003, after an outbreak in Asia, Bush signed an executive order adding severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) to a list of communicable diseases that can lead to people being involuntarily quarantined. Eventually more than 8,000 people worldwide became sick with SARS, and 774 died during the 2003 outbreak. In the United States, only eight people had laboratory evidence of the infection.In 2005, the Bush administration created the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, which called for the federal government to maintain and distribute a national stockpile of medical supplies in the event of an outbreak, and an infrastructure for future presidents to learn from and build upon in dealing with their own pandemics.
 Barack Obama – H1N1, Zika and Ebola
 
A few months into President Barack Obama’s first term in 2009, reports started coming in about H1N1, or swine influenza, which was detected first in the United States and spread quickly around the world.According to the CDC, the first case was reported April 15, 2009. The Obama administration assembled a team and declared H1N1 a public health emergency on April 26, six weeks before it was declared a pandemic and before any deaths had been recorded in the U.S.The Obama administration “geared up as soon as the virus surfaced,” Barry said. “They were 100% all in, both in terms of scientific research and trying to generate vaccines and in public health measures.”
 
Six months after that initial declaration, with more than 1,000 American lives lost, Obama declared swine flu a national emergency.
 
The CDC estimated that from April 2009 to April 2010, there were 60.8 million cases of swine flu and 12,469 deaths from it in the United States. The World Health Organization declared an end to the pandemic on August 10, 2010.FILE – President Barack Obama, with Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Guinean President Alpha Condé, speaks at the White House in Washington, April 15, 2015, on progress made in the international Ebola response.Four years later, Obama faced another crisis – the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa.Obama activated the CDC Emergency Operations Center in July 2014 to help coordinate technical assistance, including deploying personnel to West Africa to assist with response efforts. The CDC trained almost 25,000 health care workers in West Africa on infection prevention and control practices.Only 11 people were treated for the virus in the U.S. Yet some Republicans criticized Obama for not instituting travel bans from countries where the Ebola outbreak was pervasive.Obama fought a different virus on the home front – Zika, a virus transmitted by mosquitoes. The 2015 Zika outbreak was first recorded in Brazil, and by 2016 about 40,000 cases were reported in the U.S. The Obama administration requested $1.9 billion in emergency federal funding to fight the virus in February 2016, $1.1 billion of which was approved by Congress that September.In 2015, Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, created the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit, a team responsible for pandemic preparedness under the National Security Council, a forum of White House personnel that advises the president on national security and foreign policy matters.In May 2018, during the presidency of Donald Trump, the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit was disbanded. Its leader left the administration, and some of its members were merged into other units within NSC.Lessons learnedHistorians say that in the face of public health crises, presidents who are informed, focused, organized and transparent are most likely to be successful.Skidmore, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said American presidents can learn from their predecessors, particularly in establishing strong coordination between the federal government and states, and ensuring the private sector is fully engaged. Skidmore said the Obama administration greatly benefited from George W. Bush’s National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, a plan that spanned every department of the federal government, every state and broad swaths of the private sector to stockpile antiviral medications and provide scientists resources to develop vaccines.Schwartz, of Vanderbilt, and Barry, of Tulane, said that leaders must be optimistic and provide hope. But more important, they must be transparent, both to prevent unfounded information from spreading and to create the credibility that will encourage people to follow guidelines instead of being skeptical of their government.
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President Donald Trump floated the idea of a short-term quarantine as early as Saturday affecting residents of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to stop the spread of coronavirus from reaching states with fewer infections.Trump told reporters at the White House that he had spoken with Republican Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, among others, and that “a lot of the states that are infected but don’t have a big problem, they’ve asked me if I’ll look at it, so we’re going to look at it.”But Governor Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., who has criticized the federal government’s response as his state became the country’s virus epicenter, said the issue had not come up in a conversation he had with Trump earlier Saturday.”I don’t even know what that means,” he said at a briefing in New York. ” I don’t know how that could be legally enforceable, and from a medical point of view, I don’t know what you would be accomplishing. … I don’t like the sound of it.”The federal government is empowered under the law to take measures to prevent the spread of communicable diseases between states, but it’s not clear that means Trump can order state residents to stay put.’Hot spots’
 
But before Trump spoke in Norfolk, Virginia, as a U.S. Navy medical ship left for New York City to help with pandemic response there, he tweeted: “I am giving consideration to a QUARANTINE of developing ‘hot spots,’ New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A decision will be made, one way or another, shortly.”Trump said the idea of isolating many in the trio of Democratic strongholds in the Northeast was pushed by DeSantis, one of the president’s most outspoken supporters. It came a day after Trump made clear he wanted governors to be grateful when asking for federal support for the pandemic.Trump said people “go to Florida and a lot of people don’t want that. So we’ll see what happens.”In Norfolk, the USNS Comfort, a 1,000-bed hospital ship, had been undergoing planned maintenance but was rushed back into service to aid the city. It is scheduled to arrive Monday at a Manhattan pier a week after its sister ship, the USNS Mercy, arrived in Los Angeles to perform similar duty on the West Coast.President Donald Trump waves as the hospital ship USNS Comfort pulls away from the pier at Naval Station Norfolk in Norfolk, Va., March 28, 2020. The ship is departing for New York to assist hospitals responding to the coronavirus outbreak.Unnecessary, but ‘a good thing’The president acknowledged that making the 140-mile trip to Naval Station Norfolk wasn’t necessary, but said he was doing it to recognize the work of sailors and medical professionals who worked to get the ship out of maintenance more than a week ahead of schedule.”I think it’s a good thing when I go over there and I say ‘thank you,’ ” Trump told reporters Friday. He added he wanted to make the trip to show “spirit for the country.”Trump, 73, is in a high-risk category because of his age, and federal guidance for weeks has advised those in that pool to refrain from non-essential travel of all sorts. He has already tested negative once after close contact with officials who came down with the virus.
 
The trip to Norfolk was Trump’s first trip outside Washington since March 9 and only his second outside the gates of the White House since a March 19 trip to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
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A week ago, I was stocking the fridge and pantries in my apartment in Bogota, Colombia, and looking up DIY disinfectant spray recipes. I had every intention to stay put in my adopted home.
 
I moved there five years ago to learn Spanish and never left. My favorite compliment is when Colombians tell me that my accent in Spanish – though obviously gringo – is unmistakably Bogotano. I learned to be a journalist in Colombia, and it’s where my life is.
 
But a week ago, I realized I would have to up-end my life, at least temporarily. And as this novel coronavirus spreads from one country to the next, similar realizations are occurring to everyone I know. You were moving through in life at your normal pace and suddenly you looked up and everything around you was in fast-forward.  
If you’re in China or Italy, the moment when you switched from the old normal to the new may seem like a lifetime ago, but here in the Western Hemisphere, our heads are still spinning.  
 
It hit me when my friends and fellow freelance journalists, Dylan Baddour and Pu Ying Huang, found out that they were stuck in Peru. They had just called it quits on a farewell tour of South America and were about to take a 14-hour bus trip to Lima when they learned that all commercial flights would be grounded until the end of the month.
 
“We were too late, and it happened just like that,” Huang said. They will not be able to get home to Texas until at least next month.
 
This year I need to travel frequently to Seattle to finish a documentary about an asylum-seeking family that I met two years ago on a migrant caravan in Mexico. Seattle (where I need to work) and San Francisco (where my family could host me) are among the most affected areas of the United States, while Colombia had fewer than 100 reported cases a week ago. But I decided that I couldn’t risk getting stuck in Colombia for months and miss the chance to finish my film.
 
Plus, my parents wanted me home. “Families should be together in times of crisis,” is what my dad said when I asked him why it was important to them. So I bought a ticket and packed up everything I would need for an indefinite sojourn in the United States.
 
At the airport in Bogota, I passed through immigration and security in 10 minutes. The airport was much emptier than usual, though my flight was almost full. The woman sitting next to me told me she works in Colombia but was heading home to Taiwan, because of “the situation.”
 
Roughly one in four people I encountered that day was wearing a mask. At baggage claim in Houston I met Michael Jarboe, who had cut short his Spring Break vacation and was re-routing to stay with his girlfriend in San Diego instead of returning to graduate school in New York. He described his day of travel as “surprisingly easy. I guess because people are starting to hunker down and shelter in.”
 
Julio Velez was returning two weeks early from a business trip in Colombia, and described his day as “scary to say the least.”  
 
Ben Cunningham and his wife were heading home to Seattle after a one-week vacation in Mexico. They almost cut their trip short because they thought they had contracted coronavirus, but it turned out to be allergies. “We’re a little paranoid at the moment,” he said.  
 
There were only 29 people on my flight from Houston to San Francisco, where two days earlier, local officials had ordered residents to “shelter in place.” Four days later, Governor Gavin Newsom imposed the same restrictions on all of California, allowing people to leave their homes only for essential activities.  
 
When the nearly empty flight landed in San Francisco, I immediately felt the tension. Some of the people who weren’t already wearing face masks put them on before deplaning. My sister picked me up at the curb; no hugging, just laughs about how the whole car smelled like hand sanitizer.  
 
When I arrived at her house, I showered and immediately put my clothes in the washing machine, and my suitcase in the garage.  
 
After two weeks in quarantine at my sister’s house I’ll be able to see my parents, who are in their mid-60s and therefore at high risk. As a freelancer I don’t have job security, so the next few months come with a lot of uncertainty, but at least now I’m with family.  
 
When I woke up on my first morning back in my hometown, I asked my 5-year-old nephew what the plan was for the day. “We’re going to make chocolate chip cookies,” he told me. I’ve got everything I need for life to slow down for a little while.  
 
 
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The Reverend Joseph Lowery, a key ally of Martin Luther King in the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s, died late on Friday at the age of 98, his family said in a statement.“Our beloved, Rev. Dr. Joseph Echols Lowery, made his transition peacefully at home at 10 p.m., Friday, March 27, at the age of 98. He was surrounded by his daughters,” Lowery’s family said.Lowery was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama in 2009, a few months after he had given the benediction at Obama’s inauguration.Lowery co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King and other black ministers in 1957, to fight segregation across the U.S. South. He served for 20 years as its president before stepping down in 1998.He continued working for racial equality into his 90s.He spoke against South African apartheid, sought better conditions in U.S. jails, pushed for more economic opportunities for minorities, promoted AIDS education and railed against what he saw as government indifference toward the lower classes.Lowery was married to Evelyn Gibson Lowery, who shared his activism, for 63 years before her death in 2013. The Lowery Institute, now known as the Joseph and Evelyn Lowery Institute for Justice & Human Rights, was founded in his honor in 2001 and he was a member of its board.
 
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The U.N. Secretary General says the world’s nations must work cooperatively in the fight against COVID-19, “or else we will be defeated by the virus.”  
 
Antonio Guterres said in an interview Friday on the PBS News Hour he is “worried” that if the virus gets a foothold in Africa, millions of people will die.  “Africa is a continent with very little capacity to respond and I am extremely worried.”
 
The U.N. announced late Friday that 86 members of its staff have the coronavirus.  
 
The United States is now regarded as the epicenter of the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, which originated in China.  
 
Early Saturday, the U.S. had 104, 837 confirmed coronavirus cases, compared with 81,947 in China, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Italy, the epicenter of the virus in Europe, had 86,498 confirmed cases.  The global tally of confirmed cases is 601,478.
 
U.S. President Donald Trump is ready to have the National Guard and the Reserves join in the fight against COVID-19, according to a Defense Department statement Saturday.  
 
The people who are called up would be “persons in headquarters units and persons with heightened medical capabilities.”  
 
According to the statement, officials with the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services would talk with state officials before deploying the National Guard Reserve Component Services.Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, left, Vice President Mike Pence, second from right, and Republican lawmakers applaud President Donald Trump during a signing ceremony of a $2.2 trillion stimulus measure, at the White House, in Washington, March 27, 2020.Trump signed a $2.2 trillion stimulus measure Friday to bolster the economy that is reeling in the aftermath of the coronavirus.
 
Also Friday, Trump said he used government powers under the Defense Production Act to compel General Motors to manufacture ventilators to help COVID-19 patients as the United States became the first country in the world to surpass 100,000 coronavirus cases.
 
“GM was wasting time. Today’s action will help ensure the quick production of ventilators that will save American lives,” Trump said in a statement.
 
GM, however, released a statement Friday saying it had been working since last week with Ventec Life System to mass produce critical care ventilators for the coronavirus pandemic.
 
“Since Friday, March 20, Ventec and GM teams across manufacturing, engineering, purchasing, legal and others have been tirelessly and seamlessly working together to create and implement a plan for immediate, scaled production of critical care ventilators,” the statement said. 
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