A DC priest who shook the hands of 500 worshippers during communion has announced he’s contracted coronavirus.
“BREAKING: A D.C. priest has Coronavirus. He offered communion and shook hands with more than 500 worshippers last week and on February 24th,”tweeted ABC7’s Sam Sweeney.
“All worshippers who visited the Christ Church in Georgetown must self-quarantine. Church is cancelled for the first time since the 1800’s.”
The hand shaking took place despite many other Catholic churches changing their worshipping practices in an effort to stop the spread of the virus.
USA Today reports that at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, “Priests have started asking worshippers not to shake hands at the sign of peace, which occurs around midway through the Catholic service. Most Masses here normally don’t offer wine during communion, but those that do are suspending the use of the shared chalices for now.”
Such precautions are not being followed at other religious sites in regions impacted by the coronavirus.
Videos of two men licking holy shrines in Iran went viral last week, with one individual seen licking the Masumeh shrine in Qom, while saying, “I’m not scared of coronavirus.”
In another video, a man states he plans to lick the shrine “so the disease can go inside my body and others can visit it with no anxiety.”
The men face up to two years in jail in addition to 74 lashes.
The man believed to be coronavirus patient zero in Italy is a Pakistani migrant refused to self-isolate after testing positive for the virus and continued to deliver food.
Health authorities asked the man to quarantine himself at his home in the Pavia area for two weeks, but he ignored the request and continued to work at a Chinese restaurant.
He then compounded the risk of spreading the virus by making home deliveries of Chinese food.
Authorities were alerted to the situation and the military intervened to return the man to his home.
“The Carabinieri have been busy reconstructing all the movements of the young man, in order to identify as many people as possible with whom he came into contact. In the meantime, the military has closed the Chinese restaurant,” reports Free West Media.
The migrant now faces up to 3 months in jail for failing to self-isolate under article 650 of the Italian penal code.
Italy has recorded a total of more than 3,000 cases of the coronavirus and 148 people have died. The country was the primary source of the virus spreading to numerous other European countries.
The CDC has deployed emergency pop-up testing stations in every US state at area McDonald’s. The counter worker will lick your forehead and decide if it “tastes like sick.” If the test is positive, you will receive 5% off your order. If the test is negative, you will receive 5% off your order.
The patient had been in and out of hospital for issues unrelated to the coronavirus. But when they were tested at the Royal Berkshire hospital last night it was confirmed they had the virus. The death is the first in the UK where there are now 116 confirmed cases. The Chief Medical Officer says the UK is preparing to move from the ‘contain’ into the ‘delay phase’ of dealing with the outbreak. This second phase means that measures to tackle it will be ramped up.
This government has failed us. We had the perfect opportunity as an island to avoid this.
Dr. Matt McCarthy, a staff physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, just went on national television and warned that there will be “thousands” of confirmed coronavirus cases inside the United States “by next week”.
I certainly hope that he is completely wrong, but obviously he has a better vantage point for observing the progression of this outbreak than any of us do.
As an emergency room doctor in New York, he is dealing with potential COVID-19 cases every single day.
And as you will see below, he says that he has had to “plead to test people” and that it is a “national scandal” that more people have not been tested.
As I discussed in a previous article, up until just a few days ago the CDC has had extremely restrictive guidelines for who should be tested for the virus. Only those that have visited China recently and those that have had close contact with a known victim were supposed to be tested. Obviously this allowed a lot of potential victims to fall through the cracks, and now we have a major outbreak in the Seattle area.
Owen is joined by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai to dive deeper into how viruses affect our bodies and how different vitamins protect us.
Health officials in South Korea tested 10,000 people for the coronavirus on Friday alone. This week, they built drive-thru coronavirus screening locations, giving hundreds of patients an assessment of their health in just 10 minutes.
The US announced its first coronavirus case on the same day South Korea did. But six weeks later, less than 500 potentially infected Americans have gotten tests, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The agency’s official test count — which had previously been updated daily — was stripped from the CDC site on Sunday, though US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar told ABC the same day that the US had tested 3,600 people.
There is absolutely no reason why we can’t do at least as well as South Korea.
And without a doubt, a lot of doctors around the country are quite upset about the current state of affairs. During his appearance on CNBC, Dr. McCarthy explained that he literally has had to “plead to test people”…
“I’m here to tell you, right now, at one of the busiest hospitals in the country, I don’t have it at my fingertips,” he said. “I still have to make my case, plead to test people. This is not good. We know that there are 88 cases in the United States. There are going to be hundreds by the middle of the week. There’s going to be thousands by next week. And this is a testing issue.”
You can watch video of Dr. McCarthy making these comments right here. The fact that he believes that there will be “thousands” of confirmed cases by next week should be making headlines all over the nation. But so far it isn’t.
Ultimately, the CDC should be held accountable for dropping the ball so dramatically. Not only have they not been testing enough people up until now, it also turns out that the test kits they initially sent out were “problematic and potentially inaccurate”. The following comes from CNBC…
The CDC sent test kits earlier in the outbreak to public health labs around the country, but those kits were problematic and potentially inaccurate, CDC officials have since said. Because local clinicians can’t depend on the test kits, some have had to ship samples to a laboratory with the ability to run the tests, delaying the process of diagnosis and treatment.
This virus could become the biggest public health crisis of our lifetimes, and the CDC response has been a complete and total disaster.
“Testing for coronavirus is not available yet in New York City,” city Department of Health spokeswoman Stephanie Buhle said in an email late Thursday. “The kits that were sent to us have demonstrated performance issues and cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate result.”
There is no excuse.
For weeks, hospitals all over the nation have had to send samples to the CDC for testing, and that has greatly limited the number of Americans that have been able to be tested.
If you can believe it, only 32 people in the entire state of New York have been tested so far, and Dr. McCarthy is calling that “a national scandal”…
The team at New York-Presbyterian Hospital is isolating suspected coronavirus patients and taking proper precautions to prevent the spread, McCarthy said, but “they’re hamstrung.”
“In New York state, the person who tested positive is only the 32nd test we’ve done in this state,” he said. “That is a national scandal.”
Of course he is right.
The mainstream media should be hammering this story like there is no tomorrow, but other than CNBC they have mostly been ignoring it.
Did officials at the CDC think that if they just neglected this crisis that it would go away?
A lot of people have been comparing COVID-19 to the flu, but that is not true at all.
This is an extremely insidious virus. Once it gets into the lungs, it starts killing cells as it moves along. And once enough cells are killed off, it becomes increasingly difficult to breathe…
It does this by attaching to and reproducing in tissue inside the lungs, where it kills cells in the process of spreading.
As the cells are killed they drop off the lungs’ linings and build up in clumps inside the organs, making it hard to breathe and triggering further infections.
The virus can also send the immune system into overdrive as it tries to fight off infection, triggering swelling which can lead to more breathing difficulties.
Does that sound like something that you want to catch?
I truly hope that what we are facing is not nearly as dire as Dr. McCarthy is making it out to be. But nobody can deny that he is on the front lines of this battle every day, and right now he is warning that we have a complete and utter nightmare on our hands.
Students at a school in Vienna, Austria have been barred from leaving the building after one of their instructors was flagged as potentially carrying the deadly coronavirus, currently spreading across the globe.
No one is allowed to leave or enter the Albertgasse high school, located in Vienna’s inner-city neighborhood of Josefstadt, police said in a Twitter message posted on Wednesday. Officers also denied rumors that the school had been evacuated. Streets around the school have been closed to the public.
The precautionary measures were taken after a teacher returned from a trip to Northern Italy, which has seen more than 300 cases of coronavirus in recent days. The teacher and students are currently undergoing screening for the deadly virus, according to Austrian media reports.
Students at the school were reportedly seen looking out windows and shouting. They have been allowed to communicate with their parents by telephone. If one or more results do come back positive, the school could potentially face quarantine, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said.
The lockdown coincided with the quarantine of 12 people in Austria who were in close contact with a couple identified as the country’s first coronavirus cases.
Originating in Wuhan, China late last year, the illness has infected at least 80,000 people worldwide — the vast majority in mainland China. Now present in nearly 30 countries, the virus has become a major health concern in Italy, which has seen over 320 cases and 11 deaths.
Still loads of people posting how the flu is 100 times worse than Covid-19. The message is still not getting through to the masses. This is much worse than seasonal flu.
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