Coronavirus Patient Visited San Antonio Hotel, Mall After She Was 'Mistakenly Released' From Isolation, Officials Say (dallasnews.com) 130
A woman that tested positive for coronavirus was "mistakenly released" from isolation Saturday, causing the mayor of San Antonio to declare a public health emergency in the city. Dallas News reports: The patient was one of 91 evacuees who were brought to San Antonio from Wuhan, China. She was released Saturday and was in the community for a little more than 12 hours before she was quarantined again. During that time, the woman checked into a Holiday Inn hotel near the San Antonio airport and took a hotel shuttle to the North Star Mall, said Dr. Anita Kurian of the city's Metropolitan Health District. She was at the mall from about 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Kurian said the health department completed its risk assessment of any people the woman could have exposed to the virus and determined that everyone was at low risk, except for health-care personnel who were in direct contact with the woman when she was released.
The CDC said the patient had been treated at a local medical facility for several weeks after she returned from Wuhan on a flight chartered by the State Department. "At the time of discharge from the facility, the patient was asymptomatic and met all of CDC's criteria for release -- resolution of any symptoms and two consecutive sets of negative test results, collected more than 24 hours apart," the agency said. After the patient was released, a lab test was determined to be "weakly positive." The patient was brought back into isolation "out of an abundance of caution," the CDC said. "We simply cannot have a screw-up like this from our federal partners," San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said at a news conference Monday.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott also criticized the CDC, saying: "What the CDC did is completely unacceptable. It appears to be a case of negligence with regard to allowing this person who had coronavirus to leave Texas Center for Infectious Disease and go back into the general population. I think they understand the magnitude of the error."
The CDC said the patient had been treated at a local medical facility for several weeks after she returned from Wuhan on a flight chartered by the State Department. "At the time of discharge from the facility, the patient was asymptomatic and met all of CDC's criteria for release -- resolution of any symptoms and two consecutive sets of negative test results, collected more than 24 hours apart," the agency said. After the patient was released, a lab test was determined to be "weakly positive." The patient was brought back into isolation "out of an abundance of caution," the CDC said. "We simply cannot have a screw-up like this from our federal partners," San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said at a news conference Monday.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott also criticized the CDC, saying: "What the CDC did is completely unacceptable. It appears to be a case of negligence with regard to allowing this person who had coronavirus to leave Texas Center for Infectious Disease and go back into the general population. I think they understand the magnitude of the error."
Pence, pray harder! (Score:4, Funny)
Goddammit!
The old catch and release (Score:3)
Oldest trick in the contagion spread book.
Re:The old catch and release (Score:4, Insightful)
The CDC performed as expected after decades of tax cuts for the richest and cuts to funding because fuck only the poor die. Why is it performing so badly because it was designed to perform badly, be a PR entity, to function mostly in name, as funding was cut. You will now reap the reward of insatiable greed. The USA will react to this infection as poorly as a third world country because many of it's essential services were cut, contracted out to serve greed rather than the pretend service and staffed with political appointees whose only qualifications were getting a corrupt politician elected.
Years of psychopathic management of essential US government services have left them functioning in name only, as holding containers for nepotism and crony capitalism, incompetence will abound and the outcomes will be extremely bad.
The repeated failures at handling natural disasters set of zero warning bells but the escape from prosecution for failure certainly set the stage for greater corruption. It will probably be significantly safer to leave the USA, rather than rely on corrupted government services.
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Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
The con artist cut the budget for the CDC, then fired the CDC pandemic response team, and has once again proposed cuts to the CDC, and to top it all off, put a guy who believes prayer will cure all ills in charge of coordinating the response.
So yeah, not surprising stuff like this happens. After all, who needs experts?
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"funding was restored and even increased in bills that Trump ultimately signed."
"top national security officials handling pandemics left abruptly and were not replaced by the Trump administration."
https://www.politifact.com/fac... [politifact.com]
"Pence appointed a doctor, Ambassador Debbie Birx, to serve as White House response coordinator for the virus, enforced tight control of the governments public communications and added new members to a task force aimed at containing the spread of the outbreak."
https://www.washingto [washingtonpost.com]
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
So no funding was cut
Liar, liar, pants on fire. CDC budget 2016: $12.172B, CDC budget in 2018: $11.059B.
So budget was cut, and rather drastically: https://www.hhs.gov/about/budg... [hhs.gov]
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Congress is responsible for the budget, not the President. Who's lying?
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
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No Trump doesn't own the China virus.
He owns the non-response to it. Wholesale and completely.
You'd be perfectly happy killing millions of people if it means you finally Got Trump.
That's some industrial-strength projection. You can't seem to be dealing with the fact that your own choice might result in millions of preventable deaths.
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He owns the response.. if it becomes a huge issue in the US, but surely if it becomes a big nothingburger but a bunch of assholes buying out all the toilet paper from Costo to wipe their huge fat asses he will own that success too, right? Right?
I actually despise Trump and think he's not only an idiot, but worse an idiot going senile and you boobs can't even convince _me_ of this nonsense. Good luck in the 2020 election, asshole.
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He owns the response.. if it becomes a huge issue in the US, but surely if it becomes a big nothingburger but a bunch of assholes buying out all the toilet paper from Costo to wipe their huge fat asses he will own that success too, right? Right?
Absolutely. Trump is staking his entire reputation that the COVID-19 is going to turn out like the swine flu panic before it.
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Actually, about the only action that was wholly under the Executives control was he banning of travel from specific regions for the past couple of months. Almost every other action taken is right out of the CDC playbook and is followed regardless of who is in the Oval Office.
This can be most clearly seen in the fact that although Trump wanted to ban any infected people from entering the US, the CDC protocols calls for the evacuation of US residents back to mainland US from infected areas no matter their in
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You'd be perfectly happy killing millions of people if it means you finally Got Trump.
Is that you, Don Jr?
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Re: Not surprising (Score:2)
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Most, if not all of the actual decreases in the CDC budget over the past few years are due to expiring programs.
When certain outbreaks become the newest it thing monies are transferred to the CDC to deal with those. AIDS, Ebola, H1N1 etc.. all get special programs which generally run for a certain number of years and then expire taking their funding with them.
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Liar, liar, pants on fire. CDC budget 2016: $12.172B, CDC budget in 2018: $11.059B.
I was accurately paraphrasing the linked politifact article and made no claims of my own. You are also making a strawman argument. Neither the article nor I claimed the overall FY2018 budget was larger, but rather that there were key proposed changes made by Trump which were overruled and actually increased by Congress. Annual funding for emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases has regularly increased despite lower budget recommendations which congress normally exceeds anyway. https://infogram.com/unt [infogram.com]
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
If you scroll further down the AAAS link, you can see the budget changes specifically for the CDC from 2018 to 2019. Spending on Influenza and Influenza planning and response, HIV prevention and research, and infectious diseases and the opioid epidemic were actually increased. The cuts mostly fell in antibiotics resistance research, prevention research centers, and environmental health. I'm not knowledgeable enough about these departs to say with certainty, but based on the names it sounds like funding for the programs which would've been involved containing this coronavirus from spreading, were all increased. (The prevention research centers [cdc.gov] deal with more mundane disease threats, not pandemics.)
Note that the "2020 budget" is markedly lower because it's a budget request, not the actual budget. For those who don't know how the U.S. Federal budgeting process works, the President only requests a budget. Congress is the one who actually makes the budget, and they can completely ignore the President's request if they wish (and they frequently do). The President then signs or vetoes the budget Congress gives him. That's why I listed budget changes in the first paragraph as "under" a certain President, rather than attributing it to the President.
Trump has been requesting lowball amounts almost across the board [aaas.org]. In previous years, the House and Senate have brought those back up to final funding levels (moreso the Senate, than the House, contrary to your attempts to cast this as a Republican hatchet job), and the President has signed off on it. Unfortunately this is the first time I've seen that page on the AAAS website, so I don't know if this lowballing is typical of Presidents, or particular to Trump.
Re: Not surprising (Score:2)
11 billion? How can they even remotely perform their duties on such a small amount of income.
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I'm sure he's spoken with several renown experts, inside and outside the U.S., before making these tough decisions.
You have to look at it from Trump's point of view. How is he going to get away with cancelling the election if there isn't a credible threat?
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"So yeah, not surprising stuff like this happens. After all, who needs experts?"
And people with no or bad insurance won't go to a hospital because they fear they'd get a 5000$ bill and be quarantined and lose their job and since the hospital doesn't have any treatment other than a handful tamiflu which just lets you die a day later, why bother?
Either you get it or you don't, either you die or you don't.
In other developed countries your test and scanners are free and medial leave is paid for so you just stay
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It would be great if Trump set aside medical reimbursement so those who are quarantined aren't jobless and broke when it's done. Too bad we blew all that money buying the votes of the farmers after starting a trade war.
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Tamiflu is only first line defense. There are other anti-virals being used for influenza but are reserved for at-risk populations so that we don't see any mutated immune virus any time soon.
For COVID-19, there are also some HIV treatments that are having success on this virus.
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true [snopes.com]
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While all of your assertions are true, I don't think they are relevant to this case. More relevant is that a lot of the test kits have been defective. And that may not be what happened either.
Consider "an abundance of caution". "Weakly positive". She was probably perfectly safe to wander about...but probably isn't good enough when people get scared.
The real thing making COVID-19 impossible to contain is that many cases are asymptomatic, but still contagious. And an infectious period of up to 6 weeks.
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Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading comprehension is your friend. I said the con artist had cut the CDC budget. Which he did. 80% of the CDC's epidemic prevention activities overseas was cut in 2018. Further, he originally proposed a 17% cut in the CDC's funding in 2018, some of which did go through.
On top of which, his failure as a businessman spilled over into the real world when he defended his cuts by saying those people could be brought back very quickly [businessinsider.com]. Which of course is a joke because you can't bring back people in the medical field and expect them to be up and running in a day or two when all their contacts, all their research, all their everything is gone.
And no, the CDC's budget was not increased. Select areas had additional funding, but overall the net effect was a reduction in the CDC's budget. Now who's fake?
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Beware, if he gets a second term, he will do the same to the military forces. Fire everyone who is expensing, because when you need some pilots or admirals you can them just bring back in!!!
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Nope. Congress has final say in appropriations, but since 1921 the President is required to submit one to Congress which is where it all starts.
The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 requires the President to submit the budget to Congress for each fiscal year, which is the 12-month period beginning on October 1 and ending on September 30 of the next calendar year.
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Well yeah, the President submits a budget. It's usually then promptly ignored while Congress writes/passes their own and submits it to the President for his signature.
Some hacks are suggesting the President has the power to unilaterally cut the CDC budget. He does not. They're lying.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
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And then Trump declares a fake national emergency and spends the money any damn way he feels. Not absolute, but this is roughly the state of politics in America now:
Democrats define good government as helping everyone.
Republicans define good government as helping us (for increasingly narrow groups of "us").
GOT defines good government as helping the Donald.
GOP is an obsolete usage. Gang Of Trump is now in charge. Dems don't even matter, since they've never had an organized party.
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The solution then is less government, not more of it. If you really believe all of that then how on Earth could you support expanding their power over you so much more? Learn to support yourself and you won't need daddy government. The good thing that will come out of this is putting the folly and incompetence of government bureaucracy on full display. That's what Big Gov't types are really worried about and why they're already trying to scapegoat Trump.
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Take a trip to Wuhan. You don't need any government protecting your stupidity.
Actually, if you sincerely want less government, then you should start by advocating for smaller corporations with more REAL competition among them. But I bet you can't even figure out how the sig is related.
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You think China suffers from a lack of government? An overbearing oppressive government like China is exactly what we should avoid. You know, Communism?
Public masturbation of 1059246 (Score:2)
Z^-1
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Congress WRITES the budget.
Specifically, the House of Representatives is the orginator of ALL spending bills (as required by the Constitution). The President can submit a wishlist to the House, but the House can (and has, from time to time) completely ignored the President's request(s) and done what they liked.
If the CDC has its budget cut, the House is the one to be blamed, not the President....
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No.
The *spending bills* that originate in the House are to appropriate funds and pay for the items in the budget. The budget originates with the President, as per the law I referenced from 1921.
The laws around the budget process don't contradict the Constitution, they flesh out the details as to how things are going to work. There are other laws, including the Budget Act of 1974, that law out the details.
The House *CANNOT* "do what they like" because those bills passed in the House still have to pass the Se
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Congress no longer has final say on the budget (Score:1)
I'm frankly surprised this wasn't bigger news. He ignored one of the fundamental powers set out in the constitution and got away with it. It's actually terrifying. Sure, Trump's doing it for a silly fence, but the precedence that just got set is utterly horrible.
Congress Still has final say on the budget (Score:2)
He didn't ignore anything, he followed a specific legal authorization that Congress has passed that allows the President to divert funds from non-critical or wartime military construction budget allocations to address a declared National Emergency. He followed the law as passed by congress. The diversion of funds is legal and the route taken was created by congress years ago. He didn't set a preced
Liar, liar (Score:5, Informative)
Instead, the CDC's budget was increased.
Liar, liar, pants on fire. CDC budget 2016: $12.172B, CDC budget in 2018: $11.059B.
So budget was cut, and rather drastically: https://www.hhs.gov/about/budg... [hhs.gov]
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What does the President have to do with the budget? Why did the Dem-controlled House pass cuts to the CDC?
Re:Liar, liar (Score:5, Informative)
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You're right, my mistake. It's still Congress though, not the President. What did they do about it for FY 2019 and 2020?
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Not really. That's where the term "dead on arrival" started. The White House budget is usually filled with a wish list full of things with zero hope of being adopted by Congress. It's rarely even a basis for negotiation.
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Congress restored some of the cuts, but the pandemic team was definitely cut, as were global zoonotic disease surveillance.
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"as were global zoonotic disease surveillance" would have needed Communist China to allow its own experts to talk about what they found... that did not happen.
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A month-old article from USA Today? Why don't you try a Ouija board next time, it'll be more accurate.
Possible "Typhoid Mary" in Texas. (Score:2)
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Maybe a better name would be "Coronavirus Carly"?
I've heard that if you chant that three times while standing in front of a mirror, she will appear...
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Maybe a better name would be "Coronavirus Carly"?
I've heard that if you chant that three times while standing in front of a mirror, she will appear...
...hopefully holding a 6-pack of some "Beer Who Cannot Be Named." I'd take a sip. (Well, just; I like other beers better.)
Jeez guys, it's not an insta-kill effect or the Spanish Flu (yet)
[1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus)]
Link 1 [wikipedia.org]
Link 2 [cdc.gov]
This infected 500 million people worldwide or 27% of the worlds population. The death toll is estimated at 40-50 up to possibly 100 million.
Or... 10% up to 20% of infected people DIED. Don't get me wrong, that's a _LOT_. But there's also 80% of sick people who DIDN'T
The CDC is apparently run by morons (Score:2, Interesting)
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Thankfully, I'm set up well and have two years of food over here. (Yeah, I'm one of /those/).
I bet you're handing out quite a few "I told you so"s right about now.
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That's not how I read TFA. The patient was released because she met the diagnostic criteria for being virus free (2 consecutive negative rt-PCRs), and it was only after the test results were re-evaluated that one of them was reclassified as "weakly positive".
Ultimately this traces back to the CDC deciding to develop its own test kit and then having problems with that kit. Leaving local public health agencies without a kit means that ALL the testing in the USA so far has had to go through CDC, which only ha
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Now a very political CDC suddenly cant keep track of one person? Strange.
Plague president trump (Score:1)
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I feel fine laughing at you because I also laughed at the right wingnuts who thought they were Johnny Politico by trying to hang every random bad thing in the world on Obama.
Shouldn't you be out panic buying bottled water (because teh virus will destroy our water!!!) at Costco?
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What do you expect? (Score:1)
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Kurian said the health department completed its risk assessment of any people the woman could have exposed to the virus and determined that everyone was at low risk, except for health-care personnel who were in direct contact with the woman when she was released.
This is EXACTLY why we have no trust in our governments anymore. Do they think that we are stupid? Couple this with the CDC hand-waiving the whole issue and having not a clue how many in the U.S.A. are infected as at least as of a few days ago they had only tested about 450 individuals.
Granted, there are probably thousands of asymptomatic Chinese who arrived in early January walking the streets of the US which has rendered a qu
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Unless we had a wall it was meaningless anyway.
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Nice troll. Try harder. Want to get us aggravated? Just repeat things like this.
You're literally saying that you were trolled successfully, and you're willing to not merely become upset or confused, but you're willing to become aggravated on command. On anonymous command, even.
Pathetic. A lost sheep searching for a shepherd; any shepherd, or even just a passerby willing to tell you what to do!
Re:Can we start executing these people please (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet the flu infects more people very year and kills more people very year. Are we going to start quarantining people who have the flu as well?
Cows kill more people every year than crocodiles: is it rational to fear cows more than crocodiles? Coronavirus is both more infectious and more lethal than standard influenza and, on top of that, a sizeable number of patients need intensive care. Do you know what happens when many people are infected and there are not enough intensive care units for everybody? Mortality goes up, even for healthy people. We'd like to prevent that.
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Yes, absolutely. Being near a cow and not being afraid of it is stupid, perhaps it is caused by excess padding and safety in childhood.
When I was riding a horse and it got tired of my riding lesson and did a full, two-foot rodeo buck trying to throw me off, I stayed glued in the saddle and was able to recover control. Why didn't I fly over the horse's head, landing on my own head? Because I'm scared of that horse; it is larger than I am, and riding it is dangerous.
Fear makes all sorts of activities reasonab
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It can infect you through your eyeballs, just from being near the person. Yes it's highly infectious.
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Yes. Except people with the flu are more likely to be at home because they feel terrible. The number of asymptomatic carriers out there is probably very high.
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What, like some hairy eyeball voodoo magic? If you're going to make such an assertion about an emerging public health risk, please provide a reference.
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Re: Can we start executing these people please (Score:1)
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The COVID mortality rate for children is at or near zero. So we won't save money on public education.
But the mortality rate for the elderly is much higher than influenza, so we should save plenty on Medicare and Social Security.
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Re:Can we start executing these people please (Score:5, Insightful)
So, I take it you've NEVER had the flu?
This woman was released by whichever hospital after meeting all their criteria for release, including consecutive tests showing no sign of the disease conducted more than 24 hours apart.
Not her fault that someone at hospital made a mistake, nor is there any moral responsibility on her part to second-guess the doctor/hospital after THEY said she was good to go.
If you want to nail someone to a tree, try the hospital guys who did a "Oopsie, she might have had the disease after all"....
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Of course I have had the lfu. What I've never had is a highly contagious virus that is officially listed as a pandemic.
Several things here. The flu is just as contagious, if not moreso, than COVID-19. Also, COVID-19 is not officially listed as a pandemic. The flu has reached pandemic levels multiple times - the last one was 11 years ago.
No, she knew she was diagnosed with the virus.
Read the article again. She had been cleared by multiple negative results, was released, then the results of a weak positive came in afterwards.
True, but no excuse for then not at least staying at home for 14 days after release. To go to a MALL right after? That is pure evil.
You're starting to make a little bit of sense, but if she doesn't have 14 days worth of food stocked up at home, perhaps she was at the mall shoppin
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The flu is just as contagious, if not moreso
False. How contagious something is depends not only on the body's reaction to the virus but the ability to detect said virus. Influenza has an incubation period of less than 5 days after which it displays severe symptoms. COVID-19 has an incubation period of weeks where the virus is able to spread without sign, and many cases show very mild symptoms in line with the common cold. Even if the body didn't react as strongly to COVID-19 as it does to Influenza COVID-19 is still far more "contagious".
The flu has reached pandemic levels multiple times - the last one was 11 years ago.
Something no
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True, but no excuse for then not at least staying at home for 14 days after release. To go to a MALL right after? That is pure evil.
She wasn't from the area, hence checking into a hotel. She was probably at the mall buying underwear and such since, again, not home.
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If you have been diagnosed with a highly infectious disease, it should be grounds of execution if you visit a mall or any very populated area.
Why would we execute someone when the whole thing is a hoax?
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"Marked troll"
Well, intentionally or gross negligently infecting random people with a deadly disease is manslaughter or attempted manslaughter in a few thousand cases. Capital punishment is not far off for that.
Not in California, though, where a mean Tweet is punished harder than intentional, pre-meditated HIV infections.
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I'm thinking some GOP donors wanted to get home quick
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Then they should be able to afford their own ticket.
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Guys, those flights weren't provided for free. The evacuees had to pay for the flight [theintercept.com].
Let me guess, now you guys will complain about how the US didn't cover the bill for those flights and the hospital bills in 3, 2, 1...
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Bernie will pay to fly you home from wherever.... FREE!!!
Of course. How else would you get the free healthcare and the pony?
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Ok, then I ain't complaining anymore.
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Fair - I most read BBC and none of the British flights mention charging the passengers:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51... [bbc.com]
But they also don't mention NOT charging the passengers, so I guess I'm not sure. The American flights are very clear the passengers will be charged. My bad.
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To be clear, does calling for smashing certain groups faces in with hammers qualify as calling for execution? I'd like to know if I've hit the limit.
If you need to ask the specific question. You've hit the general limit.
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As long as NASA doesn't stop us.
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"The swamp" is a reasonable metaphor for any bureaucracy. It only becomes crazy when you assume some unifying control is acting that way intentionally. What's really going on is nobody wants to be in a position where they can be blamed, so it's nearly impossible to get a decision made that hasn't been "traditional". Also known as CYA, but without the paper trail that that often implies.
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