In the news, Monday, April 20, 2020

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from The Jerusalem Post

Germany’s largest paper to China's president: You're endangering the world
The editor-in-chief of Germany’s largest paper Bild on Thursday launched a full frontal attack on China’s communist President Xi Jinping for his regime’s failure to come clean about the coronavirus outbreak and the massive human rights violations carried out by the Communist Party. Julian Reichelt, the prominent editor-in-chief of the Bild, wrote to Jinping that  “Your embassy in Berlin has addressed me in an open letter because we asked in our newspaper Bild whether China should pay for the massive economic damage the coronavirus is inflicting worldwide.” He wrote that, "You [Jinping], your government and your scientists had to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn't respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan. You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.” Reichelt said that, “You rule by surveillance. You wouldn't be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country. You shut down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world.”

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from Lewiston Tribune

Publisher in Lewiston, Idaho

History of pandemics
‘A wildfire of misery’
Spanish flu swept across the nation and world in 1918 as soldiers returned from war
Edith Webb Vannoy will be 105 years old this September and is likely the last person in the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley with any memory of the influenza pandemic of 1918. In a recent phone interview with Lewiston historian Steven Branting, Vannoy remembers the entire town of Reubens, except her family, seemed to have the influenza. Her mother, Lula, made poultices of garlic and mustard. The family wore them on their chests. Edith remembers the house smelled horrible. Her father, Ernest, took the poultices to other families in Reubens.

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from National Review  RIGHT BIAS

Non-COVID Patients Need Care, Too
As the United States begins its first tentative steps out of a widespread and unprecedented lockdown, allow me to recommend that the one of the first changes we make is lifting the restrictions on “elective” medical procedures. Alaska, Oklahoma, and Texas have already done so. “Elective” procedures sound like they’re optional; when some people hear that phrase, they may envision plastic or cosmetic surgery. What they mean, in most states, is non-emergency, a procedure that is not a matter of life and death. But there are a lot of procedures that are important, even if they’re not life-and-death.

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from The Spokesman-Review

Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

COVID-19 puts rural hospitals in Eastern Washington on brink of financial collapse
It sounds like an oxymoron: hospital loses money in the midst of a pandemic. But that is happening across Eastern Washington: Rural hospital systems have bolstered COVID-19 responses and protections while losing major revenue streams from other kinds of care. The moves have left many in a financially precarious position.

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from Yke News
News from Finland in English

Historian draws parallels in Finnish response to plague and coronavirus
Think social distancing is new? Finland was already practising an extreme version of it in the 1600s.

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