US President Donald Trump has tested negative for COVID-19, according to his doctor Sean Conley.
“Last night after an in-depth discussion with the president about Covid-19 testing he elected to proceed,” Conley said in a memorandum released through Trump’s Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham on Saturday evening.
“This evening I received confirmation that the test is negative.”
Trump said earlier in the day at a White House news conference that he had taken the test “only because the press is going crazy” while his doctor did not consider it necessary and he did not want to jump the queue while people were waiting for it.
He said, “I decided I should, based on the press conference yesterday. People were asking, ‘Did I take the test?’”
He had been criticised by the media for not having taken the test even though he had been exposed to a person who came down with the disease.
One reporter went to the extent of asking him on Friday if he was being “selfish” by not getting tested.
Following the outcry over possible exposures, the White House introduced temperature screening on Saturday for people who may come in contact with Trump or Vice President Mike Pence. Among the first reported to be affected by it was a journalist who was running a temperature and was barred from the news conference.
Trump said that his temperature was also checked before he entered the briefing room. Vice President Mike Pence and other officials confirmed that their temperatures were also tested before they came in.
A White House spokesperson, Judd Deere, said that “out of an abundance of caution” temperatures were being checked for anyone who could be in close proximity to Trump or Pence.
Vice President Mike Pence’s Spokesperson Katie Miller tweeted that the journalist who was turned away was checked three times and registered above the 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Centigrade) limit set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines.
The journalist was not identified. Another journalist tweeting as the CNN White House Team claimed the person turned away had only a temperature of 99.9 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 degrees centigrade).
The CNN tweet said, “He was trying to get access to the briefing and was turned away and is being held by the press office on the White House driveway.”
Pence, who is heading the Coronavirus Task Force, said that he and his wife would be “more than happy to be tested.”
The controversy over Trump’s testing arose over him posing at a dinner for a picture at the Mar-a-Lago resort over the last weekend with Fabio Wajngarten, the communications chief of visiting Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Wajngarten was later found to be infected with Covid-19. Bolsonaro shot down rumours that he was also infected with the virus, tweeting that a test had cleared him.
“One week after having dinner with the Brazilian delegation in Mar-a-Lago, the President remains symptom-free,” Conley’s memo said on Saturday.
In a memo on Friday night, Conley had said that Trump did not need a test or a quarantine because his interactions with infected persons were considered low-risk under the guidelines of the CDC.
Referring to the Brazilian official, Conley said it was only a brief contact e “photograph, handshake.”
Conley said that they had learned on Friday evening that another person who had shared the dinner table with Trump and the White House delegation had shown symptoms of COVID-19, but only on Friday morning.
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
We’ve seen countries take all kinds of drastic measures in recent weeks, though Kuwait is taking an almost unprecedented step.
Starting Friday, March 13, 2020, Kuwait International Airport will close for passenger service indefinitely, meaning commercial flights to & from the airport are canceled. Apparently there will be some exceptions only for Kuwaiti nationals looking to go home, so presumably there may be some charter flights.
It’s not yet known how long the airport closure will last. The airport ordinarily sees nearly 500 daily flights, and served nearly 16 million passengers in 2019.
So far Kuwait has seen 72 coronavirus cases. A few days ago it was announced that the country would be closing down academic institutions for two weeks, and would suspended all sporting events until further notice.
The country has now also announced that all malls, restaurants, and cafes, will be closing through the end of the month.
As far as I know, Kuwait is the first country in the world to completely ban commercial flights as a precautionary measure.
It’ll be interesting to see how long this lasts, and if any other countries follow…
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Science Fiction Books: From ‘Wuhan-400’, the deadly virus invented by Dean Koontz in 1981, to the plague unleashed in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, novelists have long been fascinated by pandemics
According to an online conspiracy theory, the American author Dean Koontz predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 1981. His novel The Eyes of Darkness made reference to a killer virus called “Wuhan-400” – eerily predicting the Chinese city where Covid-19 would emerge. But the similarities end there: Wuhan-400 is described as having a “kill‑rate” of 100%, developed in labs outside the city as the “perfect” biological weapon. An account with more similarities, also credited by some as predicting coronavirus, is found in the 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic that jumps from animals to humans and spreads arbitrarily around the globe.
But when it comes to our suffering, we want something more than arbitrariness. We want it to mean something. This is evident in our stories about illness and disease, from contemporary science fiction all the way back to Homer’s Iliad. Even malign actors are more reassuring than blind happenstance. Angry gods are better than no gods at all.
In Homer’s Iliad, the Greeks disrespect one of Apollo’s priests. The god manifests his displeasure by firing his arrows of contagion into their camp. The plague lasts nine days, brief by modern epidemiological standards. When the Greeks make amends and sacrifice sheep and goats to Apollo, the plague is cured.
Dean Koontz’s novel ‘The Eyes of Darkness’ (1981) made reference to a killer virus called “Wuhan-400”
Seven centuries later a plague struck Periclean Athens, killing a quarter of the city’s population and setting the city-state on a path to military defeat at the hands of Sparta. Thucydides, the Athenian historian, has a simple explanation for the epidemic: Apollo. The Spartans had cannily supplicated the god and he in return had promised victory. Soon afterwards, Sparta’s enemies started dying of the plague. Hindsight suggests that Athens, under siege – its population swollen with refugees, everyone living in unsanitary conditions – was at risk of contagion in a way the Spartan army, free to roam the countryside outside, clearly wasn’t. But this thought doesn’t occur to Thucydides. It can only be the god.
Between then and now there have been prodigious advances in medical science. We understand contagious disease vastly better, and have a greater arsenal of medicine and hygiene to fight it. But in one respect we haven’t advanced at all. We still tend to see agency in our pandemics.
Disease has no agency. Bacteria and viruses spread blindly where they can, their pathways facilitated by our globalised world. We, meanwhile, bring to the struggle our ever-improving drugs and hygiene. With Covid-19, experts insist, your two best bets are: wash your hands often, touch your face never. But people do not warm to the existential arbitrariness of this. Just as the Peloponnesian plague was seen as evidence that the gods were angry with Athens, so HIV was seen by a deluded minority as God’s judgment on homosexuals. Of course, HIV spreads wherever it can and cares nothing for your morals or sexual orientation.
This attribution of agency is clearest in the many imaginary plagues science-fiction writers have inflicted on humanity. In place of gods we have aliens, like those in Alice Sheldon’s chilling and brilliant short story “The Screwfly Solution” (1977). A new disease provokes men to begin murdering women en masse. At the story’s end we discover an alien species had introduced a brain infection so that the human race will destroy itself and the aliens can inherit the emptied planet. It’s a story about what we now call “toxic masculinity” and it says: it’s not gods we have angered, but goddesses.
Sometimes the alien plague is less picky. In HP Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space (1927; recently filmed, starring Nicolas Cage) an alien infection arrives via meteorite, wastes the land and drives people mad. In Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969) potentially world-ending contagion falls from outer space. This bug repeatedly mutates as Earth’s scientists try to combat it. We’re doomed – or would be, if it weren’t for the tale’s germus ex machina ending, in which the alien spontaneously mutates into a benign form.
If it’s not aliens behind our world-threatening plague, then it is probably that other SF stalwart, the mad scientist. Dozens of zombie franchises start with a rogue scientist infecting the population with a genetically engineered bioweapon virus. In Frank Herbert’s The White Plague (1982) a geneticist, pushed into insanity by the murder of his family, creates a pathogen that kills all humanity’s females. A cure is eventually found, but not before the world’s population balance has been shifted to leave thousands of men to every woman.
In Joanna Russ’s feminist masterpiece The Female Man (1975), “Whileaway”, a gender-specific virus has wiped out all the men, creating an effective utopia for women left behind, procreating by parthenogenesis and living in harmony. By the novel’s end it is hinted that the man-destroying plague was actually engineered by a female scientist. Never mind the antibacterial handwash: it is patriarchy that we need to scrub out.
So characteristic is assigning agency to pandemics in today’s culture that a video game such as Plague Inc (Ndemic Creations 2012) styles its players not as doctors attempting to stop the spread of a pandemic, but as the sickness itself. The player’s mission is to help their plagues spread and exterminate the human race. In HG Wells’s seminal War of the Worlds (1898) and in its various modern retellings, including Independence Day (1996), the virus is on our side, destroying alien invaders that lack our acquired immunity.
One of the most striking twists on this conceit is Greg Bear’s novel Blood Music (1985). A scientist, angry at being sacked by his lab, smuggles a virus out into the world in his own body. It infects everybody, becomes self-aware, and assimilates everybody and everything to itself: human beings and their infrastructure melt down into a planetwide sea of hyperintelligent grey goo. It sounds unpleasant, but it’s actually a liberation: the accumulation of concentrated consciousness, our own included, punches through a transcendent new realm. The plague becomes a kind of secular Rapture.
If on some level we still think of contagion as the gods’ anger, these stories become about how we have angered the god – about, in other words, our guilt. When Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver planned their reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise, they decided an agent, a neuroenhancer spliced into simian flu, would both raise the apes’ level of intelligence and prove fatal to humans. The resulting movie trilogy (2011-17) was more than just a commercial hit; it proved an eloquent articulation of broader environmental concerns. The few surviving humans move through the film’s lush rejuvenated forestscapes, compelled to confront avatars of humanity’s generational contempt for the natural world.
The plague that has destroyed us has uplifted these animals, given them wisdom, and they are angry with us – why wouldn’t they be? It’s a common genre trope. The scientist in Alistair MacLean’s The Satan Bug (1965) is an environmental fundamentalist who hopes his germ will wipe out humanity. The mad scientists from Channel 4’s TV drama Utopia (2013‑14) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy are both driven by the same animus.
Having invested ourselves with the crown of all creation, coronavirus arrives to puncture our hubris. Think of the computer intelligence Agent Smith in The Matrix (1999), played with sneering panache by Hugo Weaving: humans, he tells Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus, are incapable of developing a natural equilibrium with their environment: “You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed.” In this telling, we are the virus.
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Remember we told you about a novel that predicted the coronavirus outbreak 40 years ago? It was a thriller, The Eyes of Darkness, written by Dean Koontz. Looks like it is not the only piece of fiction that predicted the coronavirus outbreak.
A book titled End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World, written by Sylvia Browne, also predicted the global outbreak of coronavirus. The book was first published in 2008. A photo of an excerpt from the book is going viral across social media platforms and is spooky enough to reach for that box of tissues to wipe your sweat.
End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World, a 2008 book written by Sylvia Browne predicted global outbreak of coronavirus
“In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and bronchial tubes resisting all known treatments,” the excerpt read.
Doesn’t it sound very similar to this novel coronavirus and the disease, Covid-19? Be it the nature of the illness, the year mentioned or the part about the resistance to treatments – the similarity with coronavirus is uncanny.
The excerpt also mentioned that the illness will vanish soon after its arrival. “Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrives, attack again ten years later and then disappear completely.”
Netizens are absolutely stumped with the reference of coronavirus outbreak in the book.
Coronavirus has spread to over 50 countries and has claimed over 3,000 lives. Medical experts are yet to find a cure for Covid-19. In India alone, there are 28 confirmed cases of Covid-19 as of Wednesday evening.
(Except headline, this story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi: The world is witnessing the first Full Moon of 2020 this weekend – with the best views expected on Sunday.
As per NASA, the full moon will appear for nearly three days, from Friday to Monday, with Supermoon sight expected on Sunday.
While most people are aware of the full moon phenomenon, the term Supermoon could be new to many people.
So, let’s understand what is a Supermoon and how it is different from a full moon.
A full moon occurs when the moon lines up on the opposite side of earth from the sun. On a full moon night, the moon is visible in its complete form, or fully illuminated from the earth.
The Supermoon phenomenon is almost similar to the full moon phenomenon, with a slight difference.
The moon never orbits earth in a perfect circle. Instead, it travels in an ellipse which brings it closer to and farther to earth.
In scientific terms, the farthest point in during the ellipse is known as apogee, while the closest point is known as perigee.
A Supermoon only occurs when the moon occurs at or near the perigee.
The moon looks slightly larger and brighter than a typical full moon on this day – that’s what the term “supermoon” refers to.
When will be the Supermoon visible in India?
According to NASA, the Supermoon will appear on February 9 at 2:33am EST. The data provided by Norwegian site TimeandDate.com indicates that the full moon phase will occur at 1:03pm IST on Sunday. This means that the first supermoon of 2020 will only appear partially for stargazers in India sometime in the evening.
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
“The whole horizon was lit up and there was no sound.”
A man’s doorbell camera captured an exploding meteor in Derby, UK. According to Metro News, Gary Rogers received a text from his smart doorbell alerting him to suspicious activity outside his home. The 52-year-old was shocked when he realised that the suspicious activity was actually a celestial light show in the night sky.
The doorbell camera footage shows the meteor streaking across the sky before exploding into a fireball.
“I was in bed and was about to go to sleep when my phone pinged. I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr Rogers to Metro News.
Watch Video:
“I’ve seen shooting stars before but never a meteor. I thought it’s definitely not a firework, it was too bright for that. The whole horizon was lit up and there was no sound,” the Derby resident added.
According to BBC, experts at the National Space Centre in Leicester said the natural phenomenon captured was probably a bolide – a large meteor and often extremely bright meteor which explodes in the atmosphere.
Rob Dawes, chairman of nearby Sherwood Observatory, said: “Mr Rogers was very lucky to get such a nice bright one. But you’d be surprised how many of these do come into the atmosphere at any time of year.”
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
A heartbreaking video of two elderly coronavirus patients, who were in their 80s, saying goodbye to each other at the hospital is doing the rounds on the internet. The video of the elderly couple was shared by a Twitter user with the caption, “What does a couple mean? Two elderly patients of #coronavirus #CoronarivusOutbreak in their 80s said goodbye in ICU, this could be the last time to meet and greet.”
As the video of the old couple went viral, social media was abuzz with reactions.
A user wrote, “So terrible seeing these old people suffer. Situation seems completely out of control. Thanks for sharing.”
Another wrote, “Loyalty to the beloved … what a sad video … but it’s says a lot about the splendor of that love that does not end until the end of life…”
A post read, “I’m heartbroken. But who is filming and how can they when it looks like the woman is in obvious distress and the man is looking for help.”
A Twitter user remarked, “The images of human suffering are unimaginable.”
In China, at least 361 people have died after being infected by coronavirus, the government said on Monday.
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Beijing, China: Coronavirus patients arrived Tuesday at a Chinese field hospital built from scratch in under two weeks at the frontline of the outbreak, state media said, following a round-the-clock construction marathon that became a national social media sensation.
The 1,000-bed facility was built to relieve hospitals swamped with patients in Wuhan, the city in Hubei province at the epicentre of the national health emergency that has killed more in China than the 2003 SARS outbreak.
Fifty patients arrived at the military-run facility, the state-backed China Daily reported, with images showing workers in protective suits pushing people in wheelchairs up a ramp and into the pre-fabricated structure.
The virus has killed more than 400 people and infected a further 20,000, nearly all of them in Hubei, and spread to two-dozen countries since it emerged in December at a market that sold wild animals in the city.
The World Health Organization has declared the crisis a global health emergency, and the first death outside China was confirmed in the Philippines on Sunday.
As reports surfaced of bed shortages in hospitals in Wuhan, construction began on Huoshenshan — “Fire God Mountain” in Chinese — on Friday January 24.
Workers toiled day and night amid a forest of earthmovers and trucks carting materials around the site, southwest of the centre of the city of 11 million.
On the side of one of the trucks, the isolated city’s new rallying cry — “Let’s go Wuhan!” — was written on a banner.
Fire and thunder
All workers wore masks, as mandated by the authorities for the entire population of Wuhan, and were checked for fevers during their breaks.
By the following Friday, they had laid 400 prefabricated shipping-container-like rooms, after setting concrete foundations and routing the power supply to the complex.
The two-floor facility was handed over to the army on Sunday and will be staffed with 1,400 military medics, including some with experience dealing with SARS and Ebola.
State media had initially reported that patients would begin arriving Monday — inside the 10-day timeframe authorities had set out when construction began.
Leishenshan (“Thunder God Mountain”), another hospital on an adjacent site, is set to start admitting patients on Thursday, with 1,600 beds.
Fire and thunder are traditionally associated in China with protection against illnesses.
Authorities said the Wuhan facilities were modelled on the Xiaotangshan hospital in Beijing, which was built from prefabricated structures in barely a week to treat patients infected by SARS in 2003.
That pathogen killed 349 people in China and hundreds more in Hong Kong and abroad.
However, with the death toll surging in Wuhan and elsewhere in Hubei province, it was not immediately clear what overall impact the hospitals would have on the virus spreading elsewhere.
The city also plans to convert three existing venues, including a gymnasium and an exhibition centre, into hospitals, the Wuhan government said.
The three buildings will be turned into healthcare facilities with a total of 3,400 beds to take in patients with mild symptoms.
Livestreamed
Footage of the mammoth construction effort was livestreamed continuously on social media and watched tens of millions of times.
It has also been feted endlessly in state media as an example of the decisive response to the public health crisis after authorities in Hubei faced a torrent of public anger for perceived incompetence, including delays in announcing the public health emergency.
Local Communist Party secretary Ma Guoqiang acknowledged Friday that officials had worsened the spread of the virus by failing to restrict travel earlier.
When a lockdown and blanket travel ban were finally introduced, they swept up more than 50 million people in Wuhan and nearby cities.
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi: Daughter of Bill Gates, Jennifer Gates decided to tie knots with an Egyptian millionaire, Nayel Nassar.
She also announced her engagement with Nassar. Along with the announcement, she shared the photograph that shows her along with the millionaire and wrote, “Nayel Nassar, you are one of a kind. Absolutely swept me off my feet this past weekend, surprising me in the most meaningful location over one of our many shared passions. I can’t wait to spend the rest of our lives learning, growing, laughing and loving together. Yes a million times over. AHHH!!!”.
Reaction of Bill Gates
Commenting on the announcement, Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist wrote, “I am completely thrilled! Congratulations, @jenniferkgates and @nayelnassar”.
Meanwhile, Nassar also shared his feelings on his Instagram account and wrote, ” SHE SAID YES!!…I’m feeling like the luckiest (and happiest) man in the world right about now. Jenn, you are everything I could have possibly imagined..and so much more.”
It may be mentioned that Jennifer Gates and Nassar attended Stanford University and love blossomed there. They have been dating for a while.
Background of Nassar
Nassar was born in Egypt.
He completed a degree in Economics from Stanford University in 2013.
In 2020, he helped Egypt qualify for the Tokyo Olympics.
The World Health Organization has declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, after an emergency committee reconvened in Geneva.
