The German Federal Government’s integration commissioner, Annette Widmann-Mauz (CDU), has strongly condemned the migration-critical statements by the singer Xavier Naidoo. Naidoo happens to be from an immigrant family himself.

“Such a video is extremely dangerous given the current threat of right-wing extremism,” said the politician to the Funke media group.

In a video, Naidoo sang, among other things: “I love almost everyone. But what if a murder happens almost every day, in which the guest steals a life from the host.”

The musician took a position on his website on the video from 2018. He has long stood against exclusion and xenophobia, he says, but it is important to be vigilant towards attacks on peaceful coexistence, “no matter from which political direction” they come and “regardless of their origin”.

Widmann-Mauz focused on the Hanau shooting however, urging all to “stand up against racism and strengthen cohesion in our country, instead of generally devaluing people because of their origin, family history, their appearance or religion”.

The musician has Indian, South African, Irish and German roots. He says that his parents came to Germany as guest workers. Adapting to the “right and moral standards of the host” must be a matter of course, he argued.

The private broadcaster RTL has since fired Naidoo from the jury for the show Deutschland sucht den Superstar. “We are advocates of freedom of expression,” said RTL managing director Jörg Graf in a statement. “But that also means that we firmly reject any form of racism and extremism. The videos of Xavier Naidoo that have now surfaced have massively irritated us.”

The music group Die Söhne Mannheims, to which Naidoo had previously belonged, used the occasion to say: “Xavier and we have been going separate ways for some time and as a musicians collective we are clearly and specifically against hatred, violence and racism!” The director and actor Til Schweiger, on the other hand, expressed his solidarity on Instagram.

In a petition, some 38 508 signatories are currently demanding from RTL that the singer be included in the jury again. Naidoo has shaped “German-language soul music like no other”. The “campaign against him and the expulsion” is an “attack on freedom of expression”.

freewestmedia.com/2020/03/13/german-integration-politician-denounces-anti-immigration-video-by-immigrant/

Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to engineer a mass invasion from Turkey into Greece of thousands of Syrian refugees and migrants. He has broken a deal reached with the European Union in 2016 to close its border with Europe to stem the flood of immigrants from the Middle East. He took Europe’s money that was part of the deal but is now reopening his country’s border with Greece to extort more concessions. “We will continue the current measure on our frontiers until all of our expectations are concretely met,” Erdogan said recently.

When Greece pushed back to protect its border from the invasion, Erdogan lashed out. “There is no difference with what the Nazis did and the images from the border,” he declared as he made unproven claims of “barbaric” tactics supposedly used by Greek border guards.

As Breitbart pointed out, “The slur against Greece is notable, as some 300,000 people were killed during the 1941 Nazi occupation of the country, which near-wiped out Greece’s Jewish population.” Then again, we should not be surprised. Erdogan is an avowed anti-Semite who has indulged in conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the world’s problems.

“Greece does not accept lessons in human rights and the respect of international law from the Turkish president,” said a spokesman for the Greek government. He claimed that Ankara’s actions were aimed at destabilizing Greece.

There are now an estimated 35,000 immigrants who are congregated along Turkey’s border with Greece. Erdogan deployed at least 1,000 heavily armed special police to the border area last week to counter Greece’s resistance to the immigrants’ entry across the border into Greece. Turkish fighter jets have been recently sighted in the region, fueling tensions between the two NATO members who have had a long history of hostilities that Erdogan appears intent on escalating. Erdogan has vowed that “Turkish naval patrols would go on harassing Greek patrol vessels at sea,” according to The Guardian, following an incident in the Aegean Sea last week. Another Turkish-instigated flare-up at sea occurred on Wednesday.

Greece’s Prime Minister, Kyriákos Mitsotákis, accused Turkey of becoming “the official trafficker of migrants to the European Union.” He said that Turkey is using “desperate people” to promote its “geopolitical agenda.”

The current EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, praised Greece’s defensive actions at its border. “This border is not only a Greek border, it is also a European border,” she said. “I thank Greece for being our European aspida [shield] in these times.”

Prime Minister Mitsotákis has charged that the thousands of Syrian refugees trying recently to enter Greece have not come from the current Syrian hotspot of Idlib in northwest Syria, where Turkey has contributed to the violence. Instead, they had been “living safely in Turkey for a long period of time.”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, has acknowledged that few, if any, of those recently arriving at Greece’s doorstep are in fact from northwest Syria. His observation would appear to back up Prime Minister Mitsotákis’s charge. Yet, Mr. Grandi’s refugee agency is leaning on Greece to allow self-declared “refugees” originally from Syria who have entered Greece’s territory “irregularly” to present themselves without delay to the authorities to seek asylum.

“Continued European resources, capacity and solidarity are needed to boost Greece’s response,” 

 the agency suggests. At the same time, “international support to Turkey,” the UN agency declares, “must be sustained and stepped up.” But does that mean that Turkey should be able to renege on its deal and export thousands of its current Syrian residents to Europe? Apparently, so.

The truth is that there will never enough to satisfy Erdogan, the deal breaker. And it is highly doubtful that he would use the bulk of increased financial support to help with the housing and education of Syrian refugees already living in Turkey. He has his military interventions in Syria and Libya to finance.

Although there are some indications that the EU may bow to Erdogan’s pressure campaign by offering him more money, Erdogan is upping the ante. He is insisting on a resumption of talks about Turkey joining the EU. That’s a hard sell given Turkey’s dramatic move towards authoritarianism under Erdogan’s rule. Expect Erdogan to continue his confrontation with Greece and the EU until they bend to accommodate his wishes one way or the other.

frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/turkey-confronts-greece-more-hordes-syrian-joseph-klein/

Health officials in Italy have issued guidelines for rationing care as hospitals there struggle to keep up with the surge of patients infected with the coronavirus. Doctors are being told that they’ll likely need to deny care to senior citizens and those with other health conditions as the virus explodes across the nation.

Italy has been rocked by the still not-well-understood COVID-29, with more than 1,200 confirmed cases and 827 deaths—second only to China—and 16 million residents currently under quarantine.

An article published by the Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care (translated here by Yascha Mounk) warns that “It may be necessary to establish criteria of access to intensive care not just on the basis of clinical appropriateness but inspired by the most consensual criteria regarding distributive justice and the appropriate allocation of limited health resources.” The report goes on to recommend rationing care to certain populations.

Rationing health care is nothing new in Italy and in fact has become an “established trend” in recent years amid an ongoing economic crisis that has strained government resources, including the government-run healthcare system.

“In a context of grave shortage of medical resources, the allocation criteria need to guarantee that those patients with the highest chance of therapeutic success will retain access to intensive care. It’s a matter of giving priority to ‘the highest hope of life and survival,'” the health experts explain.

“It may become necessary,” they warn, “to establish an age limit for access to intensive care.”

So if your Italian grandma shows up at the ER in need of care, she may just be given some cough syrup (or a pain pill) and sent home to die. With a shortage of hospital beds and doctors working themselves to the point exhaustion, hospitals have no other choice but to triage patients and only provide care to the most viable.

The medical society denies that they’re asking doctors to make a “value judgment” (of course they are) but rather it’s “a way to provide extremely scarce resources to those who have the highest likelihood of survival and could enjoy the largest number of life-years saved.”

In the event of a “total saturation of resources,” a policy of “first come, first served” would exclude patients who show up later, they explain.

But it’s not just your grandma who needs to worry about this survival-of-the-fittest policy: “In addition to age, the presence of comorbidities [additional chronic conditions] needs to be carefully evaluated. It is conceivable that what might be a relatively short treatment course in healthier people could be longer and more resource-consuming in the case of older or more fragile patients.”

So if you’ve got diabetes or a heart condition and show up at the hospital with coronavirus, you might not be worth saving because you’ll consume too many (increasingly scarce) resources and doctors may be forced to “posit a ceiling of care” (Orwellian language if I ever heard it) and you might be out of luck.

And that’s exactly what’s happening in Northern Italy, where the rationing has begun. A doctor in Western Europe described the dire situation doctors and patients face there and the chilling decisions medical professional are being forced to make:

Most of my childhood friends are now doctors working in north Italy. In Milan, in Bergamo, in Padua, they are having to choose between intubating a 40-year-old with two kids, a 40-year old who is fit and healthy with no co-morbidities, and a 60-year-old with high blood pressure, because they don’t have enough beds. In the hallway, meanwhile, there are another 15 people waiting who are already hardly breathing and need oxygen.

Northern Italy has been hit particularly hard by the coronavirus, with doctors reporting conditions we usually associate with wartime, as the death toll increases by the hour and hospitals are short-staffed and out of beds.

Dr. Daniele Macchini, who works at the Humanitas Gavazzeni hospital in Bergamo, described the conditions in a lengthy Facebook, saying “The war has literally exploded and the battles are uninterrupted day and night.”

“One after the other the unfortunate poor people come to the emergency room,” he wrote. “Now, however, that need for beds in all its drama has arrived. One after another, the departments that had been emptied are filling up at an impressive rate. The display boards with the names of the sick, of different colors depending on the operating unit they belong to, are now all red and instead of the surgical operation there is the diagnosis, which is always the same cursed: bilateral interstitial pneumonia.”

Macchini called the epidemic a “tsunami that has overwhelmed us.”

“Suddenly the emergency room is collapsing,” he continued. “Emergency provisions are issued: help is needed in the emergency room. A quick meeting to learn how the first aid management software works and a few minutes later they are already downstairs, next to the warriors on the war front.”

The symptoms are always the same: fever, difficulty breathing, cough, respiratory failure. “All to be hospitalized. Someone already to intubate and go to intensive care. For others it is late …Intensive care becomes saturated, and where intensive care ends, more are created.”

It’s a nightmare scenario, something out of a dystopian novel, and Italy’s healthcare system is collapsing under the weight of it. If this chaos spreads to other regions, COVID-19 could make its way onto the list of the world’s most deadly plagues. Pray they get control of this in Italy and elsewhere—and fast.

pjmedia.com/lifestyle/elderly-will-be-denied-intensive-care-as-coronavirus-overwhelms-italys-national-health-system-experts-warn/

Italian actor and mixed martial arts trainer Luca Franzese was trapped in his house for more than 36 hours with the corpse of his sister, who had died of Coronavirus. “Italy has abandoned us,” said Franzese in a video, with his sister’s corpse visible in the background.

“This is a very strong video, please don’t show it to children and elderly people. I am forced in all my pain to fight this situation,” said Franzese in a Facebook video pleading for help from Italian authorities.

“I have my sister in bed, dead, I don’t know what to do,” he added. “I cannot give her the honor she deserves because the institutions have abandoned me. I contacted everyone, but nobody was able to give me an answer.”

“I’ve been waiting for the institutions to give me answers since last night. Nobody came forward,” said Franzese, who was reportedly unable to find a funeral home that would bury his sister, Teresa Franzese.

The Italian actor was reportedly trapped in the house for 36 with his sister, who tested positive for the coronavirus after her death on Saturday, reports Daily Mail.

Franzese said that his sister suffered from a type of epilepsy, but that once she had shown symptoms of the Chinese virus earlier in the week. Health officials refused to test her for the coronavirus.

“I am making this video for the good of Italy, for the good of Naples,” said Franzese. “My sister died last night, probably because of the virus, and I’ve been waiting for answers since last night.”

The actor’s sister was tested for the coronavirus after she died, with the test results confirming that she had been infected, reports NY Post.

“Guys, we are ruined, Italy abandoned us,” said Franzese.

A local funeral home eventually collected Teresa’s body after her brother’s video went viral on social media.

In another video released on Wednesday, Franzese added that three more people in his family have tested positive for the coronavirus. “The nightmare goes on,” he said.

As the Wuhan virus proliferates throughout Italy, doctors working in the nation’s overwhelmed hospitals say they have been forced to ration healthcare services for older, sicker patients in order to prioritize younger patients who are more likely to be saved from the coronavirus.

On Thursday, new data released show that Italy’s death toll has now surpassed 1,000.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2020/03/12/italian-actor-pleads-for-help-after-sister-dies-from-coronavirus/

The Greek island of Lesbos, which hosts 20,000 migrants in the Moria refugee camp, has confirmed its first case of coronavirus, raising fears that the virus could spread among migrants living in poor sanitary conditions.

The island, one of the top destinations for migrants attempting to reach Europe by boat, sees more migrants landing on its shores nearly every day. 

Over the past week, the security conditions at the Moria camp have deteriorated to such an extent that many NGOs withdrew from the camp.

As a result, poor sanitary conditions prevail in overcrowded camp, which currently features no medical assistance. About a month ago, some doctors were already warning that an epidemic might happen in the camp.

Overall, volunteers working in the refugee camps on the Greek islands face increasingly aggressive attacks, and many of them have decided to leave.

Since Turkey has opened its borders and allowed migrants to head for Europe, Lesbos locals have been expecting an even greater influx of migrants.

Currently, there are about 42,000 migrants on Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, which concerns many Greeks. They are afraid that migrants may become infected with the coronavirus and spread it on the islands, especially due to a lack of available medical screening.

So far, Greece has registered only 99 cases of coronavirus, with one person dying due to the infection. In most cases, those infected were religious pilgrims who had previously visited the Middle East.

Even though Greece has already closed all schools for two weeks, if the coronavirus spreads among refugees on the Greek-Turkish border, the situation could quickly spiral out of control.

In developed countries, it is already proving difficult to limit the spread of the virus.

However, preventing coronavirus infections among migrants living in close quarters is thought to be nearly impossible, as the Turkish ambassador to the United States pointed out when speaking about refugee camps along the Turkish-Syrian border.

Since late February, thousands of Syrian refugees have tried to cross the border from Turkey into the European Union.

“There are 900,000 people. How do you want to check each one of them? That is an impossible mission,” the Turkish ambassador replied to the question of what Turkey is doing to prevent the spread of the virus from Syria.

There is currently no information about whether coronavirus is at all present in war-torn Syria and how many people may be infected, however, all neighboring states have already detected the virus.

rmx.news/article/article/first-case-of-coronavirus-hits-lesbos-as-greeks-fear-virus-may-spread-in-migrant-camps

Michael Osterholm is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, in the US.

freewestmedia.com/2020/03/12/warning-by-internationally-recognized-expert-in-infectious-epidemiology/

Despite warning that up to 70 percent of Germany could become infected with coronavirus, Chancellor Angela Markel said she refused to close the border to visitors from Italy during a joint press conference held with Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn in Berlin.

Serving as Merkel’s first public address on the outbreak, she warned that border closures would not be enough to prevent the spread of the virus, according to a report from Hungarian newspaper Mandiner.

“This is a test for our solidarity, our common sense and care for each other. And I hope we pass the test,” she said. However, she ruled out following Austria’s lead in banning visitors from Italy.

Is Merkel’s ideology endangering Germany during coronavirus outbreak?

Her refusal to put in ban visitors from one of the worst-hit countries in the world follows comments she made just two days ago that she wanted to implement measures to “buy time” in the fight against coronavirus, with “all measures” being put in place to slow the spread of the virus. She said such measures could help give researchers time to conduct medical research and even create a vaccine, which would be important for next winter when the virus is expected to accelerate.

Despite Merkel’s claims of “solidarity” and “care for each other” as the reason for maintaining and open border policy with Italy, other actions from her government seem to contradict her, including Germany’s decision to block medical supplies to Italy, an action condemned by other EU members.

Italy has 12,500 coronavirus cases and 826 deaths, and the country serves as the epicenter of coronavirus in Europe. Italy has banned travelers from a number of nations, including China and Iran in addition to implementing a nation-wide quarantine.

U.S. President Donald Trump implemented a total travel ban for travelers entering the U.S. from Europe yesterday, except for Great Britain. The move follows after his country became one of the first to ban travelers from China. Trump said during an address to the nation that if Europe had blocked travelers from China earlier, it may have avoided or at least slowed the transmission of coronavirus.

Germany grapples with spread of virus

Current data showed that Germany, with 1,966 confirmed cases of coronavirus and three casualties, was the world’s seventh most affected country by the coronavirus outbreak, which has been now declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

Merkel also said she was open to scrapping Germany’s “black zero” rule to allow new government borrowing. She said it was “an extraordinary situation” and that ending the outbreak came first.

“The virus is in Germany, it is in Europe. That’s the thought we have to get used to,” Spahn said. “It will still spread even if you close all the borders. Sooner or later you have to let people in or out and then it starts spreading again.”

Experts estimate the virus’s mortality rate in an advanced healthcare system like Germany’s at between 0.1% and 0.7%, Spahn added. Though Germany has the most intensive care beds per capita in Europe, its healthcare system could quickly be overwhelmed if the virus spread too fast.

Interviewed on Deutschlandfunk radio, Spahn said Germany’s current priority was to slow the virus’s spread to minimize the peak burden on the country’s health system.

rmx.news/article/article/merkel-refuses-to-close-border-to-italy-after-warning-70-of-germany-could-be-infected-with-coronavirus

By Richard Baehr

I have always been fascinated by numbers, so looking at data on the virus spread and its lethality is revealing, and also raises lots of questions I cannot answer, since I am not a virologist, nor am I on top of what each country is doing to contain the spread of the virus. There are several very good sources of information on the numbers if this interests you.

A 17-year-old prodigy from Seattle has created an excellent database, which updates every minute.  Here is an article on the young software designer.  Johns Hopkins University, recipient of the largest gift ever made by one person to a university (Michael Bloomberg’s gift of $1.8 billion) also has good data.

The country by country information, especially when examined over time, suggests that there are some disparities. First: the incidence rate, that is, the number of cases compared to a country’s population. This virus began in China, and grew rapidly there, particularly in one area of the country, but case volume now has leveled off with very small growth in the caseload, and well over half recovered. This is encouraging, or should be; it suggests containment is possible.

Now, of course, an authoritarian country has tools at its disposal democracies do not. In any case, China has a total caseload of 80,000 that has been quite steady for a few weeks. China has a population of 1.4 billion. In other words, 1 in every 17,000 Chinese have come down with the disease. Obviously, the incidence rate in the Wuhan area is higher than the national incidence rate in China — maybe more than 25 times higher. This is also the area where the disease spread rapidly since almost nobody early on knew what they were dealing with.  

Yesterday, Germany’s Angela Merkel predicted that 60-70% of that country’s population of roughly 85 million would come down with the virus. Really? Based on what?  1 in 17,000 in China but 7 in 10 in Germany?

In the United States, the caseload has grown tenfold in little over a week. That is a very high growth rate. We now have just over 1,000 identified cases (the number infected is undoubtedly considerably higher since few people have been tested). The US population is close to 330 million, meaning our incidence rate so far is 1 in 330,000, about 1/20th of China’s rate. In other words, if our incidence rate grew to match China’s before leveling off, we would get to about 20,000 cases. If our rate grew to match that of the Wuhan area, it might be 500,000 cases. Why the US incidence rate should grow to match the Wuhan area rate is not at all clear to me. Some of the data in the country tables seems suspect. Why would Russia have only 15 cases? The world’s highest incidence rate could be in Iran, if the official numbers represent just a small fraction of the actual caseload as some non-government sources in the country suggest. Iranian leadership has been decimated by the virus, which has not occurred anywhere else.

This year’s “regular” flu season has been a busy one. This is from yesterday’sNew York Times, which makes clear that what we are now seeing with the coronavirus is not a repeat of the 1918 “Spanish Flu” nor as prevalent as a regular seasonal flu.

“But so far this year, the annual epidemic of seasonal flu in the United States is proving much more devastating than the coronavirus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that there have been at least 34 million infected with flu this season, 350,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 deaths. So far, coronavirus has killed 27 people in the United States.”

So, as many people have died from the seasonal flu in the United States, as would be affected by the coronavirus, if the incidence rate were 20 times higher than it is so far.

Several countries are experiencing higher incidence rates than China.  Among them are South Korea, Italy, Iran. These countries are also experiencing highly differentiated death rates from the disease. The head of the WHO stated the other day that the death rate is 3.4% worldwide. I think he is wrong, and the real death rate is likely lower. 

In China, the death rate was near 5% in Hubei Province, which includes Wuhan. But in other areas of the country, the death rate has been 1%.  South Korea, which has tested a large number of people, has a high incidence rate, but a death rate of only 0.75%, less than 1%. Italy has a similar caseload as South Korea, but a death rate nearly ten times higher. Both are developed countries, with similar populations and population density. I won’t even try to explain this wide gap. I can’t. There are apparently different strains of the virus, with different degrees of lethality. Cultural differences and differing government policies on quarantining, testing, and treating victims could all be contributors.  

In the cases around the world, the death rate is far higher for those 70 and older, than for those under that age who contract the disease. It is even higher among those 80 and older and highest among those 90 and older. Young children do not seem to catch the virus. Most of the deaths in the United States so far have been associated with one nursing home in a Seattle suburb. The typical nursing home population has a median age in the mid 80s. 

You will note that I have left politics completely out of this analysis, which is where I think they belong.  Our own government should become as familiar as it can with what other countries have done to contain the virus, especially if they have had some success doing so.  Taiwan has had a particularly positive experience:

Singapore had an initial burst of cases, which has not grown much. They early on issued some directives, which as this article suggests might be difficult to replicate in most places.

News coverage of stories like this are similar to stories concerning natural disasters. The media flood the zone with nonstop coverage. For this virus, the coverage undoubtedly has increased fears among many people. The stock market collapse and concern about an economic decline are also worrisome. If you work in the travel sector, the energy business, or the restaurant industry, things have gotten tough very quickly. 

It is troubling for a respected national leader like Merkel to make the comments she did. Best I know she is an economist, not a scientist nor a virologist. I cannot predict how many people in the US or anywhere else will be impacted by this. Here are a few things to consider: every day in the United States, 6,000-7,000 people die (over 2 million a year). In China, about 25,000 die every day (9 million a year). The great majority of those who die every year in both countries are older people. The virus added about 50 deaths per day in China for two months. Italy has just over 1,000 deaths a day from all causes. In the past few weeks, that number has grown by close to 50 per day from the virus. In other words, the Wuhan area of China experienced the same supplemental death toll from the virus for about 60 days that Italy has now experienced for close to two weeks. It is understandable why Italy has chosen a quarantine type approach for the entire country, as case volumes grow, and the death toll climbs.

In short, the world is not showing signs that the end is near (though it may be for some of us). The virus is a scary thing for many people for good reasons, and precaution is a good thing, as are active measures to deal with the economic fallout as well as testing, and treatment and speedier than normal adoption of any vaccines which prove effective. I do not have the scientific background to know whether warmer months will slow the growth of the virus, as some have argued.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/coronavirus_by_the_numbers.html