Former Labour boss Gordon Brown allegedly let Muslim rape gangs roam free in Britain in an alleged deal with the Saudis, Politicalite can exclusively reveal.  

A City of London finance source exclusively claimed to Politicalite that during Gordon Brown’s short tenure as Prime Minister he borrowed money from the Saudi’s – but the deal had big strings attached. 

He urged the dollar-rich Gulf states to prop up ailing national economies through a massive injection of capital into the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and also asked for cash for Britain. In return, he allegedly had to let Muslims “do anything they like.” A source connected finance in The City told Politicalite that “In return for the money, the condition they insisted on, was that Muslims in Britain must be free to do anything they like.”

“In the light of his subsequent repression of reporting on rape gangs, this information might provide the explanation.” Politicalite reported in 2018 that ex-North West Chief prosecutor alleged that the Home Office ordered police to ignore grooming gang claims in 2008 – though Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had nothing to do with the order. Nazir Afzal who reversed a Crown Prosecution Service decision and successfully prosecuted the notorious Rochdale rape gang told the BBC in 2018 that in 2008 the Home Office sent a circular email to all police forces calling on them to not investigate the sexual exploitation of young girls in towns and cities across the UK.

He said: “You may not know this, but back in 2008 the Home office sent a circular to all police forces in the country saying ‘as far as these young girls who are being exploited in towns and cities, we believe they have made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour and therefore it is not for you police officers to get involved in.’”

“This brings a whole new dimension to the case – it was thought that both local police and local councils had failed their duty of care, but if true, Mr Afzal’s claims would show that instructions to the police to ignore the claims came from the very top, at the heart of government in Whitehall.”

Mr Afzal added in January 2020 that Jacqui Smith had nothing to do with the order and has apologised to her.

Read more (politicalite.com)…

Now we have yet another reason to resent the reusable bags moonbats try to force us to use by banning plastic bags and/or forcing us to pay for bags that have always been free. Among the diseases they can spread is coronavirus.

Via City Journal:

The COVID-19 virus is just one of many pathogens that shoppers can spread unless they wash the bags regularly, which few people bother to do. Viruses and bacteria can survive in the tote bags up to nine days, according to one study of coronaviruses.

Progressives often denounce their opponents for allegedly not believing in science. Let’s see if they like this science:

The risk of spreading viruses was clearly demonstrated in a 2018 study published in the Journal of Environmental Health. The researchers, led by Ryan Sinclair of the Loma Linda University School of Public Health, sent shoppers into three California grocery stores carrying polypropylene plastic tote bags that had been sprayed with a harmless surrogate of a virus.

The result: the tote bags spread the virus surrogate all over everything, so that anyone coming into the store might pick it up.

An earlier study of supermarkets in Arizona and California found large numbers of bacteria in almost all the reusable bags—and no contamination in any of the new single-use plastic bags.

But plastic bags are offensive to the climate or the sea turtles or whatever, so we have to spread disease to signal our obeisance to enviromoonbattery.

Other liberal initiatives that help spread diseases like the Wuhan virus include open borders.

moonbattery.com/reusable-shopping-bags-can-spread-coronavirus/

Madrid is rapidly becoming Europe’s latest epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak after 2 000 people in the Madrid region alone have tested positive for Covid-19 as of March 13, up from 1 388 as of March 12.

According to the Spanish-language daily El Mundo, citing figures from local health councilor Enrique Ruiz Escudero, the surge is “very worrying”.

Spain is witnessing Europe’s second-worst outbreak of Covid-19 with the second-highest number of total confirmed cases in Europe after Italy after the Women’s Day March.

On Thursday, the number of infected in Madrid was at 1 388 out of a total of 3004 in Spain as a whole.

The health councilor said he expected the infected cases to rise “very much” in the coming days, mostly due to the contagion spread at last weekend’s “International Women’s Day” March, where thousands of women simply ignored public health concerns, creating serious risk for vulnerable people in their communities.

Escudero and other top Madrid officials asked Spain’s central government for more supplies to help combat the virus as the “community spread” intensifies. He also called for restaurants and bars to close and demanded that people self-isolate to reduce the risk of infection.

Authorities said at least 120 000 people participated in Madrid’s march.

“This is the only thing that we know we can do to contain it,” Ruiz Escudero explained. Some 190 people infected with the virus are currently in intensive care in Madrid, while 40 people in and around the city have died.

On February 26, 2020, New York University professor and feminist Isabel Cadenas Cañón presented her lecture “Feminist Mobilizations in Contemporary Spain” at NYU’s campus in Madrid. She said Spain has recently established itself as the host of one of the most powerful feminist movements in the world, urging women to participate.

On March 7, a human chain of 8 000 women surrounded the center of Madrid “standing in solidarity of feminism”.

freewestmedia.com/2020/03/13/madrid-covid-19-infections-soar-after-womens-day-march/

By Monica Showalter

Italy’s in dire need of help.

Its health care system is collapsing. The coronavirus has put the whole country in quarantine. There are now 15,000 cases, along with 1,018 deaths, the last 24 hours bringing in 188 more. The casualty count is the highest outside China. And it’s spreading fast. Until a few days ago, the problem as concentrated in the north. Now, it has spread throughout the whole country.

Anyone with a heart can feel pity and an urge to help them. They need help, bad.

But don’t go asking the European Union.

Turns out the open-borders globalist set-up is stiffing the Italians in their hour of need:

First, the EU created the problem by failing to shut down their borders with China, enabling its spread into Italy in the first place. While President Trump was acting swiftly to protect America from the lethal virus, the European Union was saying there was no crisis and calling Trump a xenophobe.

Now, with Italy hit hard based on that hate-Trump ‘logic’, its medical system is overwhelmed. Its doctors and nurses are exhausted. There’s not enough equipment or supplies, and the patients keep coming. Health care is being doled out by triage, old people being told ‘no health care for you.’ The Italians are appealing for help with masks, surgical equipment, doctors, anything that will enable them to get through it and save human lives — and the EU is not giving it.

David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner has a must-read column on how the EU is leaving Italy to fend for itself in its hour of need.

Maurizio Massari, Italy’s permanent representative to the European Union, wrote an opinion piece for Politico Europe Tuesday evening publicly shaming fellow EU states for their failure to help, and once again asking them to come together. Instead, European countries are banning the exportation of face masks and other medical equipment needed to deal with the crisis. Germany’s health minister, quoted by Politico, argued that this was necessary: “The market is such at present that masks are not going where [they’re most] urgently needed, it’s where people pay most money for them.”This is absurd. First of all, if Germany’s government is really so worried about masks not getting where they’re needed (as opposed to covering its own backside), they can donate masks to the Italians, can’t they? This complaint about profiteering is really just cover for their own fearful selfishness. Maybe Germany is worried about becoming the next Italy, but that isn’t the excuse they’re giving. They’re hiding behind the immorality of profiteering as if that were the real motive.

Why is that a problem? Because the European Union is supposed to be all about lovey-doviness, nations giving of their surplus to help others in need in the name of the greater good. Helping the poor out, putting people first, so unlike that cowboy regime across the pond.

Fredosso continues:

And it may be perfectly understandable for Germany to want to protect its own national interest in a time of crisis, but it runs counter to the entire concept of the EU that we’ve been hearing so much about during the debate over Brexit. Member states are supposed to benefit by putting aside their own selfish needs. French President Emmanuel Macron has cayled for an even more united post-Brexit EU. What happened to that? Right now, his government is seizing control of masks throughout France. I haven’t seen anything about them ending up in Italy.

And as Freddoso notes, all they are getiting is empty EU words, nothing more. So much for all that ‘sharing.’

The hard reality here is that nations act in their own self-interest whether they say so or not. That so much propaganda to the contrary has been mouthed by the European Union in the name of preserving its stateless unaccountable bureaucracy, and is often believed by local citizens, is a sad story. Up until now, the Italians had to have been confident their association with the EU would help them. Turns out that is a load of hooey, and reason enough to leave the EU as if the restive nation didn’t already have enough of them Open borders for disease, closed borders for help with disease, what a bargain. One hopes the Italians will get wise to this and finally pull the plug.

That’s not the only thing that’s being discredited, though.

Globalism, as it turns out, seems absolutely lethal when combined with socialism.

Italy has socialized medicine, the kind Bernie Sanders seeks to push on America, leaving the country way less prepared to handle the pandemic than countries with free market health care systems.

The central planners don’t have enough beds. There’s not enough staff. There’s no free market to step in and pick up the slack, it’s not allowed. According to this disturbing piece in the Wall Street Journal, there are signs of a medical system failure, the same kind of thing that in past socialist hellhole regimes, has triggered man-caused famines. Now it’s a health-care famine for Italy, because, like Venezuela’s oilfields, the cash was spent on today-needs and political crowd pleasers such as “free” stuff, instead of invested in to increase “production” (read: profitability). The net result is the same as it is in Venezuela and all socialist hellholes: underinvestment, leading to shambling, subpar, shortage-brimming results. Ain’t party-elites making all the decisions grand? According to the Journal:

Italy lags other large European countries in provision of acute-care hospital beds, furnishing 2.62 of them per 1,000 residents as of 2016, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Germany it’s 6.06 and in France and the Netherlands it’s 3.15 and 3 respectively. That year, Italy devoted around $913 per capita to inpatient acute and rehabilitative care, compared with $1,338 in France, $1,506 in Germany, and $1,732 in the U.S.

 The writer, Joseph Sternberg, notes this:

What accounts for these divergences in health-care resources requires more study than a single newspaper column can provide, but a few early hints emerge. One is the observation that the U.K. and Italy are significantly more dependent on direct government financing of health-care than is France or Germany.

Government accounted for 79% of total health-care spending in the U.K. in 2017, according to Eurostat, and 74% in Italy. Germany and France both rely on compulsory insurance schemes with varying degrees of subsidy and government meddling, but outright government expenditure amounts to only 6% of total health spending in Germany and 5% in France. Covid-19 in this sense is a test of how much one trusts central health planners to make wise long-term decisions that boost resilience in the face of unusual dangers.

And with government making all the decisions about ‘universal’ health care, what happens now is inhuman. According to Paula Bolyard at PJMedia:

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. Imagine paying for high taxes for socialist health care all your life only to be told in your hour of need ‘too bad, you’re too old, no health care for you’? It’s enough to make one hope that Italy snaps to attention on what multilateral globalism combined with socialized medicine, have done for it. If it can’t do that, it remains a lesson for the rest of us, as Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other socialist siren-songers promise the world from all their socialization schemes, always done with the best of intentions, and always collapsing into rubble right when it counts. Socialism fails every time it’s tried. Wrap it in the European Union and it fails spectacularly.

americanthinker.com/blog/

In a sign Germany’s so-called “welcome culture” to migrants may be fraying, the German state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia, the largest state in Germany, voted against the admission of migrants with the votes of four major parties, according to WDR.

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), all voted together against accepting any refugees.

The Green Party had previously submitted an application to admit unaccompanied minors and other vulnerable refugees, with the party asking to transport 5,000 migrants from Greece to North Rhine-Westphalia. Their asylum procedures were then supposed to be processed in Germany.

The rejection comes on the heels of a new poll released in Germany, which shows that only 32 percent of Germans support the idea of Germany taking in more migrants while 44 percent are opposed. Another 15 percent do not know what their position is on the issue.

Germany just announced it would be taking in 1,500 migrant minors at the federal level, but it is still unclear which German states will be accepting them. The latest vote in North Rhine-Westphalia means it is unlikely they will be distributed there.

There have been concerns in the past that migrants have lied about their age in order to facilitate entry into Europe. For example, an incredible 84 percent of “child migrants” who were tested by Swedish government were actually adults aged 18 or older, according to a report from the BBC.

In front of the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament building, members and supporters of the refugee organization “Seebrücke” demonstrated for more migrants. 

Spokesman Patrick Schiffer emphasized that there are not only many free places for refugees in North Rhine-Westphalia, but there must also be a willingness to accept them.

Düsseldorf’s mayor agrees with that sentiment.

“We have space for such people in NRW right now and should agree to accept them and help them.” said Düsseldorf Mayor Thomas Geisel (SPD) said there are 500 free places for refugees in the state capital.

He says Germany most take in more migrants, and he is not the only one. Other cities and municipalities from North Rhine-Westphalia had also offered to accept migrants. Under the motto “We have space“, pro-migrant German politicians and activists have been promoting the idea that despite taking in over a million migrants, Germany still has plenty of space for more.

rmx.news/article/article/biggest-german-state-votes-against-accepting-more-migrants

The arrest warrant against the 34-year-old Iraqi, who has been convicted of several criminal offences and who smashed half of the face of a 33-year-old Munich resident with an axe in front of his wife, will not be enforced. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the migrant is said to have psychological problems and was therefore placed in a psychiatric ward.

Last Sunday, a 34-year-old Iraqi suddenly ran in front of the hood of a 33-year-old car driver in Munich. After the car driver brought his vehicle to a halt, the Iraqi hit the hood as if he was mad. The Munich resident got out of the car and wanted to take the rioter to task. Thereupon the Iraqi pulled an axe, hit his victim in the head on the left side and cut off almost half of his face. The aggressor missed the carotid artery and the artery in the collarbone area by a hair’s breadth. The wife of the professional driver had to watch helplessly from the passenger seat as her husband was attacked and collapsed covered in blood.

The migrant who had been living in Munich for three years fled. However, after the Iraqi had already been known to the police because of dangerous bodily harm three times and twice for other offences, he could be located and arrested because of the fingerprints left on the bonnet.

After the crime, it was quickly stated that the axe migrant had psychological problems. The public prosecutor’s office therefore requested his transfer to a psychiatric clinic. The original arrest warrant was not enforced and the transfer was ordered instead, a police spokesperson said on Thursday according to the news magazine Focus. He is now under investigation for dangerous bodily harm. An answer to the question of why this Merkel guest was not expelled long ago, when he became known to the police five times in total, the magazine Focus cannot answer. Instead, the mainstream magazine shuts off the reader commentary section, since “experience has shown that an objective discussion is not to be expected on this topic”.

journalistenwatch.com/2020/03/13/war-haftbefehl-axt/

Just ten days ago, life on Italy’s streets was as vibrant as ever. The cafés were filled to capacity with elegantly dressed Italians and tourists, and the looming Coronavirus threat was dismissed as “just another flu.” Today, the country is under a complete lockdown. The death rate in some Italian provinces is currently at a shocking 8 percent among those infected, and it has become obvious that the Coronavirus threat is living up to the hype.

Italy is finally taking the pandemic seriously and beginning to emulate the crackdown on public life that has managed to suppress the transmission rate in China and South Korea sharply. European countries are now taking preventative measures to make sure they do not become the next Italy. Austria has closed their border to Italy and shut down universities; Poland and the Czech Republic are conducting health checks at the border, and Israel is ordering all tourists to exit the country within days. China’s measures remain the harshest by far, enabled by an omnipresent surveillance state as well as the nation’s traditional respect for family values and the elderly.

That level of respect is painfully missing in one crucial country in the dead center of Europe: Angela Merkel’s Germany. While China gave other countries precious time with its aggressive containment strategy, Germany’s Health Minister Jens Spahn did virtually nothing. On February 12th, he claimed the virus was “under control.” On March 4th, speaking to the country’s parliament, he compared the Coronavirus with the influenza wave of 2017 and professed his great trust in the medical system to deal with the outbreak.

Meanwhile, Germany’s biggest epicenter, the town of Heinsberg in Northrhine-Westphalia, saw lukewarm and highly limited measures. When parents were asked to bring their potentially exposed kids in for testing, a considerable number didn’t even bother to show up. Two people have died as a result of the lack of urgency. This number is sure to explode in the following days and weeks, unless Germans are magically immune to a disease that has killed many hundreds of Italians by now. This is what happens when you have a toothless government with a weak, globalist figurehead that nobody respects. 

But it gets worse! On March 7th, 60,000 fans flocked to a soccer game in Mönchengladbach, a city bordering the epicenter in Heinsberg. On March 10th, 40,000 watched a soccer game in the East German city of Leipzig against Tottenham and on March 12, 50,000 will watch Eintracht Frankfurt against FC Basel, in Frankfurt. While Switzerland has ruled out the reverse game being held in the city of Basel on March 19 due to health concerns, Frankfurt is actually considering hosting the game’s second match regardless. On top of all of this, Berlin is busy with preparations for a half-marathon in the first week of April.

This cavalier attitude is consistent with the treatment of the crisis in German mainstream media, which consistently warns against a “panic,” relaying politically correct concerns about “discriminating” those under quarantine and spreading fake news about the epidemic being negligibly more dangerous than a common flu. After weeks of utter silence, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel finally weighed in.Unbelievably, she said that she expects two thirds of the population to become infected with the virus, and then she had the nerve to praise her Health Minister, “Great job.”

Germany’s attitude towards the Coronavirus is at extreme odds with surrounding countries, which are anything but willing to accept the risk of a virus that can potentially kill 15 to 25 percent of its elderly population and collapse their health systems. For Merkel, the virus could not come at a more inconvenient time. She is currently preparing to open the floodgates for another torrent of migrants that Islamic dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has unleashed on the Greek border. Merkel needs a bit more time to formalize the next step of her lawless migration policy.

Moreover, she has a vested interest in promoting her failing Health Minister in an intra-party power struggle that could see her old nemesis, conservative politician Friedrich Merz, take over the Christian Democratic Union. Health Minister Spahn has joined the pro-Merkel team, spending much of his time bashing Merz. Merkel is putting party politics ahead of the safety and security of the German people, as usual.

The suffering and death Merkel seems to be willing to unleash onto her country and the continent could include an unintended casualty: The crisis may well spell the end of the open-border consensus that has prevailed in Western Europe – and is now meeting its ultimate test. Coronavirus has shown the need for border controls, nationalism, and all the cultural bugaboos that EU bureaucrats revile.

Meanwhile, President Trump should take note. While he certainly wants to beat back his enemies who are weaponizing the Coronavirus against him, and protect economic stability in an election year, the time has come to muster American resources and focus them on a common goal: Securing national well-being and integrity in the face of a biological threat of potentially unforeseen magnitude.

townhall.com/columnists/gavinwax

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has now reached more than 45 countries in Europe, where (as of March 12) more than 30,000 people have tested positive for the disease, according to a Gatestone Institute tally based on calculations from European health ministries.

The disease is spreading fast: more than 28,000 coronavirus cases (93% of all cases) in Europe were confirmed during just the first twelve days of March. The number of new cases has been doubling, on average, every 72 hours.

Italy is Europe’s worst-affected country, followed by Spain, France and Germany. Twelve other European countries have reported coronavirus cases in the triple digits: Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Austria, Greece, the Czech Republic, Finland and Iceland.

In Europe as a whole, more than 1,200 people — 4.0% of those confirmed as having been infected — have died from COVID-19.

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), in a risk assessment, warned that the actual number of COVID-19 cases in Europe could be far higher due to under-detection, particularly among mild or asymptomatic cases that do not lead to a visit to the hospital.

In an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 news, Dr. Richard Hatchett, Chief Executive Officer of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a Norway-based international alliance for developing vaccines against infectious diseases, explained the long-term dangers of the COVID-19, not only for Europe, but globally:

“The threat is very significant… There are many epidemiologists who talk about the potential of the virus in terms of attack rates globally that could be between 50% and 70% of the global population.

“It is important to recognize that the virus is here and that it has tremendous potential to be disruptive, to cause high rates of illness and even high rates of death….

“I don’t think we are dealing with the flu here… this is a virus that is now circulating in a population that has absolutely no immunity to it…. You might have an attack rate that is three times higher than seasonal flu with a mortality rate that is ten times higher.

“The most concerning thing about this virus is the combination of infectiousness and the ability to cause severe disease or death. We have not since 1918 — since the Spanish flu — seen a virus that combined those two qualities in the same way. We have seen very lethal viruses — Ebola’s mortality rate in some cases is greater than 80% — but they don’t have the infectiousness that this virus has. They don’t have the potential to explode and spread globally….

“I think that what we are seeing is a virus that is many, many times more lethal than the flu, and a population that is completely vulnerable to it, and we are seeing its ability to explode. It has increased in some countries over the last two weeks by one thousand-fold and many countries are seeing ten-fold or one hundred-fold increases in cases. There is nothing to stop that expansion from continuing unless those societies move aggressively, engage their publics, implement multiple public health interventions, including introducing social distancing….

“We need to modify our behavior. We need to start practicing that now. We have to modify our behavior in ways that reduces the risk of transmitting the virus…. One challenge that we face is that people who are young and are generally healthy won’t perceive personal risk and they will govern their behavior based on what they perceive their personal risk to be. I think we need to start thinking in terms of the social risk. If I have a cold and I go to work and shake hands with my older colleague who has a chronic medical condition, I could be responsible for that colleague’s death. We all need to think about our responsibility to each other as we govern our behavior. We can’t view the epidemic in terms of our personal risk, we need to act collectively in a cooperative manner….

“I don’t think it’s a crazy analogy to compare this to World War 2… I think this is an appropriate analogy and the mindset that people need to get into….

“We don’t see any way that a vaccine can be available much more rapidly than 12 to 18 months, and even it if were to be available in 12 and 18 months, that would literally be the world record for developing and delivering a vaccine. We would not have seven billion doses of that vaccine in 12 months.

“This is a virus that is going to be with us for some time. There are many epidemiologists who believe that this virus is likely to become globally endemic and be with us in perpetuity…. I think this is a virus that we are going to be dealing with for years.

“This is the most frightening disease that I have ever encountered in my career. That includes Ebola, MERS and SARS. It’s frightening because of the combination between infectiousness and a lethality that appears to be many-fold higher than flu.”

After months of complacency, European leaders are beginning to acknowledge the scale of the unfolding crisis.

In Germany, Europe’s most populous country, Chancellor Angela Merkel, in her first public comments on the coronavirus, warned that more than two-thirds of the population — 58 million people — could get infected. During a press conference on March 11, nearly three weeks after the crisis in Germany began, she admitted:

“The virus has arrived in Europe, it is here, and we must all understand that. As long as there is no immunity in the population, no vaccines and no therapy, then a high percentage of the population — experts say 60% to 70% — will become infected.”

Merkel said that her government’s top priority was to slow down the contagion to prevent a collapse of the German healthcare system. Nevertheless, Germany has not implemented social distancing measures such as those in other European countries, including Italy, Spain and France.

In Britain, a leaked government report estimated that in a worst-case scenario, up to 80% of the population — 53 million people — could become infected with the coronavirus, and that half a million Britons could die from COVID-19. A survey conducted by The Doctors’ Association UK, a trade association for British doctors, found that only 1% of doctors in the country believe that the National Health Service is prepared to deal with a major outbreak of coronavirus.

In Ireland, one of Europe’s smaller countries with only 4.8 million inhabitants, healthcare officials said that 40% of the population — 1.9 million people — will almost certainly become infected with the coronavirus. Most of those would become sick within a three-week concentrated burst, which would place “intense pressure” on the healthcare system. Those figures were effectively confirmed by Paul Reid, CEO of the Health Service Executive (HSE), which manages the delivery of all public health services in Ireland.

In Spain, where the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus has increased exponentially in recent days, hospitals are overwhelmed and the healthcare systems in the most affected regions are in danger of collapse. In Andalusia and the Basque Country, hundreds of doctors and nurses have been quarantined to prevent hospitals from becoming centers of infection.

In Madrid, the head of the regional government, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, said that medical professionals expected a significant increase in coronavirus cases this coming weekend and that the spread of the virus would peak over the next three weeks.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron said that the coronavirus epidemic was the country’s worst health crisis in a century and announced that schools throughout the country would close indefinitely beginning next week. “We are just at the beginning of this crisis,” Macron said. “In spite of all our efforts to break it, this virus is continuing to propagate and to accelerate.”

In Italy, more than 12,000 people are infected with coronavirus. On March 9, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte ordered a nation-wide lockdown. The quarantine of Europe’s third-most populous country, with 60 million inhabitants, bans non-essential travel to, from and within Italy; prohibits all public events; and requires that people maintain a distance from each other of at least one meter (three feet). The restrictions were subsequently extended: all restaurants and bars, as well as all stores, except for grocery stores and pharmacies, have been ordered closed.

Dr. Daniele Macchini, who works at the Humanitas Gavazzeni hospital in Bergamo, ground zero of the coronavirus crisis in Italy, warned about the dangers of complacency:

“After thinking for a long time if and what to write about what is happening to us, I felt that the silence was not at all responsible. I will therefore try to convey to people more distant from our reality, what we are experiencing in Bergamo during these pandemic days from Covid-19.

“I myself looked with some amazement at the reorganization of the entire hospital in the previous week, when our current enemy was still in the shadows: the wards slowly ’emptied,’ the elective activities interrupted, the intensive therapies freed to create as many beds as possible. All this rapid transformation brought into the corridors of the hospital an atmosphere of surreal silence and emptiness that we still did not understand, waiting for a war that was yet to begin and that many (including me) were not so sure would ever come with such ferocity.

“Well, the situation is now nothing short of dramatic. No other words come to mind. The war has literally exploded, and the battles are uninterrupted day and night. One after the other, the unfortunate people come to the emergency room. What they have is much more than the complications of a flu. Let’s stop saying it’s a bad flu.

“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 damn same: bilateral interstitial pneumonia. Now, tell me which flu virus causes such a rapid tragedy?

“An epidemiological disaster is taking place. There are no more surgeons, urologists, orthopedists, we are only doctors who suddenly have become part of a single team to face this tsunami that has overwhelmed us.”

On March 11, U.S. President Donald J. Trump announced a 30-day ban on continental Europeans traveling to the United States. “The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hotspots,” Trump said. “As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe.” The restrictions, which will go into effect at midnight on March 13, will not apply to the United Kingdom, and exemptions will be made for U.S. citizens. “This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history,” he said.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15729/coronavirus-europe-crisis