© Reuters / KHAM
India's billion-plus population went into a three-week lockdown on Wednesday, with a third of the world now under orders to stay indoors, as US politicians agreed to spend $2 trillion to counter the economic damage of the coronavirus pandemic.
Financial markets soared as the Senate and the White House thrashed out a stimulus package worth roughly 10 percent of the entire US economy, an injection Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said represented a "wartime level of investment".
President Donald Trump has voiced hope that the United States will be "raring to go" by mid-April, but his optimism appeared to stand almost alone among world leaders, who were ratcheting up the movement restrictions in a bid to stifle the spread of the disease.
India ordered its 1.3 billion people -- the world's second-biggest population -- to stay at home for three weeks.
Comment: In more news, the Spanish deputy PM, Carmen Calvo, has
tested positive for coronavirus. Russia's death toll from the virus has risen to 3 after two elderly patients
died in a Moscow hospital. Both of them suffered from pneumonia and had pre-existing medical conditions. Conservative outlet The Federalist rattled a hornet's nest after publishing an article by a physician in Portland, Oregon who
suggested a "controlled voluntary infection" strategy to contain the virus. He says by exposing those at low risk of "severe complications" to Covid-19, we will create a "herd immunity," which is how many diseases - chicken pox for example - used to be suppressed.
French president Emmanuel Macron
launched a military operation to help with "health, logistics and protection" during the crisis. The leader of the Nevada state medical team that banned hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to treat coronavirus does not actually have a
license to practice medicine in Nevada. His opposition to the treatment looks to be more about an anti-Trump bias than from medical knowledge. Another researcher pointed out that both Nevada's medical epidemiologist and state epidemiologist also seemed to lack the necessary qualifications to "make medical decisions related to infectious disease." Medical epidemiologist Stephanie Woodward has a doctorate in psychology, not epidemiology or public health; while state epidemiologist Melissa Peek-Bullock has just a BS in health ecology. While her resume touts her leading roles managing various local disease outbreaks, she lacks even a Masters in Public Health and neither woman appears to have attended medical school. Trump Derangement Syndrome continues to rear its ugly head.
Trump's Secretary of State continues his verbal war against China, this time
derailing a G-7 statement on the coronavirus. Following the teleconference with world leaders, Pompeo claimed that the rest of the countries are on board with being against China's "disinformation campaign. According to the German magazine
Der Spiegel, however, the other G-7 leaders did not see eye to eye with Pompeo on naming the virus after Wuhan - the Chinese city where it was first detected - insisting on the more diplomatic term "Covid-19" adopted by the World Health Organization.
Trump's top medical expert has
warned about the coronavirus coming back "in cycles." Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has
threatened to hold up the coronavirus stimulus plan over "anti-worker bias." Sanders wants to make sure corporations are not allowed to "lay off workers, cut wages or benefits, ship jobs overseas, or pay workers poverty wages." This ultimately did not happen though, as the Senate
passed the gigantic stimulus bill.
Syria has registered 4 new cases and
instituted a 12-hour curfew across the country.
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