The United States is expected to see an unprecedented 50 percent drop in gross domestic product in the second quarter due to coronavirus outbreak, says Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard.

According to his projections, the US unemployment rate could hit 30 percent in Q2 as a result of massive shutdowns to combat the virus.

Bullard has called for a powerful fiscal response to replace the $2.5 trillion in lost income to assure a strong eventual US recovery. He said that the Fed should be poised to do more to ensure markets function during a period of high volatility.

"This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the US economy in the second quarter," he told Bloomberg. "The overall goal is to keep everyone, households and businesses, whole" with government support. "It is a huge shock and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under control."

In an article published in Scientific America on December 18, 2019, titled Invisible Ink Could Reveal whether Kids Have Been Vaccinated, the author, Karen Weintraub, states that in the not too distant future vaccinations will be accompanied with an invisible ink tattoo:

Along with the vaccine, a child would be injected with a bit of dye that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with a special cell-phone filter, combined with an app that shines near-infrared light onto the skin.

The dye would be expected to last up to five years, according to tests on pig and rat skin and human skin in a dish. The system — which has not yet been tested in children — would provide quick and easy access to vaccination history, avoid the risk of clerical errors, and add little to the cost or risk of the procedure, according to the study."

Shockingly, in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, Denmark have already introduced mandatory vaccinations, and the UK is considering following suit.

Laura Donnelly writes in the Telegraph:

Community transmission of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, has officially begun in the U.S., with two cases in California and one in Oregon of unknown origin. The first COVID death was reported Saturday, Feb. 29, in Seattle. The natural human response to a strange, new disease making its way to a neighborhood near you is to feel anxiety and want to DO SOMETHING. That's why many people have been buying up and stockpiling masks. But even if you could buy any in the midst of global shortages, should you?

No.

And if you already have masks, should you wear them when you're out?

No.

Even if there are COVID cases in your community?

Even if there are cases next door, the answer is no, you do NOT need to get or wear any face masks — surgical masks, "N95 masks," respirator masks, or anything else — to protect yourself against the coronavirus. Not only do you not need them, you shouldn't wear them, according to infection prevention specialist Eli Perencevich, MD, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa's College of Medicine.

"The average healthy person does not need to have a mask, and they shouldn't be wearing masks," Dr. Perencevich said. "There's no evidence that wearing masks on healthy people will protect them. They wear them incorrectly, and they can increase the risk of infection because they're touching their face more often."

Much of the world is shocked at the coronavirus numbers coming out of Italy.

The country has one of the oldest populations in Europe and also has the largest Chinese diaspora in the EU today.

The Italian government also released the percentage of deaths by age group.

90+ years old: 6% of deaths
80 - 89 years old: 42% of deaths
70 - 79 years old: 35% of deaths
60 - 69 years old: 16% of deaths

On Saturday Professor Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy's minister of health, told the Telegraph that the coronavirus mortality rate in Italy may be exaggerated due to the way the country records fatalities.

Do we really think "it can't happen here" in America? Could we quarantine the constitution? Are we doing it already?

Panics from pandemics unleash unchecked governmental power. The very premise of popular films like V for Vendetta reveal this: a group uses a virus to seize power and create a totalitarian society. Anyone could witness this from far-off lands, watching the news about China locking people up in their own homes and then removing them screaming from those homes whenever the state wanted. World War I and the Great Depression birthed virulent forms of governments with leaders like Hitler, Mao, Mussolini and Stalin.

People's refusal to panic has been a great source of frustration for the establishment in recent years. 'The planet is burning', they lie, in relation to climate change, and yet we do not weep or wail or even pay very much attention. 'I want you to panic', instructs the newest mouthpiece of green apocalypticism, Greta Thunberg, and yet most of us refuse to do so. A No Deal Brexit would unleash economic mayhem, racist pogroms and even a pandemic of super-gonorrhoea, they squealed, incessantly, like millenarian preachers balking at the imminent arrival of the lightning bolt of final judgement, and yet we didn't flinch. We went to work. We went home. We still supported Brexit.

Our skittish elites have been so baffled, infuriated in fact, by our calm response to their hysterical warnings that they have invented pathologies to explain our unacceptable behaviour. The therapeutic language of 'denialism' is used to explain the masses' refusal to fret over climate change. Environmentalists write articles on 'the psychology of climate-change denial', on 'the self-deception and mass denial' coursing through this society that refuses to flatter or engage with the hysteria of the eco-elites. Likewise, the refusal of voters to succumb to the dire, hollow warnings of the ferociously anti-Brexit wing of the establishment was interpreted by self-styled experts as a psychological disorder. '[This is] people taking action for essentially psychological reasons, irrespective of the economic cost', said one professor.

Nearly a month after opening the gates to Europe, the Turkish government has closed the border due to the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus.

The Turkish authorities shut down the land border this week in the Evros region near the town of Kastanies but not before migrants along the border made one last attempt to storm their way into Greece and the European Union the night before.

The migrants, allegedly aided by Turkish forces firing tear gas towards Greece, were repelled in the early morning hours of Thursday by Greek border forces, according to a report from Greek newspaper Proto Thema.

The Turkish government's decision to close the border came at midnight on Wednesday and comes after German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged millions of euros for Turkey to pay for migrants fleeing the conflict in the Idlib province of Syria earlier this week.

Eventually, the Woke had to discover that Darwin is not a co-belligerent. We are told at Inside Higher Ed, "An assistant professor says he was fired because he dared to talk about human population variation and got slandered as a eugenicist:

[Bo] Winegard, who is in his second year at Marietta and is scheduled to leave at the end of the academic year, says the trouble started in October. That's when he was invited to address the University of Alabama's Evolution Working Group, which is affiliated with the university's evolution studies program. Both parties agreed that Winegard would talk about population variation, or, in his words, "the hypothesis that human biological differences are at least partially produced by different environments selecting for different physical and psychological traits in their populations over time."

The idea was to link the theory with natural selection, in line with a recent article Winegard co-wrote for Personality and Individual Differences. The article, called "Dodging Darwin: Race, Evolution and the Hereditarian Hypothesis," says, "Like most hereditarians (those who believe it likely that genes contribute to differences in psychological traits among human populations), we do not believe there is decisive evidence about the causes of differences in cognitive ability." Yet the "partial genetic hypothesis is most consistent with the Darwinian research tradition."

Colleen Flaherty, "Risky Research" at Inside Higher Ed

New data has shown that available containers at many major ports around the world outside of China stand at record lows. This enormous imbalance brought about by the trade war and then the coronavirus sees Chinese ports rammed full of boxes waiting to move, while carriers are urgently deploying extra tonnage to other hubs where equipment shortages are now at their lowest levels ever.

Container xChange, launched in 2018, runs its own Container Availability Index (CAx), which forecasts supply and demand in container logistics for most of the biggest port locations for the coming three weeks. The index works whereby above 0.5 indicates a surplus and below 0.5 indicates a deficit of containers.

Container availability at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles in the US, and at Hamburg, Rotterdam and Antwerp are now at their lowest levels recorded.

Despite the coronavirus outbreak, the Moscow government will not shut its most used public transit system, the metro, said the mayor while dismissing the rumors to the contrary as "nonsense and stupidity."

"The metro will work in any situation," Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin told the news channel Rossiya 1. He was responding to online rumors that a total shutdown of the system was imminent to curb the spread of the Covid-19 infection.

Before the pandemic Moscow metro was used daily by some 9 million passengers. Since the Russian capital closed many public venues and advised employers to allow workers do their jobs from home, where possible, the ridership dropped by some 30 percent.

Sobyanin said that even if there was no need to transport people, the underground trains would still have to be operated.