Tag: covid-19

COVID Numbers Inflated 600% Due to False Positives among University Athletes: Report

A rash of false-positive coronavirus tests has led the University of Arizona to issue an apology to student-athletes who it claimed had the virus but did not.

The university reported Thursday that 13 student-athletes had tested positive for COVID-19 — a single-day record for the school.

Three days later, however, Arizona athletics said in a statement that the actual number of positive tests was just two. That means the initial numbers inflated the total by more than 600 percent.

“On Thursday, Arizona Athletics reported a single-day high of positive COVID-19 test results for student-athletes,” the university said Sunday. “After concluding an exhaustive contact-tracing protocol, the medical director for Arizona Athletics requested additional testing of the samples, stating that the contact history reports did not support the positive test results.

“After further review, Arizona Athletics Director of Medical Services Dr. Stephen Paul said conflicting information prompted a rerun of the test samples. The retest showed that false positive results were previously reported.

“On Sep. 3, the athletics department reported 13 positive test results for athletes, after a rerun of those tests, two came back positive,” the university said.

Better safe than… accurate or effective.

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Nearly two decades after 9/11, the parallels between the post-terrorist attack ‘New Normal’ & that of Covid-19 can’t be ignored

Both the 9/11 attacks and the Covid-19 pandemic have dramatically shaped Western society. But the changes they wrought were devastating and unnecessary, pushed through by control-hungry governments who saw opportunity in crisis.

While both the worst terror attack in US history and the deadliest pandemic in a generation were immediately hyped as the defining elements of the era, the uncomfortable reality is that neither terrorism nor the novel coronavirus pose any risk more severe than taking a bath.

However, the media hype – fueled by think tanks and governments drooling over the possibility of adopting controls that would normally spark popular revolt – has created the same climate of fear that allowed the imposition of the post-9/11 police state, paving the way for a post-Covid regime that will make the Patriot Act look cuddly.

The shocking changes to the American “way of life” that have followed both events were in no way required, or even logical, responses to the crises in question. It took an unlikely series of what the government described as “intelligence failures” for the events of 9/11 to fall into place, and the Trump administration scrapped completely adequate pandemic response plans to adopt a regime of lockdowns and economic shutdowns that will likely end up doing more harm than the virus itself. Had governments followed their own procedures, neither catastrophe likely would have happened.

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Australia Goes Full Fascist: State Issues First Ankle Tracker for Quarantine Violator

This week, Australia took its burgeoning fascist police state to a new level, with officials in Western Australia now issuing electronic ankle bracelets and forced isolation in specially designated hotels to anyone it believes has violated the new raft of controversial new ‘COVID laws.’

A 33-year-old woman from Perth in Western Australia has become the first person to be fitted with the state’s new electronic monitoring bracelet, after allegedly violating new COVID quarantine rules imposed on the population.

According to police reports, the woman arrived home from New South Wales state on September 1st, and was then directed to ‘self-isolate’ in her Perth home for 14 days as part of Australia’s new mandatory quarantine system.

She was then caught by agents working with the state’s newly deputised COVID enforcement force known as the “Self-Quarantine Assurance Team.” Agents claim they were only conducting a “routine check” when they discovered two men visiting the woman at her own house. Agents then raised the alarm to central office who then promptly ordered the woman be removed from her home and placed in a specially designated hotel which is being used by the state as a makeshift isolation facility where she would be tagged and surveilled for a period of two weeks.

On top of the forced detention, the woman was issued with a punitive $1,000 AUD fine for interacting with the two men during her initial home quarantine order.

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From 9/11 to Covid-19: Nineteen Years of Permanent “Emergency”

During March and April of this year—during the early days of the covid-19 panic—each day came to be accompanied by a general feeling of dread. As new emergency orders and decrees rained down from governors, mayors, and faceless health bureaucrats, I wondered, What new awful thing will governments think up today? As business and churches were closed by government edict, politicians increasingly were threatening to arrest and jail ordinary citizens for doing things that were perfectly legal mere days before.

Even worse was the new orthodoxy that seemed to immediately spring up. All dissent from the new regime of lockdowns and business seizures was denounced and mocked. We were now all expected to chant new slogans. “We’re all in this together. Flatten the curve.”

There was no sign of any sizable opposition. The courts were silent. So-called due process was abandoned.

But for those of us who are old enough to remember the dark times that followed the 9/11 attacks, the feelings of dread had a familiarity to them.

The blind sloganeering, the anger toward dissent, and the obeisance toward politicians who were credited with “keeping us safe” brought back bad old memories.

They were memories of the days and months and years that followed the 9/11 attacks. These were the days of so many new assaults on basic human freedoms and human rights. They were days when the public was bullied into accepting whatever new scheme politicians were dreaming up in the name of keeping us “safe.”

In many ways, the current hysteria is even worse than that of the early years of the twenty-first century. It affects the everyday lives of countless Americans in ways the 9/11 panic did not.  But the current crisis is nonetheless very much a continuation of the attitudes and paranoia that surged nineteen years ago.

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