3 Stories You Should Read 4/8/2020: Racism, Borris Johnson, Coronavirus theories
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In the category of: Racism and pandemics
Intelligence Agencies Warn Extremists Could Use Pandemic To Attack Asians, Jews
The bulletin, a joint effort of the Department of Justice, the National Counterterrorism Center and the Department of Homeland Security, is dated April 7.
The document says that domestic violent extremists — known as DVEs — “have sought to conduct, or conducted attacks citing the COVID-19 pandemic as a factor in the timing or motivation of their attacks.”
It additionally says that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” or RMVEs, “who advocate for the superiority of the white race seek to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic to bolster their narratives and encourage attacks and hate crimes against minorities, including Jewish and Asian Americans. Some RMVEs claim government responses to the pandemic could crash the global economy, hasten societal collapse, and lead to a race war.”
In the category of: No one is immune
Coronavirus: Boris Johnson ‘improving’ as intensive care treatment continues
The chancellor said Mr Johnson now was “sitting up in bed and engaging positively with the clinical team”.
The PM was taken to St Thomas’ Hospital in London on Sunday – 10 days after testing positive for the virus – and then moved to intensive care on Monday.
It comes as a record 938 daily deaths were reported in UK hospitals.
The total number of UK deaths now stands at 7,097, according to the latest Department of Health figures.
At the daily coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, Mr Sunak said Mr Johnson was “receiving excellent care from the NHS team at St Thomas'”.
“The prime minister is not only my colleague and my boss but also my friend and my thoughts are with him and his family,” he added.
In the category of: Who cares
Coronavirus origin: Few leads, many theories in hunt for source
Coronavirus most likely to have jumped to humans from intermediary host, but some say lab accident cannot be ruled out.
At the start of the outbreak in December, the most mainstream assumption was that the virus originated from a so-called wet market in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the first COVID-19 cases were reported.
But as the virus spread globally, the role of public-health laboratories in Wuhan came under increasing scrutiny.
In two labs in Wuhan, long-running experiments with bat viruses helped scientists quickly identify the coronavirus as most likely to have come from the nocturnal mammal, but those same labs have also fuelled biosafety concerns.
The practice of collecting viruses from bats first burst into public view in the early weeks of the outbreak when Shi Zhengli, a noted scientist with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, refuted a swirl of online accusations both at home and abroad that the coronavirus may have leaked from her institute, where a lab certified as BSL-4, the highest level for handling dangerous pathogens, opened three years ago.
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