New York Post, Tuesday, December 1, 2020
nypost.com
outbreak
By STeveN NeLSoNCongress returned to work on
Monday for a final pre-Christmas
stretch before the holidays, but re-
mained no closer to passing
broadly supported COVID-19 pan-
demic relief items, such as another
round of $1,200 stimulus checks.
House Democrats and Senate Re-
publicans have been gridlocked on
new relief legislation for months,
despite most lawmakers agreeing
on core elements, including an-
other round of stimulus checks, a
revived federal unemployment-in-surance subsidy and more forgiva-
ble loans for small businesses.
The last legislation en route to
President Trump’s desk is likely to
be a government-funding deal be-
fore a Dec. 11 deadline to prevent a
partial government shutdown —
potentially a vehicle for relief, al-
though both sides have already
agreed in principle to the size of
that package.
Republicans, led by Senate Ma-
jority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.), argue that legislators
should first pass the most popular
pandemic items, then debate andhorse-trade on the more conten-
tious details. Democrats, led by
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
(D-Calif.) say a comprehensive
COVID-19 bill is needed.
Sad tales on TV from restaurant
owners facing bankruptcy and
massive food pantry lines did not
break the impasse.
Key points of contention remain
unchanged: Democrats want a
large amount of funds for state and
local governments, which Republi-
cans are wary of giving, arguing it
would effectively bail out poorly
run Democratic areas. AnddC’S BAH
Congress is back, but still
By Tamar LapiNA trove of newly leaked docu-
ments detail how China bungled
its handling of the pandemic’s
early days — including lowbal-
ling COVID-19 data and taking
weeks to diagnose new cases, ac-
cording to a report on Monday.
The 117 pages of internal papers
obtained by CNN outline how
health officials in Hubei Province,
where the virus was first de-
tected, were hampered by chronic
underfunding, leading to gaps in
staffing and testing equipment.
“It was clear they did make mis-
takes — and not just mistakes
that happen when you’re dealing
with a novel virus — also bureau-
cratic and politically motivated
errors in how they handled it,”
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow
for global health at the Council
on Foreign Relations, told CNN.
The documents, from the Hu-
bei Provincial Center for Disease
Control and Prevention, reveal
inconsistencies between what of-
ficials knew at the start of the
outbreak and what they publicly
reported, the report said.
Chinese officials “seemed actu-
ally to minimize the impact of the
epidemic at any moment in time,”
including by not including the
number of suspected cases in its
total at first, said William Schaff-
ner, professor of infectious dis-
eases at Vanderbilt University.
A report from Hubei marked
“internal document, please keep
confidential” shows how localhealth officials on Feb. 10 re-
ported 5,918 new coronavirus
cases — while the publicly re-
ported number was 2,478, accord-
ing to CNN.
“China had an image to protect
internationally, and lower-rank-
ing officials had a clear incentive
to underreport — or to show
their superiors that they were un-
derreporting — to outside eyes,”
said Andrew Mertha, director of
the China Studies Program at
Johns Hopkins University.
By mid-February, authorities
did improve the system and fired
top health officials in Hubei who
would have been responsible for
the reporting, CNN said.
The report notes that the sys-
tem improved by March 7, with
more than 80 percent of new con-
firmed cases being recorded in
the system that same day.
The files show health officials
at first didn’t realize the magni-
tude of the outbreak or that it
would evolve into a global crisis.
“They had a massive run on the
medical system. They were over-
whelmed,” Dali Yang of the Coun-
cil on Foreign Relations said.
Although the CNN report in-
cluded specific new details on
the botched coronavirus re-
sponse, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-LI)
said, “This isn’t news.”
“The better question for
@CNN is why they waited until
after the election for their public
epiphany that China misled the
world about Coronavirus,” Zeldin
tweeted.Revealed:
How China
botched it
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cor-
tez raised nearly a quarter of a
million dollars for people in
need because of the coronavirus
pandemic by playing the interac-
tive online game “Among Us”
over the Thanksgiving holiday
with a Canadian lawmaker.
The New York Democrat
played the social-deduction
game for five hours on Fridaywith Jagmeet Singh, a member of
the Canadian Parliament and
head of Canada’s New Demo-
cratic Party, to raise $200,000 for
those without enough to eat and
at risk of being evicted.
“This is going to make such a
difference for those who need it
most right now. Thank you all,”
Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter
Saturday. Mark MooreAOC’s ‘play’ for charity nets $200K
David Prowse, who played Darth Vader in the
original “Star Wars” trilogy, was suffering from the
coronavirus before dying Sunday at age 85, his
daughter said.
“It’s horrible that COVID restrictions meant we
did not get to see him and say goodbye,” the late
actor’s daughter Rachel, 50, told the UK’s Sun
newspaper.
“But when we went to collect his stuff from thehospital, the nurse said what a cool guy he was,”
she added. “He was such a larger-than-life charac-
ter. He would have loved to see himself trending
on Twitter.”
Rachel also confirmed that her dad — a 6-foot-
former bodybuilder — had been suffering from
Alzheimer’s disease and had spent two weeks in a
London hospital with COVID-19.
“He might have looked quite scary but as a per-