President Trump Conference Call – Restaurant Executives…


Earlier today President Trump held a conference call with a who’s-who of executives in the restaurant industry.  One of the key aspects to the call was President Trump asking the CEO’s to continue food service operations despite the dine-in closures.  The reason is simple: the alternative, the retail supermarket industry nationwide, cannot compensate for the closure of restaurants in the total food production supply chain. [Ground Reports]

(WHITE HOUSE) – Today, President Donald J. Trump spoke by telephone with restaurant executives representing hundreds of thousands of hardworking Americans about the response to COVID-19. The executives thanked President Trump and his Administration for the whole-of-government response and for his efforts to ensure the public has the most accurate and up-to-date information.

The President reminded the restaurants that they can help flatten the curve and slow the spread of this virus in communities across the country by encouraging their customers to use drive-thru, pickup, or delivery options.

All of the executives committed their restaurants to this critical guideline and assured the President they fully intend to continue feeding their communities through these other innovative avenues. President Trump thanked the participants for moving quickly to implement this change and agreed to stay in close communication on this public-private partnership to protect our businesses and the public.

Executive Participants:

  • Richard Allison, CEO, Domino’s Pizza
  • Dan Cathy, CEO, Chick-fil-A
  • John Chidsey, CEO, Subway
  • Jose Cil, CEO, Restaurant Brands International
  • Robert Cresanti, President and CEO¸ International Franchise Association
  • David Deno, CEO, Bloomin’ Brands
  • Joe Erlinger, President, McDonald’s USA
  • David Gibbs, CEO, YUM! Brands
  • AJ Kumaran, Co-CEO and COO, Raising Cane’s
  • Gene Lee, President and CEO, Darden Restaurants
  • Rob Lynch, CEO, Papa Johns
  • Todd Penegor, CEO, Wendy’s
  • Matt Shay, National Retail Federation

Ground Reports – How Well Stocked is Your Neighborhood Grocery Store?…


By today the closure of dine-in restaurants should be in full swing across almost all areas. Understandably there’s going to be an operational lag as many of those restaurants don’t have the systems or equipment in place for exclusive take-out or pick-up services (ie. carry-out containers); though hopefully many are responding quickly to the changes.

The upstream consequence of the restaurant disruption is going to be even more pressure on grocery outlets already seeing additional traffic. Many people now shifting from meals “outside the home”, back to the more traditional “home-cooked” meals etc. Which brings up the question of the retail supermarket capacity to meet that extra demand.

This coronavirus event is like a nationwide pre-Hurricane shopping experience.

There have been numerous reports of wide-scale shortages in retail food markets. On the positive side this experienced supply chain has the ability to scale-up very fast (depending on region). However, on a national scale this is the first time the entire country has needed this level of increased retail food distribution simultaneously. To cope with the volume most stores appear to have reduced their hours of operation.

Hopefully, by mid-week the first set of full recovery orders should have arrived at your local grocer from a very busy regional distribution network. Note: “recovery orders” are not regular store deliveries; they are prioritized emergency replenishments, specifically for these types of events.  They can arrive on top of regular orders and deliveries.

With that in mind what are you experiencing in your city, town or neighborhood market? Use the comment section to share your experience. How is the supply chain responding to the increased demand in your area?   Has the panic buying settled down?

Of particular interest would be anyone in Illinois and Ohio (or mid-west if impacted), or areas with less logistical familiarity with state-wide emergency food supply distribution.

Feel free to provide tips on anything you might deem valuable for others. Also, if there are cooking ideas you have for good and tasty meal suggestions, while maximizing budgets, feel free to share those too. I’ve read some of those creative rice dish discussions and they sound yummy….

So what’s going on in your neighborhood?

PS.  As with all emergencies, if anyone is in a crisis situation, especially if anyone is having trouble with basic needs, feel free to drop us an email and we’ll try to find a way to help.  There’s a lot of creative people hanging around these pages.

Advertisements
Seen ad many times
Not relevant
Offensive
Covers content
Broken
REPORT THIS AD

Dr. Fauci’s Mysterious Math – The Quantifying Today Reflects Where We Were A Week Ago – Today Cannot Be Quantified Until Next Week…


Let me say up front, there’s something very sketchy about the wordy explanations provided by CDC Director Dr. Fauci.  Listen/watch or read what he says below.

Encapsulating Dr. Fauci’s position:  Data on the coronavirus assembled today doesn’t reflect what is actually taking place today, but rather reflects where we were several days ago…. OK, that part makes sense (there’s a lag).

He then goes on to say what is actually happening today will not be included in data until we arrive at a place a few days from now when today’s reality is quantified.  Again, that reasonably makes sense…  However….

The media is/are reporting on coronavirus impacts in real time.  There is no delay in what the media are reporting from various places around the nation.  The media reporting reflects what is taking place today; right now… and what the media is reporting today is not worse than the data Fauci is explaining.

Meaning if Dr. Fauci was correct, and if the coronavirus data (the reports of spread) was behind by several days from the reality of today; then what the media would be reporting (the on the ground reality of the spread today) would be significantly worse (higher incidents) than Fauci’s data, which he claims is lagging several days behind….

The problem with that supposition – The media ground reports do not reflect a higher incidence of coronavirus spread than Fauci’s data today.

The concept of “flattening” the virus curve; the presumptive reason for social distancing; is based on a theory to extend the spread of COVID-19 to a lesser incident rate over a longer duration, thereby lessening the burden on the U.S. healthcare system.  Hence, ‘flatten’ the spike in infections.

Put another way: “Flattening” means the same number of people eventually contract the virus, only they do so over a longer period of time, and the healthcare system can treat everyone because the numbers do not rise to level where the system is overloaded.  In theory that seems to make sense.

However, no-one is asking: what is the current stress level on the healthcare system right now?  Where are we in that capacity?… and what is normal capacity level during a high-level flu outbreak?… and Where are we when compared against that baseline?

The premise to extend the virus duration in an effort to lower the infection rate and spread the virus over a longer period of time needs to measured against: (a) where the healthcare system is at any given moment; and (b) under traditional high-flu seasons where are we during those historic events.

♦ STRESS LEVEL – The healthcare ‘system’ per se, is expending an awful lot of time on mitigation efforts.  As Dr. Brix noted: the current negative test rate for coronavirus among those showing symptoms who are tested is 98 to 99 percent.  That means of all the people taking coronavirus tests, 98/99 out of 100 are symptomatic (they are sick) but they are not infected with coronavirus.  They are normal flu cases.

Our healthcare “system” is expending an incredible amount of resources on a mitigation effort.  According to Dr. Brix and the test results 99 percent of those mitigation efforts are not engaging with coronavirus.  They are dealing with regular flu (perhaps a strong flu).

If you extract the mitigation effort from the overall effort, the current stress level on the healthcare system doesn’t seem to be overwhelming.  What is stressing the system is a coronavirus mitigation effort with a rate of 99 percent testing negative.

♦ Dr. Fauci’s theory is self-fulfilling.

If the viral spread never exceeds the capacity of the healthcare system to deal with it, he can claim success.  Look, our flattened curve worked.

However, when contrast against flu outbreaks, no-one knows what the COVID-19 capacity threshold is within the healthcare system.  There’s no way to disprove Fauci’s theory.

Given the nature of the baseline for overall U.S. sanitation and hygiene, which is significantly higher than Italy, S-Korea and China; and given the higher standards of food safety (U.S. is the world leader); again significantly higher than Italy, S-Korea and China; and given the nature of the U.S. healthcare system (more capacity per person); is it really a fair comparison to overlay a COVID-19 outbreak, without also overlaying a traditional flu outbreak?

Any theory that cannot be scientifically tested; and is simultaneously self-fulfilling; is, by its nature, a false theory.

This is not to say that Dr. Anthony Fauci is intentionally misleading anyone; however, it is absolutely true that no-one will be able to quantify if trillions of dollars of economic wealth lost; and trillions more in economic activity lost; and trillions more in deficit spending; and that might all be done just to follow the fantastical whims of a doctor who is directing the mitigation of an ordinary flu-virus/season, and appears to be quite full of his own sense of self-importance.

98/99% negative test rate should alarm everyone.  We’ve shut down the biggest economic system in the world for a virus that is not appearing in 99% of the people who are sick.

DR. BIRX: Yeah. No, thank you, Mr. Vice President, for mentioning that because, as I told you, in South Korea there are 250,000-plus tests. About 96-plus percent were negative. So — and that was with symptoms.

So we’re working very hard integrating everything they have learned about symptoms and screening, and that is going into the development of this website. So it’s not just a simple checkbox website. It’s actually going to go through critical symptoms. And that’s why we’re giving ourselves the weekend to get it put up.

So far, in the United States, from LabCorp and Quest, they’re running about a 99 to 98 percent negativity. This always worries me because I’ve worked in public health a long time. When you tell someone they’re negative, yes, it’s reassuring, but the last thing we want is them so reassured that they stopped practicing these critical practices that are going to protect all of us.

This epidemic will be stopped at the community level. Those are the individuals — it’s Americans and their response that will get us over this hump. And that’s why, yes, we’ll have testing available. We’ll have to know that many of them are going to be negative, and you’re going to have to help us carry that message that that means, just at that moment, you’re negative, you need to continue to do all of your protection and protection of others to ensure you remain there. (read more)

♦ FACT: 98 to 99% of the American people tested, who have symptoms (similar to flu), test negative for the Wuhan novel coronavirus (COVID-19).  We are spending hundreds of billions, and disrupting all facets of life and liberty, to avoid a virus almost no-one carries.

Here’s SKETCHY Dr. Fauci’s explanation:

DR. FAUCI: Thank you very much, Dr. Birx. So just to connect with what I mentioned to you in previous discussions in this room — and Dr. Birx said it very well — that in order to be able to contain and curtail this epidemic to not reach its maximum capability, we have a two-pillar approach, one of which I believe has been very effective in preventing the substantial seeding, and namely the travel restrictions that we’ve discussed many times in this room.

The other, equally, if not more important, is when you have infection in your own country, which we do. And you know I could read the numbers, but they’re really, essentially, what we’ve seen yesterday: incremental increases, both globally as well as in the United States, with the curve doing that.

So therefore, the kinds of things that we do are containment and mitigation.

This — what we’re mentioning now — the guidelines, when you look at them carefully, I believe if the people in the United States take them seriously, because they were based on some rather serious consideration back and forth, some may look at them and say they’re going to be really inconvenient for people.

Some will look and say, well, maybe we’ve gone a little bit too far. They were well thought out.

And the thing that I want to reemphasize, and I’ll say it over and over again:

When you’re dealing with an emerging infectious diseases outbreak, you are always behind where you think you are if you think that today reflects where you really are. That’s not word speak.

It means:

If you think you’re here, you’re really here because you’re only getting the results; therefore, it will always seem that the best way to address it were to be doing something that looks like it might be an overreaction. It isn’t an overreaction. It’s a reaction that we feel is commensurate, which is actually going on in reality.

So take a look at the guidelines. Read them carefully. And we hope that the people of the United States will take them very seriously, because they will fail if people don’t adhere to them. We have to have, as a whole country, cooperate and collaborate to make sure these get done.

Thank you.

If the coronavirus spread never exceeds the capacity of the healthcare system to deal with it, he can claim success.  Look, our flattened curve worked.  However, we’ve also destroyed the U.S. economy to do so, and we’ve wiped out tens of trillions in U.S. wealth.

If Dr. Fauci’s magic theories are correct, then by THIS Friday there should be tens of thousands of people testing positive for Coronavirus.  If not….

Here’s the new Fauci recommendations:

Kudlow Explains $800 Billion in Options for Direct Financial Infusion to Middle Class…


National Economic Council (NEC) Director Larry Kudlow held an impromptu press conference to describe what sectors of the U.S. economy may need direct financial assistance to bridge revenue gaps from mandated government policy. The stock market is not the U.S. economy.

Calling this type of financial assistance a “bailout” is not a fair term considering the financial impact was created by government instruction.  Government orders to shut down restaurants creates a financial loss for restaurants who also have bills and payroll obligations to meet.  These types of affected businesses will need immediate assistance.

Airlines, hotels, resorts, private parks, gyms, restaurants and various entertainment companies/industries may also need a direct infusion of cash or deferred tax payment to compensate for financial losses.  Again, these businesses have been impacted by government ordering their closure. Depending on the size of the business, the need for gap funds may be urgent.

Unhappy Meals – McDonalds USA Closes all Dining Rooms and Playgrounds…


The McDonalds USA corporate restaurants, not necessarily all franchises, has announced the closing of all in-house dining and the kids playgrounds.  Approximately eight percent of all “food away from home” comes from McDonalds restaurants.

McDONALDS Press Release – “To align with increasing regulations throughout the country, effective at the close of business today, McDonald’s USA company-owned restaurants will close seating areas, including the use of self-service beverage bars and kiosks, and shift our focus to serving customers through Drive-Thru, walk-in take-out and McDelivery.

This decision allows for customers without access to a Drive-Thru and those unable to use McDelivery to continue to have access to McDonald’s.

Additionally, we have made the decision to close all PlayPlaces at U.S. locations, also effective today.

Our independent franchisees continue to focus on the needs of their local communities and make safe and caring decisions. Franchisees are strongly encouraged to adopt similar operations procedures while keeping the needs of their people and communities at the center of their decisions. This guidance is supported by franchisee leadership and is expected to be adopted by the majority of franchisees.” (more)

This too shall pass

It Begins – San Francisco Initiates Forced Quarantine of all Residents, All Hours, Effective Midnight…


San Francisco has skipped the interim mitigation efforts and has announced a forced quarantine of all residents inside their homes 24-hours-a-day for the next three weeks.

A totalitarian dream.  All residents must remain confined inside their homes or residences and no-one will be permitted outside except for emergency services or monitored visits to the grocery stores.  The order remains in effect until April 7, 2020, and may be extended.

CALIFORNIA – [….] Mayor London Breed announced what she calls a “defining moment” in U.S. response to the pandemic. Beginning at 12 AM, all residents within the city can only leave home for doctor’s appointments or runs to the grocery store.

It’s the strictest new policy enacted in the nation, and matches the current rules in Italy … which has been the 2nd hardest-hit country in the world.

The Mayor says the rule will remain in effect for at least the next 3 weeks.

In addition, to the city shut down, 6 Bay Area counties are telling residents to “shelter in place.” That means … unless your work falls under the list of “essential businesses,” you’ve been ordered to stay home. (read more)

Justin Trudeau Closes Canadian Border to Most Foreign Travelers….


In 2017 Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously mocked the U.S. effort to restrict migration by saying Canada welcomes all refugees. However, apparently in 2020 diversity is a Canadian strength, unless there is a possibility a person might be germy.

CANADA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Monday that Canada will be closing its borders to foreign travellers in an attempt to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Speaking to reporters from Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, Trudeau said Canada is taking “increasingly aggressive steps” and will be closing its borders to people who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada.

“I know that these measures are far-reaching,” Trudeau said. “They are exceptional circumstances calling for exceptional measures.”

Trudeau said the restrictions will come into effect Wednesday but that exceptions will be made for air crews, diplomats, immediate family members and U.S. citizens.

Trudeau said that second, air operators will ban anyone who is showing symptoms of the virus from getting on a plane. (read more)

….’unless you are germy’

 

White House Coronavirus Task Force Press Briefing – 3:30pm ET Livestreams


Vice-President Mike Pence and the COVID-19 task force will be holding a press briefing from the White House at 3:30pm ET.  Livestream Links Below

WH Livestream Link – Fox News Livestream Link – CSPAN Livestream Link

.

.

WH Trade Advisor Peter Navarro Discusses Coronavirus Mitigation on Multiple Fronts…


White House trade advisor Peter Navarro appears on CNBC to discuss the White House’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, and the administration’s plan to help stimulate the economy.

Navarro gives examples of the public-private partnership working together with logistics of getting critical supplies distributed; also Navarro discusses the importance of timely and targeted stimulus measures.   Additionally, Navarro outlines the construct of a likely executive order to shift medical supply manufacturing back to the U.S.

Germany Closing its Borders


GERMANY has just closed its borders within Europe and that includes France. The free movement of goods should remain secured. Commuters can also continue to cross the borders, but they are also trying to stop panic buying which actually is the first step in reigniting inflation.