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Although health authorities in numerous countries have now cautioned against shaking hands in an effort to rein-in the spread of coronavirus, some world leaders are refusing to lead by example.

Perhaps most notable are Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who have both stated their intention to continue to manipulate other peoples grasping organs in greeting.

The British prime minister said he would continue to shake hands with people despite the outbreak of coronavirus, and on Thursday TV presenter Philip Schofield said he was unable to avoid shaking Mr Johnsons hand before his appearance on the programme This Morning.

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Mr Trump meanwhile a man already famous for numerous awkward handshakes has admitted he is not comfortable with shaking hands, but said hes going to keep doing it anyway.

The same cannot be said for Vice President Mike Pence the man who Mr Trump has appointed to lead the US response to the deadly outbreak.

Arriving by aeroplane in Washington state where he met Governor Jay Inslee, Mr Pence approached Mr Inslee, who instead of extending his hand, presented his elbow to the vice president, who then reciprocated, and the two men gently bumped the corners of their arms together.

Mr Pence has admitted the US is underprepared for the virus, and currently lacks enough testing equipment.

On Thursday he said the Trump administration would not be able to deliver the one million testing kits this week, as had been planned.

There are now almost 100,000 cases of coronavirus confirmed globally.

The World Health Organisations director of pandemic disease, Dr Sylvie Brand, has endorsed other methods of greeting, including waving, the Pence-style elbow bump, and the Thai Wai pressing your hands together and bowing the head.

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Mr Trump said during an interview on Fox News he was not thrilled about still going aroundshaking hands, but said: You cant be a politician and not shake hands.

Attempting to explain his rationale, he added: If there was ever a time that you could convince people not to shake hands, this would be it.

I love the people of this country, and you cant be a politician and not shake hands. And Ill be shaking hands with people. [If] they want to say hello and hug you and kiss you, I dont care.

There are now at least 226 cases of the coronavirus in the United States, and at least 70 of them are in the Seattle area. At least 11 people have died.

According to new World Health Organization statistics released on Thursday, the mortality rate for the virus is 3.4 per cent significantly higher than previous figures indicated.

Mr Trump said the rate was a false number.

This is just my hunch, the president said in a live phone interview on Fox News. Mr Trump then guessed at the coronavirus death rate apparently pulling a figure out of thin air.

I think that that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 per cent, he told host Sean Hannity.

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In Britain, Boris Johnson said on Wednesday he wasnt about to stop shaking hands because of the deadly virus.

When asked how he was planning to greet visiting dignitaries, Mr Johnson replied: Im shaking hands.

To the incredulity of many, he added: I was at a hospital the other night where I think a few there were actually coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, youll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands.

In the UK, people have been advised to wash their hands. Asked about hand shaking, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, told the Radio 4 Today programme this week: The overriding scientific evidence is that shaking hands has minimal impact, it is not a significant thing, and therefore, so long as you wash your hands after youve shaken hands, and wash your hands more often, then thats fine.

However, the Premier League has banned football players from the usual pre-match fair play handshakes as a measure to help stop the spread of the virus.

Other countries where traditional greetings are being advised against include France, where health minister Olivier Vran has said people shouldconsider cutting back on hugs and kisses, and Italy, where the countrys special commissioner for coronavirus, Angelo Borrelli, has said to help prevent the spread of the virus, people should rein-in the friendly double kiss, and be a bit less expansive.

In China, enormous red billboards are urging people to clasp their own two hands together, instead of shaking hands.

In Australia, New South Wales health minister Brad Hazzard has suggested people slap each other on the back instead of shaking hands.

And in Iran, a viral video shows people tapping their feet together with one another as a means of forgoing the usual handshake.

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Mike Pence greets governor with coronavirus handshake amid backlash over lack of testing kits in US - The Independent

Many Americans, perhaps most, appear to view the president as a public intellectual or shock-jock media personality. Voters increasingly pledge their loyalty to a candidate who not only articulates what they want to hear, but does so in the way they want to hear it. One problem with this reduction of the presidency one among many is that it eliminates nearly everything that the federal government does from political consideration.

Donald Trump gains support from his congregants, rather than loses it, when he excels in the only role that he is capable of performing a weird combination of dive-bar drunkard, unable to filter the stream of pollutants that move through his mind and outhis mouth, and Fox News talking head. Aformer reality television star and a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, Trump representsthe culmination of "infotainment," the process that has draggedpolitics from the Lincoln-Douglas debates down to relentless name-calling, bloviation and lies.

It turns out that the work of politics is actuallyboring. Talented writerslike Aaron Sorkin or David Mamet can make a fictionalized version of drafting legislation or managing public agencies seem exhilarating oramusing, but ensuring that the Department of the Interior competently oversees the managementof public land is not likely to translate into a hit showon any cable network or streaming platform.

There is nothing like a potential pandemic to remind an easily distractedelectorate that governance matters. As the coronavirus spreads, the death count risesand people all over the world begin to fear infection, the incoherent and dangerous reaction of the Trump administration offers a high-stakes indictment. This is what happens when you elect someone to run the federal government who has noprerequisite knowledge, experienceor ability forpublic policy and administration.

The Obama administration opened 49 overseas offices of the Centers for Disease Control, designed to proactively prevent viruses from reaching pandemic proportions. Over the objections of medical experts within his own administration, our current president has shut down 39 of them. One of these satellite CDC offices was in China.

For the past two years, Trump's budget proposal has included reductions to the CDC and the National Institute of Health. If we want proof that elections have implications on the actual work of government on not merely who is able to give inspiring or outrageous speeches with a title in front of his or her name the House Democratic majority prevented those cuts from going into effect.

Congress could not, however, prevent Trump from neglecting the fundamental responsibilities of his position. In 2018, the director of the National Security Council's global pandemic prevention effort resigned, and his entire staff subsequently did likewise. Trump has not replaced them, creating massive vulnerabilities in the U.S. response to thecoronavirus outbreak.

Concerned citizens can relax, though, because Trump has appointed Vice President Mike Pence as the "coronavirus czar." Pence's previous high-water mark in public health was denying, and then delaying, the implementation of clean needle exchange programs when he wasgovernor of Indiana a display of evangelical moralism that experts agree was partly responsible for the increase of HIV infection rates in the state.

The world's wealthiest nation is struggling to disperse testing kits, and running dangerously low on face masks for hospitals and clinics. Meanwhile, the CDC, undermined by Trump, is failing to update testing standards and recommendations as the disease spreads more widely and the death rate rises.

It is not merely Trump's ignorance and imbecility that creates a country unprepared and ill equipped to deal with a health problem, but the entire ideology that underwrites his incompetence.

For decades, conservatives have told the public that, in the words of Ronald Reagan, "Government is not the solution to the problem. It is the problem." One of the most catastrophic actions of the Trump administration has been the empowerment of thisright-wing, antisocial mindset a pathological pursuit that Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign chief and White House strategist,was honest enough to telegraph. He boasted shortly after Trump's inauguration that item No. 1 on Team Trump'sagenda was the "deconstruction of the administrative state."

The dismantling of government institutions and agencies extends even beyond the undoing of every possible aspect of theObama administration. Trump also killed off Predict,a program from the George W. Bush era that monitored the threat of animal-born diseases to humans.

As cable newsfollows Trump's every tweet and crude utterance like a child watching a bouncing ball, Michael Lewis reports in his outstanding book"The Fifth Risk" that the Trump administration is deliberately understaffing important governmental agencies, or appointing ideological dolts who despise those very agencies to run them. Betsy DeVos, who would not be qualified toapply for a teaching position inelementary school, is the secretary of education. Trump's director of the Environmental Protection Agency is an MBAwith years of experience working as a lobbyist for the coal and fossil fuel industries.

An avalanche of right wing propaganda, along withthe Democratic Party's failure to offer a persuasive counterargument, has allowed too many Americans to believe that government is an abstract entity a scare term that signifies a bunch of elitist bureaucrats who collect handsome salaries on the taxpayer's dime to push papers aroundand interfere with the freedomsof "real Americans."

Government employees are citizens from every state and every background, more often than not doing the important work of keeping the country safe, efficient, and functional. That allsounds pretty pedestrian and boring, but when a pandemic threatens to affect the lives of literally everyone in the country, it quickly becomes urgent.

"I can do the job" is not a thrilling political slogan, but it was a major part of Hillary Clinton's argument for the presidency in 2016. She lost, to a candidate who manifestlycannot do the job. Americans can only hope we will breathe a sigh of relief, from beneath our respiratormasks, if the same thingdoesn't happen again this year.

The rest is here:
The right wanted to destroy the "administrative state": Coronavirus is why we need it - Salon

Twenty new cases of the virus were confirmed in King County, Washington, local health officials said, bringing the total in the county to 51 with 11 deaths.

Many of the cases in Washington state have been linked to an outbreak at the nursing facility in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland, including several deaths.

"We're being told that all CDC precautions and procedures are being followed, yet we wake up daily with news of another death," said Kevin Connolly, the son of an elderly patient at the Life Care Center of Kirkland.

"I don't think that the Life Care Center of Kirkland have done a particularly good job, but I don't think they are equipped or trained to deal with this. Whomever the people are who are supposed to fly in and deal with this highly infectious and deadly disease, they are the people that I am, personally, incredibly angry with."

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'If this facility is safe enough for my father-in-law, I want Mike Pence in that facility' -family of nursing home patient - Yahoo News

The Vice President will be in town on Tuesday.

Vice President Mike Pence will visit Troy to host a Keep America Great rally at theDetroit Marriott Troy, 200 W. Big Beaver Rd. Doors open to the general public at 3 p.m., and close at 4:30 p.m., for the 5 p.m. event.

The Oakland County stop is part of a two-stop Michigan bus tour that begins with a visit to Lansing Tuesday morning. While there, Pence will deliver remarks at the annual Michigan Farm Bureau Lansing Legislative Seminar, which is attended by stakeholders, farmers, and legislative leadersto discuss policy and issues affecting agriculture and

Pence's visit comes two weeks before the state's presidential primary on Tuesday,March 10, and with early-voting in full-swing. He's visited Michigan multiple times during the current election cycle including stops in Saginaw, Portage, and Holland in December.

LAS VEGAS>> Bernie Sanders scored a resounding victory in Nevada's presidential caucuses on Saturday, cementing his status as the Democr

Although President Trump won Michigan in 2016 by a 10,704-vote margin, he's currently trailing all of the Democratic presidential candidates inhead-to-head general electionmatchups, according to a battleground statepoll conducted by The University of Wisconsin-Madison Feb. 11-20.Sen. Bernie Sanders has the largest lead (seven-percentage points).

In 2016, Oakland County voters chose Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over Trump by eight percentage points or a 53,867-vote margin,according to theOakland County Elections Division. Although Sanders defeated Clinton during Michigan's March primary, he lost to Clinton in Oakland County by nearly 8,000 votes.

Election Day is still six weeks away, but many Michigan voters are getting a head start on casting their ballots.

In January, Trump held a rally in Warren at Dana Manufacturing Inc., an automotive supplier, one day following his signing of the new United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (USMCA). It was the president's second visit to Michigan in a six-week span after holding a re-election Christmas rally in Battle Creek in December.

Since 2017, Pence has visited Michigan 12 times, including five stops in Oakland County (Bloomfield Hills, Auburn Hills, Birmingham, Rochester, and Waterford Township). Trump has visited the Great Lakes State five times since taking office (Ypsilanti, Washington Township, Grand Rapids, Battle Creek, and Warren).

President Donald Trump was greeted by a friendly crowd at the Dana Inc. plant in Warren Thursday to talk about a new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that he feels will present a "whole different ballgame" in terms of manufacturing.

EAST LANSING (AP) A man held up a hostile poster a few rows behind Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin as she spoke. On other side of the room, all

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Vice President Mike Pence visiting Oakland County Tuesday - The Oakland Press

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) Vice President Mike Pence made several stops across Hampton Roads during a visit on Feb. 19. The final one was at NAS Oceana in Virginia Beach, where he met with naval special warfare operators.

During his stop at Oceana, Vice President Pence spoke with WAVY News 10s Andy Fox. They touched on several topics, including the strength of the military in the Hampton Roads region and President Trumps effort to win re-election.

We met Vice President Mike Pence at NAS Oceanaafter he spent a full day in Hampton Roads,

Good to see you again, Andy, thanks for coming out, the VicePresidenttold us after beginning what is the thirdinterviewwe have conducted with him.

While democrats are revving up for Super Tuesday Primaries,includingVirginia, we asked what thebottom linemessage is for whatwillbe four years ofTrump-Pence.

This Presidentsaid we were going to revive oureconomyandcreating taxcuts,and cutting red tape, how wewantfreeand fair trade,and now we have a booming economywithmorethan7 million jobscreated.

Some of Vice President Pences detractors and pundits suggest President Trump could replace him on theNovember Republicanticketwithperhaps former United NationsAmbassador Nikki Hailey which isextremelyunlikely. He smiles at the question.

Ill letotherssaywhat I brought to the ticketfouryears ago,and whatIllbringto the ticket again in 2020.I will tell you, Andy,it isthe greatesthonorof my life to beVice-Presidentandto run for re-electionas Vice-President again.

The Vice President told us about how he sells the President and theAdministrationacross thecountry.

He saidwe were going to rebuild our military. Here in Hampton Roads Iseethecommitment that he hasmadetoactiveduty members as well as our veteranswhich is alarge part of life here inVirginia. He is also appointingconservatives to ourcourt. Whatever roleIhavebeen able to play in helping move that legislative agenda onCapitol Hillhas beenaprivilegefor me.

We asked him aboutU.S.Attorney General WilliamBarrandthe latest controversyleaving Barr with no option but to tell the Presidentpubliclyhis tweeting and his commentsabout Justice Department Prosecutions makes it hard for Barr to do his job.

The Presidenthas made no secret after three years of endlessinvestigations,aculminationVice-President Pence also summed up where he went across Hampton Roads.

To be able to be here in Virginia today, to be out with all of the brilliant people at Langley Research Center as we revive human space exploration and the mission of NASA. To be at Hampton University, one of the great historically black colleges in this country and to see the commitment the president has made to all of those great institutions.

Watch the full interview in the video player at the top of this page.

Interviewed VP Mike Pence. With photog Rob Rizzo. Asked him about politics, the military, Attorney General William Barr, his place on ticket with President Trump, those that want to replace him on the ticket, and the quality of loyalty. My reports tomorrow only on 10 @WAVY_News pic.twitter.com/Df8h3D8oyA

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Vice President Mike Pence: Full interview with WAVY's Andy Fox - WAVY.com