Coronavirus, Other Stories You Don't Wanna Miss!

“While the potential damages of a pandemic are in general large, the analyses thus far on the coronavirus are largely global in nature and fail to account for the rapid federal response to secure the country and create a cure,” Bradley Blakeman and Christos Makridis write for The Washington Times. “That’s evident in a recent Gallup poll that found 77 percent of the population is very or somewhat confident in the government’s ability to handle the coronavirus, up significantly from 58 percent from the Ebola virus in 2014 and 67 percent from the swine flu in 2009,” they explain. “At a time when coronavirus was just getting on the radar, the administration took decisive steps to mitigate the spread of the virus to the United States.”   Click here to read more.

“U.S. companies kept adding jobs in February despite the coronavirus scare, as private payrolls expanded well above the pace that Wall Street had anticipated. Employment excluding government jobs rose by 183,000 for the month . . . topping the 155,000 that economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected,” Jeff Cox reports for CNBC.

“I have been studying and reporting on emerging contagions for many years. I have seen them mismanaged, hyped and poorly messaged. In fact, I have never seen a new virus or bacteria handled as well by our public health officials as this one, with sober attention paid to identifying, isolating and tracing contacts of known or suspected cases along with restricting travel as best they can,” Dr. Marc Siegel writes in Fox News.

More than 700 miles of new U.S.–Mexico border wall have either already been built or are in the process of being built, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf says. Wolf added that the border wall is one of many steps being taken to curb illegal immigration and support Border Patrol officers, Matthew Boyle reports for Breitbart.