1 Territorial Gangster Outdoing the Other: Chinese Gov Asserts Claim to Global Leadership by Providing Supplies to Other Nations while Trump Raises His Liarability Rating & Floats More Paper Boats

The 1,000-Bed Comfort Was Supposed to Aid New York. It Has 3 Patients. “It’s a joke,” said a top hospital executive, whose facilities are packed with coronavirus patients. Probably sounded good though to Trump’s stupid believers. More at the bottom of the story.

US Govt Only Prepared to Wage Wars. From [WSJ] New York City’s Times Square stands empty, a testament to the threat the coronavirus poses to the biggest U.S. city. 

Meanwhile, 7,500 miles to the east, young people celebrate the end of quarantine over hotpot in a crowded restaurant in the Chinese city of Chengdu. 

And in Fujian province, a team of Chinese virus experts heads to the airport for a chartered flight to help an overwhelmed Italy.

The three images, posted close to each other on the Twitter feed of China’s official Xinhua News Agency one day last week, encapsulate a sweeping effort by the Communist Party to craft the story of the pandemic and cast China in the role of global savior. 

Chinese President Xi Jinping, speaking by video link to other leaders of the Group of 20 nations last week, said his country had made tremendous sacrifices to curtail the virus’s spread at home and would now help others.

China’s French embassy put it in starker terms in a tweet storm. “When the epidemic started to explode everywhere, it was China who the entire world asked for help, and not the United States, the ‘beacon of democracy,’” the embassy said. “It is China who lent a helping hand to more than 80 nations. Not the United States.”

China, the country where the virus first appeared and claimed its first several thousand lives, is now using the global spread of the disease to bolster an increasing vocal, assertive bid for global leadership that is exacerbating a yearslong conflict with the U.S. 

Combined with deliveries of essential goods, this public-relations push has enabled China to stake a claim to a void on the global stage left by an inward-looking America—while also helping Chinese leaders distract attention at home from criticism they mishandled the early stages of the outbreak.

Over a two-week period in March, Chinese government agencies, companies and charities donated more than 26 million face masks, 2.3 million testing kits and other supplies to 89 countries, according to a review of state media reports and government and company statements. On Tuesday, China’s Foreign Ministry said the number of countries receiving its coronavirus-related help has reached 120.

In hard-hit countries such as Italy, the aid has sparked ire that China was quicker to respond than closer allies such as Germany or the U.S. [MORE]

The NYT states: “Such were the expectations for the Navy hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort that when it chugged into New York Harbor this week,throngs of people, momentarily forgetting the strictures of social distancing, crammed together along Manhattan’s west side to catch a glimpse.

On Thursday, though, the huge white vessel, which officials had promised would bring succor to a city on the brink, sat mostly empty, infuriating local hospital executives. The ship’s 1,000 beds are largely unused, its 1,200-member crew mostly idle.

Only three patients had been transferred to the ship, officials said, even as New York hospitals struggled to find space for the thousands infected with the coronavirus. Another Navy hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Mercy, docked in Los Angeles, has had a total of 15 patients, officials said.

“If I’m blunt about it, it’s a joke,” said Michael Dowling, the head of Northwell Health, New York’s largest hospital system. “Everyone can say, ‘Thank you for putting up these wonderful places and opening up these cavernous halls.’ But we’re in a crisis here, we’re in a battlefield.”

The Comfort was sent to New York to relieve pressure on city hospitals by treating people with ailments other than Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.

President Trump left a nine-day sequester in the White House last week to travel to Norfolk, Va., to personally see off the ship as it set sail for New York, saying it would play a “critical role.” The ship’s arrival on Monday was cheered as one of the few bright moments in a grim time for the city.

But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all.“