COVID-19 in Red, Blue America | COVID-19 & Cybersecurity | Guyana’s Dodgy Poll, and more

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia) Dumped Millions in Stock After Coronavirus Briefing (Lachlan Markay, William Bredderman, Sam Brodey, Daily Beast)
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia) is the second senator who has gotten rid of their holdings right as the stock market went bad.
Loeffler sold off seven figures’ worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private, all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S. equities.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) reported the first sale of stock jointly owned by her and her husband on Jan. 24, the very day that her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private, all-senators briefing from administration officials, including the CDC director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on the coronavirus. 
Loeffler is the second known senator to sell off large stock holdings between that Jan. 24 briefing and the dramatic drop in stock-market indices over the last week. The Center for Responsive Politics reported on Thursday that Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, sold between $500,000 and $1.5 million in stock in February, shortly before markets tanked—and before Burr privately warned of the havoc that coronavirus was poised to wreak.

China Is Avoiding Blame by Trolling the World (Shadi Hamid, Defense One)
Beijing is successfully dodging culpability for its role in spreading the coronavirus.

Coronavirus Now Possibly Largest-Ever Cyber Security Threat (Alex Scroxton, Computer Weekly)
The cumulative volume of coronavirus-related email lures and other threats is the largest collection of attack types exploiting a single theme for years, possibly ever

Germany’s Other Neglected Plague Is Far-Right Terrorism (Cathrin Schaer, Daily Beast)
The coronavirus crisis is a perfect proving ground for the extreme right’s theories of apocalypse. Too bad the German government has been treating all terrorists as equal.

COVID-19 Mortality Was 1.4% in Outbreak Epicenter: Study (AFP)
The novel coronavirus proved deadly in 1.4 percent of patients with COVID-19 symptoms in the Chinese outbreak city of Wuhan, far lower than global estimates of the killer pandemic, researchers said Thursday.

Half of Coronavirus Infections in Florida Involve People 60 or Older (Zachary T. Sampson, Tampa Bay Times)
The state announced the case total had risen to 192, including 173 Floridians, and that a sixth person had died at a Broward County assisted living facility. A full breakdown of new cases wasn’t immediately available.

Inside a Lab Trying to Develop a Coronavirus Vaccine (Helen Santoro, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Creating a working vaccine is challenging and will likely take over a year, at best. But with Seattle at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States—as of March 13, the state had seen 568 cases and 37 deaths, numbers almost certain to rise as more people are tested—this task is the top priority for the scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design. “We’ve put a lot of projects on hold so that we can focus on this,” said Brooke Fiala, a vaccine researcher who leads the institute’s nanoparticle laboratory.

Guyana’s Dodgy Poll Is All about Oil (Economist)
If the election is stolen, the windfall will surely be squandered.