Friday, May 15, 2020

Self-isolation Day 59.


Last night I went to bed at 11pm, fell asleep quickly, got up once during the night, again about 5am, couldn’t fall back asleep so I got up at 6am. (Probably will be a nap sometime in my near future.)


I remember it was exactly 2 months ago when I had my last "normal" day starting with breakfast at Ganso & Castor with Glenn and James.


From the Today show, 1,430,567 US coronavirus cases with 86,904 deaths.

Colombian President Ivan Duque has ordered all residents of the Amazonas Department, near the border with Brazil, to stay inside except to buy food or get medical care. Local hospitals are being overwhelmed as cases rise in a vulnerable part of the Amazon, home to many indigenous groups.

“The Amazon rainforest needs your help,” teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg said in an online video seeking assistance for Manaus, Brazil’s biggest city in the vast region. According to official data, 809 people have died so far in Manaus and 9,410 have contracted the virus. But experts and people on the ground say the numbers are likely to be much higher and that people are dying at home, often buried in mass graves without having been tested and not making it into the official count.  Associated Press.

Mitch McConnell during a campaign event with Lara Trump last Monday said, “clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this.”

Mitch McConnell today, “I was wrong. They did leave behind a plan. I clearly made a mistake in that regard.”



From the British medical journal The Lancet: “The Trump administration further chipped away at the CDC's capacity to combat infectious diseases. CDC staff in China were cut back with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from the China CDC in July, 2019, leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge. In a press conference on Feb 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned US citizens to prepare for major disruptions to movement and everyday life. Messonnier subsequently no longer appeared at White House briefings on COVID-19. More recently, the Trump administration has questioned guidelines that the CDC has provided. These actions have undermined the CDC's leadership and its work during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Americans must put a president in the White House come January 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics,”



Kathleen Sebelius, the former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services serving under president Obama, and a former governor of Kansas serving in the George W. Bush era, says the White House has abdicated its responsibilities to lead on the coronavirus outbreak.



The anonymous hackers this week that crippled the computer systems of high-profile celebrity law firm Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks claiming to have stolen 756GB of highly-confidential documents, say they have trump’s ‘dirty laundry’ and want $42million to keep it secret.



Teresa wants to get her hair done but all the beauty parlors are closed. She got the idea that she could have a barber (if that’s the right term) come and do her hair in the garage. She called someone and they said that that wouldn’t be allowed until June 1^st so maybe this quarantine is going to end (be relaxed) soon.



Very cold again this morning but the sun came out about noon and now its 84 degrees. A little later it got cloudy and turned cool again.



Dr. Rick Bright laid out the multiple failings of the administration — pushing discredited drug cures, refusing to plan ahead for production and purchase of masks, etc. Worse still, the administration has no “single point of leadership right now for this response, and we don’t have a master plan for this”.

In a speech on Thursday at Owens and Minor, a medical supply distributor in Allentown, Pennsylvania, President Donald Trump asked whether testing for COVID-19, is actually “overrated." “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases. They don't want to write that, but it's common sense,” Trump said in his address.

At today’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany described the 69-page Obama administration pandemic response plan as a thin piece of paper.  (Actually, the Obama playbook was 69-pages.)



For two months, President Trump repeatedly pitched hydroxychloroquine as a safe and effective treatment for coronavirus, asking would-be patients “What the hell do you have to lose?” Clinical trials, academic research and scientific analysis indicate that the danger of the Trump-backed drug is a significantly increased risk of death for certain patients. Evidence showing the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating covid-19 has been scant. Those two developments pushed the Food and Drug Administration to warn against the use of hydroxychloroquine outside of a hospital setting last month, just weeks after it approved an emergency use authorization for the drug.



Remember Trump on January 22^nd? “We have it totally under control.  It’s one person coming from China.  We have it under control.  It’s going to be fine.”

The US has 1,417,674 ð 1,446,012 coronavirus cases with 85,438  ð 87,181 deaths.


Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 13,610 ð 14,216 cases with 546 deaths.  Medellin has 312 ð 329 cases, an increase of 10 from May 12^th to 14^th. 


Joke of the day

It was three o'clock in the morning, and the receptionist at a posh hotel was just dozing off, when a little old lady came running towards her, screaming.

"Please come quickly," she yelled, "I just saw a naked man outside my window!"

The receptionist immediately rushed up to the old lady's room.

"Where is he?" asked the receptionist.

"He's over there," replied the little old lady, pointing to an apartment building opposite the hotel.

The receptionist looked over and could see a man with no shirt on, moving around his apartment.

"It's probably a man who's getting ready to go to bed," she said reassuringly.  "And how do you know he's naked, you can only see him from the waist up?"

"The dresser, honey!" screamed the old lady. "Try standing on the dresser!"