Friday, May 8, 2020

Self-isolation Day 52.

Last night I went to bed at 10:45, got up once during the night, again at 5am, took me 30-60 minutes to fall back asleep, finally waking/getting up at 8:15.


Per the Today show the total US coronavirus cases stands at 1,267,279 with 76,767 deaths. And the US unemployment rate is officially 14.7% but is believed to be closer to 23-25%. (Just last week, another 3.2 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits – adding to the over 33 million from the last seven weeks.) Jared Bernstein tweet: “Been writing up these job reports for 3 decades and I’ve never seen anything remotely this bad. Payrolls down 20.5 million. Almost a decade of job gains wiped out in 2 months. Unemployment spiked to 14.7% & all of this in a system with the weakest safety net of all adv economies.”



Trump says the 20 million Jobs lost to COVID-19 'will be back very soon'.  Uh, no, ain’t going to happen.


A recent paper by Scott Baker of Northwestern University and colleagues suggests that economic uncertainty is at an all-time high. 


The results of a weekly survey from Moody’s Analytics, a research firm, finds that businesses’ investment intentions are substantially lower even than during the financial crisis of 2007-09.


A poll by Yougov on behalf of The Economist finds that over a third of Americans think it will be “several months” before it will be safe to reopen businesses as normal—which suggests that if businesses do reopen some, at least, may stay away.



As many parts of the world’s biggest economy begin to reopen after weeks of stay-at-home orders that slowed the spread of the coronavirus but gutted jobs, Americans should not expect a quick return to growth, U.S. Federal Reserve officials said on Friday.



When Trump was asked about his personal valet testing positive for the coronavirus he replied, “I’ve had very little contact with this gentleman.”



Today vice president Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, tested positive for the coronavirus.



Newly unveiled documents suggest nearly a dozen U.S. Secret Service members have tested positive for COVID-19 according to Yahoo News.


Trump has consistently shown contempt for the coronavirus. Now the virus, which has infected 1.3 million people in this country and killed more than 78,000, has made its way into the White House. Experts were saying on Friday that the virus has probably spread completely through the West Wing. Of course it has. Sources told MSNBC that "no one" in the White House has been observing social distance rules or wearing masks.



Some states desperately waiting for supplies of the drug remdesivir — which is helpful in the treatment of the coronavirus — are getting shortchanged by the federal government with the drug mistakenly being shipped by the federal government to other areas that have not been hit as hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.



Per USA Today, U.S. companies continued their massive sell-off of medical masks overseas throughout March, well after the coronavirus began infecting Americans and draining hospitals of critical supplies and even as White House officials raised red flags.



One day after President Trump complained that the amount of coronavirus testing happening nationwide makes the United States “look bad,” Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said such efforts are essential and should be stepped up.



International relations scholars are almost uniformly negative when rating Washington’s role in coordinating a global response to the pandemic. Far from seeing the United States as a leader, 97 percent of participants say the United States has played a role that was “not very effective” or “not effective at all.” 



It took 184 years to eradicate smallpox after a vaccine was developed.  It plagued humanity for at least 3,000 years and killed 300,000,000 people in the 20^th century alone.



“We have governors who are stepping up, luckily, but now we have 50 different homegrown state solutions instead of a national response,” Melinda Gates said in an interview with Politico. Once testing and contact tracing are in place, states can then start thinking about slowly reopening places in a safe and healthy way. 

Melinda Gates, co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, gave the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic a grade of D-minus, saying it’s created “chaos” in the U.S.  She said the U.S. has “wasted so much time” and doesn’t have national leadership to provide enough tests, protective gear and other supplies and services needed across the country. She cited Germany as an example of a nation that was able to keep certain sectors of its economy open while also keeping its residents safe.

“That’s the kind of leadership we should expect as citizens in this country, and we’re not getting it. We haven’t gotten it yet during this crisis, and you’re seeing what’s happening. And it’s chaos,” she said Friday on NBC’s “TODAY.”



The decision to shelve detailed advice from the nation’s top disease control experts for reopening communities during the coronavirus pandemic came from the highest levels of the White House, according to internal government emails obtained by The Associated Press.



Teresa informed me that the public will be allowed to go out on April 25^th, although still with facemasks.



The US has 1,276,707 coronavirus cases with 76,527 deaths. (That’s a far cry from “it’ll be gone soon.”)


Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 10,051 cases with 428 deaths.  Medellin has 300cases, an increase of 3.



Joke of the day

Autocorrect can go straight to he’ll.