Sunday, June 21, 2020

Self-isolation Day 96.

Happy Father’s Day!

Last night I went to bed at 11pm, fell asleep quickly, slept through the night, finally waking at 7am and getting up at 7:45.

Of course I received Father’s Day congratulations from my kids. Also from Laura who texted me around noon asking where Teresa was. “She’s here but she’s leaving soon.”

 

The coronavirus pandemic will “fade away” even without a vaccine, but researchers are close to developing one anyhow, President Donald Trump said.

“We’re very close to a vaccine and we’re very close to therapeutics, really good therapeutics,” Trump said Wednesday night in a television interview with Fox News. “But even without that, I don’t even like to talk about that, because it’s fading away, it’s going to fade away, but having a vaccine would be really nice and that’s going to happen.”

Trump’s comments come as the U.S. continues to see 20,000 new daily cases from a pandemic that so far has killed 117,000 people in the country. The president has called for easing restrictions on public activity that were imposed to slow the spread of the virus but that plunged the U.S. into recession.

 

More than 1.5 million Americans filed initial unemployment claims in the week ending June 13. That's an improvement of 58,000 on the prior week, but the latest figure comes in above economists' estimates. More worryingly, it marks 13 straight weeks with jobless claims topping a million.

 

With between 20,000 and 30,000 new U.S. coronavirus cases reported daily over the past week, President Donald Trump said that he ordered officials to slow down testing for the virus.

"You know, testing is a double edged sword," Trump said at his campaign rally in Tulsa on Saturday. He recounted that he was told that "when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please. "

 

Temperatures in the small Siberian town of Verkhoyansk — normally one of the coldest places on the planet — reached 100.4°F on Saturday, likely the hottest temperature ever recorded in Siberia and north of the Arctic Circle, CBS News reports.

 

The head of the World Health Organization warned Friday that humanity is facing “a new and dangerous phase” of the coronavirus crisis.

“The pandemic is accelerating,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The remarks from came at a media briefing in Geneva where Tedros announced a grim milestone.

“More than 150,000 new cases of Covid-19 were reported to WHO yesterday—the most in a single day so far,” he said.

Tedros acknowledged that people worldwide were eager to be free from lockdown restrictions but warned that “the virus is still spreading fast” and is “still deadly.”

Today I bested Teresa 5-4 in parcheesi.

A Trump replay from March 26^th: VP Pence: “I can tell you that at no point has the White House Task Force discussed a nationwide lockdown.”

The US has 2,228,733 ð 2,264,931  ð 2,291,237 coronavirus cases with 119,100 ð 119,701 ð 119,979 deaths.

Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 63,276 ð 65,633   ð 68,652 cases with 2,237 deaths.  Medellin has 1,136  ð 1,181  ð 1,238 cases, an increase of 64 from June 20^th to 21^st. Colombia’s rolling 6-day average of new cases is on the increase Medellin included. Envigado has a total of 63 cases, an increase of 2 from June 20^th to 21^st.

Joke of the day

PAUL REVERE'S JEWISH MOTHER:
"I don't care where you think you have to go young man, midnight is long past your bed-time!"