Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Self-isolation Day 119.

Last night I went to bed at 10:30 (just as it was starting to rain), got up several times during the night, finally waking/getting up at 6am.

Last night I played 6 games on Chess.com, winning 5 and losing 1, finishing with a rating of 1259. One of my games only went 11 moves because my opponent lost a piece, the game I lost my finger slipped on a move and I lost a rook, and the last game I won on time with 2.6 seconds remaining on my clock.

Teresa left at 9:30 to go for a walk. She returned at 10:45 and said she had no problem.

If I don’t hear anything specific about not going out for exercise then I will start tomorrow.

I watched Hush (6.6) on Netflix. I soon realized I had seen it before. According to my blog Teresa and I saw it together in 2018 and 2 years before that in the finca.

Teresa beat me in parcheesi today 7 games to 4.

 

California's governor announced a massive rollback of reopening plans. All indoor activities for restaurants, wineries, and movie theaters have been shut down again. And the state's two largest public school districts – Los Angeles and San Diego – said classes this fall will start online only. California has seen a surge in coronavirus cases, topping an average of 8,000 new cases a day. And the LA school superintendent said he didn't want schools to be a "petri dish" of infection.

 

The Washington Redskins officially announced it will retire its name and logo.

 

Four weeks ago today, amidst widespread concerns about coronavirus data in the U.S. that didn't appear to be improving, Vice President Mike Pence wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. The message was simple: thanks to Donald Trump, "we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy."

"While talk of an increase in cases dominates cable news coverage, more than half of states are actually seeing cases decline or remain stable.

Every state, territory and major metropolitan area, with the exception of three, have positive test rates under 10%.

Lost in the coverage is the fact that today less than 6% of Americans tested each week are found to have the virus.

Cases have stabilized over the past two weeks, with the daily average case rate across the U.S. dropping to 20,000 -- down from 30,000 in April and 25,000 in May.

And in the past five days, deaths are down to fewer than 750 a day, a dramatic decline from 2,500 a day a few weeks ago -- and a far cry from the 5,000 a day that some were predicting.

The media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different. The truth is, whatever the media says, our whole-of-America approach has been a success.

 

Both “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos say life is full of risks so send your kids back to school no matter what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say. 

 

Liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has not hesitated to lambast President Donald Trump and his sycophants for their response to the coronavirus pandemic — a response that, according to Krugman, has made the crisis much worse than it has to be in the United States. And in his July 13 column, Krugman points to recent GOP “opposition research” against Dr. Anthony Fauci as a prime example of the type of insanity that is making the U.S. #1 in COVID-19 infections.

Krugman opens his column by offering a “brief history of the past four months in America.” While health experts like Fauci have warned, “Don’t rush to reopen, this isn’t over,” Trump’s message has been “LIBERATE!” — and the response of COVID-19 is “Wheee!” And the boneheaded mentality of Trump officials, according to Krugman, has been “Here’s our opposition research on Anthony Fauci.”

 

NO ONE could level an accusation of complacency at Kanakuk Kamps, a network of Christian camps in Missouri that posted a 31-point program of pandemic precautions as summer approached. Despite those preparations, one of its camps for teenagers was hit by a major outbreak last month. That failure, and others like it nationwide, are a warning sign for schools and colleges that hope to reopen this fall.

 

Policies that require face coverings ought to be widely considered to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, a new study published Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concludes. 

There’s no U.S. nationwide mandate like in some other countries and businesses have been largely left to enforce face covering requirements on their own, as CNBC previously reported. 

The authors of the study investigated the case of two infected hair stylists in Springfield, Missouri, who appear to have not transmitted the virus to any of their 139 clients even as they continued to work while infectious.

A Trump replay from April 23^rd: Trump says coronavirus "may not come back" in the fall, a claim at odds with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said it will persist.

The US has 3,315,363  ð 3,379,906 ð 3,433,156 coronavirus cases with 134,943 ð 135,402 ð 136,122 deaths.

Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 150,445 ð 154,277 ð159,898 cases with 5,624 deaths.  Medellin has 3,940 ð 4,506 ð 5,044 cases, an increase of 231 from July 11^th to July 13^th.  Envigado has a total of 216 cases, an increase of 25 from July 11^th to July 13^th.

 

Joke of the day

Before heading off to Mexico on vacation, I asked my doctor for medicine to ward off any potential stomach problems.  Instead, the doctor prescribed bottled water and electrolytes, “which have simple sugars and salt.”

I replied “Oh, like a margarita?”