Tuesday, August 25, 2020

 

Quarantine Day #160.

Last night I went to bed at 10:30, fell asleep quickly, got up twice durng the night, finally waking/getting up at 7am.

Last night I played 4 games on Chess.com, winning 3 and drawing 1, amazing because I had the black pieces for 3 of the 4 games. I had the white pieces in the 1^st game and I checkmated my opponent in 21 moves. In the 2^nd game I played the Sicilian Defense and I had a won game but had to take a draw so as not to lose on time. Unfortunately, I had a mate in 2 at the time. That game went 68 moves. In the 3^rd game I had black and played the Stonewall Dutch and checkmated him in 17 moves. In the 4^th game I had black and made plenty of mistakes but luckily he made more and I checkmated him in 37 moves. My new rating is 1237.

 

According to Medellin Guru, Medellin is planning a gradual, total reopening over the next 4 months, starting with restaurants, gyms, and churches. The last day of pico y cedula will be Sunday, August 30^th. Yay! But the virus is still here so it will be up to everyone to take care of themselves.

Teresa left at 9:15 for Poblado where hopefully a woman can help her get her injection. I watched the first 20 minutes of the Today show then left for my walk in 67-degree weather with overcast skies. I stopped at the local tienda and picked up milk, a couple of bananas and what I thought was a package of English muffins that turned out to be almojabanas.

The GOP claimed that their convention that started last night would be significantly more optimistic than Democrats’ last week. Most of what we got Monday was decidedly not that.

“The big contrast you’ll see between the Democrats’ doom-and-gloom, Donald Trump-obsessed convention will be a convention focused on real people, their stories, how the policies of the Trump administration have lifted their lives, and then an aspirational vision toward the next four years,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said over the weekend.

McDaniel got things rolling Monday by saying that “‘nice’ guys like Joe [Biden] care more about countries like Iran and China than the United States of America.”

A medical professional warned that some Democrats’ proposal for government-run health care would mean “we’d be lucky if we could see any doctor.” (Biden doesn’t support single-payer health care, as some Democrats do.)

Former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, the partner of Donald Trump Jr., offered a particularly bleak picture, saying Democrats “want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom.”

Trump Jr. said, “Biden also wants to bring in more illegal immigrants to take jobs from American citizens,” as if that were Biden’s goal. He added that Democrats are “attacking the very principles on which our nation was founded: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the rule of law.”

Even Trump Jr.’s more aspirational messages were repeatedly punctuated by warnings about what Democrats would do.

Cuban American immigrant Maximo Alvarez, in an impassioned speech, suggested Democrats and possibly even Biden are secretly putting the country on a path to communism.

The novel coronavirus is the issue Trump would rather not have looming over him. Polls show his approval rating on the pandemic dropping into the low to mid-30s, as the death toll climbs ever closer to the upper bound of what Trump himself would constitute a successful response.

But the convention began its prime hours Monday night by focusing on the unavoidable topic — and in one major way attempting to rewrite history.

The convention played a video featuring Democrats and others who, at one point or another, downplayed the severity of the outbreak.

 

The first night of the Republican National Convention drew 15.8 million viewers across six networks, a significant falloff from the 18.7 million who tuned in to the Democratic National Convention’s debut evening.

 

GOP’s Trump loyalty: They’re wonderfully adept bootlickers. Fmr. Republican and MSNBC Political Analyst Steve Schmidt discussed the lack of a new Republican Party platform and Trump's RNC and the way Republicans on the Hill remain in lockstep behind Trump.

 

At a news conference on Sunday announcing the emergency approval of blood plasma for hospitalized Covid-19 patients, President Trump and two of his top health officials cited the same statistic: that the treatment had reduced deaths by 35 percent.

Mr. Trump called it a “tremendous” number. His health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, a former pharmaceutical executive, said, “I don’t want you to gloss over this number.” And Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said 35 out of 100 Covid-19 patients “would have been saved because of the administration of plasma.”

But scientists were taken aback by the way the administration framed this data, which appeared to have been calculated based on a small subgroup of hospitalized Covid-19 patients in a Mayo Clinic study: those who were under 80 years old, not on ventilators and received plasma known to contain high levels of virus-fighting antibodies within three days of diagnosis.

What’s more, many experts — including a scientist who worked on the Mayo Clinic study — were bewildered about where the statistic came from. The number was not mentioned in the official authorization letter issued by the agency, nor was it in a 17-page memo written by F.D.A. scientists. It was not in an analysis conducted by the Mayo Clinic that has been frequently cited by the administration.

“For the first time ever, I feel like official people in communications and people at the F.D.A. grossly misrepresented data about a therapy,” said Dr. Walid Gellad, who leads the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh.

 

Teresa returned at 11:15. I understand she walked to the building next to the grotto with the shrine and found it to be closed. She said “it’s far”. I told her every Sunday for months I would walk past that to Starbucks, have coffee, and walk back.

She said her girlfriend wants her to meet at Carulla (15 minutes from our apt) at 7:30am and walk to Parque Poblado for breakfast. I told her that would be a walk of 60-75 minutes.

On the afternoon news they showed a few families dining outside of a restaurant in La Buena Mesa of Envigado. It looked like it was La Doctora or a neighboring restaurant.

Teresa finally talked to Maria and I understand she wanted to order a carrot cake from her but she wanted me to go to the bank to put the money in her account. I told her I would rather wait until next week when I have to go to the bank to pay for the apt.

I took a 45-minute nap in the afternoon.

Teresa has been trying to get an injection for her bones. She says it will cost 2 million pesos (about $600) if we don’t use our insurance. She’s been trying to contact different clinics for weeks but she says things are more difficult because of the virus.

 

This is what I learned on the first night of the Republican National Convention. I learned that Joe Biden is a Communist, a Socialist, the next Castro, and a puppet controlled by cosmopolitan elites, Hollywood moguls, the Chinese government, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I learned that the streets of California are paved with heroin needles, that MS-13 will be moving in next door, and that HUMAN SEX DRUG TRAFFICKERS!!!!!!!!!!! I learned that the Democrat Party plans to abolish the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, Jesus, and the suburbs. I learned that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is the last bodyguard of Western Civilization, and that is an actual thing that actually was said.

 

The University of Alabama on Monday reported that more than 550 people on campuses have tested positive for coronavirus since classes began less than a week earlier.

Of the 566 new cases at the University of Alabama's campuses and facilities, 531 of them were reported in students, faculty and staff at the university's main campus in Tuscaloosa, according to the school's tracker, released Monday.

Those numbers don't include the 310 students who tested positive before Wednesday, Aug. 19, upon returning to school at the Tuscaloosa campus.

Nearly 160 at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Dozens at the University of Southern California.

Colleges and universities that brought students back to campus are expressing alarm about coronavirus infections emerging as classes have barely started, raising the possibility everyone could be sent home.

 

White House economic adviser Peter Navarro said on Tuesday that recommendations from health experts that convalescent plasma undergo a randomized trial as a COVID-19 treatment before receiving an emergency authorization are a "crazy talking point."

Why it matters: Top federal health officials urged the FDA last week to hold off on issuing an emergency use authorization for the safe, but unproven treatment, but the agency went ahead with it on Sunday amid pressure from Navarro and Trump.

• The National Institutes of Health's Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and H. Clifford Lane were among the scientists who sought to intervene to stop the FDA from immediately authorizing plasma due to the absence of strong data about its effectiveness.
• “The three of us are pretty aligned on the importance of robust data through randomized control trials, and that a pandemic does not change that,” Lane told the New York Times.

Yes, but: The FDA said in a statement that the authorization "is not intended to replace randomized clinical trials and facilitating the enrollment of patients into any of the ongoing randomized clinical trials is critically important for the definitive demonstration of safety and efficacy of COVID-19 convalescent plasma."

The big picture: The FDA authorization came one day after President Trump accused the administration of slow-walking the development of vaccines and therapeutics for political purposes. Earlier in the week, Navarro accused health officials of being part of the "deep state" and urged them to get on "Trump time."

What they're saying: "On the issue of not being able to do randomized trials, what is the calculus here? Are we going to wait to use something that can save thousands of lives just so we can have a study that tells us what we already know?" Navarro told MSNBC.

• "The odds of this being able to hurt you are close to zero, so it's safe. The odds of it being able to help you are close to 100%," Navarro claimed.
• Reality check: The odds of plasma being able to help COVID-19 patients are not "close to 100%."

The other side: Speaker Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC after Navarro's appearance that the Trump administration is "politicizing science." She warned of the need to watch out for the politicization of the vaccine process because the Trump administration has "already indicated that they will overstate the safety and the efficacy of a drug."

 

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro offered lavish praise of first lady Melania Trump Tuesday, labeling her the "Jackie Kennedy of her time."

Navarro, head of President Donald Trump's White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, remarked on the "elegance" and "soft-spokennness" of the first lady ahead of her headline speech at the Republican National Convention Tuesday night. Navarro abruptly switched topics during an MSNBC appearance in which he was responding to questions about the Trump administration's coronavirus pandemic response. Navarro slipped in a comparison between Melania and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

The Melania-Jackie Kennedy comparison comes just days after the first lady was criticized by many Trump critics for renovating the Rose Garden, which had been through a redesign in the early 1960s, during the Kennedy administration.

 

It started raining about 5:30 and soon was a downpour lasting until about 8pm.

 

The US has 5,696,871 ð 5,750,997 ð 5,790,573 coronavirus cases with 175,600+ ð 176,400+ ð 177,100+ ð 178,300 deaths.

Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 541,147 ð 551,696 ð 562,128 cases with 17,889 deaths.  Medellin has 40,756 ð 41,289 ð 41,884 cases, an increase of 607 from August 24^th to 25^th. Envigado has a total of 2,253 cases, an increase of 22 from August 24^th to 25^th. So, new infections have plateaued or even decreased recently. It appears we have returned to the number of new cases that we had at the beginning of August.

 

Joke of the day

I ran out of toilet paper and had to start using newspapers. Times are rough.