Sunday, September 6, 2020

Saturday, September 5, 2020

 


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

Last night I had some last minute things to take care of so I didn’t have the opportunity to play chess on Chess.com.

Teresa was talking to Laura and then informed me that Lenny’s father has a house in Italy so we can travel there and stay for free. I told Teresa I want us to go visit Chicago first. She said Laura first has to get her papers in order. I asked her if Laura goes to Italy how can she get back in the US without papers? That ended that discussion.

 

I left the apt just before 10am and walked through the back street of La Buena Mesa. The intersection of one of the restaurant streets with a café street is closed off to traffic. They have 4 sideless tents set up for people to eat outside. I walked past Parav and they were open but still not to indoor seating. I walked past Eduardo Madrid bakery and observed a short line outside. They don’t appear to be letting people inside either. I walked to the mall and had a café con leche in Todo Fresa. At 11:45 I went upstairs to the food court. I saw at most a dozen people sitting at tables. In the restaurant aread almost all are open but sadly most were completely empty. The most I saw at any were 2 customers. I picked up a few things at Exito and took a taxi back to the apt.

 

There’s a general consensus in the medical community that the first safe COVID-19 vaccine won’t be available until at least very late this year and that truly effective vaccines will have to wait till next year. Yet that does not jive with guidance from the White House, which is fueling hopes that we will have an FDA-approved vaccine before Election Day in November— a prospect that scientists say is “very unlikely.”

 

Military veteran and famed US Airways pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III on Friday urged voters to send Donald Trump packing in November, a day after news broke that the president had allegedly derided Americans killed in World War I as “losers” and “suckers.”

“We owe it not only to those who have served and sacrificed for our nation, but to ourselves and to succeeding generations to vote him out,” Sullenberger said in a tweet thread.

 

A former senior White House official said the controversial remarks President Donald Trump was reported to have made, according to The Atlantic, resembled his speech pattern and was "so consistent with who he is."

"He uses the word 'loser' as often as he can," the former official told Insider, adding that Trump's interest in the military was "totally disingenuous."

Trump was said to have called notable US military veterans, including Sen. John McCain and President George H.W. Bush a "loser," according to The Atlantic's previous reporting.

 

 

The Atlantic reported on Thursday that President Donald Trump made derogatory remarks about fallen members of the military, going so far as to call them "suckers" and "losers."

Fox News on Friday said the report was fabricated and criticized The Atlantic's use of anonymous sources.

However, one of its own — national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin — said parts of the damning report were verified to her by two people who previously worked for the Trump administration. 

"According to one former senior Trump administration official: 'When the President spoke about the Vietnam War, he said, 'It was a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker,'" Griffin tweeted.

Griffin also reported learning that Trump "just hated" Sen. John McCain and thought it was "not a good look" to include the "wounded guys" in a July 4 military parade.

Trump appeared to be aware of Griffin's reporting and called on Fox News to fire her.

Journalists who covered the White House responded by defending Griffin's credentials and her reporting.

 

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday that he's not sure what President Donald Trump meant when he said earlier that evening that the country is "rounding the corner" on the coronavirus pandemic.

"I'm not sure what he means," Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN's Jim Acosta on "The Situation Room."

"There are certain states that are actually doing well in the sense of that the case numbers are coming down." However, Fauci continued, experts remain concerned by a number of states, including Montana, Michigan, Minnesota and the Dakotas, that are starting to see an uptick in the percentage of coronavirus tests coming back positive -- an indication of spread of the virus.

The exchange marked another example of a top scientist and a member of the White House coronavirus task force publicly disputing the President's claims about the virus, a dynamic that has played out nearly since the start of the pandemic.

"By the way, we are rounding the corner," Trump said during a news briefing at the White House. "We are rounding the corner on the virus."

Earlier Friday, a new model often cited by top health officials projected that more than 410,000 people in the US could die from the coronavirus by January 1 -- more than doubling the current death toll.

"Of course it's possible," Fauci said of the model's forecast. "If you do a lot of indoor activity and you don't utilize masks to the utmost, you very likely will get to this number."

But Fauci cast the projection as a "good heads up" of what could happen if Americans don't take precautions. "Although the number's a little scary ... it may be a sort of a nudge for us to realize that we can do something to stop that," Fauci said.

 

Since the start of the pandemic, experts have warned that the coronavirus — a respiratory pathogen — most likely capitalizes on the scarred lungs of smokers and vapers. Doctors and researchers are now starting to pinpoint the ways in which smoking and vaping seem to enhance the virus’s ability to spread from person to person, infiltrate the lungs and spark some of Covid-19’s worst symptoms.

“I have no doubt in saying that smoking and vaping could put people at increased risk of poor outcomes from Covid-19,” said Dr. Stephanie Lovinsky-Desir, a pediatric pulmonologist at Columbia University. “It is quite clear that smoking and vaping are bad for the lungs, and the predominant symptoms of Covid are respiratory. Those two things are going to be bad in combination.”

 

On the West Coast, the COVID threat joins forces with deadly heat and an increase in wildfire danger. Between California, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado, at least 43 million Americans are baking under record temperatures. 

 

We left the apt at 7pm, called a taxi, picked up MT and went to Antica Pizza in La Mesa barrio of Envigado. Nicely, Gloria let us sit inside, but we were the only ones; everyone else had to sit on the curb to eat their pizza. When we left it was in a light drizzle but luckily not hard enough to bother us much and I don’t think it lasted very long. We were back at the apt by 9pm.

 

The US has 6,154,383 ð 6,217,833 ð 6,241,869 coronavirus cases with 186,300+ ð 187,600+ ð 188,000+ deaths.

Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 641,574 ð 650,062 ð 658,456 cases with 21,156 deaths.  Medellin has 48,968 ð 49,932 ð 50,942 cases, an increase of 1,008 from September 4th to 5th. Envigado has a total of 2,698 cases, an increase of 45 from September 4th to 5th.

 

Joke of the day

One day a husband comes home from work. His wife greets him and says, "Honey, you know, in the upstairs bathroom one of the pipes is leaking, could you fix it?"

The husband says, "Who do I look like, Mr. Plumber?"

A few days go by, and he comes home from work and his wife says, "Honey, my car won't start. I think it needs a new battery. Could you change it for me?"

He says: "Who do I look like, Mr. Goodwrench?"

Another few days go by, and it's raining pretty hard. The wife finds a leak in the roof.

She says, "Honey, there's a leak on the roof! Can you please fix it?"

He says, "Who do I look like, Bob Vila?"

The next day the husband comes home, and the roof is fixed. So is the plumbing. So is the car.

He asks his wife what happened. "Oh, I had a handyman come in and fix them," she says.

"Great! What did he charge?" he says.

"Nothing. He said he'd do it for free if I either baked him a cake or slept with him."

"Cool! Well, what kind of cake did you make?" asks the husband.

"Who do I look like," she says, "Betty Crocker?"

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