Economy
The Untold Story of the Birth of Social Distancing (Evan G.)
How that idea — born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak — became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis.
It required the key proponents — Dr. Mecher, a Department of Veterans Affairs physician, and Dr. Hatchett, an oncologist turned White House adviser — to overcome intense initial opposition.
Many states are far short of Covid-19 testing levels needed for safe reopening, new analysis shows (tmn)
But the new state-by-state review reveals a far more fragmented picture: 31 states and the District of Columbia were doing too little testing last week to identify most infected people in a timely manner. Ten states would need to increase their daily testing totals by at least 10,000 to do so by May 1. New York, for instance, would have to perform more than 100,000 more tests a day, and New Jersey 68,000 more. Nineteen states — all but two in the South or the western half of the country — are already doing enough testing.
Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality (tmn)
State and federal officials have nowhere near the testing capacity that experts say is needed to track and limit the spread of the virus, and there is no vaccine yet. But states are already reopening, urged on by President Trump, who is eager to restart the United States economy.
That push is likely to exacerbate longstanding inequalities, with workers who are college educated, relatively affluent and primarily white able to continue working from home and minimizing outdoor excursions to reduce the risk of contracting the virus.
Reopening states too early will bring deadlier outcomes, coronavirus projection models show (tmn)
One model frequently cited by the White House coronavirus task force has upped its predicted death toll again, this time projecting 74,000 Americans will lose their lives to the virus by August.
The projection was adjusted because of longer peaks in some states and signs that people are becoming more active again, according to Dr. Chris Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
An ER doctor who continued to treat patients after she recovered from Covid-19 has died by suicide (Sparky1)
She worked in the emergency department and had been on the front lines for weeks, handling the onslaught of cases, her father said. New York City has been the US’ pandemic epicenter, recording nearly 300,000 cases and more than 22,000 deaths as of Tuesday morning.
Breen contracted Covid-19 and took a week and a half off to recover, but when she went back to work, she couldn’t last through a 12-hour shift, her father said. Still, she felt like she had to get back in there to help her colleagues.
How Do You Reopen a State That Never Closed? (tmn)
But on March 11, the whole state had 14 confirmed cases, all tied to an Egyptian cruise along the Nile sponsored by a local bank. Our local leaders didn’t seem too worried. One county supervisor was on the road with the Bernie Sanders campaign; another left that day for a vacation with his family to New Zealand. Life in Iowa in mid-March felt like watching your toddler walk along the edge of the water. Maybe he’d fall and be okay, maybe he wouldn’t be okay, or maybe he wouldn’t fall.
New York Cautious As More US States Ease Virus Lockdowns (tmn)
Cuomo plans to allow manufacturing and construction to restart in some of the state’s least-affected areas after May 15 as part of a phased reopening.
But for now that seems about it for New York, which has been shut down since mid-March.
Macomb County business raided by the FBI over possible improper COVID-19 treatments (Joe V.)
After talking to staff members off-camera, some believe this is a misunderstanding. They claim the vitamin C is meant to help prevent or shorten the duration.
Dr. Charles Moks, who owns Allure Medical Spa, did a Facebook live video giving an IV-vitamin C treatment for free to a Detroit police officer. In the video, Moks said “What I’m finding in practice — I treat a lot of COVID patients — is that if we catch people early, get them on intravenous vitamin c, they turn around really fast.”
James Howard Kunstler: The Great Conundrum (thc0655)
Which leads to the Great Conundrum of the moment: Reality is telling us that things organized on the gigantic scale are entering failure mode; but so many Americans are employed by exactly those activities organized on the gigantic scale. Or were, I should say. The humungous joint effort by the federal government and its caporegime, the federal reserve, to flood the system with dollars is precisely a desperate effort to prop up the giant-scale activities that defined the prior state-of-things. Those giant enterprises even did an end-run around the truly small businesses that were supposed to get scores of billions in grants, loans, and bailouts so congress is attempting a do-over of that play.
Mark Manson: Nobody Knows What Is Going On (yogmonster)
Let’s start with the first system: the spread of the virus. Despite months of research and testing, we still know very, very little. For example, we know that the virus is highly contagious, but we still have no clue how contagious. Studies pin its R0 number (how many people each sick person goes on to infect) as high as 6.6 and as low as 1.4. For reference, that’s like saying the virus will infect anywhere from 20% of the population to 80%, a range so broad that you might as well pick a number out of a hat.
Pentagon officially releases UFO videos (Sparky1)
“After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems,” said Gough in a statement, “and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.”
The Navy now has formal guidelines for how its pilots can report when they believe they have seen possible UFO’s.
Coronavirus forced a group of teens to sail home across the Atlantic (Sparky1)
The students, aged between 14 and 17, were on a sail/study program around the Caribbean on the “Wylde Swan” two-mast topsail schooner. While they were scheduled to fly home from Cuba last month, restrictions due to the global pandemic put their return journey in major doubt.
Christophe Meijer, the director of Masterskip, the company which organized the program, told CNN: “We decided the best solution would be to sail back with the students to the Netherlands, rather than staying in the Caribbean, with all the question marks there.
The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds (Sparky1)
Unlike historical megadroughts triggered by natural climate cycles, emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have contributed to the current one, the study finds. Warming temperatures and increasing evaporation, along with earlier spring snowmelt, have pushed the Southwest into its second-worst drought in more than a millennium of observations.
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The post Daily Digest 4/28 – The Untold Story of the Birth of Social Distancing, How Do You Reopen A State That Never Closed? appeared first on Peak Prosperity.
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