Please stop shooting and attacking people who tell you that you have to wear a mask. You do not have a constitutional right to run around harming other people because you can’t stand the stink of your own breath.
Notes below. Updates through the day.
📰 First thing’s first. The LA Times trotted out this story this morning: “Scientists say a now-dominant strain of the coronavirus appears to be more contagious than original.” I’m gonna need everyone to take a whole entire salt block with this story because it’s got some issues. The main issue is that this whole article is based on a “pre-print” study and the claims made by that study’s author on her personal Facebook page. Scientists around the world right now are sharing their studies as fast and as publicly as they can, without peer review, which is fine for scientists and science. Problem is, journalists are grabbing these pre-prints and running with them, without them really being vetted properly. Here’s one expert talking about why the LA Times article is dubious.
📈 A new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll finds that Americans widely oppose re-opening businesses while the pandemic’s still happening.
🤡 The Trump administration has known about COVID-19 since early January and has been ignoring the whole time. We knew that already, but the doctor leading the vaccine charge for the US government was fired for trying to warn the administration, so he just lodged a formal whistleblower’s complaint about the situation.
🇺🇸 This take on the Joe Biden/Tara Reade situation pretty accurately summarizes my feelings on the matter.
🦠 A new death model for COVID-19 predicts 135,000 American deaths by early August, due to the lifting of various stay home orders.
🐝 This has nothing to do with COVID-19 at all, but since everyone (including me) was all het up about it the other day, “‘Murder Hornets’ Are Unlikely to Murder You Personally.” (I mean, that’s what they told us about COVID-19 at first, too.)
😷 Stillwater, Oklahoma mandated public mask wearing, and then almost immediately had to rescind the order when assholes started making violent death threats against store workers trying to enforce the order.
🦠 Hey, remember the prison thing I’ve been talking about? Nearly every single inmate in a Louisiana prison dorm has tested positive for COVID-19.
🤡 The Trump administration is going to shut down their pandemic task force.
🍊 Meanwhile, Trump is absolutely going to forge ahead with attempting to force the country to “re-open” before it’s safe. He doesn’t care that a hundred thousand people or more will die, and he isn’t capable of feeling bad about that. He sees a bad economy and thinks that if he forces the country to “re-open,” the economy will get better and he’ll win re-election. He thinks that if every single person in America knows someone who either died, or survived COVID-19, or suffered lifelong detrimental effects from COVID-19 (strokes, heart attacks, kidney failures, etc.), that, for some reason, people will still vote for him. Please, for the love of little puppies with heart-shaped spots, don’t let him be right.
😷 Calvin Munerlyn, a security guard at a Family Dollar in Flint, Michigan, was shot dead yesterday because he told a woman her daughter couldn’t come in the store without a mask. The woman came back with her father later on, and the father shot Munerlyn in the head.
🍖 The situation in meat packing plants across the country is dire.
💉 Pfizer has begun human trials with a COVID-19 vaccine.
🍊 “I’m viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors. They’re warriors. We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country […] Will some people be affected badly? Yes.” – Donald Trump.
The president of the United States doesn’t care if his constituents die, as long as his economy numbers look good. And with that, we’re done for the day. Here, enjoy this bouncy baby goat.
Notes & Thoughts 