My area seems to think it’ll be reopening in a couple of weeks, including sit-down dining and hair salons. I have to tell you: there is no way in hell I’ll be sitting down in a restaurant or letting some rando breathe all over me while they screw up my haircut anytime soon.
Notes below. Updates through the day.
🦠 The standard and most common initial symptoms of COVID-19 are coughing, fever, and shortness of breath. But that’s not the only way it presents: Doctors keep discovering new ways the coronavirus attacks the body.
🦠 COVID-19 is making its way into rural areas. These areas lack the health, financial, and logistical resources of cities, and their outbreaks are probably going to be longer, slower, and more devastating. Also, Trump is hiding the fact that the coronavirus is heading into his voting base.
🇷🇺 Putin is also terrible at handling pandemics, if that makes you feel any better.
🍊 Even as Tom Perez and the DNC are (grudgingly) investigating options to hold their convention without meeting in person, Trump is insisting the RNC go ahead with an in-person Republican convention.
🤥 Conspiracy theories around COVID-19 are driving me up a fucking wall. JFC, people, this disease and the pandemic are terrifying enough on their own with a bunch of lunatics inventing more bullshit and making things worse.
🍊 Speaking of conspiracy theories and their believers: Trump. Not that he necessarily believes them. He doesn’t believe in anything. But he’ll sure as hell use them to rile up his base of fools.
🦠 COVID-19 seems to be causing something similar to Kawasaki disease in some kids.
🍽️ Remember the Colorado restaurant that opened for Mother’s Day? Shut down the next day.
💭 The story of the Colorado restaurant made my boyfriend and I remember the county health inspector we used to work with back when we worked in restaurants. “Can you imagine what he’d do to us if we tried to pull that stunt?” I asked. “He’d kick in the doors and shoot us in the knees,” my boyfriend answered.
🍊 You remember how Trump told people to inject disinfectants to cure COVID-19? Of course you do. Many idiots actually did it. Well, they drank it, that is. Because even though they worship Trump and will do whatever he suggests, they’re still too stupid to follow directions, I guess.
📰 A Harvard-NPR analysis released on 5/7/20 says that only 9 states are ready to safely reopen. They are: Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
🤡 So, in order to keep Trump and his merry band of corrupt morons safe in the White House, they’re testing everyone daily (y’know, just like the refuse to do for the rest of the country). Except they’re using tests that get it wrong about half the time.
🤡 The Trump administration is trying to pressure the CDC into playing number games with the COVID-19 death tolls to make Trump look better. Reminder: we’re already undercounting the deaths from COVID-19.
🦠 Dr. Rick Bright, who was forced out of his job, is expected to testify to Congress on Thursday that shit will get real this winter if they don’t get this pandemic under control. I’m sure he’ll put it more civilly than that.
🤡 Mitch McConnell is going around saying that President Obama didn’t leave the Trump administration a pandemic game plan, which is a bald-faced lie. Obama left Trump a game plan, a strategy session, and a whole goddamn department dedicated to watching for pandemics. Trump flushed the whole thing.
💰 So, the Federal Reserve is basically printing money to see us through the pandemic, and I was always taught that was a bad thing, but it turns out Ron Paul thinks that too, so clearly that’s wrong. At any rate, USA Today has an article about all that: US is ‘printing’ money to help save the economy from the COVID-19 crisis, but some wonder how far it can go.
📀 The world’s last Blockbuster is still open, even during the pandemic.
🍑🍆 Thanks to the porn industry, Super 8 was standardized for film. Porn killed Betamax, because you could get pornos on VHS. Closed captioning is thanks to porn. Porn drove the development and modernization of streaming video. Porn drove the invention of online payments. Porn killed HD DVD, because it went with Blu Ray for high def video. Pornos are the innovators behind all human endeavors. Well, that might be taking things a bit too far. But it turns out that the porn industry has a thing or two to teach Hollywood about how to make films during a pandemic.
📰 Indiana’s recent study shows that about 2.8% of Indiana either has, or has had, COVID-19. They came up with a fatality rate of about .6 percent, which is quite a bit worse than the seasonal flu but not as bad as some estimates we’ve heard. About 45% of COVID-19 cases were completely asymptomatic. And Indiana’s testing regimen was missing 10 out of every 11 cases in the state. Read all about it.
Well, I’ve got all these video games and they ain’t gonna play themselves, so I’m outta here.
Notes & Thoughts 