Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Let there be snark.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Petty moves from a petty man.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update: Tuesday/Wednesday, June 30-July 1

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update: Tuesday/Wednesday, June 30-July 1

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50Comments

  1. 1.

    Mary G

    God these idiots are going to get a couple of million Americans killed and drop the economy into the toilet for a decade.

  3. 3.

    Amir Khalid

    Malaysia’s daily numbers. One new case, the lowest number reported since the second wave here began on March 27. It’s an imported case: a Malaysian returning from Turkey. Cumulative total 8,640 cases.

    At today’s media briefing, still in progress as I type, DG of Health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah says it’s a landmark achievement to have zero cases from local infection. He congratulates us Malaysians on our self-control and discipline in observing the new norms, but reminds us that we need to keep it up because the virus is still out there in the world.

    21 more patients recovered and were discharged, total 8,375 recovered or 96.9% of the cumulative total. That leaves 144 active and contagious patients in hospital for isolation/treatment; four are in ICU, two of them on ventilators.

    No new deaths. That’s 17 days in a row with no fatalities from Covid-19. Infection fatality rate is 1.4%, case fatality rate is 1.42%.

  4. 4.

    Gvg

    I haven’t seen it mentioned specifically, but I don’t see how any military units can remain uninfected. Soldiers and sailors live and work in large groups. They seem like sitting ducks in virus conditions. I don’t see how to get around that.

  5. 5.

    Amir Khalid

    I think there’s a generic version of remdesivir, which is available only to developing nations. I don’t know if Malaysia still counts as one, but Dr Noor Hisham said today there are only nine Covid-19 patients here for whom it might be suitable.

  6. 6.

    terben

    From the Australian Dept of Health:

    ‘As at 3pm on 1 July 2020, a total of 7,920 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Australia, including 104 deaths and 7,063 have been reported as recovered from COVID-19.

    • Over the past week, there has been an average of 57 new cases reported each day. Of the newly reported cases, the majority have been from Victoria.
    • Following the peak of cases at the end of March, there have been a relatively low number of new cases reported daily between mid-April and mid-June 2020. Cases have increased since late June however they remain below the March peak.
    • Of cases with a reported place of acquisition, 59% have recent international travel history, including over 1,300 cases associated with cruise ships.
    • To date, over 2,505,500 tests have been conducted nationally. Of those tests conducted 0.3% have been positive.’

    87 new cases today, 1 reclassified for a net increase of 86. 14 cases in NSW, all in quarantine. 73 cases in Victoria, which is doing it tough at the moment. At this time NSW has not closed the border to Victoria, (it would be logistically difficult anyway) but they are promising massive fines for any Victorians from the designated lockdown zones who think it might be a good idea to visit.

    The Victorian outbreak seems to have started in a quarantine hotel, when security staff became infected and then spread it among their families. In my state, quarantine security is being done by police rather than private contractors. There are lessons to be learned everywhere.

  7. 7.

    Amir Khalid

    @Gvg:

    I’m surprised that the US military’s only widely known outbreak was aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

  8. 8.

    Kirk Spencer

    • Houston numbers from the Texas medical center here. The short is 40,861 confirmed cases is 1.4x the number 7 days ago.

    While TMC says there is enough bed space for another couple weeks at this rate, several news reports last night said local hospitals are transferring patients out to other sites so as to make room.

  10. 10.

    Amir Khalid

    In other news, Education Minister Dr. Mohd Radzi Mohamad Jidin announced today that school will reopen for all remaining grades this month. Fifth formers and sixth formers in Semester II, the grades sitting for critical public exams, are already back in school. Semester I sixth formers, first, second, third and fourth formers, and children in year 5 and year 6 go back to school on the 15th. Years 1 to 4 go back on the 22nd. Schools are subject to standard operating procedures drawn up with the Health Ministry’s input.

  11. 11.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Mary G:

    God these idiots are going to get a couple of million Americans killed and drop the economy into the toilet for a decade.

    Some perspective here – at least 10s of millions of non-voting selfish shithead children (of all ages) didn’t have to live through 4 years of having (whiny voice) “Ewwww Hillary!” as President. Because they used their votes to tell her to fuck off. So hooray for them.

  13. 13.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Yesterday, Beijing reported 3 new domestic confirmed cases, and no new suspect and asymptomatic cases. One of the case had been identified as a close contact of a previous confirmed case, and was placed under centralized quarantine, since 6/19. Another case has several coworkers and family members with connection to the Xinfadi wholesale produce exchange, had dinner with a previous confirmed case; the case was identified as a close contact on 6/26, and was placed under centralized quarantine. The final had shopped at Xinfadi on 6/11. She went into self-quarantine for 14 days. On 6/21 she developed mild symptoms (headache, nausea and loss of smell), but did not seek treatment. On 6/25, she felt that she had completed her self-quarantine without incident, and went out to hang out with friends. She tested positive on 6/30. We may see some of her friends join the infected list in the coming days.

    Overall, I think the Xinfadi outbreaks has been brought under control. It was discovered adequately early, and the authorities responded quite quickly and with abundance of caution, and the testing campaign in Beijing has been truly massive. Given the initial epicenter, this outbreak had the potential to quickly spread across Beijing and Northern China, a slow response like Wuhan in mid-Jan. (never mind the likes of the US and Brazil) would have been catastrophic.

  14. 14.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Saddam Hussein had “Baghdad Bob”. Any catchy monikers for the current and past White House Press Secretaries?

  17. 17.

    YY_Sima Qian

    For sample pooling to work, overall COVID-19 prevalence needs to be relatively low. Taking Utah’s 10% positive rate, pooling a batch of 5 samples to be tested together, 40% of the batches would return positive and require retesting the individual samples. Taking Arizona’s 25% positive rate, 75% of the batches would produce positive results that would require retesting of the individual samples. If one has to frequently retest high risk groups (EMS, police, firefighters, medical staff, nursing home staff, service staff, etc.), then sample pooling might make sense.

    With low prevalence, sample pooling can quickly achieve extraordinary testing capacity. Its value has been demonstrated by Germany and China (in Wuhan and Beijing).

  18. 18.

    Kirk Spencer

    @Kirk Spencer:  I should correct and clarify my post. TMC says it has enough beds, true. But they expect to exceed phase 1 beds after tomorrow. Phase 1 is ICU beds in standard configuration. Phase 2 is still intensive care beds, but reorganized and reconfigured t almost double. What is not expected over the next two weeks is phase 3 which is using non intensive care beds

    So yeah, at roughly 1% of Houston infected, things are about to get interesting here.

  21. 21.

    randy

    Dear Kay,

    When you talk about the low priority of primary and secondary schools of America in this covid crisis, I hear urgency, anger, and even desperation. Those were my own feelings in the late eighties to early nineties in the face of a home schooling failure on the Afro side of my family. Urgency is good all the way, but sometimes anger and desperation, as valid as they are, don’t help find the better way forward when taken as guidance instead of motivation. It took me time to learn that even a failed home schooling can help students grow more peaceful and well adjusted. Somehow destitution and often boyfriend trouble did not keep my sister from giving her three black sons enough emotional reassurance and intellectual stimulation to overcome that academic weakness later on. The oldest leads a world-wide team of software engineers. After being fry cook and camp boss on every dig site, the next has begun work on a masters in anthropology. And the youngest I thought would always be a stoner mechanic executed a 4.0 tour de force of industrial design and went straight into law school.

    The lessons I take for our current schooling dilemma are three-fold.

    Let us work toward classroom effect, but not at deadly risk.

    Let us spend freely on families, communities, and broad proliferation of intellectual stimulation.

    Finally, although you have reminded us that the new at-risk population is similar to the old, let us be alert and inquisitive to new winners and unexpected losers. Failure shall not be allowed, even if covidian civilization must redefine success and failure.

    randy

  22. 22.

    Kay

    I’m optimistic about the election but I think the idea that Trump doesn’t “want” a second term is flat-out delusional.

    We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars he gifted the very wealthy with those tax cuts. There is an enormous amount of money at stake. And that doesn’t even take into account that he gutted environmental regulations, essentially ended tax collections enforcement, gutted worker safety and product regulations, and on and on.

    They’re not going down without a fight. It’s just now dawning on them that they might actually lose. There is a going to be a ferocious response. These assholes aren’t returning the billions and billions Trump handed them without all manner of sleazy tricks and skullduggery. They also have a completely corrupt AG in their corner and we already saw that the FBI is politicized when they intervened on Trump’s behalf in 2016. Remember that? The FBI snowflakes were pissed off that BLM activists thought police should stop murdering people so the FBI blatantly backed Trump? What’s changed about that? Nothing.

  23. 23.

    Kay

    @randy:

    The oldest leads a world-wide team of software engineers. After being fry cook and camp boss on every dig site, the next has begun work on a masters in anthropology. And the youngest I thought would always be a stoner mechanic executed a 4.0 tour de force of industrial design and went straight into law school.

    That’s great randy but in my district only half the students go on to college as it is and they had school every day. In our district, the single best predictor of success after high school for low income students is attendance. Showing up. There are always exceptions, but they are the exceptions. In a smaller school you can count those exceptions on one hand. What is much more common in our school is when low income students are given extra supports in a directed, planned way many, many more of them succeed. We don’t leave it to chance because if we did the vast majority of them wouldn’t succeed. Some would! But not nearly as many.
    So I don’t think it’s acceptable to just hope people find their way and all become ace homeschoolers, or if they don’t become ace homeschoolers (as in your case) the students somehow persevere and overcome that. No other developed country is taking this laissez-faire approach to public education in a pandemic. I guess it could work but what you’re betting here is 50 million children. That’s who we’ll be conducting this experiment on. They had nothing to do with our political and governmental collapse. They are the LEAST responsible for this mess we find ourselves in.

  24. 24.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @Kay: To be blunt, I’m not a fan of the Pulling Myself Up By My Own Bootstraps theory of empowerment, especially when the hucksters who peddle this bullshit inherited a shoe store.

  25. 25.

    Kay

    @The Thin Black Duke:

    I’m on a school committee in a small town and we have these success stories every year. A disadvantaged kid who is bright and bored in school so cuts their own path and succeeds. But they’re so much the exception they inspire individual anecdotes. MUCH more common is where the school intervened – planned, specific actions- and took a much larger group from “poor” to “hopefully middle class”.  We can’t do this one by one anymore than we can control the virus one by one. There are 50 million of them.

  26. 26.

    Sab

    @Kay: My stepdaughter’s step- oldest was “home- schooled” ( i.e. not schooled) for most of her elementary school. Basically she stayed home and watched the babies. We got her into the public schools when she was due for junior high school. She graduated from high school a couple of years ago with an ACT in the top 5%. No way she could have done that from home.

  27. 27.

    Kay

    @Sab:

    I don’t know if she would or wouldn’t have but there are extraordinary people – no one doubts that. But that’s not the point of a generalized public education system- the point of a generalized public education is to move big numbers of kids in a general direction.

    There are people with extraordinary immune systems, or really good genes where they smoke or whatever and live to 102. No one designs a health care system around those people. Not taking anything away from them! But they’re not what we’re doing with this.

    America better be really damn exceptional because they’re abandoning their entire public education system – unlike every other developed county in this crisis- and hoping it works out. It’s not going to. It will be a disaster. I would bet my house on it.

  28. 28.

    Kay

    @Sab:

    I also think if we’re going to say “we follow the science!” we can’t just blithely ignore the academy of pediatrics who put out a really strong (and supported) statement urging schools to open.

    That’s science too. You don’t get to just discard the parts you don’t like.

  31. 31.

    Sab

    @Kay: Some of my step-in-laws have hired teachers to do their day care. Setting up their own little professional day-care/nursery schools. They aren’t trusting their government. Their parents survived China’s cultural revolution. They are glad to be Americans but wary of government competence.

  32. 32.

    Kay

    @Sab:

    Oh, God, no I don’t. I spent all these decades getting real estate and paying it off and now I can’t fucking wait to unload it. What I would like is a newer mobile home closer to my grandchild – so I can essentially stalk her :)

    My daughter is going to put her in some hippie school, I just know it. She sends me these links- “the woods school”. OMFG. They’re not going to teach her to read, I just know it.

  33. 33.

    randy

    @Kay:

    Everyone has a chance to be exceptional if they get enough support. If it’s the only safe way, I say commandeer buildings until every four or five have their own room, but also think outside the classroom. Think big. Pay students to study. Pay parents to teach.

  35. 35.

    Obdurodon

    My school district just sent out their “blueprint” for reopening. 60 pages. Measures include a week-in/week-at-home cohort system, fewer/longer classes to reduce each student’s number of contacts per day, various measures to reduce encounters in hallways, distancing, PPE, frequent cleanings, HVAC audit and possible upgrade (for already-pretty-modern systems). There is a fully remote option, but needs-based and requires approval. It’s about as good as one could expect, but as I read it I kept noticing how practically every measure is possible only because we’re an affluent suburb. Poorer city schools are going to have a hard time with even the most basic improvements. I don’t know how – we can’t undo the legacy from years of inequitable funding in just a couple of months – but we need to do better.

  36. 36.

    Sab

    @Kay: Akron schools just released their plan. I am happy. Everyone (teachers and pupils) in masks. Kids partly in class and partly at home to keep class size down. Special needs kids high priority to get more in class time.

  38. 38.

    Obdurodon

    @randy: It might seem a bit cynical, but I’m pretty sure there will be a lot of commercial real estate that will be empty for a while because the occupants went out of business. We could commandeer some of that space, possibly offering later tax breaks as recompense. Managing many such spaces would be a logistical nightmare so I’m not sure it would actually work, but the resource is there.

  39. 39.

    Sab

    @Kay: Plus all of the students come from anti-vaxx families.

    ETA: My college roommate teaches at a Waldorf Steiner school. Parents are amazing, and not in a good way. Forget discipline.

  40. 40.

    Robert Sneddon

    Nicola Sturgeon, our First Minister here in Scotland is currently biting lumps out of PM Boris Johnson after his fatuous statement in the House of Commons about how there would be no quarantine restrictions at the Scottish border because “one nation” and all that.

    Right now Scotland is doing better than England in getting its COVID numbers down. Since health is a devolved issue then requiring English visitors to Scotland to have to undergo some kind of quarantine is entirely within the remit of the Scottish government. There’s no quarantine at the moment but the way England is approaching the end of initial lockdown in a laissez-faire manner it’s not inconceivable that the decision to require quarantine might well be made.

  42. 42.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Sab: It’s the other way round, Britain (or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) is one country but Scotland is a nation within that Union as is England (Wales is a Principality). It has a national assembly, the Scottish Parliament which has devolved powers over things like health in Scotland.

  43. 43.

    Quiltingfool

    I live in the Lake of the Ozarks, MO, region.  I am puzzled by our Covid numbers – ranks about the low middle range for all MO counties (60 cases, 1 death) – I thought it would be higher considering the huge number of people coming here for Memorial Day weekend (remember the pictures of crowded lake bar swimming pools?).

    Two things that I can think may have bearing on these numbers:  people come here for outdoor activities – boating and drinking/eating outside, and these folks go back home – and take infection with them.  Tourists mingle with other tourists – locals generally stay away from restaurants, bars, and to some degree, the lake, during summer weekends.  We leave that to tourists.  The folks who have lake homes may go to lakeside bars (easy to get to by boat), but they may be entertaining family at home.

    I don’t know.  You’d think we would be a hotspot, but no so far.  And that’s the key word – so far.  I wear a mask, want to protect the workers who are surrounded by people all day long.

  44. 44.

    randy

    @Obdurodon: u not cynical. mi cynical.

    Thanks for help in brainstorm. I’ve helped solve these thorny patches keeping an open mind, persisting, etc. Not so nearly under threat of death those times.

  45. 45.

    randy

    @randy: How about:

    Visiting teacher comes in the bookmobile, starts the lesson, pays parent a pittance to finish it and supervise homework?

  46. 46.

    Lacuna Synechdoche

    AP Europe via Anne Laurie @ Top:

    “The virus is out there, still circling like a shark in the water.” Boris Johnson urged caution as a local outbreak forced authorities to lock down a city in England …

    Every time I see a picture of Boris Johnson, I wonder how could someone who looks that ridiculous become Prime Minister of the UK … and then I remember I’m American and who our president is.

  47. 47.

    Lacuna Synechdoche

    AP via Anne Laurie @ Top:

    BREAKING: The European Union announces that it will reopen its borders to travelers from 14 countries, but most Americans have been refused entry for at least another two weeks due to soaring coronavirus infections in the U.S.

    The number of increasing infections is already baked in for the next 3 weeks, which means our numbers will continue soaring for at least 5 weeks. The EU should have announced an at least 6 week delay in admitting people from the US, and frankly even that’s optimistic.

  49. 49.

    Bill Arnold

    @Obdurodon:

    My school district just sent out their “blueprint” for reopening. 60 pages.

    Masks/face coverings?
    (Meals and cracking down on general non-compliance would be a problem but even 80 percent mask usage would help a lot.)

  50. 50.

    Royston Vasey

    New Zealand
    0 new cases for the second day running.
    0 new deaths (total = 22)

    22 active cases (all returning NZers from overseas)
    including 1 in hospital (non-critical)

    The total number of confirmed cases remains at 1178, with 350 probable cases, for a combined total of 1528.

    In other news, paid parental leave was increased from 22 weeks to 26 weeks.

    RV in NZ

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