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Jul. 28th, 2020 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction - which of course, I can't read at the moment. There's a lot of books and television shows that I can't read or watch at the moment.
Apparently, I'm in the minority in this.
2. At 88, He's a Historical Rarity - the Living Son of a Slave - apparently the Washington Post is letting me read their articles again in the hopes that I'll subscribe. (Nope, can't afford it - already subscribed to the NY Times.)
After his father died in 1938, Dan Smith picked up where Abram’s life left off, witnessing decades of the nation’s racial history — the injustice of Jim Crow, the grief and glory of the civil rights movement, the elections of the first black president and then Donald Trump, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. He watched the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis caught on cellphone video, horrified, and wonders where this new unrest will lead.
All along, Smith created his own history — as a medic in the Korean War and a hometown hero who rescued a man from a flood. He’s been chased on a dark road by white supremacists in Alabama as a foot soldier in the fight for civil rights. Smith was there when a young firebrand named John Lewis roused the crowd at the March on Washington, and he linked arms with activists in Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Just weeks before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Smith moved to the Washington area, where he built a rich and meaningful life. Smith and his first wife, who was black, raised their two children in Bethesda, Md., while he pursued his career as a federal worker promoting health and education and fighting poverty. He retired in 1994 and in 2006 wed his second wife, Loretta Neumann, who is white, at the National Cathedral, where as head usher he escorted presidents.
Daniel Smith and his wife, Loretta Neumann, walk past their vegetable garden in Northwest Washington. When Smith and Neumann married their first spouses in the 1960s, interracial marriage was illegal. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Daniel Smith and his wife, Loretta Neumann, walk past their vegetable garden in Northwest Washington. When Smith and Neumann married their first spouses in the 1960s, interracial marriage was illegal. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
What does it mean to Smith to be the living son of an enslaved person in the 21st century?
“Quite frankly, I’ve just grown up and been busy, and I’ve never thought much about it,” Smith said.
A courtly man with pecan-colored skin wearing a perfectly pressed blue and white striped collared shirt and khakis, Smith shared his life story from the wide front porch of his home in Northwest Washington on a sweltering July day. Cars rushed by as Neumann leaned in at his side to listen.
Yet when he thinks about it in this moment, time feels elastic. The 157 years since his father’s birth had once seemed like “a solid gap,” but now the time strikes him as distressingly brief. With Trump as president, the years feel to Smith like an accordion — the decades folding, folding — back toward slavery “almost to the point where it could happen again.”
And with a mountaintop view in his ninth decade of life, Smith can also see clearly the valleys and hills — how his father was shaped by slavery and racism and was able to push ahead despite it, and how Abram Smith did the best he knew how to prepare his children for life.
3.You can stop cleaning your mail now
Scientists still don’t have a perfect grip on COVID-19—they don’t know where exactly it came from, how exactly to treat it, or how long immunity lasts.
But in the past few months, scientists have converged on a theory of how this disease travels: via air. The disease typically spreads among people through large droplets expelled in sneezes and coughs, or through smaller aerosolized droplets, as from conversations, during which saliva spray can linger in the air.
Surface transmission—from touching doorknobs, mail, food-delivery packages, and subways poles—seems quite rare. (Quite rare isn’t the same as impossible: The scientists I spoke with constantly repeated the phrase “people should still wash their hands.”) The difference may be a simple matter of time. In the hours that can elapse between, say, Person 1 coughing on her hand and using it to push open a door and Person 2 touching the same door and rubbing his eye, the virus particles from the initial cough may have sufficiently deteriorated.
The fact that surface areas—or “fomites,” in medical jargon—are less likely to convey the virus might seem counterintuitive to people who have internalized certain notions of grimy germs, or who read many news articles in March about the danger of COVID-19-contaminated food. Backing up those scary stories were several U.S. studies that found that COVID-19 particles could survive on surfaces for many hours and even days.
But in a July article in the medical journal The Lancet, Goldman excoriated those conclusions. All those studies that made COVID-19 seem likely to live for days on metal and paper bags were based on unrealistically strong concentrations of the virus. As he explained to me, as many as 100 people would need to sneeze on the same area of a table to mimic some of their experimental conditions. The studies “stacked the deck to get a result that bears no resemblance to the real world," Goldman said.
As a thousand internet commenters know by heart, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But with hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of scientists around the world tracing COVID-19’s chains of transmission, the extreme infrequency of evidence may indeed be evidence of extreme infrequency.
A good case study of how the coronavirus spreads, and does not spread, is the famous March outbreak in a mixed-use skyscraper in Seoul, South Korea. On one side of the 11th floor of the building, about half the members of a chatty call center got sick. But less than 1 percent of the remainder of the building contracted COVID-19, even though more than 1,000 workers and residents shared elevators and were surely touching the same buttons within minutes of one another. “The call-center case is a great example,” says Donald Schaffner, a food-microbiology professor who studies disease contamination at Rutgers University. “You had clear airborne transmission with many, many opportunities for mass fomite transmission in the same place. But we just didn’t see it.” Schaffner told me, “In the entire peer-reviewed COVID-19 literature, I’ve found maybe one truly plausible report, in Singapore, of fomite transmission. And even there, it is not a slam-dunk case. ”
The scientists I spoke with emphasized that people should still wash their hands, avoid touching their face when they’ve recently been in public areas, and even use gloves in certain high-contact jobs. They also said deep cleans were perfectly justified in hospitals. But they pointed out that the excesses of hygiene theater have negative consequences.
For one thing, an obsession with contaminated surfaces distracts from more effective ways to combat COVID-19. “People have prevention fatigue,” Goldman told me. “They’re exhausted by all the information we’re throwing at them. We have to communicate priorities clearly; otherwise, they’ll be overloaded.”
Hygiene theater can take limited resources away from more important goals. Goldman shared with me an email he had received from a New Jersey teacher after his Lancet article came out. She said her local schools had considered shutting one day each week for “deep cleaning.” At a time when returning to school will require herculean efforts from teachers and extraordinary ingenuity from administrators to keep kids safely distanced, setting aside entire days to clean surfaces would be a pitiful waste of time and scarce local tax revenue.
New York City’s decision to spend lavishly on power scrubbing its subways shows how absurd hygiene theater can be, in practice. As the city’s transit authority considers reduced service and layoffs to offset declines in ticket revenue, it is on pace to spend more than $100 million this year on new cleaning practices and disinfectants. Money that could be spent on distributing masks, or on PSA campaigns about distancing, or actual subway service, is being poured into antiseptic experiments that might be entirely unnecessary. Worst of all, these cleaning sessions shut down trains for hours in the early morning, hurting countless late-night workers and early-morning commuters.
As long as people wear masks and don’t lick one another, New York’s subway-germ panic seems irrational. In Japan, ridership has returned to normal, and outbreaks traced to its famously crowded public transit system have been so scarce that the Japanese virologist Hitoshi Oshitani concluded, in an email to The Atlantic, that “transmission on the train is not common.” Like airline travelers forced to wait forever in line so that septuagenarians can get a patdown for underwear bombs, New Yorkers are being inconvenienced in the interest of eliminating a vanishingly small risk.
Finally, and most important, hygiene theater builds a false sense of security, which can ironically lead to more infections. Many bars, indoor restaurants, and gyms, where patrons are huffing and puffing one another’s stale air, shouldn’t be open at all. They should be shut down and bailed out by the government until the pandemic is under control. No amount of soap and bleach changes this calculation.
Instead, many of these establishments are boasting about their cleaning practices while inviting strangers into unventilated indoor spaces to share one another’s microbial exhalations. This logic is warped. It completely misrepresents the nature of an airborne threat. It’s as if an oceanside town stalked by a frenzy of ravenous sharks urged people to return to the beach by saying, We care about your health and safety, so we’ve reinforced the boardwalk with concrete. Lovely. Now people can sturdily walk into the ocean and be separated from their limbs.
By funneling our anxieties into empty cleaning rituals, we lose focus on the more common modes of COVID-19 transmission and the most crucial policies to stop this plague. “My point is not to relax, but rather to focus on what matters and what works,” Goldman said. “Masks, social distancing, and moving activities outdoors. That’s it. That’s how we protect ourselves. That’s how we beat this thing.”
Be nice if we could move work and school outside. Maybe I should move into my brother's barn. Probably be freezing in the winter. Also it's too close to the post-apocalyptic book I wrote - where the protagonist moved into her brother's loft space. And - he has horrid wifi/internet access, which is crucial for what I'm doing.
4. I think I have a mouse, at least I hope it's a mouse.
Me: I think I have a mouse. I saw it run across the stove.
Mother: The stove? That's a bit high up for a mouse, they are usually on the ground.
Me: Well, it was big - so I hope it's not a spider.
Mother: I was thinking a cockroach.
Me: Too big and it moves more like a mouse.
Mother: Have you had mice before? I know in the last apartment -
Me: Yes. I found three dead ones. Used mint - they hate it, and steel wool, which didn't work as well. Mint worked better - but actually what killed them was the paint job. I'm not afraid of them, I just find them startling.
Mother: Yes, I'd prefer not to have them show up in my bed in the middle of the night. Our cats kept doing that. I was always having to chase them down and get rid of them. Your father never did - it was always me.
Me: You were also saving all our pets from the cats, the hamsters and the gerbil. Poor things.
Mother: Always in the middle of the night.
Me to Brother via texting: I have a mouse. Can I borrow Piper to get rid of it? (Piper is the cat.)
Bro: Oh, Clover (the other cat - which may be the pic above, they look alike to me) brought us a mouse in the middle of the bed at 4AM in the morning. I threw a towel over it, scooped it up and threw it outside. I'm a pro.
Me: Maybe I should borrow you?
5. Per the Governor's newsletter ....tonight.
We have exciting news today. The Eastman Kodak Company, a storied New York manufacturer based in Rochester, was awarded a $765 million federal loan under the Defense Production Act. This loan will allow Kodak to create a new business unit, Kodak Pharmaceuticals, dedicated to producing pharmaceutical ingredients that are essential for vital medications. New York's long-term support for Eastman Business Park helped allow the company to take advantage of this opportunity. Today's announcement means 300 direct jobs and 1,200 indirect jobs for New Yorkers. More importantly, it will help ensure that America can provide for our own needs in a pandemic like this one. Never again do we want to rely on shipments from China or elsewhere in order to get lifesaving medical supplies. It is not just a public health issue—it's a national security issue. This is a great step forward and a great business opportunity for New York.
That's nice. I'd rather they gave the money to my agency. But admittedly it would be a drop in the bucket at this stage. Maybe I should quit and join Kodak Pharmaceuticals as a contract administrator. Honestly, if you work in medicine right now, in any capacity? You're golden. That and technology.
Here's what else you need to know tonight in our on-going and seemingly ceaseless coverage of New York vs. the Coronavirus (and apparently idiotic Americans who can't get their act together)
*Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico have been added to the state's travel advisory list. Individuals traveling from these areas, and other states with high infection rates, must quarantine for 14 days. The advisory now applies to 34 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. See the full list and more details here. (They just keep adding and subtracting states, although I don't think they've subtracted any at the moment - possibly taking a wait and see approach with Texas, Arizona, Florida, and South Carolina - can't say I blame them.)
* The state has suspended liquor licenses for 12 New York City bars after finding egregious violations of pandemic-related Executive Orders. Over the weekend, the state task force, led by the State Police and State Liquor Authority, conducted over 1,300 compliance checks, documenting violations at 132 establishments. A list of licensees charged and businesses served with summary suspension orders can be found here. - at this rate no one will have a liquor license. There will be no bars or restaurants serving alcohol in NY State. Hmmm. It'll be like Kansas. Kansas has bizarre liquor rules. We used to go Missouri, if my Dad wanted a drink with dinner, and Kansas if he didn't.
The number of total hospitalizations remains low. Yesterday, there were 648 total hospitalizations. The State conducted 57,397 tests, of which 534, or 0.93%, were positive. Sadly, we lost 9 New Yorkers to the virus. I don't know - 534 cases seems high to me. I guess it's all relative? I mean other countries get close to that number and they shut down. Granted NY has 19 million people and in the Spring had 500-1000 deaths a day.
Major League Baseball teams are welcome to play in New York if they are experiencing difficulties in their home states. New York State has one of the lowest infection rates in the U.S. We have a full Department of Health protocol system in place. My offer to the MLB: If you are having problems playing in other states, come play in the Empire State. (Okay, so we are now bringing in the teams coming down with the virus in their home states? I'm not sure that's a good idea. The Yankees/Phillies game kept getting delayed because of the virus - in Philadelphia. And the Marlins had several members test positive. Do we want the Yankees and the Mets to get the virus?
Are we trying to kill the Yankees? I mean I get "Damn Yankees" but this is taking it a bit far, don't you think? Watching the US attempt to have a sports season is kind of like watching absurdist theater in slow motion.)
Reminder to stay cool and stay safe. If you go to a cooling center, beach or pool to escape the extreme heat, remember to socially distance and wear a mask. Learn how to identify the symptoms of heat-related illnesses, including heat strokes, here. - The pools are packed by the way, there's long lines to get into them. Same with beaches. I'm staying indoors. No summer vacation for yours truly. Although I am admittedly tempted to escape to my brother's barn.
Tonight's "Deep Breath Moment": Every year, the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy hosts an annual Hike-A-Thon. This year, the organization turned it into a fairytale-inspired scavenger hunt. The MHLC preserves were scattered with wooden gnomes that hikers could pose with for photos. See the pictures from the event here. - Looks like a huge amount of hikers. In my next life - I'm living upstate in the mountains.
The world is doomed.
Brother's Barn hidden behind the trees - taken last fall, before all hell broke loose.
Apparently, I'm in the minority in this.
2. At 88, He's a Historical Rarity - the Living Son of a Slave - apparently the Washington Post is letting me read their articles again in the hopes that I'll subscribe. (Nope, can't afford it - already subscribed to the NY Times.)
After his father died in 1938, Dan Smith picked up where Abram’s life left off, witnessing decades of the nation’s racial history — the injustice of Jim Crow, the grief and glory of the civil rights movement, the elections of the first black president and then Donald Trump, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. He watched the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis caught on cellphone video, horrified, and wonders where this new unrest will lead.
All along, Smith created his own history — as a medic in the Korean War and a hometown hero who rescued a man from a flood. He’s been chased on a dark road by white supremacists in Alabama as a foot soldier in the fight for civil rights. Smith was there when a young firebrand named John Lewis roused the crowd at the March on Washington, and he linked arms with activists in Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Just weeks before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Smith moved to the Washington area, where he built a rich and meaningful life. Smith and his first wife, who was black, raised their two children in Bethesda, Md., while he pursued his career as a federal worker promoting health and education and fighting poverty. He retired in 1994 and in 2006 wed his second wife, Loretta Neumann, who is white, at the National Cathedral, where as head usher he escorted presidents.
Daniel Smith and his wife, Loretta Neumann, walk past their vegetable garden in Northwest Washington. When Smith and Neumann married their first spouses in the 1960s, interracial marriage was illegal. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Daniel Smith and his wife, Loretta Neumann, walk past their vegetable garden in Northwest Washington. When Smith and Neumann married their first spouses in the 1960s, interracial marriage was illegal. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
What does it mean to Smith to be the living son of an enslaved person in the 21st century?
“Quite frankly, I’ve just grown up and been busy, and I’ve never thought much about it,” Smith said.
A courtly man with pecan-colored skin wearing a perfectly pressed blue and white striped collared shirt and khakis, Smith shared his life story from the wide front porch of his home in Northwest Washington on a sweltering July day. Cars rushed by as Neumann leaned in at his side to listen.
Yet when he thinks about it in this moment, time feels elastic. The 157 years since his father’s birth had once seemed like “a solid gap,” but now the time strikes him as distressingly brief. With Trump as president, the years feel to Smith like an accordion — the decades folding, folding — back toward slavery “almost to the point where it could happen again.”
And with a mountaintop view in his ninth decade of life, Smith can also see clearly the valleys and hills — how his father was shaped by slavery and racism and was able to push ahead despite it, and how Abram Smith did the best he knew how to prepare his children for life.
3.You can stop cleaning your mail now
Scientists still don’t have a perfect grip on COVID-19—they don’t know where exactly it came from, how exactly to treat it, or how long immunity lasts.
But in the past few months, scientists have converged on a theory of how this disease travels: via air. The disease typically spreads among people through large droplets expelled in sneezes and coughs, or through smaller aerosolized droplets, as from conversations, during which saliva spray can linger in the air.
Surface transmission—from touching doorknobs, mail, food-delivery packages, and subways poles—seems quite rare. (Quite rare isn’t the same as impossible: The scientists I spoke with constantly repeated the phrase “people should still wash their hands.”) The difference may be a simple matter of time. In the hours that can elapse between, say, Person 1 coughing on her hand and using it to push open a door and Person 2 touching the same door and rubbing his eye, the virus particles from the initial cough may have sufficiently deteriorated.
The fact that surface areas—or “fomites,” in medical jargon—are less likely to convey the virus might seem counterintuitive to people who have internalized certain notions of grimy germs, or who read many news articles in March about the danger of COVID-19-contaminated food. Backing up those scary stories were several U.S. studies that found that COVID-19 particles could survive on surfaces for many hours and even days.
But in a July article in the medical journal The Lancet, Goldman excoriated those conclusions. All those studies that made COVID-19 seem likely to live for days on metal and paper bags were based on unrealistically strong concentrations of the virus. As he explained to me, as many as 100 people would need to sneeze on the same area of a table to mimic some of their experimental conditions. The studies “stacked the deck to get a result that bears no resemblance to the real world," Goldman said.
As a thousand internet commenters know by heart, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But with hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of scientists around the world tracing COVID-19’s chains of transmission, the extreme infrequency of evidence may indeed be evidence of extreme infrequency.
A good case study of how the coronavirus spreads, and does not spread, is the famous March outbreak in a mixed-use skyscraper in Seoul, South Korea. On one side of the 11th floor of the building, about half the members of a chatty call center got sick. But less than 1 percent of the remainder of the building contracted COVID-19, even though more than 1,000 workers and residents shared elevators and were surely touching the same buttons within minutes of one another. “The call-center case is a great example,” says Donald Schaffner, a food-microbiology professor who studies disease contamination at Rutgers University. “You had clear airborne transmission with many, many opportunities for mass fomite transmission in the same place. But we just didn’t see it.” Schaffner told me, “In the entire peer-reviewed COVID-19 literature, I’ve found maybe one truly plausible report, in Singapore, of fomite transmission. And even there, it is not a slam-dunk case. ”
The scientists I spoke with emphasized that people should still wash their hands, avoid touching their face when they’ve recently been in public areas, and even use gloves in certain high-contact jobs. They also said deep cleans were perfectly justified in hospitals. But they pointed out that the excesses of hygiene theater have negative consequences.
For one thing, an obsession with contaminated surfaces distracts from more effective ways to combat COVID-19. “People have prevention fatigue,” Goldman told me. “They’re exhausted by all the information we’re throwing at them. We have to communicate priorities clearly; otherwise, they’ll be overloaded.”
Hygiene theater can take limited resources away from more important goals. Goldman shared with me an email he had received from a New Jersey teacher after his Lancet article came out. She said her local schools had considered shutting one day each week for “deep cleaning.” At a time when returning to school will require herculean efforts from teachers and extraordinary ingenuity from administrators to keep kids safely distanced, setting aside entire days to clean surfaces would be a pitiful waste of time and scarce local tax revenue.
New York City’s decision to spend lavishly on power scrubbing its subways shows how absurd hygiene theater can be, in practice. As the city’s transit authority considers reduced service and layoffs to offset declines in ticket revenue, it is on pace to spend more than $100 million this year on new cleaning practices and disinfectants. Money that could be spent on distributing masks, or on PSA campaigns about distancing, or actual subway service, is being poured into antiseptic experiments that might be entirely unnecessary. Worst of all, these cleaning sessions shut down trains for hours in the early morning, hurting countless late-night workers and early-morning commuters.
As long as people wear masks and don’t lick one another, New York’s subway-germ panic seems irrational. In Japan, ridership has returned to normal, and outbreaks traced to its famously crowded public transit system have been so scarce that the Japanese virologist Hitoshi Oshitani concluded, in an email to The Atlantic, that “transmission on the train is not common.” Like airline travelers forced to wait forever in line so that septuagenarians can get a patdown for underwear bombs, New Yorkers are being inconvenienced in the interest of eliminating a vanishingly small risk.
Finally, and most important, hygiene theater builds a false sense of security, which can ironically lead to more infections. Many bars, indoor restaurants, and gyms, where patrons are huffing and puffing one another’s stale air, shouldn’t be open at all. They should be shut down and bailed out by the government until the pandemic is under control. No amount of soap and bleach changes this calculation.
Instead, many of these establishments are boasting about their cleaning practices while inviting strangers into unventilated indoor spaces to share one another’s microbial exhalations. This logic is warped. It completely misrepresents the nature of an airborne threat. It’s as if an oceanside town stalked by a frenzy of ravenous sharks urged people to return to the beach by saying, We care about your health and safety, so we’ve reinforced the boardwalk with concrete. Lovely. Now people can sturdily walk into the ocean and be separated from their limbs.
By funneling our anxieties into empty cleaning rituals, we lose focus on the more common modes of COVID-19 transmission and the most crucial policies to stop this plague. “My point is not to relax, but rather to focus on what matters and what works,” Goldman said. “Masks, social distancing, and moving activities outdoors. That’s it. That’s how we protect ourselves. That’s how we beat this thing.”
Be nice if we could move work and school outside. Maybe I should move into my brother's barn. Probably be freezing in the winter. Also it's too close to the post-apocalyptic book I wrote - where the protagonist moved into her brother's loft space. And - he has horrid wifi/internet access, which is crucial for what I'm doing.
4. I think I have a mouse, at least I hope it's a mouse.
Me: I think I have a mouse. I saw it run across the stove.
Mother: The stove? That's a bit high up for a mouse, they are usually on the ground.
Me: Well, it was big - so I hope it's not a spider.
Mother: I was thinking a cockroach.
Me: Too big and it moves more like a mouse.
Mother: Have you had mice before? I know in the last apartment -
Me: Yes. I found three dead ones. Used mint - they hate it, and steel wool, which didn't work as well. Mint worked better - but actually what killed them was the paint job. I'm not afraid of them, I just find them startling.
Mother: Yes, I'd prefer not to have them show up in my bed in the middle of the night. Our cats kept doing that. I was always having to chase them down and get rid of them. Your father never did - it was always me.
Me: You were also saving all our pets from the cats, the hamsters and the gerbil. Poor things.
Mother: Always in the middle of the night.
Me to Brother via texting: I have a mouse. Can I borrow Piper to get rid of it? (Piper is the cat.)
Bro: Oh, Clover (the other cat - which may be the pic above, they look alike to me) brought us a mouse in the middle of the bed at 4AM in the morning. I threw a towel over it, scooped it up and threw it outside. I'm a pro.
Me: Maybe I should borrow you?
5. Per the Governor's newsletter ....tonight.
We have exciting news today. The Eastman Kodak Company, a storied New York manufacturer based in Rochester, was awarded a $765 million federal loan under the Defense Production Act. This loan will allow Kodak to create a new business unit, Kodak Pharmaceuticals, dedicated to producing pharmaceutical ingredients that are essential for vital medications. New York's long-term support for Eastman Business Park helped allow the company to take advantage of this opportunity. Today's announcement means 300 direct jobs and 1,200 indirect jobs for New Yorkers. More importantly, it will help ensure that America can provide for our own needs in a pandemic like this one. Never again do we want to rely on shipments from China or elsewhere in order to get lifesaving medical supplies. It is not just a public health issue—it's a national security issue. This is a great step forward and a great business opportunity for New York.
That's nice. I'd rather they gave the money to my agency. But admittedly it would be a drop in the bucket at this stage. Maybe I should quit and join Kodak Pharmaceuticals as a contract administrator. Honestly, if you work in medicine right now, in any capacity? You're golden. That and technology.
Here's what else you need to know tonight in our on-going and seemingly ceaseless coverage of New York vs. the Coronavirus (and apparently idiotic Americans who can't get their act together)
*Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico have been added to the state's travel advisory list. Individuals traveling from these areas, and other states with high infection rates, must quarantine for 14 days. The advisory now applies to 34 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. See the full list and more details here. (They just keep adding and subtracting states, although I don't think they've subtracted any at the moment - possibly taking a wait and see approach with Texas, Arizona, Florida, and South Carolina - can't say I blame them.)
* The state has suspended liquor licenses for 12 New York City bars after finding egregious violations of pandemic-related Executive Orders. Over the weekend, the state task force, led by the State Police and State Liquor Authority, conducted over 1,300 compliance checks, documenting violations at 132 establishments. A list of licensees charged and businesses served with summary suspension orders can be found here. - at this rate no one will have a liquor license. There will be no bars or restaurants serving alcohol in NY State. Hmmm. It'll be like Kansas. Kansas has bizarre liquor rules. We used to go Missouri, if my Dad wanted a drink with dinner, and Kansas if he didn't.
The number of total hospitalizations remains low. Yesterday, there were 648 total hospitalizations. The State conducted 57,397 tests, of which 534, or 0.93%, were positive. Sadly, we lost 9 New Yorkers to the virus. I don't know - 534 cases seems high to me. I guess it's all relative? I mean other countries get close to that number and they shut down. Granted NY has 19 million people and in the Spring had 500-1000 deaths a day.
Major League Baseball teams are welcome to play in New York if they are experiencing difficulties in their home states. New York State has one of the lowest infection rates in the U.S. We have a full Department of Health protocol system in place. My offer to the MLB: If you are having problems playing in other states, come play in the Empire State. (Okay, so we are now bringing in the teams coming down with the virus in their home states? I'm not sure that's a good idea. The Yankees/Phillies game kept getting delayed because of the virus - in Philadelphia. And the Marlins had several members test positive. Do we want the Yankees and the Mets to get the virus?
Are we trying to kill the Yankees? I mean I get "Damn Yankees" but this is taking it a bit far, don't you think? Watching the US attempt to have a sports season is kind of like watching absurdist theater in slow motion.)
Reminder to stay cool and stay safe. If you go to a cooling center, beach or pool to escape the extreme heat, remember to socially distance and wear a mask. Learn how to identify the symptoms of heat-related illnesses, including heat strokes, here. - The pools are packed by the way, there's long lines to get into them. Same with beaches. I'm staying indoors. No summer vacation for yours truly. Although I am admittedly tempted to escape to my brother's barn.
Tonight's "Deep Breath Moment": Every year, the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy hosts an annual Hike-A-Thon. This year, the organization turned it into a fairytale-inspired scavenger hunt. The MHLC preserves were scattered with wooden gnomes that hikers could pose with for photos. See the pictures from the event here. - Looks like a huge amount of hikers. In my next life - I'm living upstate in the mountains.
The world is doomed.
Brother's Barn hidden behind the trees - taken last fall, before all hell broke loose.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-29 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-30 02:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-30 02:15 am (UTC)So I read him the article and am relieved that along with reducing our time after grocery shopping etc. we won't be creating piles of trash with decontaminating wipes. I heartily wish this means I can bring my own bags back to the grocery at some point.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-30 02:53 am (UTC)I've been using my own bags at the grocery stores for some time now. Before? I'd just spray them with bleach. Now? I don't bother. It's not a virus that gets transmitted from hard surfaces. Unless someone really sneezed on them hard, and you immediately came into contact.
The problem is all the misinformation. There was an article in the NY Times briefing this morning stating that the reason the US had more cases and deaths than other countries - is we have more misinformation or it is more prevalent.
I mean the information on masks is very confusing. I was wandering about the park today worrying about whether I should be taking the mask off completely, or could just push it down. It's impossible to take it off completely and still take photos and walk about - I have no where to put it. Also, logically, unless I'm talking to someone or sitting with them, or touching things, there's no germs on my neck and chin. But there's information out there claiming otherwise.
I'm on a COVID-19 Science and Facts group on FB - where they fact check the articles on COVID and you are only allowed to post valid stuff.