- Quarantine Day 37
- Trump declares, via Tweet, that all immigration is halted. No one in the administration knows what he's talking about. Which is to say, business as usual.
- Attorney General Barr threatens states with legal action for continuing suppression measures. This despite Trump having told governors that they're on their own to figure everything out.
- The National Institutes of Health recommend against using the drug that Trump has been touting as a miracle cure.
- The National Security Advisor is now pushing the completely unsupported claims that the WHO is a Chinese propaganda puppet. Trump paid no attention when the WHO warned us in January, so his failure to act must be their fault.
- Livermore cases: 33
- Alameda County cases: 1,235; deaths: 44
- U.S. Cases: 802,000+; deaths: 44,500+
I mentioned in previous posts about the protests against the shelter-at-home orders. One might think that these protestors are upset because of things like, "I need to work to put food on the table." I'd be entirely sympathetic to people who are trying to make it known that their families are starving and that they need help.
That's not who's protesting.
These are people protesting because they can't go play golf or get a haircut or a massage--insisting that temporary inconvenience is oppression. They're selfish, self centered, and willfully ignorant. And the messaging is all being pushed through intentional disinformation/astroturfing campaigns and encouraged by Trump. It disgusts me.
Yesterday I came across this concerning article from last week: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2010025 (Title: In Pursuit of PPE, Date: April 17, 2020, DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2010025). It describes the extreme lengths some hospitals are resorting to in order to obtain PPE. In this case moving equipment in trucks labeled as food supplies and then needing Congressional involvement to stop the FBI from seizing the shipment and giving it to DHS.
Normally I wouldn't put much stock in an internet anecdote like this, but it's through the New England Journal of Medicine so it gets a huge credibility boost. Presumably they have some vetting on at least the authors if not the information they're providing. And that makes it quite concerning. If the federal government has been actively hijacking equipment purchased by hospitals there are serious problems afoot.
