Idiot preacher arrested and charged for violating distancing guidelines

A Florida evangelical church leader who still held services in his church despite being told not to has been arrested.

A Florida pastor who refused to stop holding crowded church services was arrested after officials said he flouted emergency orders against public gatherings to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Florida officials said they had repeatedly reached out to Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne and staff at the River at Tampa Bay Church, asking them not to hold in-person services for fear it could expose parishioners to the virus. But the pastor continued to hold services Sunday.

“His reckless disregard for human life put hundreds of people in his congregation at risk, and thousands of residents who interact with them this week in danger,” Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said at a press conference.
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China is sending medical supplies to the US

China has started shipping planeloads of medical equipment to the US to help cope with the pandemic. That country has created new factories to produce these supplies even as their domestic needs wane.

“China has abundant protective equipment now, and the rest of the world has a huge shortage,” said James McGregor, the chairman of greater China for APCO Worldwide.
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The White House is arranging for air transport to help expedite the shipping of personal protective equipment purchased by these companies overseas, the spokesman said, adding that both FEMA and the State Department were helping support the effort.
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Seth Meyers talks to Bernie Sanders

Sanders is the first guest that Meyers has had since the show went into its new production mode with no audience and people working from home. Sanders explains why his proposal of Medicare For All would have made a world of difference to how the country would have responded to this pandemic.

Dammit, when I hear Sanders speak so clearly about the problems and how they should be addressed and compare that to the wishy-washy responses of Joe Biden, I am depressed that Biden is in the lead for the Democratic nomination to take on the ignorant self-serving Donald Trump.

Understanding exponential growth during the pandemic

I recently posted a link to a more easily understandable display of Covid-19 infections and deaths for every country. (Incidentally its creator, a high school student, had a brief profile written about him in the latest issue of The New Yorker.) But one thing it lacked was the ability to visualize the differential rates of growth in each country over time to better enable us to understand how the disease is spreading and what is meant when people say that one region lags behind another by so many days, and how to know if containment methods are successful.
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The new politeness was the old rudeness

My daily walk around the neighborhood is along a narrow path. A couple of days ago, as I was walking I saw a woman coming towards me. As she got near, she stepped off the path and went and stood 10 feet away on the grass as I went by. We smiled and waved at each other without exchanging a word. It struck me that this kind of avoidance would have been considered very rude just a few weeks ago, as is the case when people sometimes cross the street to avoid passing near someone they think of as undesirable and wish to avoid, but was now the polite and considerate thing to do.
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Coronavirus cases dashboard

There is a lot of stuff being written about the Covid-19 pandemic and hard data threatens to get lost in the noise. Here is a dashboard that shows clearly the rates of positive tests, deaths, and recoveries using data provided by the CDC and the WHO for each country and for regions within some countries. Interestingly, this dashboard was created by Avi Schiffmann, a high school student in the state of Washington, who is clearly using his time at home to sharpen his computer skills.
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A very thin line separates being diplomatic from being a sycophant

Dr. Deborah Birx has become a very public figure because of her presence at the daily press conferences of the coronavirus task force that Donald Trump has turned into a substitute for his campaign rallies.

Prior to being assigned to the coronavirus task force on Feb. 26 (the same day Vice President Pence was assigned to the body), Birx was the U.S. global AIDS coordinator. That’s an ambassador-level job inside the State Department in which she oversaw the U.S. government efforts to combat the spread of HIV globally. She was appointed to the post by President Barack Obama in 2014.

She’s one of the few Obama-era holdovers at the Trump White House. Her job as AIDS coordinator included running the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the highly praised program launched by President George W. Bush that has gotten millions of people with HIV around the world onto life-saving anti-AIDS therapy.

Before that, she spent nearly a decade running the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s global HIV/AIDS division.

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We’re #1!

We have come a long way in the short time since Donald Trump blithely announced that the 15 Covid-19 cases that had been reported thus far would start to decline to zero and that by magic the virus would disappear by April. Yesterday, the US reached a grim milestone, overtaking China to become the country with the most number of people who have tested positive for Covid-19.

The US now has more confirmed cases of coronavirus than any other country with at least 82,404 positive tests.

According to the latest figures collated by Johns Hopkins University, the US overtook China (81,782 cases) and Italy (80,589).

The grim milestone came as President Donald Trump predicted the nation would get back to work “pretty quickly”, after 3.3 million layoffs.

More than 1,100 people with Covid-19 have died in the US.

All together now: “We’re #1! USA! USA!”