Wuhan Virus Watch: Texas, California, and Iowa among states lifting lockdown rules
Rhode Island also begins the reopen. Apple retail stores opening for business. U.S. field hospitals closing. Can COVID19 be sexually transmitted?
On Friday afternoon, my company discussed the development of recommissioning plans.
Perhaps the massive protests from last weekend compelled Gov. Gavin Newsom to make better choices, or perhaps the fact that other states are beginning to open up was a factor in this decision.
California entered “Stage 2” of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s reopening plan, which allows lower-risk workplaces like book sellers, clothing stores, florists and sporting goods outlets to conduct business — but with social distancing modifications.
…In Iowa, dental services can resume starting Friday if they comply with guidelines adopted by the state’s dental board.
Businesses like campgrounds, drive-in movie theaters, tanning facilities and health spas can also reopen in Iowa with limited capacity and “appropriate public health measures,” officials said.
In Texas, hair and beauty salons are allowed to reopen Friday with social limits, such as one customer per stylist.
Rhode Island becomes first in Northeast bloc to lift stay-at-home order
The last one across this line will be the loser.
Rhode Island on Saturday will become the first state in the Northeast coalition to lift its stay-at-home order during the coronavirus outbreak.
The move will permit the reopening of noncritical retail stores and offices, but with capacity limits, the state says. Elective medical procedures also will be allowed to resume.
“My goal is to get as many people back to work as quick as possible without ever jeopardizing our public health and without ever having to go backwards to where we’ve just come from, which is shutting down our economy,” Gov. Gina Raimondo said Thursday.
She is expected to sign an executive order Friday establishing the beginning of phase one of reopening the state’s economy, WPRI reports.
Apple to start gradual reopening of U.S. stores next week
Apple plans to open its U.S. retail stores next week.
The reopening of its 271 US locations — which have been shuttered in March due to the coronavirus — will be gradual, starting with six stores in Alabama, Alaska, South Carolina and Idaho, the company said.
“We’re excited to begin reopening stores in the US next week,” an Apple representative told CNBC, which first reported the news. “Our team is constantly monitoring local health data and government guidance, and as soon as we can safely open our stores, we will.”
The reopened stores require temperature checks for employees and customers and will limit the number of people in the store at any one time. The stores will also focus more on repairing products and preparing items for pick-up than making in-store sales, according to Apple, which has launched a number of products via press release over the past two months and then selling them on its website.
U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients
Hopefully, some important lessons were learned during the response to this illness…especially the reliance on experts and their models.
Public health experts said this episode exposes how ill-prepared the U.S. is for a pandemic. They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds, but experts said there wasn’t enough planning to make sure these field hospitals could be put to use once they were finished.
“It’s so painful because what it’s showing is that the plans we have in place, they don’t work,” said Robyn Gershon, a professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health. “We have to go back to the drawing board and redo it.”
But the nation’s governors — who requested the Army Corps projects and, in some cases, contributed state funding — said they’re relieved these facilities didn’t get more use. They said early models predicted a catastrophic shortage of hospital beds, and no one knew for sure when or if stay-at-home orders would reduce the spread of the coronavirus.
“All those field hospitals and available beds sit empty today,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said last month. “And that’s a very, very good thing.
Coronavirus could be sexually transmitted by recovering patients, new research shows
Perhaps the newly resigned British pandemic modeler Neil Ferguson can be reached for comment?
The coronavirus disease COVID-19 could be transmitted through sexual intercourse, a new study has concluded, prompting fears of a new way the disease could be spread.
The virus was found in the semen of a small number of men who had tested positive for COVID-19 at a hospital in China. Doctors at China’s Shangqiu municipal hospital analyzed the sperm of 38 men and found SARS-CoV-2 in some of their semen.
The study was based on a small sample size, so more work would need to be done to establish whether the coronavirus can be sexually transmitted. If so, this would be a worrying development because it means the disease could be transmitted human-to-human beyond respiratory droplets and contact.
The results are at odds with other small studies, also conducted in China, in February and March, which did not find traces of the disease in the semen of men who had tested positive for the coronavirus.
I will simply note that Chinese studies on this virus have been…unreliable.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Something just doesn’t fit about the whole Covid-19 panic. I don’t know what it is, but it’s nagging at my like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
When SARS-CoV-2 first appeared and seemed like a lethal mystery, okay, I get that. Play it safe. But as we got more experience, it became clear that the pathogen was — though serious — not nearly as dangerous as we initially feared.
For people under 50 with no serious medical problems, it posed very little risk. For others, the risk was serious but not very large: as on the Diamond Princess, most people who are exposed don’t get infected and most who are infected either don’t get sick at all or don’t have life-threatening illness. A few people get very sick, and especially at the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t know how to treat them and did a lot of things wrong that arguably made outcomes worse. Now we know more. And yet the entire world, apart from Sweden and a few of the red states, seems to have gone nuts with panic and obsessive fear.
The analogy with the disease itself is striking: one way that Covid-19 kills people is by provoking a massive over-reaction by the immune system, and it’s the over-reaction that actually kills the patient. Likewise, the Covid-19 panic has provoked a massive over-reaction by governments and news media, and it’s the over-reaction that now threatens to destroy or cripple our countries for years to come.
Something’s wrong with this picture. I don’t know what it is, but there’s a missing piece, and half of the pieces we’ve got seem to be from another puzzle.
Dantzig, it helps to understand that none of this is about the virus. It is about control.
That’s why it is known as the…..
DEM-PANIC.
Narrative Fail:
15 Days After Lockdown Ease, Georgia Sees Lowest Day Of COVID Hospitalizations
https://www.weaselzippers.us/448559-narrative-fail-15-days-after-lockdown-ease-georgia-sees-lowest-day-of-covid-hospitalizations/
Taiwan did not lock down either.
“FS
9 days ago
The campus will not be able to get back to normal if we stop lockdown at this moment. I am on my sabbatical this year and spending the year in Taiwan for my research (lucky me!). The island nation has very few cases (less than 500 in a nation of 23 million) and only 5 deaths. Taiwan did not and has never been locked down, life goes on pretty much as is but they are very cautious about back to the normal. Today is the fourth day that there is no confirmed case but the local DCD insists they will have to see zero case continues on for two week to be able to allow big social and religious events to come back……”
Inside Higher Ed
That article makes it clear that colleges do not intend to open this fall but instead are trying to tie up students advance payment of fall tuition while trying to minimize lawsuits.
Certainly Uncertain
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/30/what-does-intent-reopen-mean
At great risk to them. Do ‘marginal’ colleges not realize that this reaction will wipe them out? Does Oberlin? Suicide by virtue-signalling is painful to watch.
Even public colleges will see great decreases in enrollment.
A survey quoted in that same publication a month ago said enrollment drops of 20%.
I say they are too optimistic.
The MSM has scared the young the most so many of them will take the attitude of live for today.
That same survey found about 20% of HS seniors planned to take a gap year off from education. It also found lots of already enrolled college students are also planning on taking a year off.
Governor Abbott it is time to stop with the bs and really open Texas. All that talk about Texas being business friendly seems to be just talk.
I ran the stats from the Oregon Health Authority last night: 95% over 60, 75% over 70, and 45% over 80. I bet if one had a distribution of all deaths in Oregon over that time period, that this would simply be an identical curve albeit lower amplitude. No deaths under 40 and yet it is the millenials who seem to be the most affected. I simply do not allow it to impact my life when possible.
Oh, and 90% of those who died had 1 severe co-morbid condition and 82% had more than 1. As I said awhile back, most of the deaths were people already at the edge of the cliff and covid, like the flu, just gave them a little push. The .gov reaction has been one of “save granny at any cost” and that price of course is personal freedom.
My understanding is the nursing profession here in America does not have the time to collect these samples.
Something the virus have revealed- the majority of American citizens prefer being subjects, not citizens. Not among my friends, not among the commenters here, but looking at comments and letters in newspapers, especially in cities, people who want to actually be free and responsible for their own lives appear to be in the minority.
Something the virus has confirmed- computer models aren’t worth the electricity needed to run them. GIGO dominates. Not a single model of the spread has proved accurate.
Something studies of the ICU and dead patients have revealed- if everyone was taking Vitamin D supplements, the death toll from covid19 would be significantly lowered. What measure has not been recommended by public health experts and authorities? That everyone take Vitamin D supplements. Some, a very few, cautiously say, they might be helpful, might be, for some.
Good news.
People who still read newspapers are a small minority today.
Those that are writing in are almost invariably Democrats.
DEMS troll online with theit lies so I expect the same now for all old school print media……
Vitamin D isn’t as profitable as remdesivir.
I have no doubt leftist states will reopen, not because of “science” but because they will have to start to lay off government workers since there has been a steep decline in tax revenue, especially in large cities. Once the layoff/furlough talk starts happening, the government employee unions will HOWL for reopening in order to keep their union members employed.
Yes… I’ve wondered about this, how long can the states hold out with such a diminishment of tax revenues? I guess they’re expecting a Federal Bailout. So sad that there will be none.
What we learned is that politicians taking charge of anything ALWAYS leads to disaster. Our healthcare system couldn’t have handled this on their own? All of the extreme recommendations and actions by the politicians led to system-wide misallocation of resources (Cuomo demanding 30,000 more ventilators from Trump and threatening to seize others from northern NY state facilities when only 400 were used e.g.), needless destruction of our economy and a historic suspension (repeal?) of our constitutional freedoms.
This like the Three Mile Island nuclear plant “meltdown” where, after the event autopsy, it was determined that the computer safety programs would have safely shutdown the core systematically had the scientists not interfered. What made them think they wouldn’t? Probably because the Jane Fonda film “China Syndrome” had coincidentally just hit the theaters providing a perfect opportunity to create a crisis? Well that one worked too.
Most of our so-called leaders, including the illustrious governor of my home state, California, have, so far, behaved like a bunch of frightened rabbits. I fear that each of them grudgingly loosening up this strangle-hold on our lives has a contingency plan all ready to clamp down again immediately at the slightest up-tick in new cases.
The lesson of all this? Politicians and bureaucrats aren’t very good at things. (Hey, I said lesson, not big surprise).
This news about sexual transmission will be of great concern to the subset of the population planning on having intercourse with a partner while: (1) Wearing scuba gear with a HEPA filter at the exhaust to prevent transmission by breath and proximity, (2) Wearing latex gloves and a full body suit to prevent skin-to-skin transmission, and yet (3) not wearing a condom.
Now men will have to wear condoms when they leave the house. And to enforce it the police will need to do random searches. It’s just not enough to wear a face mask when you go to a brothel. Anything can happen when you meet a stranger on the street.
Um…
When do we transition from “you’ll get permission to do some things, maybe, if we feel like it” to “anything goes (like normal), unless we have a specific reason.”
“The coronavirus disease COVID-19 could be transmitted through sexual intercourse, a new study has concluded, prompting fears of a new way the disease could be spread.”
So you are assuming the people having sex aren’t kissing or having skin-to-skin contact that could transmit it? The only way it is transmitted is through sex?
Kinda sad to think this is a problem. That people would be safe from transmission during sex with the exception of intercourse.
No other transmission activity is involved during sexual intimacy that is more likely to transmit it.
Is there a possibility that the lockdown will prompt resistance to the next attempt or will people remain dumb?