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solarbirdWe're going to end up right back in lockdown. Really are. Unless a miracle occurs and people start wearing the goddamn masks. (Our state is making it mandatory as of Friday. It's overdue.)
----- 1 -----
What they don’t tell you about surviving COVID-19
'Recovered' doesn't mean healthy again
https://www.seattlepi.com/science/article/What-they-don-t-tell-you-about-surviving-15347792.php
Most people who catch the new coronavirus don’t experience severe symptoms, and some have no symptoms at all. COVID-19 saves its worst for relatively few.
ICU nurse Sherie Antoinette has seen the serious cases first hand.
The lucky ones — if you can call them that — recover, but not in the sense that their lives are back to normal. For some, the damage is permanent. Their organs will never fully heal.
“When they say ’recovered,’ they don’t tell you that that means you may need a lung transplant,” Antoinette wrote in a Twitter post. “Or that you may come back after discharge with a massive heart attack or stroke, because COVID makes your blood thick as hell. Or that you may have to be on oxygen for the rest of your life.”
----- 2 -----
As virus cases rise, will King County have to revert back to Phase 1?
Nick Popham, KOMO News Published 7:16 am PDT, Monday, June 22, 2020
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/komo/article/As-virus-cases-rise-will-King-County-have-to-15356846.php
SEATTLE - Dr. Jeff Duchin doesn't regret King County applying to move up to Phase 2 of the governor's reopening plan, despite seeing a 47% rise in COVID-19 cases.
"This is not a time to let down our guard," he said. "As we begin to do more and we begin to have more activities we've always known that the risk will be increased."
Duchin, the county's public health officer, says even with that knowledge, seeing an increase of 113 more new cases this week than the previous week makes him concerned.
To him, it further reiterates that people need to continue doing things like social distancing, wearing masks and getting tested.
"We're dependent on one another in order to move forward safely," Duchin said.
While many have taken part in large protests throughout the state and the country, Duchin says there isn't one sole factor behind this increase.
"Out of all the hundreds of cases that we see each week, in the last week, we identified only six people as having attended a rally or protest event," Duchin said.
According to Duchin, that could change depending on how many protesters go and get tested.
He says many of these new cases come from young adults throughout the county and people living in Seattle.
"If these increases continue we'll have to think about whether or not we need to step back," Duchin said.
----- 3 -----
John Scotus
john_scotus
9:39 PM · Jun 21, 2020
https://twitter.com/John_Scotus/status/1274924937728233472
[THREAD]
I was going to write a long article about this, but I just don't have the time, so a thread about covid-19:
[INFORMATIVE, continues at link]
----- 4 -----
Tori Centanni
twitter.com/toricentanni
22 June 2020
https://twitter.com/toricentanni/status/1275098052915683336
I keep seeing a lot of tweets/post about "people following the rules" of the pandemic, people who aren't, and I think we need to understand there are now two sets of rules out in the world.
[NEXT]
Rule set 1: wear a mask, social distance, only go out for essentials, stat home. This is the set being followed by people who are on social media and/or fear the risks are greater than they're being told. Who (correctly imo) think everything opened too early.
[NEXT]
Rule set 2: these are the people who (fairly) believe things would not open up if it was not safe. Who might wear mask when they're out if not eating but still think going out to eat is okay because restaurants are open and surely it must be!
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
----- 5 -----
In Yakima County, as cases soar, community spread increasingly drives the coronavirus pandemic
By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter
22 June 2020
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/in-yakima-county-as-cases-soar-community-spread-increasingly-drives-the-pandemic/
YAKIMA — For Sean Gilbert, the April 21 arrival of a face mask shipment from China marked a turning point in the battle to control COVID-19 at his family’s fruit warehouse. Once the masks were distributed — and wearing them was made mandatory — the number of new cases dropped sharply.
The current tally is 26 among the more than 300 processing workers. Just two higher than a month ago.
“The masks were a turning point,” Gilbert said. “I believe unequivocally that masks work.”
State COVID-19 agricultural rules, in place since June 4, require all employees, except those who labor alone, to wear masks, including the crews thinning apples and now picking cherries in orchards.
Still, the novel coronavirus has continued to rage through the ranks of Yakima’s agricultural workers and the broader county population in a pandemic that health district officials believe to be increasingly driven by what happens outside of the workplace, where masks are often not worn in stores and elsewhere, and holiday weekends result in case counts spiking.
The risks of such conduct prompted Gov. Jay Inslee to announce Saturday he will soon order Yakima County residents to wear face coverings in public spaces, a first-of-a-kind move in Washington as state and local governments try to gain control of a runaway spread that poses a wider threat to Washington’s efforts to tamp down the coronavirus.
“As goes Yakima, so goes the rest of the state,” said Inslee, who called the situation “desperate.”
Yakima’s soaring positive case count, 6,270 as of Friday, improbably is just below the 6,572 count for the entire state of Oregon, which has more than 16 times the county’s population.
----- 6 -----
Weijia Jiang
twitter.com/weijia
22 June 2020
https://twitter.com/weijia/status/1275128745565839360
.twitter.com/kaitlancollins, twitter.com/agearan, + twitter.com/Yamiche also tried to get clarity from twitter.com/PressSec on this, but she offered none.
She repeated “Kung flu” was simply linking the virus to its origin, and accused “the media” of using comparable phrases.
No term “the media” has used is comparable.
[QUOTED TWEET]
CBS News
twitter.com/CBSNews
22 June 2020
.twitter.com/weijia asks McEnany why President Trump "uses racist phrases, like 'kung flu'" when discussing coronavirus.
McEnany doesn't answer whether the White House believes the phrase is racist, and says "the media is trying to play games with the terminology" http://cbsnews.com/live
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK]
----- 7 -----
Trump to host 4th of July event despite pleas from lawmakers to cancel
By Tal Axelrod - 06/19/20
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/503680-trump-to-host-4th-of-july-event-despite-pleas-from-lawmakers-to
President Trump will host a Fourth of July event despite pleas from lawmakers to cancel over concerns regarding the coronavirus pandemic.
The White House announced Friday that Trump and first lady Melania Trump, with the Interior Department, will host the "2020 Salute to America" on the South Lawn of the White House and Ellipse on July 4.
The event will feature music, military demonstrations and flyovers to celebrate the nation’s service members and veterans, as well as an address from the president.
The event comes despite pushback from lawmakers that holding a mass gathering could put people at risk of contracting the coronavirus.
Ten lawmakers representing the National Capital Region sent a letter to the secretaries of the Defense and Interior on Tuesday expressing "serious concerns" about the possibility of a gathering sparking an outbreak, noting that stay-at-home orders in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland are still in effect.
----- 8 -----
Florida gov blames coronavirus rise on ‘overwhelmingly Hispanic’ workers
By Amanda Woods
June 19, 2020
https://nypost.com/2020/06/19/desantis-blames-covid-spike-on-overwhelmingly-hispanic-laborers/
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pointed to clusters of “overwhelmingly Hispanic” day laborers and agriculture workers driving the state’s recent coronavirus spike — but farmworkers and industry associations argue that resources and testing came too late to those communities, according to new reports.
The Republican governor told reporters Tuesday that cramped living and working conditions for migrant workers and Hispanic construction workers are partly to blame, according to WFOR-TV.
“Some of these guys go to work in a school bus, and they are all just packed there like sardines, going across Palm Beach County or some of these other places, and there’s all these opportunities to have transmission,” DeSantis said during a press conference in Tallahassee.
He pointed to cases in migrant camps, a watermelon farm and Immokalee, a major hub for tomato production, as evidence of the uptick.
But Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried argued that the majority of farmworkers left several weeks ago after harvests ended and that the real uptick is in non-agricultural areas, according to the Miami Herald.
----- 9 -----
The Prison Was Built to Hold 1,500 Inmates. It Had Over 2,000 Coronavirus Cases.
Prison overcrowding has been quietly tolerated for decades. But the pandemic is forcing a reckoning.
by Dara Lind June 18
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-prison-was-built-to-hold-1500-inmates-it-had-over-2000-coronavirus-cases
Jason Thompson lay awake in his dormitory bed in the Marion Correctional Institution in central Ohio, immobilized by pain, listening to the sounds of “hacking and gurgling” as the novel coronavirus passed from bunk to bunk like a game of “sick hot potato,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
Thompson lives in Marion’s dorm for disabled and older prisoners — a place he described to ProPublica in a phone call as the prison’s “old folks home” — where 199 inmates, many frail and some in wheelchairs, were isolated in a space designed for 170. As the disease spread among bunks spaced 3 or 4 feet apart, Thompson said he could see bedridden inmates with full-blown symptoms and others “in varying stages of recovery. While the rest of us are rarely 6 feet away from anyone else, sick or not.”
“Prison is not designed for social distancing,” said Thompson, who is serving a de facto life sentence (his first parole hearing will come in 2087) for aggravated murder and kidnapping. “That’s not the system’s fault. That’s not the prison’s fault. It couldn’t have been designed with the vision of one day having to social distance for 6 feet. ... It squeezed as many of us in here as it could.”
----- 10 -----
Mike Madrid
twitter.com/madrid_mike
23 June 2020
https://twitter.com/madrid_mike/status/1275274972894650371
Remember this photo of Trump campaign staff without masks 12 days ago?
Remember 8 staffers tested positive for COVID-19 a couple days ago?
Yeah....
[QUOTED TWEET]
Kyle Griffin
twitter.com/kylegriffin1
June 10, 2020
It appears that Mike Pence has deleted this tweet.
[EMBEDDED IMAGE: Pence at photo of entirely-unmasked Trump campaign mass gathering of staff]
----- 11 -----
Weijia Jiang
twitter.com/weijia
23 June 2020
https://twitter.com/weijia/status/1275422015059615750
[THREAD]
Just now I asked the President if he was kidding when he said he told his people to slow down testing, which is how White House officials explained the comment.
He said, “I don’t kid.”
He also said again testing is a double-edged sword, and praised the job the U.S. has done.
[NEXT]
UPDATE: twitter.com/PressSec told reporters aboard Air Force One that the President was using “sarcasm” in his original comment about slowing down testing during his rally, even though that’s not what he said this morning.
Official WH transcript and McEnany’s explanation here:
[EMBEDDED IMAGE OF TRANSCRIPT AND EXPLANATION]
----- 12 -----
Rebekah Jones aka #Insubordinate #scientist
twitter.com/GeoRebekah
23 June 2020
https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1275539345257218053
[THREAD]
[EDITOR: This is the scientist fired by the State of Florida for refusing to alter data]
BREAKING: 1 OF 3: Florida announced yesterday they're not counting the icu bed availability anymore, a key element in keeping things open, so the state can proceed to the next phase by July 4.
[NEXT]
BREAKING 2 OF 3 I have multiple sources at DOH who have just told me they have been instructed this week to change the numbers and begin slowly deleting deaths and cases so it looks like Florida is improving next week in the leadup to July 4, like they've "made it over the hump."
[NEXT]
BREAKING 3 OF 3 I've independently verified they've deleted at least 1200 cases in the last week.They're only reporting all these cases now so they can restrict reporting next week to make everyone think it's over. I've had two DOH employees in different offices confirm
----- 13 -----
Charlotte Clymer
twitter.com/cmclymer
23 June 2020
https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/1275483438267727873
Trump has handled the COVID crisis so disastrously that the European Union doesn't want to put their own citizens in danger by permitting Americans to enter their borders.
[NEXT]
For all of his talk about the American flag, Trump has effectively turned it into a toxic warning label.
----- 14 -----
EXCLUSIVE: Feds About To Bail On Supporting COVID Testing Sites In Texas And Other States
By Josh Kovensky
June 23, 2020
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/exclusive-feds-about-to-bail-on-supporting-covid-testing-sites-in-texas-and-other-states
The Trump administration is ending funding and support for local COVID-19 testing sites around the country this month, as cases and hospitalizations are skyrocketing in many states.
The federal government will stop providing money and support for 13 sites across five states which were originally set up in the first months of the pandemic to speed up testing at the local level.
Local officials and public health experts expressed a mixture of frustration, resignation, and horror at the decision to let federal support lapse.
Texas will be particularly hard hit by the decision. The federal government gives much-needed testing kits and laboratory access to seven testing sites around Texas. But in the state, which is seeing new peaks in cases, people still face long lines for testing that continues to fail to meet overwhelming demand.
----- 15 -----
The faster a country required masks, the fewer coronavirus deaths it had: study
By Patrick Cain Global News
Posted June 22, 2020
https://globalnews.ca/news/7075024/mask-wearing-fewer-coronavirus-deaths/
Some countries have been devastated by the novel coronavirus, and others have escaped lightly.
Why the extreme differences? The main one is that countries that quickly resorted to widespread mask-wearing had far lower death rates and shorter outbreaks, a new study argues.
The authors looked at coronavirus death rates in 198 countries, trying to see why some had painfully high death rates and others very low.
“What we found was that of the big variables that you can control which influence mortality, one was wearing masks,” says Christopher Leffler of Virginia Commonwealth University, one of the study’s authors.
“It wasn’t just by a few per cent, it was up to a hundred times less mortality. The countries that introduced masks from the very beginning of their outbreak have had hardly any deaths.”
- What they don’t tell you about surviving COVID-19
- As virus cases rise, will King County have to revert back to Phase 1?
- An informative thread on Japan vs. US response to COVID-19
- Two sets of rules in the world
- In Yakima County, as cases soar, community spread increasingly drives the coronavirus pandemic
- Twitter.com/weijia asks McEnany why President Trump "uses racist phrases, like 'kung flu'" when discussing coronavirus.
- Trump to host 4th of July event despite pleas from lawmakers to cancel
- Florida gov blames coronavirus rise on ‘overwhelmingly Hispanic’ workers
- The Prison Was Built to Hold 1,500 Inmates. It Had Over 2,000 Coronavirus Cases.
- Remember this photo of Trump campaign staff without masks 12 days ago?
- Trump asked if he was "kidding" about slowing down testing: "I don't kid."
- Scientist Rebekah Jones, fired by Florida for refusing to alter COVID-19 data, reports that Florida is systematically removing cases from tracking to "make everyone think it's over."
- European Union on verge of banning US travellers over COVID-19 mishandling
- EXCLUSIVE: Feds About To Bail On Supporting COVID Testing Sites In Texas And Other States
- The faster a country required masks, the fewer coronavirus deaths it had: study
----- 1 -----
What they don’t tell you about surviving COVID-19
'Recovered' doesn't mean healthy again
https://www.seattlepi.com/science/article/What-they-don-t-tell-you-about-surviving-15347792.php
Most people who catch the new coronavirus don’t experience severe symptoms, and some have no symptoms at all. COVID-19 saves its worst for relatively few.
ICU nurse Sherie Antoinette has seen the serious cases first hand.
The lucky ones — if you can call them that — recover, but not in the sense that their lives are back to normal. For some, the damage is permanent. Their organs will never fully heal.
“When they say ’recovered,’ they don’t tell you that that means you may need a lung transplant,” Antoinette wrote in a Twitter post. “Or that you may come back after discharge with a massive heart attack or stroke, because COVID makes your blood thick as hell. Or that you may have to be on oxygen for the rest of your life.”
----- 2 -----
As virus cases rise, will King County have to revert back to Phase 1?
Nick Popham, KOMO News Published 7:16 am PDT, Monday, June 22, 2020
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/komo/article/As-virus-cases-rise-will-King-County-have-to-15356846.php
SEATTLE - Dr. Jeff Duchin doesn't regret King County applying to move up to Phase 2 of the governor's reopening plan, despite seeing a 47% rise in COVID-19 cases.
"This is not a time to let down our guard," he said. "As we begin to do more and we begin to have more activities we've always known that the risk will be increased."
Duchin, the county's public health officer, says even with that knowledge, seeing an increase of 113 more new cases this week than the previous week makes him concerned.
To him, it further reiterates that people need to continue doing things like social distancing, wearing masks and getting tested.
"We're dependent on one another in order to move forward safely," Duchin said.
While many have taken part in large protests throughout the state and the country, Duchin says there isn't one sole factor behind this increase.
"Out of all the hundreds of cases that we see each week, in the last week, we identified only six people as having attended a rally or protest event," Duchin said.
According to Duchin, that could change depending on how many protesters go and get tested.
He says many of these new cases come from young adults throughout the county and people living in Seattle.
"If these increases continue we'll have to think about whether or not we need to step back," Duchin said.
----- 3 -----
John Scotus
john_scotus9:39 PM · Jun 21, 2020
https://twitter.com/John_Scotus/status/1274924937728233472
[THREAD]
I was going to write a long article about this, but I just don't have the time, so a thread about covid-19:
[INFORMATIVE, continues at link]
----- 4 -----
Tori Centanni
twitter.com/toricentanni
22 June 2020
https://twitter.com/toricentanni/status/1275098052915683336
I keep seeing a lot of tweets/post about "people following the rules" of the pandemic, people who aren't, and I think we need to understand there are now two sets of rules out in the world.
[NEXT]
Rule set 1: wear a mask, social distance, only go out for essentials, stat home. This is the set being followed by people who are on social media and/or fear the risks are greater than they're being told. Who (correctly imo) think everything opened too early.
[NEXT]
Rule set 2: these are the people who (fairly) believe things would not open up if it was not safe. Who might wear mask when they're out if not eating but still think going out to eat is okay because restaurants are open and surely it must be!
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
----- 5 -----
In Yakima County, as cases soar, community spread increasingly drives the coronavirus pandemic
By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter
22 June 2020
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/in-yakima-county-as-cases-soar-community-spread-increasingly-drives-the-pandemic/
YAKIMA — For Sean Gilbert, the April 21 arrival of a face mask shipment from China marked a turning point in the battle to control COVID-19 at his family’s fruit warehouse. Once the masks were distributed — and wearing them was made mandatory — the number of new cases dropped sharply.
The current tally is 26 among the more than 300 processing workers. Just two higher than a month ago.
“The masks were a turning point,” Gilbert said. “I believe unequivocally that masks work.”
State COVID-19 agricultural rules, in place since June 4, require all employees, except those who labor alone, to wear masks, including the crews thinning apples and now picking cherries in orchards.
Still, the novel coronavirus has continued to rage through the ranks of Yakima’s agricultural workers and the broader county population in a pandemic that health district officials believe to be increasingly driven by what happens outside of the workplace, where masks are often not worn in stores and elsewhere, and holiday weekends result in case counts spiking.
The risks of such conduct prompted Gov. Jay Inslee to announce Saturday he will soon order Yakima County residents to wear face coverings in public spaces, a first-of-a-kind move in Washington as state and local governments try to gain control of a runaway spread that poses a wider threat to Washington’s efforts to tamp down the coronavirus.
“As goes Yakima, so goes the rest of the state,” said Inslee, who called the situation “desperate.”
Yakima’s soaring positive case count, 6,270 as of Friday, improbably is just below the 6,572 count for the entire state of Oregon, which has more than 16 times the county’s population.
----- 6 -----
Weijia Jiang
twitter.com/weijia
22 June 2020
https://twitter.com/weijia/status/1275128745565839360
.twitter.com/kaitlancollins, twitter.com/agearan, + twitter.com/Yamiche also tried to get clarity from twitter.com/PressSec on this, but she offered none.
She repeated “Kung flu” was simply linking the virus to its origin, and accused “the media” of using comparable phrases.
No term “the media” has used is comparable.
[QUOTED TWEET]
CBS News
twitter.com/CBSNews
22 June 2020
.twitter.com/weijia asks McEnany why President Trump "uses racist phrases, like 'kung flu'" when discussing coronavirus.
McEnany doesn't answer whether the White House believes the phrase is racist, and says "the media is trying to play games with the terminology" http://cbsnews.com/live
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK]
----- 7 -----
Trump to host 4th of July event despite pleas from lawmakers to cancel
By Tal Axelrod - 06/19/20
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/503680-trump-to-host-4th-of-july-event-despite-pleas-from-lawmakers-to
President Trump will host a Fourth of July event despite pleas from lawmakers to cancel over concerns regarding the coronavirus pandemic.
The White House announced Friday that Trump and first lady Melania Trump, with the Interior Department, will host the "2020 Salute to America" on the South Lawn of the White House and Ellipse on July 4.
The event will feature music, military demonstrations and flyovers to celebrate the nation’s service members and veterans, as well as an address from the president.
The event comes despite pushback from lawmakers that holding a mass gathering could put people at risk of contracting the coronavirus.
Ten lawmakers representing the National Capital Region sent a letter to the secretaries of the Defense and Interior on Tuesday expressing "serious concerns" about the possibility of a gathering sparking an outbreak, noting that stay-at-home orders in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland are still in effect.
----- 8 -----
Florida gov blames coronavirus rise on ‘overwhelmingly Hispanic’ workers
By Amanda Woods
June 19, 2020
https://nypost.com/2020/06/19/desantis-blames-covid-spike-on-overwhelmingly-hispanic-laborers/
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pointed to clusters of “overwhelmingly Hispanic” day laborers and agriculture workers driving the state’s recent coronavirus spike — but farmworkers and industry associations argue that resources and testing came too late to those communities, according to new reports.
The Republican governor told reporters Tuesday that cramped living and working conditions for migrant workers and Hispanic construction workers are partly to blame, according to WFOR-TV.
“Some of these guys go to work in a school bus, and they are all just packed there like sardines, going across Palm Beach County or some of these other places, and there’s all these opportunities to have transmission,” DeSantis said during a press conference in Tallahassee.
He pointed to cases in migrant camps, a watermelon farm and Immokalee, a major hub for tomato production, as evidence of the uptick.
But Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried argued that the majority of farmworkers left several weeks ago after harvests ended and that the real uptick is in non-agricultural areas, according to the Miami Herald.
----- 9 -----
The Prison Was Built to Hold 1,500 Inmates. It Had Over 2,000 Coronavirus Cases.
Prison overcrowding has been quietly tolerated for decades. But the pandemic is forcing a reckoning.
by Dara Lind June 18
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-prison-was-built-to-hold-1500-inmates-it-had-over-2000-coronavirus-cases
Jason Thompson lay awake in his dormitory bed in the Marion Correctional Institution in central Ohio, immobilized by pain, listening to the sounds of “hacking and gurgling” as the novel coronavirus passed from bunk to bunk like a game of “sick hot potato,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
Thompson lives in Marion’s dorm for disabled and older prisoners — a place he described to ProPublica in a phone call as the prison’s “old folks home” — where 199 inmates, many frail and some in wheelchairs, were isolated in a space designed for 170. As the disease spread among bunks spaced 3 or 4 feet apart, Thompson said he could see bedridden inmates with full-blown symptoms and others “in varying stages of recovery. While the rest of us are rarely 6 feet away from anyone else, sick or not.”
“Prison is not designed for social distancing,” said Thompson, who is serving a de facto life sentence (his first parole hearing will come in 2087) for aggravated murder and kidnapping. “That’s not the system’s fault. That’s not the prison’s fault. It couldn’t have been designed with the vision of one day having to social distance for 6 feet. ... It squeezed as many of us in here as it could.”
----- 10 -----
Mike Madrid
twitter.com/madrid_mike
23 June 2020
https://twitter.com/madrid_mike/status/1275274972894650371
Remember this photo of Trump campaign staff without masks 12 days ago?
Remember 8 staffers tested positive for COVID-19 a couple days ago?
Yeah....
[QUOTED TWEET]
Kyle Griffin
twitter.com/kylegriffin1
June 10, 2020
It appears that Mike Pence has deleted this tweet.
[EMBEDDED IMAGE: Pence at photo of entirely-unmasked Trump campaign mass gathering of staff]
----- 11 -----
Weijia Jiang
twitter.com/weijia
23 June 2020
https://twitter.com/weijia/status/1275422015059615750
[THREAD]
Just now I asked the President if he was kidding when he said he told his people to slow down testing, which is how White House officials explained the comment.
He said, “I don’t kid.”
He also said again testing is a double-edged sword, and praised the job the U.S. has done.
[NEXT]
UPDATE: twitter.com/PressSec told reporters aboard Air Force One that the President was using “sarcasm” in his original comment about slowing down testing during his rally, even though that’s not what he said this morning.
Official WH transcript and McEnany’s explanation here:
[EMBEDDED IMAGE OF TRANSCRIPT AND EXPLANATION]
----- 12 -----
Rebekah Jones aka #Insubordinate #scientist
twitter.com/GeoRebekah
23 June 2020
https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1275539345257218053
[THREAD]
[EDITOR: This is the scientist fired by the State of Florida for refusing to alter data]
BREAKING: 1 OF 3: Florida announced yesterday they're not counting the icu bed availability anymore, a key element in keeping things open, so the state can proceed to the next phase by July 4.
[NEXT]
BREAKING 2 OF 3 I have multiple sources at DOH who have just told me they have been instructed this week to change the numbers and begin slowly deleting deaths and cases so it looks like Florida is improving next week in the leadup to July 4, like they've "made it over the hump."
[NEXT]
BREAKING 3 OF 3 I've independently verified they've deleted at least 1200 cases in the last week.They're only reporting all these cases now so they can restrict reporting next week to make everyone think it's over. I've had two DOH employees in different offices confirm
----- 13 -----
Charlotte Clymer
twitter.com/cmclymer
23 June 2020
https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/1275483438267727873
Trump has handled the COVID crisis so disastrously that the European Union doesn't want to put their own citizens in danger by permitting Americans to enter their borders.
[NEXT]
For all of his talk about the American flag, Trump has effectively turned it into a toxic warning label.
----- 14 -----
EXCLUSIVE: Feds About To Bail On Supporting COVID Testing Sites In Texas And Other States
By Josh Kovensky
June 23, 2020
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/exclusive-feds-about-to-bail-on-supporting-covid-testing-sites-in-texas-and-other-states
The Trump administration is ending funding and support for local COVID-19 testing sites around the country this month, as cases and hospitalizations are skyrocketing in many states.
The federal government will stop providing money and support for 13 sites across five states which were originally set up in the first months of the pandemic to speed up testing at the local level.
Local officials and public health experts expressed a mixture of frustration, resignation, and horror at the decision to let federal support lapse.
Texas will be particularly hard hit by the decision. The federal government gives much-needed testing kits and laboratory access to seven testing sites around Texas. But in the state, which is seeing new peaks in cases, people still face long lines for testing that continues to fail to meet overwhelming demand.
----- 15 -----
The faster a country required masks, the fewer coronavirus deaths it had: study
By Patrick Cain Global News
Posted June 22, 2020
https://globalnews.ca/news/7075024/mask-wearing-fewer-coronavirus-deaths/
Some countries have been devastated by the novel coronavirus, and others have escaped lightly.
Why the extreme differences? The main one is that countries that quickly resorted to widespread mask-wearing had far lower death rates and shorter outbreaks, a new study argues.
The authors looked at coronavirus death rates in 198 countries, trying to see why some had painfully high death rates and others very low.
“What we found was that of the big variables that you can control which influence mortality, one was wearing masks,” says Christopher Leffler of Virginia Commonwealth University, one of the study’s authors.
“It wasn’t just by a few per cent, it was up to a hundred times less mortality. The countries that introduced masks from the very beginning of their outbreak have had hardly any deaths.”
