Today's News (2020/5/4): May the 3,000 Deaths Per Day be With You edition

Daily 9/11s is apparently a perfectly good price to pay for nail salons and tattoo parlours, I guess.

1. [Ohio] GOP State Rep. Nino Vitale on why he won’t wear a face mask
2. The Daily 202: Sitting in Lincoln’s shadow, Trump casts himself as a victim amid coronavirus crisis
3. "Mr. President, are you serious? Lincoln was assassinated."
4. It’s safe to reopen states, Trump says as governors grapple with loosening restrictions
5. Protesters at the Michigan Capitol can't just play politics with a pandemic or we'll all lose
6. Pres. Trump can't even seem to tell the truth when he's helping.
7. No, there is no evidence pointing to President Obama running the counterintelligence investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russia.
8. NY, NJ, CT, PA, DE, RI and MA are launching a regional purchasing consortium to jointly procure PPE, tests, ventilators and other medical equipment.
9. Excess U.S. deaths hit estimated 37,100 in pandemic’s early days, far more than previously known
10. Trump administration projecting 3K daily coronavirus deaths by June

( The articles )

Today's News (2020/5/5): The Herd Immunity And Who's Going To Stop Me? edition

Today's news includes part of the GOP push to undermine and discredit COVID-19 containment efforts, particularly in the last article, by a website called the California Globe. It's run by an OAN-friendly journalist. She's a Trumpist Conservative who has written for various right-leaning and rightist newspapers including the Sacramento Bee and the Washington Examiner.

And she's calling the Western States Pact illegal, while promoting the "herd immunity" line, which is to say, let it kill everybody it's can until we get to 70%. In California, at current death rates, that would be somewhere around 70% of 39.5 million people, and since the hospitals would be overwhelmed we'd be looking at a heightened death rate.

What that means is a good question. If it's 5%, since that's easy math and in line with where that has already happened, it means kill 1.3 million Californians.

If things go extremely well, then it's more like 2%, and it's 550,000 Californians.

Or if exceedingly - really, impossibly - well, that's 1%, and 275,000 Californians.

This year.

Put in context with the other stories in the order presented, and you can watch the plan proceed apace.

Also, I don't know that the speculation below about this so-called "cubic" model the White House is using that shows new cases going to zero by May 15th? But the speculation looks all too likely.

1. BUSTED: Records reveal the Trump campaign has not returned illegal donation from foreign national
2. Three Russian Doctors Treating The Coronavirus Have Fallen Out Of Windows In Just Over A Week
3. AWS engineer Tim Bray resigns from Amazon following worker firings
4. Australian intelligence officials tell Sydney Morning Herald that U.S. briefings on Wuhan lab theory are mostly write-ups of news reports and "contained no material from intelligence gathering."
5. Australian intelligence knocks back US government's Wuhan lab virus claim
6. Draft report predicts covid-19 cases will reach 200,000 a day by June 1
7. If you put the last 30 days’ worth of death data into Excel and then use the “add trendline” function, specify a third-order polynomial, and project forward 30 days into the future you get a sharp decline in deaths starting around May 15.
8. Pressure mounts on governors to ease restrictions
9. Chris Christie pushes to reopen country despite dire Covid-19 projections: 'There are going to be deaths'
10. Gov. Newsom’s 5 Western State Pact Looks More Like Collusion Than Cooperation [EDITOR: I'm including this because it highlights a part of the GOP effort to undermine and discredit COVID-19 containment. This is a rightist California website, run by someone with experience in actual newspapers, including the Sacramento Bee. She's friendly towards One America News, as well.]

( The articles )