Opinion | How America Lost the War on Covid-19 – The New York Times

Over the past three weeks things have quickly gotten very grim. Hospitals in Arizona and Texas are in crisis. And, yes, it was premature reopening that did it, both directly and by sending a signal to individuals that the risk was past.

But what strikes me, when looking at America’s extraordinary pandemic failure, is how top-down it all was.

Those anti-lockdown demonstrations weren’t spontaneous, grass-roots affairs. Many were organized and coordinated by conservative political activists, some with close ties to the Trump campaign, and financed in part by right-wing billionaires.

And the rush to reopen in Sunbelt states was less a response to popular demand than a case of Republican governors following Trump’s lead.

This Oregon town of 170,000 replaced some cops with medics and mental health workers. It’s worked for over 30 years – CNN Eugene, OR

Around 30 years ago, a town in Oregon retrofitted an old van, staffed it with young medics and mental health counselors and sent them out to respond to the kinds of 911 calls that wouldn’t necessarily require police intervention.

Source: This Oregon town of 170,000 replaced some cops with medics and mental health workers. It’s worked for over 30 years – CNN

The implications of silent transmission for the control of COVID-19 outbreaks | PNAS

Our results indicate that symptom-based isolation must be supplemented by rapid contact tracing and testing that identifies asymptomatic and presymptomatic cases, in order to safely lift current restrictions and minimize the risk of resurgence.

Source: The implications of silent transmission for the control of COVID-19 outbreaks | PNAS

President Trump lashes out at NASCAR’s only full-time black driver Bubba Wallace accusing him of creating a hoax and suggesting he should apologize

Shows how out of line Trump is….

BCNN1 WP

Bubba Wallace stands next to his car during a prayer before a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indianapolis, Sunday, July 5, 2020. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

NASCAR’s layered relationship with President Donald Trump took a sharp turn Monday when Trump blasted the racing organization for banning the Confederate flag and wrongly accused the sport’s only full-time Black driver of perpetrating “a hoax” when a crew member found a noose in the team garage stall.

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Victoria reimposes coronavirus stage 3 lockdown on metropolitan Melbourne and Mitchell Shire after record rise in cases – ABC News

He said the virus had leaked from postcodes already under the stay-at-home orders to other parts of Melbourne.

“We know we are on the cusp of something very, very bad if we don’t take these steps today,” he said.

Source: Victoria reimposes coronavirus stage 3 lockdown on metropolitan Melbourne and Mitchell Shire after record rise in cases – ABC News

Nurses Who Battled Virus in New York Confront Friends Back Home Who Say It’s a Hoax – The New York Times

Heather Smith, a nurse from Topsail Island, off the coast of North Carolina, who worked at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, struggled to hold back tears when describing how she felt when her brother said he did not believe the virus was real. When Ms. Smith started typing a rant on Facebook, she said, “I realized how angry I was.” She said she could not get out of her mind the images of patients who died alone: “No one understands how serious and how traumatizing it is.” Courtney Sudduth, a nurse from Oklahoma City, said that when she arrived in New York people from back home wanted to know: Was it really as bad as the news media made it sound? Yes, she would tell them, describing the 18-wheel refrigerated truck that was parked outside Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital in Manhattan and used to store bodies. Even that was not enough. Her grandmother in Mississippi still does not wear a mask when she goes grocery shopping, she said. “Oh, I’ll be fine,” Ms. Sudduth recalled her grandmother as saying. One of Ms. Sudduth’s brothers, who lives in Mississippi, believed conspiracy theories about the virus and continued to socialize at cookouts — until last month, she said, when he cam

Months Into Virus Crisis, U.S. Cities Still Lack Testing Capacity – The New York Times

At a testing site in New Orleans, a line formed at dawn. But city officials ran out of tests five minutes after the doors opened at 8 a.m., and many people had to be turned away.

In Phoenix, where temperatures have topped 100 degrees, residents have waited in sweltering cars for as long as eight hours to get tested.

And in San Antonio and other large cities with mounting caseloads of the virus, officials have reluctantly announced new limits to testing: The demand has grown too great, they say, so only people showing symptoms may now be tested — a return to restrictions that were in place in many parts of the country during earlier days of the virus.