The Countdown to the restart of the economy has begun.

[BoSoxGal]

How did this person understand ‘work at home’ to mean invite numerous unrelated persons to your home for close contact, likely unmasked in poorly ventilated conditions? How did a lawyer advise him this was acceptable?

I’m sure contact tracing for this idiot will be a nightmare- I wonder how many infections are actually attributable to him, while he denigrates Governor Cuomo. POS!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... le-8323441

[Darren]

"The USNS Mercy departed the Port of Los Angeles Friday morning after seven weeks supporting COVID-19 relief efforts in the region.

The 1,000-bed U.S. Navy hospital ship arrived in Los Angeles on March 27 to serve as a referral hospital for non-COVID patients so local hospitals would be available for the expected surge of coronavirus patients.

Despite its 1,000 bed capacity, the USNS Mercy treated just 77 patients, with the last being discharge on May 5, according to reports. None of the patients were COVID-19 positive.

USNS Mercy is now returning to its homeport in San Diego, California."

[Darren]

"Tesla has picked Austin, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, as finalists for its new U.S. assembly plant, a person briefed on the matter said Friday.

It came just days after owner Elon Musk threatened to move manufacturing and Tesla´s headquarters out of California in a fight with San Francisco Bay Area health officials over whether their Fremont plant could reopen after being closed to stop the spread of coronavirus.

The person says company officials visited Tulsa in the past week and were shown two sites."

[Joe Guy]

Tesla in Tulsa?

[RayThom]

Type 'S' in Texas?

[Darren]

"NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) - The governor’s office announced Tennessee will lift capacity restrictions on restaurants and shops and instead focus on social distancing best practices.

The announcement from the Tennessee's Economic Recovery Group on Friday is for 89 of the state's 95 counties and the next phase of reopening will go into effect on May 22.

According to a release, the capacity restrictions and guidelines will be issued to facilitate the safe reopening of larger, non-contact attractions on or after May 22."

[Darren]

"Gov. Janet Mills has continued to lift lockdown measures that have slowed the pandemic in Maine even though the state has failed to meet key reopening prerequisites and other essential benchmarks and guidelines established by public health experts.
...
Facing heavy pressure from business and industry, Mills announced April 28 that Maine would take its first steps toward reopening on May 1, when barbershops, hairdressers, auto dealers, doctor’s offices and golf courses would be allowed to reopen statewide. "

[MajGenl.Meade]

[Scooter]

The risk levels of everyday activities like dining out, going to the gym, and getting a haircut, according to an infectious disease expert

So reading between the lines, workplaces where people are in a shared workspace (i.e. offices, factory floors, warehouses, kitchens, etc., etc., etc.) are at medium to high risk of infection, social distancing be damned, because breathing the same air for any length of time is going to be enough for transmission.

But the death cult says it's time to get everyone back to work, so I guess millions of people are going to be forced to take the risk of killing themselves and/or their families, if they don't want to be left destitute without recourse to any benefits.

Keeping America great!

[dales]

Some Tesla factory employees say they're being pressured to return to work
"I'm going to believe medical professionals before I believe Elon," one worker said.


May 13, 2020, 12:07 PM PDT
By Ahiza García-Hodges

When Jessica Naro was told she would need to report back to work Wednesday at Tesla's automobile assembly plant in Fremont, California, her first thought was that it wasn't safe.
She was worried about her health as the sole provider for her family but even more worried that she'd be exposed to the virus and pass it on to her 6-year-old son. In March, he spent two weeks in a hospital for a condition that she was told makes him more vulnerable to serious complications if he contracts the coronavirus.

"It was really hard," she said. "I'm not ever trying to deal with that again."

Naro is one of five workers who spoke with NBC News about their concerns over Tesla's efforts to reopen its plant despite a countywide health order issued in mid-March to limit the spread of the coronavirus. It's unclear how many workers have gone back to work, but based on conversations with the five workers, many Tesla employees seem to have returned. Concern remains that public guarantees that they would be able to return to work at their discretion are contradicted by internal pressure to help the company resume producing cars.
Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

Naro, 25, works the night shift at the plant. She has been furloughed since late March, when the countywide order forced the factory to shut down most operations. The order from the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency limits nonessential businesses like Tesla to "minimum basic operations" until further notice. At first, Tesla fought the order, arguing that it was an essential business, but law enforcement got involved, and it eventually complied. Monday, it acted to again defy the order.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ ... -n1205866

[BoSoxGal]

I am grateful to be working in healthcare, so when I return to work after furlough, I can reasonably expect everyone to be adhering to sensible masking policies and maintenance of social distance except when hands on assistance mandates otherwise.

[Scooter]

Alan Fairweather

"There isn't any iceberg. There was an iceberg but it's in a totally different ocean. The iceberg is in this ocean but it will melt very soon. There is an iceberg but we didn't hit the iceberg. We hit the iceberg, but the damage will be repaired very shortly. The iceberg is a Chinese iceberg. We are taking on water but every passenger who wants a lifeboat can get a lifeboat, and they are beautiful lifeboats. Look, passengers need to ask nicely for the lifeboats if they want them. We don't have any lifeboats, we're not lifeboat distributors. Passengers should have planned for icebergs and brought their own lifeboats. I really don't think we need that many lifeboats. We have lifeboats and they're supposed to be our lifeboats, not the passengers' lifeboats. The lifeboats were left on shore by the last captain of this ship. Nobody could have foreseen the iceberg."

[Scooter]

[Scooter]

Texas cases of COVID-19 increasing by thousands since reopening

Texas has seen a steady rise in novel coronavirus cases and fatalities since reopening just over two weeks ago.

There are now 45,198 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. That is an increase of 1,347 cases from Thursday to Friday. The new numbers have not yet been recorded for Saturday.

Last Friday, the daily case increase was 1,219.

While the cases are still well below New York, the state with the most confirmed cases at more than 345,000, the steady increase shows that the curve has not yet flattened in Texas.

The state also experienced its highest and second-highest daily death toll just a day apart. On Thursday, 58 deaths were recorded in 24 hours and Friday that number dropped only slightly to 56, according to the health department. The total number of fatalities is at 1,272.

Last Friday, the daily death toll was 31.

Hospitalizations rates have appeared to flatten, but that data is reported on a two-week lag. Currently there are 1,716 people in a Texas hospital, according to the health department.

Texas began reopening after its stay-at-home order was lifted on April 30.

Restaurants are open for in-person dining at 25% capacity. Movie theaters and malls are also open at 25% capacity.

Retail stores, libraries and museums are fully open. Come Monday, gyms will reopen too.

The two most populous counties -- Harris and Dallas -- have recorded the most cases. There are 8,817 confirmed cases in Harris County and 6,837 confirmed cases in Dallas County.

The state has tested nearly 646,000 people out of a population of 29 million. Cases are most likely higher because of how few people have been tested.

[Scooter]

A 'cuckoo' graph with no sense of time or place shows how Georgia bungled coronavirus data as it reopens

On the coronavirus-data page on the Georgia Department of Public Health's website, one of many brightly colored graphics shows COVID-19 cases over time in the state's five most affected counties.

But the first iteration of the graph followed neither time nor county. Instead, the way the data was arranged gave the impression of neatly descending case counts.

Local reporters began to take notice on May 10. On Twitter, Stephen Fowler, a reporter for the local radio station GPB News, pointed out the inconsistent data representation.

On the horizontal x-axis, the graph began on April 28, went back in time to April 27, then jumped two days ahead to April 29. This date-hopping continued along the x-axis.

What's more, the colored bars — with each color representing a county — were arranged in different orders for each date.

The graph seemed to bend both time and place to achieve a clean descending-staircase effect.

"It's just cuckoo," Democratic state Rep. Scott Holcomb of Atlanta told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday.

Holcomb added: "I don't know how anyone can defend this graph as not being misleading. I really don't."

Holcomb sent a letter about the graph to the governor's office on Monday.

"This data is being used to inform state policy, and it's also being used by individuals," Holcomb wrote in a Facebook post about the graph after sending the letter. "It's incredibly important for the data to be as accurate as possible and to be presented in a manner that is not misleading."

However it appeared in the original graph, the data does not actually reflect a clear downward trend.

The Georgia DPH has since updated the graph to progress chronologically from left to right and to keep the counties in the same order for each date.

"The x axis was set up that way to show descending values to more easily demonstrate peak values and counties on those dates," Candice Broce, the communications director for Gov. Brian Kemp's office, tweeted on Monday. "Our mission failed. We apologize. It is fixed."

It's unclear how the original graph ended up so out of order. Broce told the Journal-Constitution that the governor's office did not choose the data that the DPH publishes. A DPH spokeswoman told the newspaper that there was an error in how the graph sorted dates. Holcomb said on Facebook on Tuesday that he'd been told that a vendor that publishes data on the website had chosen it.

The Georgia DPH and Kemp's office did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Cody Hall, Kemp's press secretary, said on Twitter on Monday that the data team had thought the graph "would be helpful," though it "obviously" turned out not to be.

"Never ever ever again will we have a graph with a x-axis that is not chronological on the website," Hall wrote. "Never. I promise. I swear."

Beyond other data mishaps that the Journal-Constitution cited — changing criteria for case start dates, changing color coding for a county-by-county case map, and temporary data errors on the website — Georgia's reopening strategy might be based on a fundamental misinterpretation of data.

It takes time to process coronavirus tests, and Georgia backdates cases to the date the patient first showed symptoms. So the state government may not know how many cases were confirmed on a given day until two weeks have passed.

DPH graphs showing cases and deaths over time now clearly note that data from the past 14 days is still in progress.

However, these graphs had previously presented the incomplete data as a continuous part of the larger curve.

Holcomb said the DPH changed the graphs after he mentioned them in his letter on Monday.

"The shaded areas on the right show data that exists so far, but this should not be relied upon because it is incomplete," Holcomb wrote on Facebook, adding, "We need to continue to monitor and watch how the curve develops."

Kemp appeared to take that incomplete data at face value as he allowed businesses to reopen across the state, two researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Biological Sciences, Stephen Beckett and Joshua Weitz, argued in an article for Slate on Friday.

Kemp asserted that the number of new cases in Georgia was declining when he announced reopenings at the end of April. However, "Georgia was, and still is, in a 'plateau'-like trajectory," Beckett and Weitz said.

"If decision-makers in the state of Georgia want to use evidence-based criteria to continue to reopen, they must not conflate reporting lags with actual declines to suit preferred narratives," they wrote. "Instead, they must deal with the evidence as it is."

[Scooter]

Over 100 Million in China’s Northeast Face Renewed Lockdown

Some 108 million people in China’s northeast region are being plunged back under lockdown conditions as a new and growing cluster of infections causes a backslide in the nation’s return to normal.

In an abrupt reversal of the re-opening taking place across the nation, cities in Jilin province have cut off trains and buses, shut schools and quarantined tens of thousands of people. The strict measures have dismayed many residents who had thought the worst of the nation’s epidemic was over.

People “are feeling more cautious again,” said Fan Pai, who works at a trading company in Shenyang, a city in nearby Liaoning province that’s also facing renewed restrictions. “Children playing outside are wearing masks again” and health care workers are walking around in protective gear, she said. “It’s frustrating because you don’t know when it will end.”

While the cluster of 34 infections isn’t growing as quickly the outbreak in Wuhan which started the global pandemic last December, China’s swift and powerful reaction reflects its fear of a second wave after it curbed the virus’s spread at great economic and social cost. It’s also a sign of how fragile the re-opening process will be in China and elsewhere as even the slightest hint of a resurgence of infections could prompt a return to strict lockdown.

The government of Shulan, a city in Jilin, said on WeChat Monday it would put in place its strictest measures yet to contain the virus. Residential compounds with confirmed or suspected cases will be closed off, with only one person from each family allowed to leave to purchase essentials for two hours every two days.

Shen Jia, a Shenyang-based salesman at a life sciences company, canceled a three-day business trip to Jilin city last week because he would have been quarantined for as long as 21 days on his return. A state-owned restaurant he visited last week separated his party of three because only two people are allowed at each table, a restriction that had been eased weeks ago before being re-instated.

“You can feel that control is stricter,” he said. People “have been more careful and reduced outdoor activities.”

A sense of deja vu is permeating Jilin city, which underwent the same strict lockdown implemented in most of China in February and March despite only reporting daily cases in the single digits then. Overall, Jilin province’s total cases stand at 127; Hubei province had 68,000.

Still, delivery services have been mostly halted and anti-fever medication is banned at drugstores to prevent people from hiding their symptoms. The tension has spread to nearby areas, even if no cases have been reported officially in those places yet.

“Everyone is jittery,” said Wang Yuemei, a pharmaceutical factory worker in neighboring Tonghua. “I never ever expected Jilin province to be a hard-hit area when the whole country is getting back to normal now.”

After facing global criticism for its delayed response to Wuhan’s outbreak, President Xi Jinping’s administration is taking visible steps to stop the spread of the virus in the northeast. Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who led the central government’s virus task force in Wuhan, arrived in Jilin city on May 13. The highest-ranking Communist Party official of Shulan, where the new cluster’s first infection emerged, was removed on Saturday along with five other cadres.

Pressure to contain the infections is even greater with China’s annual political meetings scheduled to commence this week in Beijing after being delayed from their usual March date. Thousands of political delegates will gather in the capital to endorse the government’s agenda from Friday and the central leadership is determined to project stability and calm during this period.

Health officials do not yet know how the new cluster started, but suspect that the patients may have come into contact with infected returnees from Russia, which has one of the worst outbreaks in Europe.

Those in charge of transporting potentially infected arrivals from abroad to centralized quarantine centers need to do a better job, said Wang Bin, a National Health Commission official, during a briefing on Sunday.

“Imported cases from overseas and clustered infections domestically have created dual pressure on us in containing the virus,” she said.

The new cluster is also a reminder that much of China still remains vulnerable to the virus because its first wave of infection was largely confined to Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, thanks to a lockdown that sealed the region off from the rest of the country in January.

“The majority of Chinese at the moment are still susceptible to the Covid-19 infection” because of a lack of herd immunity, top Chinese epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan told CNN over the weekend. The nation is facing a “big challenge,” he said, adding that the situation in China is “not better than foreign countries.”

Videos circulating on Chinese social media showed some senior high school students in tears when they were told to leave their campus because they’d lose precious time to prepare for their college entrance exams due in two months.

“It’s really unfortunate for us to encounter the epidemic at this point of time,” said Zhou Han, an 18-year-old student in Jilin. “I’m anxious because I can’t prepare for the exam well without last-minute instruction and supervision by my teachers.”

[Darren]

"Huge day as Detroit 3 restart at least 51 plants shuttered since March by coronavirus"

[RayThom]

"Huge day as Detroit 3 restart at least 51 plants shuttered since March by coronavirus"

I feel "Big Auto" will be using this "grand reopening" as a way to cull the herd of all those nasty UAW members that prevent them from making obscene profits.

Only the subsequent COVID stats will tell.

[Crackpot]

it wouldn't happen without the rank and file. Most places opening up around here are doing so at reduced capacity and with extra precautions in place. Monday was the first day my company was re opened but only for those who can't work from home plus mandated PPE.

[Scooter]

Florida scientist said she was fired for 'refusing to manipulate' COVID-19 data

The scientist who created Florida's COVID-19 data portal wasn't just removed from her position on May 5, she was fired on Monday by the Department of Health, she said, for refusing to manipulate data.

Rebekah Jones said in an email to FLORIDA TODAY that she single-handedly created two applications in two languages, four dashboards, six unique maps with layers of data functionality for 32 variables covering a half a million lines of data. Her objective was to create a way for Floridians and researchers to see what the COVID-19 situation was in real time.

Then, she was dismissed.

"I worked on it alone, sixteen hours a day for two months, most of which I was never paid for, and now that this has happened I'll probably never get paid for," she wrote in an email, confirming that she had not just been reassigned on May 5, but fired from her job as Geographic Information Systems manager for the Florida Department of Health.

After FLORIDA TODAY first reported Jones' removal from her position in charge of the Florida COVID-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard she created, she confirmed, as reported by CBS-12 in West Palm Beach that she was fired because she was ordered to censor some data, but refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen."

She provided no further details.

In an email last Friday to researchers and other data users, Jones warned that with her removal changes were likely coming to the accessibility and transparency of the dashboard data.

"They are making a lot of changes. I would advise being diligent in your respective uses of this data," she wrote.

Researchers who saw the email reacted with shock and dismay, suggesting it could be evidence that the Gov. Ron De Santis' government was censoring information to support the case for re-opening Florida.

Lucky Tran a Biologist and public health communicator at Columbia University on Twitter reacted to the news in a series of tweets. "When politicians censor scientists and manipulate the numbers, the rest of us suffer," he wrote.

US Congresswoman representing Tampa Bay, Kathy Castor wrote: "Floridians will not feel safe in opening up without transparency."

Governor Ron DeSantis' spokeswoman, Helen Aguirre Ferré, issued a statement to the Miami Herald, saying: “The Florida COVID-19 Dashboard was created by the Geographic Information System (GIS) team in the Division of Disease Control and Health Protection at the Florida Department of Health. Although Rebekah Jones is no longer involved, the GIS team continues to manage and update the Dashboard providing accurate and important information that is publicly accessible.”

But emails from Jones through April showed that Jones was the one responding to feedback from researchers in a bid to improve and update her product. Jones told FLORIDA TODAY that she alone was responsible for "every line of code."

In a May 5 email in which she announced the launch of a Spanish-language version of the dashboard, Jones wrote: "Please be patient as we get all this connected and running smoothly, and do let me know if you see any errors." It was sent the same day she was removed from her role managing of the dashboard.

For 60-days Jones said she never took a day off, not even when a powerful April 12 Easter tornado leveled her parents' home in Southeast Mississippi. A GoFundMe page was set up to help her family recover. Luckily, her mother survived. Her father, a truck driver, was in Texas at the time.

"Sorry if I’ve been a little slow to respond these last few days," she wrote to data users in an email just 3 days later reporting updates to how data was organized, and the inclusion of county-level race data.

Jones provided detailed updates in emails every few days, often technical and always responsive to user feedback. At the time was dismissed, she was working on making historical data more accessible to users.

On April 25, Jones provided an explanation to why the data set would go from morning and evening daily updates to just once per day.

"We’re gearing up to provide more analytics and data, and would not be able to process the full dataset twice daily with the staff we have," she wrote.

"We have been directed to start tracking data related to reopening, and it is consuming a lot of staff hours on very short notice."

Days later she would be removed from the position entirely and her data users sounded the alarm that government might be censoring science.

Jones had worked with the Department of Health as a geospatial analyst and then a Geographic Information System (GIS) manager since obtaining her doctorate in Geography from Florida State University in 2018.

She holds a masters of science degree in geography and mass communication from Louisiana State University and a bachelors in Journalism and Geography from Syracuse University.

The Department of Health has so far not replied to request for comment.

Terrie Rizzo, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, released a statement on Tuesday calling for an investigation.

“Allegations that Florida’s government may have tried to manipulate or alter data to make reopening appear safer is outrageous. These kinds of actions are dangerous and, frankly, should be criminal," she wrote.

"An independent investigation into these allegations is needed immediately. Meanwhile, city and state officials across Florida should closely monitor the situation to protect the public’s health.”