Day 110: The Five Million Mark

The world has reached five million cases. The US has 1.59 million of them, with Russia in second place at 309,000 and Brazil jumping to third place with 293,000 cases. Massachusetts is up 1% again today. Things are pretty calm on day 2 1/2 of Phase 1, except for some sour grapes among the pro-extreme-masking party over some stating of the obvious by the Plainville police department.

In a FaceBook post that survives only in reposts, they appear to have explained why they can't arrest non-mask-wearers: anyone can have a medical excuse and they aren't required to explain it. Apparently you can even have a mental health excuse. Perhaps the latter classification fits PlagueBlog's pre-existing condition of numeracy better. Believe me, it can be an extremely painful condition, especially in these trying times.

Also on the semi-legal front, a judge in Ohio has ruled that Ohio state law does not permit banning healthy people from going to the gym because somebody else has the flu a serious pandemic disease. Setting aside the question of whether it's legitimate to quarantine every single citizen of the state on suspicion of coronavirus, the judge noted that you only get to quarantine your suspects for 14 days, and those 14 days were up about six weeks ago.

It's cities and towns day here in Massachusetts, and the plateau plateaus on. Today's hotspots are all tiny towns where a few cases have an outsized effect. Out of the major cities, Fall River and New Bedford are the warmest compared to the rest of the state.

(Pop out.)