My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.The world has some large number of cases that have exceeded PlagueBlog's buffer. Spain, still a strong second place to the US, is contemplating universal basic income as a response to the pandemic. Germany has crossed the 100,000 case barrier, putting it in fourth place among nations. New York State is at 123,000 cases, over a third of all 337,000 cases in the US, and looks likely to overtake third-place Italy (129,000) soon. (IHME updated its projections for the US yesterday, including state-by-state peaks.)
The Feds, in their endearing way, confiscated a shipment of 35,000 N95 masks destined for Somerset County, NJ. One, it hardly seems worth it, and two, let's hope this drives home the lesson of how important it is to field your own successful football team for end-runs around the federal government.
On the cancellation front, Tomorrowland, an electronic music festival scheduled to be held in Belgium this summer, is on the chopping block. Also Gamestop got their plastic-bag-covered hands slapped last week for operating a non-essential curbside pickup business in Boston. Hopefully they've really closed this time and won't just pop up again like a bad mall kiosk.
P.S. The Guardian reports that Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care.
Massachusetts' testing numbers are down again today from Saturday's high of almost 6,000 tests. Today only 4,500 or so were tested, with 1337 new cases (up 11%) for a total of 13837. (Middlesex County is back in the lead.) There were 29 new deaths. Once again, it was a lack of Quest test results that kept the numbers down. PlagueBlog suspects the feds are confiscating our swab supplies now.
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