Day 119 Retrospective: More Plateau

On Friday the world hit six million cases of coronavirus. Massachusetts cases were up 0.7%, and The Hill reported that consumer spending had "plunged" by 13.6% in April, despite a 10.5% increase in personal income due to unemployment overcompensation plus stimulus checks. It had previously dropped 6.9% in March.

It turns out New York State was not alone in the brilliant idea of sending COVID-19 patients into nursing homes full of the most susceptible population of people since the native Americans met the smallpox virus. Apparently the NHS has been doing the same thing in Britain since the start of the pandemic there, and several other US states did it as well. The National Review accuses California, Michigan, New Jersey, and, of course, New York, based on varying amounts of evidence. Breitbart adds Pennsylvania to the hall of shame. According to the AARP, California backed down from whatever grandma-killing plans they briefly contemplated, as did Massachusetts.

PlagueBlog managed to extract some cities and towns data to make this week's version of the usual graph, though the new testing and positivity data isn't mapped yet. The upshot of the case counts is much like the previous week: some big-looking increases in small towns and some ongoing activity in the Worcester suburbs, but most of the action is in Southeastern Massachusetts, especially Somerset:

(Pop out.)