Day 151: The Zombie Uprising

Massachusetts cases are up a tenth of a percent today, with no new deaths. In fact, we have -41 deaths due to yet another data correction. (Beware of zombies.) On the other hand, California had the most new deaths in the US today at a cool 100, and they are also leading in new cases (over 7,000). Rhode Island remains the leader in testing, having managed to test more than a fifth of their population. New York is second at about a fifth.

On the hydroxychloroquine front, a letter to the European Journal of Internal Medicine questions recent, negative results from the West from a Southern perspective:

The countries of the South use hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine on a massive scale, just as they used them before for malaria, or still use them now for systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatic diseases. And, as more than 2 billion people at least have used this treatment, they have the greatest difficulty in believing that this product has become, by 2020, an extremely toxic product.

On the legal front, over 30 Texas bar owners are suing the state over the bar closure. A US District Court also summarily granted a preliminary injunction against Governor Cuomo's unconstitutionally arbitrary suppression of religious gatherings (at 25% occupancy as compared to at least 50% occupancy for every other possible activity in the state).

Apparently you can't get interfacing for love or a reasonable amount of money these days, because it's all gone into masks [YouTube]. PlagueBlog must ask, is it really life without adequate supplies of interfacing, yeast, toilet paper and Chlorox wipes? More seriously, Lionel Shriver asks, Is living without risk really living at all?

Perhaps in future we’ll adulate a whole different set of national heroes. We’ll give Olympic medals to gymnasts who realise that flipping around uneven parallel bars is terribly dangerous, and so have prudently sat out their athletic careers in a chair. The winner of the Tour de France will be the cyclist who never rides faster than eight miles an hour and remembers to wear sunscreen. We’ll award the Victoria Cross to the safest member of the armed forces ‘in the presence of the enemy’ — who comes under bombardment and hides in the boot of his jeep, or who safely joins the other side if it seems to be winning.