The Friday Breeze
Want to learn the very best and most provocative tales from the week? Welcome to the Friday Breeze, the place we compile all of them — so that you’re set along with your weekend studying.
Another week has passed by, and the largest information stays that COVID numbers aren’t looking much better because the illness spreads rapidly by Florida, Arizona, Texas and California.
Three million circumstances and 133,000 deaths within the United States. Testing still takes too long, KHN reported — the Atlanta mayor needed to wait eight days for outcomes! — and, no, more testing isn’t skewing the numbers.
With practically 60,000 new circumstances in in the future, the United States set another COVID record. The United States leads the world, however not in a great way, as a headline in a KHN morning publication put it this week. Indeed, it’s fairly doable that President Donald Trump’s latest rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, contributed to the spike, Reuters reported.
COVID News, Lots of It
The focus of the arguing this week was on back-to-school plans. School districts are attempting to make that onerous resolution with a purpose to shield youngsters, employees members and fogeys. (Well, and the economic system, for that matter.) The Atlantic printed some suggestions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is under pressure from Trump to water down its reopening security suggestions so, as Trump put it in a tweet Monday, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” Colleges are developing with varied plans to permit some college students again on campus however provide few in-person lessons.
Meanwhile, much more Americans have misplaced religion in Trump’s dealing with of the epidemic, in response to a brand new ballot launched by ABC News/Ipsos: 33% approve, down from 41% three weeks ago.
The Friday Breeze
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The beleaguered World Health Organization, to which Trump says he’ll minimize U.S. funding, acquired embroiled in an argument over whether or not airborne particles transmit the coronavirus. Scientific American attempted to sort out a complicated story, whereas WHO acknowledges the evidence.
KHN printed, with the Los Angeles Times, an excellent story about how COVID-19 is beginning to kill inmates on California’s death row at San Quentin. A prosecutor of one of many murderers who died wasn’t sympathetic. The Texas Tribune studies how the illness is ravaging Texas prisons and killing individuals who had very quick sentences.
A number of different tales from the week that shouldn’t be missed as a result of they offer you a great have a look at how authorities officers nonetheless battle to get a deal with on this disaster: Stat studies that the Food and Drug Administration “once more dangers being pulled into an ugly political fracas” over hydroxychloroquine. Jim Fallows on the Atlantic did a masterful job of telling the story of the inept coronavirus response, within the fashion of an aviation accident report. It’s effectively value studying. This article in BMJ, the medical journal, is somewhat tougher to learn, however well worth the effort for the provocative and opposite level it makes: The U.S. buy of a lot of the world’s provide of the drug remdesivir, a doable COVID remedy, could also be a boon to the rest of the world.
Put these two in your checklist for weekend studying, maybe: The Washington Post’s horrific look inside a nursing home wracked with COVID infections and a New York Times story on the racial inequity of the coronavirus in a sequence of maps and graphics.
The Toolkit
Every week there are new on-line graphics and different visible shows of COVID information that make it simpler to know what’s going on within the epidemic. A number of that I and the KHN employees discovered:
A COVID vaccine progress tracker from The New York Times.
Another smart vaccine tracker, this one from the Milken Institute.
County-level data on COVID infections and threat calculations from the Harvard Global Health Institute. (Their server could be a bit sluggish. Be affected person.)
Follow who’s getting federal bailout money with this instrument from ProfessionalPublica.
But wait: If you’re assembling a toolkit, the good well being reporter Charlie Ornstein of ProfessionalPublica has already performed a lot of the give you the results you want. Open up this Google Doc to search out his excellent assortment.
Oddly Important News, More Odd Than Important
Well, for all the eye it was getting, some folks appeared to suppose Kanye West working for president was huge information. Forbes interviewed him, and right here is one factor he mentioned that was well being care-related:
“It’s so many of our children that are being vaccinated and paralyzed. … So when they say the way we’re going to fix Covid is with a vaccine, I’m extremely cautious. That’s the mark of the beast. They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven.”
The Italian Mafia has innovated within the well being care trade. The Financial Times studies: “By corrupting local officials, organised criminals have been able to make vast profits from contracts given to their own front companies, establishing monopolies on services ranging from delivering patients in faulty ambulances to transporting blood to taking away the dead.”
Here’s a well-told story of a socialite spreading COVID at a celebration of fellow swells.
To finish on an uplifting notice, as a result of that’s necessary in these occasions, a video of a light display over Seoul with 300 drones telling Koreans to put on masks and wash their arms. (And they do. Korea has one of many lowest an infection charges on the planet.)
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