By Joe Carroll
Houston-area officials are “getting close” (click here) to reimposing stay-at-home orders and are prepared to reopen a Covid-19 hospital established but never used at a football stadium as virus cases expand in the fourth-largest U.S. city.
The announcement by Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner on Thursday came a day after the Lone Star state recorded its highest one-day tally of new cases since the pandemic emerged....
Now is not the time for "letting up." Letting up means letting go. Now, is the time to dig in and win a safer and sane America.
"The Virus Will Win" (click here)
By Yascha Mounk
A Second Wave of the coronavirus is on the way. When it arrives, we will lack the will to deal with it. Despite all the sacrifices of the past months, the virus is likely to win—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it already has.
In absolute terms, the United States has been hit harder than any other country. About a quarter of worldwide deaths have been recorded on these shores. And while the virus is no longer growing at an exponential rate, the threat it poses remains significant: According to a forecasting model by Morgan Stanley, the number of American cases will, if current trends hold, roughly double over the next two months.
But neither the impact of mass protests over police brutality nor the effect of the recent reopening of much of the country—including the casinos in Las Vegas—is reflected in the latest numbers. It can take at least 10 days for people to develop symptoms and seek out a test, and for the results to be aggregated and disseminated by public-health authorities....
An increasing number of cases in the USA means increasing numbers of deaths, maiming and disabilities. This is not the flu. A full six percent of all Americans that contract the virus will die. These include mothers and fathers that will leave children scarred with the loss of a parent and forbid both parents.
"Sheltering at Home" is the best form of prevention and ending this virus in the USA. Competent leadership requires strong measures. Would everyone in the USA consent to a three week sheltering in place if it meant the end of SARS-CoV-2 completely? That is a real option that should not be ignored, but, there needs to be an apolitical approach that doesn't dismantle such a measure for the second time. Why expect a third escalation?
There are states like Maine that have mostly tackled the virus, but, they still have hotspots that could use a reset.
By Colin Woodard
Hospitalizations (click here) for COVID-19 continued to fall across the state over the past week, even in the parts of southern Maine that have continued to see significant numbers of people testing positive for the disease.
At Maine Medical Center, which has had nearly half of the state’s confirmed coronavirus inpatients through most of the crisis, the number of confirmed COVID-19 inpatients hovered at between 8 and 11 over the week ending Thursday, down from a peak level of 35 hit on both April 7 and May 25. The inpatient count Tuesday and Wednesday was the lowest daily number there since March 22, at the beginning of the crisis.
At Portland’s other major hospital, Mercy, the number of inpatients fell from five to zero during the period, down from five to eight the previous week and eight to ten the week before that, which had been the busiest that hospital had experienced during the pandemic.
In Androscoggin County, hospitalizations have fortunately not been paralleling discouraging trends in new cases. The county saw a dramatic spike in new COVID-19 cases in mid-May – going from a seven-day average of one case at the end of April to more than 15 on May 23 – and over the past seven days has averaged a still-high nine cases a day, according to data from the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention....
