Various Covid News

The classic Vegas mentality at work. Thankfully the Strip is outside her jurisdiction:

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman thinks that businesses in the city that want to reopen should be able to — that way, those businesses that see outbreaks can just be closed again at a later date.

The mayor, who doesn't have authority over the Vegas Strip, shared her idea with MSNBC's Katy Tur in a phone interview on Tuesday.

"Assume everybody's a carrier," the mayor told Tur. "And then you start from an even slate, right there, and tell the people what to do. And let the businesses open, and competition will destroy that business if, in fact, they become evident that they have disease. They're closed down. It's that simple."

Congregate-care facilities seem to be the most vulnerable:

The ZIP code covering North Oak Park and other neighborhoods bordering the UC Davis Medical Center has emerged as the coronavirus epicenter of Sacramento. But the sprawling hospital campus that has been treating coronavirus patients for weeks isn’t the source, public health officials say.

...Sacramento County public health officials have declined to offer details about the cases, but acknowledged this week they are tracking three coronavirus infection “clusters” within the ZIP code, all of them at congregate care facilities. The county’s ZIP code data, shown publicly on a map on its website, is based on where infected people reside, not where they are diagnosed or treated.

Citing patient privacy concerns, health officials declined to disclose the names or locations of the three facilities, and declined to say how many confirmed infections have occurred at those sites. County public health officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye said a cluster is three or more associated cases.

The county defines congregate care facilities as skilled nursing facilities; assisted/senior living facilities; memory care facilities; group homes/board and care; and mental health, alcohol, or drug treatment facilities.

Best explanation I've heard yet why we aren't going to get the tests we need:

It should be obvious what’s going on: The Trump administration is doing everything possible to hamstring states’ capacity to perform the large-scale testing that would be needed to end the lockdowns safely and reopen the economy. When Trump is called out for this, he lies about it. He literally doesn’t want more testing. But why?

...No one is under any illusions that Trump cares about the American public, of course. But mass testing seems like it would clearly be in the president’s self-interest. His best chance at winning re-election is for the economy to be safely reopened, and at least partly recover, before November. But that simply can’t be done without mass testing. Trying to reopen the economy without doing that, as states like Georgia and South Carolina are planning to do, is just likely to cause the virus to spread more rapidly, which will only worsen the economic downturn.

So why is Trump doing whatever he can to prevent the very thing that would give him the best chance of saving the economy and boosting his re-election chances? Why is a notorious narcissist whose only plausible motivation is his own self-interest not doing the one thing that would benefit him in this crisis?

Because Trump isn’t capable of seeing widespread testing — and more accurate information about the spread of the virus — as being in his self-interest. He sees it this way: The more tests that are done, the more confirmed cases are counted, and his impulse is to conceal that larger number if he possibly can. So he’s trying to keep the official case count as low as possible through the only method he understands: Lying and cheating. In this case, by preventing testing such that no accurate count is possible.