This is my weekly update for the week ending July 19, 2020. I’m sure I missed a lot of important stories so please feel free to comment on them below.
Global Covid 19 Cases: 14,495,636
Global Covid 19 Deaths: 606,474
37,377 newly dead, this is an average of 5,340 per day up from 4869 last week
U.S. Covid 19 Cases: 3,840,748
U.S. Covid 19 Deaths: 142,926
5,350 newly dead, avg of 764 per day this is slightly up from 741 last week
Hawaii State Total Covid 19 Cases: 1,354
Island of Oahu Covid 19 Cases: 1,040
Total State of Hawaii Covid 19 Deaths: 24
311 active cases from 309 last week. Hawaii average of 22 new cases per day slightly down from last week but we lost 5 people to it island wide last week.
Pandemic News:
The Trump administration changed the ways numbers are reported last week, going directly to the administration instead of through the CDC – so all of the American numbers are now suspect. This happened mid-week so probably not a huge effect this week, but moving forward the numbers will probably be more manipulated. There were an unusually large number of celebrity and politician deaths last week – some from Covid, some from other things. The U.S. keeps topping single case day records. Deaths are starting to go up now as well. Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California appear to be on the brink of having New York size emergencies. They will most likely either move into lockdown mode again or have much larger emergencies. The re-opening has been a deadly failure. Many schools in those states have opted to go virtual only but Orange County bizarrely decided to go full open with no social distancing and no mask requirement. California has made wearing a mask mandatory and is starting to issue tickets for violations. Several companies have suggested they are having good results producing vaccines which produce anti-bodies, but researchers are now saying antibody protection will now last only several months. A large number of infants have caught the disease in Texas. The $600 pandemic unemployment supplement benefit ends this week. The pandemic moratorium on evictions and foreclosures ends at the end of the month. Meanwhile, Trump supporters continue to say having to wear a mask is an infringement on their civil liberties and have taken to wearing masks with holes in them or masks made from lace in protest. You can’t make this stuff up.
U.S. Political and Economic News:
Ruth Bader Ginsberg is battling liver cancer.
In presidential politics multiple polls are saying that Biden has a huge lead over Trump. This sounds like 2016 again to me. There are lots of people who vote for Trump but won’t admit it. Lots of people don’t want to be on any record voting for a racist dictatorship. As many as 50% of African-American owned small businesses won’t survive. This is probably true for all small business. Tesla, Amazon, and many other stocks are at record highs.
The U.S. has sent federal agents and troops into Portland to squash protests – their excuse was grafitti on public buildings and monuments. Activists have been being abducted by camouflage wearing soldiers in unmarked vehicles, not read their rights, not arrested with due process, and later released. These are gestapo tactics. The federal presence in Portland is fanning flames higher. Portland is the wrong city to try militant strong arm tactics in. These protests have moved from being Black Lives Matter protests to protests that are about the infringement of civil liberties.
Twitter was hacked earlier this week. Dozens of high profile accounts were used to run a Bitcoin scam which authorities say yielded 12 Bitcoin, about $100,000. Former president Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Apple and many others – the Twit in Chief was not among them. To me, this feels suspect on several levels. First, if you have root level access why not take the highest profile account of them all and secondly these are all people who have either openly gone against Trump or recently abandoned him. The fact that they only went after Bitcoin is also suspect, the operation probably cost more than it yielded. Further suspect is the fact that the accounts were not used to sew chaos – which could easily have been done. This was a test, it seems clear.
Iran claims to have 24 million people infected which seems possible but impossible to have tested for.
On a personal note, I completed my book Not My America: A Stranger in My Strange Land. It’s free and you should download it and share it. The last two chapters in particular are something everyone should read, titled Not My America and My America. You can download a free PDF copy at https://vagobond.com/not-my-america-a-stranger-in-my-strange-land read it online.
