Cumulative Confirmed COVID-19 Cases

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Lots 'o Links

Here's your weekly reading from Larwyn's Linx; Stephen Kruiser's Morning Briefing; and Maggie's Farm

Harold Ticktin tells us in his Yiddish Vinkl column that the word lid means song, as in: "The yiddishe lid, 'Bei Mir Bistu Shein' (To Me You’re Beautiful) was popularized by the Andrews Sisters, a hit singing trio, in 1937; followed by 'Ot Azoy' (The Tailor’s Song) sung by famous black jazz singer Cab Calloway in 1939." Don''t you just love it?

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Important Reading for American Morons:

In coronavirus news, the great medical website STAT has a somber must-read titled "America's Window of Opportunity to Beat Back COVID-19 is Narrowing." Too bad it's not required reading for the incredibly selfish idiots in this country! Here's an excerpt:

"Ehresmann and others in public health are flummoxed by the phenomenon of people refusing to acknowledge the risk the virus poses.
'Just this idea of, ‘I just don’t want to believe it so therefore it’s not going to be true’ — honestly, I have not really dealt with that as it relates to disease before,' she said.
Buckee, the Harvard expert, wonders if the magical thinking that seems to have infected swaths of the country is due to the fact many of the people who have died were elderly. For many Americans, she said, the disease has not yet touched their lives — but the movement restrictions and other response measures have.
'I think if children were dying, this would be … a different situation, quite honestly,' she said.
Epidemiologist Michael Mina despairs that an important chance to wrestle the virus under control is being lost, as Americans ignore the realities of the pandemic in favor of trying to resume pre-Covid life.
'We just continue to squander every bit of opportunity we get with this epidemic to get it under control,'’ said Mina, an assistant professor in Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
'The best time to squash a pandemic is when the environmental characteristics slow transmission. It’s your one opportunity in the year, really, to leverage that extra assistance and get transmission under control,' he said, his frustration audible.
Driving back transmission would require people to continue to make sacrifices, to accept the fact that life post-Covid cannot proceed as normal, not while so many people remain vulnerable to the virus. Instead, people are giddily throwing off the shackles of coronavirus suppression efforts, seemingly convinced that a few weeks of sacrifice during the spring was a one-time solution."

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