Red alert, day 19. Lockdown, day nine. As of this morning, Suffolk has 116 confirmed cases and Tower Hamlets has 225 confirmed cases. The UK has 25,150 confirmed cases (143,186 tests), and as of yesterday 1789 patients have died.
This has been the longest month ever, many commented through social media (“I have now lived through seven decades: the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and March”).
The Home Office is extending visas for healthcare workers it was previously trying to get rid of.
Helsinki Mayor Jan Vapaavuori, who has been giving daily briefings in Finnish and Swedish, also addressed the city in English for the first time.
An enormous white hospital ship, the USNHS Comfort, is docking in New York. People are crowding to see it. The field hospital in Central Park has been revealed to be the project of a Christian group, not of public health.
Wildlife is returning. Goats are taking Llandudno, boars are taking Bergamo. Turkeys, as in birds, have been spotted in Cambridge, Mass.
Amazon fired a worker who led a walkout over the company’s refusal to shut down and clean its Staten Island warehouse. The company refused to pay workers who were sick or in quarantine. Jeff Bezos is worth $117.3 billion. In other monopoly/cartel news, I learned today that the music site CDbaby has closed its direct music sales – it just feeds mp3s to the Internet giants now.
P&O passenger ferries have furloughed 1,100 staff and gone freight only, The Loadstar reports.
The US Postal Service may shut down. I thought it had been privatized a while ago, but that would be postal services in the UK (Royal Mail) and Finland (government owned company Itella – Finland has set up a number of agencies this way so it can sell shares if it wants money). The US one is still a government agency! The inability of the post office to keep going in an age of deliveries seems like terrible mismanagement, analogous to Sears’s failure to pivot to the Internet. But if they can’t protect the workers either, that’s very bad.