piling up

Red alert, day 42. Lockdown, day 32. Suffolk has 814 (+99) confirmed cases in today’s figures, neighboring Essex has 2069 (+89, about 2X Suffolk population) cases and Tower Hamlets has 578 (+15, about 0.5X Suffolk population) confirmed cases as of this morning.

Today’s Public Health England release logs 138,078 cases on 583,496 tests (+23,560, some on the same people). A total of 18,738 (+616) deaths in hospital have been recorded. Some of the bereavement announcements on social media are for not just one death in the family, but several.

In the daily US briefing, President Trump advised people to use bleach (taken internally) or ultraviolet light against the virus. Unlike on television, no staffer piped up, “With respect sir, no, they should not, that will kill them.” Only in living rooms did this happen (Dr Frank Wu video). The New York Times framed his comments against a mushy second opinion (“some experts”), and only later took a firmer stand.


After the remarks blew up, Trump said he was using sarcasm. Breitbart said he didn’t say it at all. The Guardian reported that he’d received a letter from a televangelist touting bleach as a cure. CNN suggested he seemed to be playing off comments about the efficacy of bleach and light in killing the coronavirus on surfaces, made by a Homeland Security official earlier in the conference and just before it (an interpretation favored by Dr Deborah Birx). Two days later (click thread to see how much money they’re up to):

Meanwhile what other news have we missed? Well, in supply chains, the UK could run out of warehouse space in a fortnight as imports pile up, says the Loadstar. These would be imports that were already on their way by sea, before things seized up, but can’t be moved further into closed retail chains.

Posted on by Diana ben-Aaron
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