COVID19 Update - Day 40

US Tests: 3,865,864
US Cases: 749,203
US Deaths: 35,793
Worldwide Cases: 2,394,291
Worldwide Deaths: 164,938

This is not your regular flu.  People pushing a certain political agenda have attempted to downplay the seriousness of the current crisis --- partly to excuse Trump's disastrous handling of it, and partly to push for 'reopening' society.  They claim that this is just like any other flu, or that thousands of people die in car accidents every year, and we don't close down the economy for that.

Those people are wrong.  COVID19 really is an exceptional threat, requiring an exceptional response.

And since we haven't revisited it in a while, here's your periodic reminder that federal agents are regularly seizing orders of medical supplies and PPE with no explanation, leaving states and hospitals high and dry in their time of desperate need.

This most recent story, fortunately, has a happy ending.  But it's obscene that in 21st century America, a chief of medicine needs to engage in such subterfuge to obtain medical supplies:

A lead came from an acquaintance of a friend of a team member. After several hours of vetting, we grew confident of the broker’s professional pedigree and the potential to secure a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators. The latter were KN95 respirators, N95s that were made in China. We received samples to confirm that they could be successfully fit-tested. Despite having cleared this hurdle, we remained concerned that the samples might not be representative of the bulk of the products that we would be buying. Having acquired the requisite funds — more than five times the amount we would normally pay for a similar shipment, but still less than what was being requested by other brokers — we set the plan in motion. Three members of the supply-chain team and a fit tester were flown to a small airport near an industrial warehouse in the mid-Atlantic region. I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected.

I need to emphasize that the problem here isn't merely that the federal government isn't providing these supplies in the midst of the worst pandemic this country has seen in the last 100 years.  It's that the federal government is ACTIVELY PREVENTING THE SUPPLIES FROM GETTING TO THE HOSPITALS THAT NEED THEM.

This is a huge, huge scandal with a huge human cost, and it's receiving practically no attention from the media.  In any sane world, Trump and the head of whatever agency is behind this would already be in prison.

On a personal note, I held my usual weekly Zoom conference with college alumni today.  Nothing of great note came from it, other than the fact that some people would like an option of meeting on a day other than Sunday.

I'll see what I can do.  I aim to please.

The other observation --- somewhat surprising, to me, anyway --- is that my local Costco appears to have toilet paper in plentiful supply, and there doesn't seem to be any great demand for it.  I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this, if any.