COVID19 Update - Day 148

US Tests: 58,646,378*

US Cases: 4,793,336*

US Deaths: 150,205*

Worldwide Cases: 18,727,530*

Worldwide Deaths: 706,041*

* - Numbers are a lower bound.  True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration

Could we please make a rule that, from now on, we will keep terrible people out of government?  Not just in the United States, but everywhere?

Confident it had beaten the coronavirus and desperate to reboot a devastated economy, the Israeli government invited the entire student body back in late May.

Within days, infections were reported at a Jerusalem high school, which quickly mushroomed into the largest outbreak in a single school in Israel, possibly the world.

The virus rippled out to the students’ homes and then to other schools and neighborhoods, ultimately infecting hundreds of students, teachers and relatives.

Other outbreaks forced hundreds of schools to close. Across the country, tens of thousands of students and teachers were quarantined.

Israel’s advice for other countries?

“They definitely should not do what we have done,” said Eli Waxman, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science and chairman of the team advising Israel’s National Security Council on the pandemic. “It was a major failure.”

How much more evidence do we need that reopening public schools is going to be a disaster?  At least a little bit more, apparently.

Meanwhile, as the outbreaks occur, they are followed by the inevitable coverups, inevitably led by terrible people:

CSU football players and university athletic department staff say coaches have told players not to report COVID-19 symptoms, threatened players with reduced playing time if they quarantine and claim CSU is altering contact tracing reports to keep players practicing.

And they say those actions by the athletic administration is putting their health at risk in return for monetary gain the school would receive if fall sports are played.

Football players said they would like to play this season but don’t believe there should be a season given the spike in positive cases on the team in the past two weeks and the threat of more once Colorado State's full student body comes to campus later this month.

"I believe there is a cover-up going on at CSU,'' said a current football player who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. "But they could only cover it up so long and now that we have so many cases across athletics, they can’t cover it up anymore. It’s not about the health and safety of the players but about just trying to make money off the players.''

Said an athletic department staff member: "There are some red flags in the athletic department but the common denominator with this administration is to protect the coaches before the student-athletes and that makes them feel more like cattle than student-athletes."

That is my wish.  That terrible people are not allowed to have positions of responsibility, where they can then allow terrible things to happen and then try to cover them up.

Is that too much to ask?