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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
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By Knvul Sheikh @ NYTimes.com/Health, May 1
Scaling up the manufacturing of syringes and other medical products required to deliver a vaccine to millions of Americans will be just as important as the vaccine itself.
(Hearing another report, live from Moscow, on CNN right now while I am posting this: no longer under control like Putin assured, now spiraling out of control...)
@ The Moscow Times, 2 hrs. ago
Russia confirmed 9,623 new coronavirus infections Saturday, bringing the country’s official number of cases to 124,054 and marking a new one-day record increase.
Russia is now the seventh most-affected country in terms of infections, having surpassed China, Turkey and Iran this week.
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on Thursday confirmed that he has the coronavirus, making him the highest-ranking official in Russia to contract the virus.
In total, 1,222 people have been killed by the virus in Russia [....]
By Brooke Seipel @ TheHill.com, May 2
The CEO of an Ohio-based real estate investment firm made $1.6 million in just eight days as the volatile stock market fluctuated drastically in response to the coronavirus pandemic. But rather than keep the money himself, he is giving it out as bonuses to his employees.
Larry Connor, the founder and owner of The Connor Group, announced the decision in a video to employees. "I started to think about probably our most important core values: Do the right thing and people count," he says in the video. "I'm taking the entire $1.6 million and dividing it up among all of you. In my view, this is not a gift. You have earned it."
According to a report by the Cincinnati Enquirer, the company will give the funds out in bonuses ranging from $2,000 to $9,000, and they'll go to all "non-highly compensated associates." There is a tiered system of bonuses, based on how long people have been with the company and their position.
Associates who make more than $150,000 annually were not eligible [....]
Covid-19 is running rampant through some workplaces, including factories and farms.
By Lois Parshley @ Vox.com, April 28
[....] “The epicenter of this outbreak really has shifted into the smaller rural areas,” said Angela Hewlett, associate professor in infectious disease at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in a recent Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing. And that’s a major problem, given that the health systems of many of these places are the least equipped to deal with a sudden surge in cases.
Testing in many less-populous areas has lagged even further behind the already-low national average, obscuring the extent of transmission in more sparsely populated areas. As protests in largely rural states show, some people assume rural areas might be spared the worst of Covid-19 outbreaks [....]
Rural can mean many things. The US census definition, for example, is any spot with a population of fewer than 50,000 people. But depending on what federal definition you use, some 17 percent to 49 percent of people in the US live in “rural” areas.
Additionally, otherwise-rural regions can have small and even fairly large metropolitan areas. According to a new Covid-19 map from the Dartmouth Atlas Project, the top 10 regions with the fastest growth rates in cases are primarily metropolitan areas with blue-collar industry, located in largely rural states.
Because they are small, many rural counties have few cases, giving the impression that broad regions of the country are still unaffected. A more accurate picture of what is happening with Covid-19 across the US emerges when the data are aggregated to larger geographic areas defined on where people get health care. “Both counties and states fail to reflect how and where people get care,” explains Elliott Fisher, a professor of health policy and medicine at the Dartmouth Institute [....]