COVID-19: March 13, 2020
Local impact:
- French Quarter Fest postponed till October
- Saenger, Mahalia Jackson theatres closed
- Louisiana Presidential Primary postponed till June
- Louisiana is shuttering K-12 schools across the state until April 13 and banning public gatherings of more than 250 people
- PatIOI’IBrien’sI open
Cases:
- Nationwide cases: 1629 (CDC Noon report) or 2028 (Johns Hopkins University 8:33 pm update) or 2110 (NYT Map count updated at 8:11 pm)
- Louisiana cases: 36 (La. Dept of Health 4:30 pm count)
- Orleans Parish: 26
Why is everything closing?
It’s all part of an effort to do what epidemiologists call flattening the curve of the pandemic. The idea is to increase social distancing in order to slow the spread of the virus, so that you don’t get a huge spike in the number of people getting sick all at once. If that were to happen, there wouldn’t be enough hospital beds or mechanical ventilators for everyone who needs them, and the U.S. hospital system would be overwhelmed. That’s already happening in Italy.
“The Trump administration’s decision to forgo a World Health Organization test and create its own allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/coronavirus-testing-failure-123166
On 02/21/2020, the Dow closed at 28992.41
Yesterday (03/12/2020), it closed at 21200.62, a loss of 7,791.79 points.
Today, it went up 1985 points and Trump saw fit to congratulate himself and send out a signed copy of the chart, showing a close of 23185.62.
(Update: On 03/20/2020, the Dow closed at 19173.98, a loss of 9,818.43 in one month.)
What an asshole. So quick to claim credit - but wants none of the criticism.
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