Sharp increase in COVID-19 new cases and deaths in my state

[Chris]

Why Georgia’s reopening hasn’t led to a surge in coronavirus cases (so far)

Georgia was the first state to start reopening its economy after shutting down due to the coronavirus pandemic. When the shelter-in-place order expired on April 30, a lot of experts and much of the public worried about the worst: a sustained spike in Covid-19 cases that would overwhelm emergency rooms and lead to a surge in deaths.

Yet more than a month later, the worst hasn’t arrived.

Even as the state has increased its testing capacity, boosting its ability to pick up new coronavirus cases, the total of daily new cases has remained relatively flat, despite some ups and downs. The state isn’t getting significantly better — dozens of Covid-19 deaths are still reported each day in Georgia — but it doesn’t seem to be getting much worse either.

[CenterField]

Democrats and the liberal progressive media took a major blow today when it was revealed the medical studies on the dangers of hydroxychloroquine they been touting for months are complete trash.

One study.

There are plenty of others and the issue is not Democrats or the Liberal Media.

This is a pandemic.

Of the 211 countries facing this, only one has a Democratic Party. The pandemic is not a vast conspiracy to discredit the Republican Party. The other 210 countries couldn't care less for the Democractic and Republican parties.

[CenterField]

I'm coming back to this thread because at one point there was a discussion about the WHO and CDC saying that facemasks don't protect the healthy individual. I made reference to a large meta-analysis saying that they do. This article here mentions the same meta-analysis and adds what I've been suspecting forever, that the contrary previous advice for the population to refrain from buying facemasks was intentionally misleading, in order to protect stocks for the use of healthcare workers. For me, the approach was wrong from the beginning. Instead of trying to discredit masks with the hope of preserving stock (which ended up going sold out anyway), we should have encouraged masks AND engaged in a massive effort to domestically produce hundreds of millions of them.

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/6/2128210...ines-cloth-n95

Eric Topol, a research methods expert and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, calls WHO’s delay “preposterous.” He adds, “I have great respect for the World Health Organization — but they got the mask story all wrong, and we have lost people because of it.”

Topol, on the other hand, says the best reason he can think of for the WHO not recommending everyone wear masks is because of the worry over a global shortage of masks, particularly in the US. Perhaps, he says, “They didn’t want to have masks maldistributed, because of the dire need for, and lack of, PPE for health care personnel.”

But, he adds, “That’s not the reason to say you don’t need masks — that’s the reason to say we desperately need to make masks.”