Notes From All Over, Early Morning Edition -- May 26, 2020

Coronavirus: statistics. By country. By state.

Coronavirus conflation: from The Atlantic --

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic.

We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus.

The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons.

This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points.

Several states—including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont—are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice after it was covered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Atlantic. Maine similarly separated its data on Wednesday; Vermont authorities claimed they didn’t even know they were doing this.  

The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country’s ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.”

Speaking of The Atlantic: journalists are angry.

Laurene Powell Jobs, the majority owner of The Atlantic magazine, is worth an estimated $19.5 billion—a gain of $3.1 billion since mid-March. Despite the gain, The Atlantic, the publication in which she has a controlling stake, announced plans this week to lay off 20% of its staff, making Powell Jobs the latest billionaire to face questions about obligations to workers in the face of a ruinous pandemic. 

In a letter to the magazine's staff, chairman David Bradley said, “We are informing 68 of our colleagues that we will not have a place for them on ​The Atlantic’s ​new course. The contraction affects mainly our events, sales, and editorial staffs.” Bradley added that the company will freeze pay for its remaining staffers through the rest of the year, and that executives will take a pay cut. 

The news stirred agitation on social media, particularly within media circles. “Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire majority owner of The Atlantic, is rich enough to be able to pay the salaries of all 68 laid off Atlantic staffers every year for the next 3,000 years,” wrote Zach Schonfeld, a freelance writer and former Newsweek staffer, in one of many critical posts.

 OXY: CEO Vicki Hollub has done all she can to save jobs at her company and protect the company's sharesholders.

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Spring, 2020

Social distancing with Sophia, #2:


Which takes me to riders "after" the storm. LOL: