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Current as of June 29, 2020 at 8:00 a.m.

COVID-19 Testing Sites - Florida

  • Drive-Thru Testing sites available are listed by county. Each walk up site can test up to 200 individuals per day. Access the list here

Safe. Smart. Step-by-Step


The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity is now giving daily updates on Florida’s Reemployment Assistance program


Access the Florida Department of Health COVID Dashboard


Graphs, Charts, and Real Time Tracking of COVID-19


Data Sources


Data Sources on Social Media


Other Resources




Rarly in the COVID-19 pandemic, infectious disease experts said that developing a vaccine for the virus would take at least 12–18 months. Now, in their continued blitzkrieg against SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, several drug companies are keeping pace with their ambitious timelines, and some are moving even faster than they initially predicted.

Three companies with funding from the US government—AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna—are on track to distribute the first commercial batches of their experimental vaccines in late 2020 or early 2021. Those firms are top players in Operation Warp Speed, the US plan to have 300 million doses of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine by January 2021.

Separately, several groups began clinical trials in June of monoclonal antibodies designed to target and neutralize SARS-CoV-2. Although many older drugs are being repurposed as potential COVID-19 therapies, the antibody trials helmed by Eli Lilly and Company, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and Singapore-based Tychan are the first to test drugs created specifically for treating COVID-19.

The pandemic is pushing drug companies to develop and test their wares at unparalleled speeds. “There is no reason you couldn’t speed up drug development if you really focused on it, and that’s what the pandemic has brought,” says Lisa Kennedy, CEO of the life sciences consulting firm Innopiphany.

Never have so many groups been working on vaccines and treatments for the same disease, says Esther Krofah, executive director of FasterCures, a medical research advocacy division of the Milken Institute. “We have to be cautiously optimistic,” Krofah says. “Clinical trials are notorious for not going well.”

Large trials this summer and fall could provide the first evidence that some of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines are working. AstraZeneca, which is developing an adenoviral vector vaccine designed at the University of Oxford, is recruiting 10,000 people in the UK, 30,000 people in the US, and potentially 2,000 people in Brazil for its Phase III study to determine if the vaccine is effective. If the trial is successful, AstraZeneca says, it could start distributing the vaccine as early as September in the UK and October in the US.


At one point, the theory of “flattening the curve” was ubiquitous. The basic concept was that lockdowns could slow the spread of coronavirus, and this was of great importance since, as we were told at the time, “We can’t stop this virus.” The narrative went that if the virus were to spread unchecked, hospitals would be overwhelmed and both people with coronavirus and those needing medical attention for other ailments would die from the lack of access to care.

It all made sense. To a certain extent, it still does. Most graphics depicting flattening the curve, such as in The New York Times, showed two curves. Typically, the first was associated with no lockdowns that peaked well above the capacity of the health-care system, while the second, “flattened” curve was associated with lockdowns with its peak hovering near capacity. The areas under each curve, representing the total number of Covid-19 infections, were roughly equal.

Flattening the curve made two assumptions. First, it assumed that a certain amount of deaths and infections were inevitable and the best we could do was delay the process. No one promoting flattening the curve talked of stopping the disease; there were no graphs showing that if we locked down, infections would go straight to zero.

Second, flattening the curve was always shown with the same level of flattening: just enough to not overwhelm the health-care system. This was a tacit admission that flattening the curve would be painful and that it would not be beneficial to flatten the curve beyond the level needed to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system.
Flattening the curve was the bait. Next came the switch.


The coronavirus doomsayers could not even wait until the fall for the apocalyptic announcements of the dreaded second wave. Because the red states recklessly loosened their lockdowns, we are now told, the US is seeing a dangerous spike in coronavirus cases. ‘EXPERTS SKETCH GLOOMY PICTURE OF VIRUS SPREAD: FAUCI TELLS OF “DISTURBING” WAVE, WITH A VACCINE MONTHS AWAY,’ read the front-page lead headline in the New York Times on Wednesday. ‘VIRUS SPREAD AKIN TO “FOREST FIRE”’ read another front page headline in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, quoting Michael Osterholm, one of the media’s favorite public health experts. Osterholm had told NBC’s Meet the Press: ‘I’m actually of the mind right now — I think this is more like a forest fire. I don’t think that this is going to slow down.’

The ‘this’ is an uptick in daily new cases from 19,002 on June 9 to 38,386 on June 24. The high to date in new daily cases was on April 24 — 39,072. Since April 24, the daily case count started declining, then began rising again after around June 9. What virtually every fear-mongering story on America’s allegedly precarious situation leaves out, however, is the steadily dropping daily death numbers — from a high of 2,693 on April 21 to 808 on June 24. That April high was driven by New York City and its environs; those New York death numbers have declined, but they have not been replaced by deaths in the rest of the country. This should be good news. Instead, it is no news.

The New York Times put three reporters on a full-page article on Texas, published June 25 under the headline ‘AS NEW CASES SOAR, THE GOVERNOR FACES FALLOUT FROM A RUSH TO REOPEN.’ The story never mentioned coronavirus deaths. Texas’s daily death count has bounced around since early May without a sharp rise — a high of 63 new deaths on May 21, 42 on June 24. Arizona, another state facing media contempt, finally beat its earlier high of 67 deaths on May 8 with 79 deaths on June 24. Between those two dates, however, the curve was steady. The Arizona mortalities are concentrated on Indian reservations and to a lesser extent around the Mexican border.

In May, Georgia was the main target of expert contempt for its allegedly premature reopening. Since then, the media have gone silent, due to the state’s truly discouraging downward daily death toll from a high of 119 on April 7, long before the reopenings, to 10 on June 24.

There are no crises in hospital capacity anywhere in the country. Nursing homes, meat-packing plants, and prisons remain the main sources of new infections. Half the states are seeing cases decline or hold steady. Case counts are affected by more testing; the positive infection rate captured by testing is declining. The current caseload is younger, which is a good thing. The more people who have been infected and who recover, the more herd immunity is created. Meanwhile, daily deaths from heart disease and cancer — about 3,400 a day combined — go ignored in the press.

But the drum beat to halt the still far too tentative reopenings gets louder by the day. It should be resisted. The lockdowns were a mistake the first time around; to reimpose them would be disastrous for any remaining hope of restoring our economy. The damage that has been done to people’s livelihoods and future prosperity will continue to outweigh the damage done by the coronavirus. The only vaccine against poverty and resulting despair is a robust economy. 


Coronavirus data has been, in a word, maddening since the initial outbreak began in China. Beginning with initial reports from the WHO and China, it’s been very hard for the average person to know what is truth and what is fiction.

Hopefully that’s beginning to change.

On Friday, in a story that received relatively muted media coverage, the CDC released its latest data on the prevalence of the coronavirus in the country and the results are fairly eye opening, especially for those who haven’t paid much attention to the antibody studies in this country — the CDC now estimates there are ten times as many cases in the United States as our testing has uncovered.

That is, instead of around 2.6 million cases in the country there have actually been 26 million cases.

Those of you who have been following the national antibody studies aren’t surprised by this data, but I feel like that’s a small part of the overall country.

So for most of the country this should land as a certifiable blockbuster.
Why is this CDC finding significant?

Well, it means nearly one in every ten Americans have already had the coronavirus, which is a fairly gigantic finding. It also means many of these infected people had such mild cases they felt no need to receive treatment. In fact, it probably means the majority of the people who have had the coronavirus in this country never even knew they had it.

But it also means, and this is perhaps the most significant data point, the coronavirus is far less deadly than we’ve been led to believe.

In fact, the CDC study suggests the all age death rate from the virus is roughly .5%. Meaning 99.5% of all people infected with the coronavirus, regardless of age, recover. (There are other studies that suggest the .5% death rate is still far too high, but it’s still significant that the virus has a 99.5% recovery rate per the CDC).


The reason I'm walking you through all of this is because the recent rise in hospitalizations in Florida is driven by younger people. This appears to be true in Texas as well, though I don't think we have data sources in Texas that break out the distribution as well as Florida's.

Some of my smart & wise friends like @kavitapmd point out that even if your risk of being hospitalized for #COVID19 is low, because you're younger, it's best to not get COVID and avoid that risk. I agree! Please wear masks when near others, wash your hands, distance, etc.

One question that remains outstanding: Texas and states like it reopened on May 1. The rise in cases is in the last week or two. So what happened in late May or early June that has lead to rising cases?

By the end of the call, Cafferty had been suspended without pay. By the end of the day, his colleagues had come by his house to pick up the company truck. By the following Monday, he was out of a job.


A dozen states have seen record highs in new coronavirus cases, blares the news media, accompanied by dire warnings of a “second wave” of the disease because those awful Republican states reopened too soon. Once again, however, the mainstream press is needlessly scaring the public by hiding the relevant context.

One news outlet put it this way: “The U.S. reported more than 33,000 new coronavirus cases on Saturday – the highest total since May 1 – while the surge of infections in several states is outpacing growth in coronavirus testing.”

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow tried to tamp down the panic by declaring that there is no second wave. “There are some hotspots. We’re on it,” he said.
Even if there is a “second wave,” it doesn’t mean anything in and of itself.

For one thing the Centers for Disease Control has long predicted that coronavirus cases would increase as the country reopened, for the simple reason that the lockdowns were never intended to stop the spread of the disease, only to slow it down. Remember? Flatten the curve?

The point of the lockdown was to give the country the time to ramp up testing, look for treatments, and increase medical supplies. By curbing the spread, health officials could more readily identify hotspots and conduct contact tracing, and the health care system could cope with any increase in demand. Which, as Kudlow points out, is exactly what’s happening now.

What’s more, the increase in coronavirus cases matters only if they are going up faster than expected, and whether this is resulting in a second wave of deaths.

Neither of those appears to be true.


A new study suggests that as many as 8.7 million Americans came down with coronavirus in March, but more than 80% of them were never diagnosed.

A team of researchers looked at the number of people who went to doctors or clinics with influenza-like illnesses that were never diagnosed as coronavirus, influenza or any of the other viruses that usually circulate in winter.

There was a giant spike in these cases in March, the researchers reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

"The findings support a scenario where more than 8.7 million new SARS-CoV-2 infections appeared in the U.S. during March and estimate that more than 80% of these cases remained unidentified as the outbreak rapidly spread," Justin Silverman of Penn State University, Alex Washburne of Montana State University and colleagues at Cornell University and elsewhere, wrote.

Study shows 10 times more New Yorkers had Covid-19 by April than previously counted
Only 100,000 cases were officially reported during that time period, and the US still reports only 2.3 million cases as of Monday. But there was a shortage of coronavirus testing kits at the time.

The team used data collected from each state by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for influenza-like illness. The CDC uses this data to track the annual seasonal flu epidemic. It asks doctors to report all cases of people coming in for treatment for fever, cough and other symptoms caused by influenza.


As companies and organizations of all sorts have scrambled to institute a zero-tolerance policy on racism over the past few weeks, some of them have turned out to be more interested in signaling their good intentions than punishing actual culprits. This emphasis on appearing rather than being virtuous has already resulted in the mistreatment of innocent people—not all of them public figures or well-connected individuals with wealth to cushion their fall.

What happened to Emmanuel Cafferty is an especially egregious example. At the end of a long shift mapping underground utility lines, he was on his way home, his left hand casually hanging out the window of the white pickup truck issued to him by the San Diego Gas & Electric company. When he came to a halt at a traffic light, another driver flipped him off.

Then, Cafferty told me a few days ago, the other driver began to act even more strangely. He flashed what looked to Cafferty like an “okay” hand gesture and started cussing him out. When the light turned green, Cafferty drove off, hoping to put an end to the disconcerting encounter.

But when Cafferty reached another red light, the man, now holding a cellphone camera, was there again. “Do it! Do it!” he shouted. Unsure what to do, Cafferty copied the gesture the other driver kept making. The man appeared to take a video, or perhaps a photo.

Two hours later, Cafferty got a call from his supervisor, who told him that somebody had seen Cafferty making a white-supremacist hand gesture, and had posted photographic evidence on Twitter. (Likely unbeknownst to most Americans, the alt-right has appropriated a version of the “okay” symbol for their own purposes because it looks like the initials for “white power”; this is the symbol the man accused Cafferty of making when his hand was dangling out of his truck.) Dozens of people were now calling the company to demand Cafferty’s dismissal.


Ibram X. Kendi, the New York Times best seller who insists that everyone is either racist or anti-racist, now has a children’s book to indoctrinate toddlers on one side of this crude binary. Or take this position voiced on Twitter by a chemistry professor at Queen’s University in Canada this week: “Here’s the thing: If whatever institution you are a part of is not COMPLETELY representative of the population you can draw from, you can draw only two conclusions. 1) Bias against the underrepresented groups exists or 2) the underrepresented groups are inherently less qualified.” Other factors — such as economics or culture or individual choice or group preference — are banished from consideration.

Revolutions also encourage individuals to take matters in their own hands. The distinguished liberal philosopher Michael Walzer recently noted how mutual social policing has a long and not-so-lovely history — particularly in post–Reformation Europe, in what he has called “the revolution of the saints.” “The ‘saints’ were very strong on the work of neighborhood committees. In Calvin’s Geneva, law and order were maintained through ‘mutual surveillance.’ Church members (ideally all Genevans were church members) ‘watched, investigated, and chastised’ each other.” Imagine what these Puritans could have done with cell phones and Twitter histories.

Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today. The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute. The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.” The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school. The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.

And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible. You can’t keep up — which is the point. (A good resource for understanding this new constantly changing language of ideology is “Translations From the Wokish.”) The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.

So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment. It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment. Even good and important causes, like exposing and stopping police brutality, can morph very easily from an exercise in overdue reform into a revolutionary spasm. There has been much good done by the demonstrations forcing us all to understand better how our fellow citizens are mistreated by the agents of the state or worn down by the residue of past and present inequality. But the zeal and certainty of its more revolutionary features threaten to undo a great deal of that goodwill.

The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.

But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present


WASHINGTON, D.C. — Blazing sun and high humidity met hundreds of protesters, counter-protesters, neighborhood residents, police officers, and reporters Friday evening at Capitol Hill’s Lincoln Park. The protest, planned Tuesday, hoped to tear the monument of Abraham Lincoln with one hand on the Emancipation Proclamation freeing a slave, modeled by freedman Archer Alexander. It was paid for by local black residents and black Union veterans and dedicated by Frederick Douglass.

After a Tuesday rally promised to return to tear the statue down on Thursday, Park Police surrounded the monument with fencing re-enforced by Jersey barriers and stood guard night and day. Tension in the usually busy community park had been building since then, broken by short moments of music and happy protest

The rally began slow, upsetting gathered bicycle Antifa supporters in masks and football helmets with their “centrist liberal bullshit,” but quickly broke into yelling when Don Folden, owner of Capital Buddy Tours took the microphone in his uniform. “Y’all young people don’t know shit!” he hollered into the crowd, beginning what would become a counter-protest within.

While Black Lives Matters activists tried to chant them down, reenactors dressed as freed slaves of Capitol Hill and Frederick Douglass gave an abridged version of the dedication speech. When the organizer told the crowd that the older generation had failed them and had nothing to teach them, a black man in a “New York City” shirt followed, raising his voice to tell the crowd his great-great-grandfather is that slave (depicted in the memorial), and “this young upstarts” better show some respect for the suffering of their people.


On June 2, as Minneapolis and cities across the nation saw millions take to the streets to protest, I attended the funeral of Grand Forks Police Officer Cody Holte.

Twenty-nine-year-old Cody, a family friend, was killed by a man who fired 41 rounds at police officers as they attempted to serve him an eviction notice. Cody leaves behind a wife and infant son, and he is missed dearly.

Police Officer Cody Holte

After the funeral, Cody’s wife Mandy told me, “People forget about Cody and the life he lost and only care about the people that have done something wrong. What happened in Minnesota shouldn’t have happened, but it shouldn’t have happened to Cody either.”

Sadly, she is right. In a matter of days, police officers went from being seen as hometown heroes to incompetent racists.

While imperfect, police officers are still heroes. They wake up every day ready to put their lives on the line to keep their friends and neighbors safe. Amid a sincere effort to address concerns over police brutality, we have unfairly disparaged the reputation of the entire police force, including the memory of good officers, like Cody, who have paid the ultimate price for the safety of their communities.

Unfortunately, some in Congress are exacerbating the problem.


America is in the midst of one of the great moral panics in our nation’s history. If we don’t stand up for our nation’s core values, the situation could get even worse – and soon. If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last three weeks, you’ve probably noticed the organized campaigns to get college and even high school students expelled or denied admission based on their political views. You’ve also seen gleeful mobs celebrating as Americans lose their jobs for running afoul of someone’s momentary political obsessions.
In every sector of American society, people are having their careers destroyed to the pitiless baying of the “woke” masses. It’s happening in business. CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman spent 20 years building the fitness brand into a multi-billion dollar company, only to be thrown out of the empire he built for declining to go along with the “racism is a public health crisis” dogma.

It’s happening in journalism. New York Times editor James Bennet, a liberal, was fired for publishing an op-ed by a sitting Republican senator advocating for a military response to nationwide rioting -- a position the majority of Americans agreed with. The same fate befell Philadelphia Inquirer editor Stan Wischowski, who was terminated for approving an article that condemned looting and arson.

It’s happening in entertainment, in academia, and pretty much anywhere someone can be found who is not sufficiently supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement.

It’s even happening to people who didn’t do anything at all. An L.A. Galaxy soccer player was forced to resign because his wife tweeted that rioters should be shot. A lawyer in San Francisco was fired because his wife was rude to a man she thought was spray-painting BLM propaganda on a building that wasn’t his (it was). On Thursday, this Stasi-esque trend reached another level when a company called Equity Prime Mortgage fired the stepmother of the officer charged in the controversial shooting of drunk driver Rashad Brooks after he fought with and fired a taser at police. The stepmother was apparently fired for no reason other than family loyalty.

On Monday, the panic reached what one can only hope will be its peak when a San Diego Gas and Electric employee lost his job for “making a white supremacist hand gesture.” We’ve long since debunked the notion that the OK sign is somehow racist -- that was just a fiction perpetrated by internet trolls -- but in this case, this man lost his livelihood despite the fact he wasn’t even making an OK sign. He was apparently cracking his knuckles as he drove.


Among the Founding Fathers, James Madison has received less attention from historians than some of his contemporaries have received. The principal architect of the Constitution, co-author of the Federalist Papers, and author of the Bill of Rights has often been overshadowed by the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams.
Indeed, Madison lacks the military honors and the Cincinnatus reputation of Washington, he did not possess the reckless zeal and charisma of the enigmatic Jefferson, nor did Madison have the unflinching political brashness of Adams.

On the surface, Madison was not even suited for politics. He was physically frail, nervous, and shy — and his voice was shrill. During an age in which fiery baroque oratory was revered, Madison wasn’t an imposing public speaker.

Yet for too long history has oversimplified the image of Madison, reducing him to a bookish, diminutive political theorist and tactician, better behind the scenes than out on the political stage, a mere sidekick to some of the most influential Founding Fathers.

During his lifetime, however, Madison was one of the most respected and revered political figures. His political ally and confidant, Thomas Jefferson, considered him “the greatest man in the world.” Even his political rivals issued praise, with John Adams having said, Madison “has acquired more glory, and established more union, than all his three predecessors — put together.”

In 1776, Virginia adopted “God bestowed upon us this leisure” as its state motto, reflecting the belief of the landed gentry and political elite of the Old Dominion that it was their divine right to live a life of pleasure filled with horse racing, fox hunting, dancing, drinking, socializing, etc. Though a scion of Virginia tobacco planters from the state’s famed Piedmont region, Madison chose not to pursue the aforementioned lifestyle. Additionally, while descendants of the Virginia gentry traditionally attended the College of William and Mary, Madison headed north to the College of New Jersey, a.k.a. Princeton University. Following a period of intense study that allowed him to graduate in two years but also detrimentally affected his physical well-being, Madison returned home in a state of depression and poor health


One of the iconic images of the Revolutionary War is Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s 1851 painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware. It is the night of December 25, 1776. The Continental Army is being transported across the Delaware River to attack a Hessian garrison at Trenton, New Jersey, some nine miles to the south. In the foreground, anonymous men (and possibly one woman) of varying nationalities and races row an overloaded boat across the river, pushing great slabs of ice out of the way. Two of the boat’s occupants are not anonymous: General George Washington, standing resolutely near the bow, and young Lieutenant James Monroe, holding the stars and stripes.

Leutze’s painting is glorious–and wrong in almost every detail. The river resembles the Rhine more than the Delaware; the boat is too small and of inaccurate design; there is too much light for what was a night crossing; Washington did not cross standing up; the stars and stripes had not yet been adopted by the Continental Congress; and James Monroe was not holding the flag, not in the boat, and not even present with the army.

He was already across the river, and he was busy.

Washington’s plan for a surprise attack on Trenton was a risky attempt to reverse the sagging fortunes of the Patriot cause. During the summer of 1776 British forces, including Hessian mercenaries, had driven the Continental Army from New York across New Jersey and into Buck’s County, Pennsylvania. Expired enlistments and outright desertion had thinned the American ranks, and many of those who remained were despondent. 

Washington gambled that a successful attack against an isolated British outpost would boost the army’s morale and stiffen the resolve of Congress and the people.

Three Hessian regiments, comprising about 1,400 men, were stationed at Trenton under the command of Colonel Johann Rall (also spelled Rahl). Washington planned to bring 2,400 Continental soldiers across the river overnight at McKonkey’s Ferry, march to Trenton, and attack before dawn. Two other elements of the army were part of the plan. A 1,900-man force under Colonel John Cadwalader would make a diversionary attack against British troops at Bordentown, New Jersey. General James Ewing would lead 700 men across the Delaware at Trenton Ferry, control the bridge over Assunpink Creek, and intercept any Hessian troops retreating from Trenton. Bad weather prevented both of these deployments, meaning that everything would depend on the main body’s effort. The army’s password for the evening was “Victory or Death.”

Washington’s plan included sending a small detachment of troops over the Delaware first to secure the army’s route of march. James Monroe was with this contingent. In his autobiography (written in the third person late in life and not completed before his death), Monroe described the mission:

The command of the vanguard, consisting of 50 men, was given to Captain William Washington, of the Third Virginia Regiment . . . Lieutenant Monroe promptly offered his services to act as a subaltern under him, which was promptly accepted. On the 25th of December, 1776, they passed the Delaware in front of the army, in the dusk of the evening, at [McKonkey’s] ferry, 10 miles above Trenton, and hastened to a point, about one and one-half miles from it, at which the road by which they descended intersected that which led from Trenton to Princeton, for the purpose, in obedience of orders, of cutting off all communication between them and from the country to Trenton.

Monroe noted that the night was “tempestuous,” and that snow was falling. While manning their post, the detachment was accosted by a local resident who thought the Continentals were British troops. Describing the incident many years later at a White House dinner during his presidency, Monroe recalled that the man, whose name was John Riker, was “determined in his manner and very profane.” Upon learning that the soldiers were Americans, he brought food from his house and said to Monroe, “I know something is to be done, and I am going with you. I am a doctor, and I may help some poor fellow.” Dr. Riker proved remarkably prescient.


As new coronavirus cases surge across a large swath of the country, with real spikes occurring in certain states, what are we to make of what's happening? It's undoubtedly true that increased testing is leading to increasing raw numbers of people testing positive, which helps explain a significant portion of this effect. But that's not the whole story, as infection rates are also up in places like Florida (though they're roughly stable nationally).
Gov. Ron DeSantis has conceded this point, which was echoed by one of the state's GOP Senators, himself a former governor. That said, there are less worrisome statistics that mitigate the serious jumps in cases we're seeing. What's going on? Let's start here:

Yes, COVID-19 cases are rising in some places. That’s okay. | Rooney
https://savejersey.com/2020/06/yes-covid-19-cases-are-rising-in-some-places-thats-okay-rooney/

I’m old enough to remember when “flattening the curve” was the goal, Save Jerseyans.
Back in the uncertain days of early April 2020 (April 6th specifically), Politico New Jersey reporteed that “officials expect to see infections and hospitalizations peak between April 19 and May 11, according to models Murphy presented during the briefing. The state could see anywhere between 86,000 and 509,000 patients test positive, with hospitalizations ranging between 9,000 and 36,000.“

“If we keep our current practice, we can get through our peak with the hospital beds we are preparing, the new wings, the reinstated buildings, the field medical stations,” Murphy told reporters. “It will be tough, it will be stressful, but our health system can get through this intact.”

And we did ultimatey get through the peak just fine. Better than expected, in fact.
As of June 23rd, New Jersey reported 169,734 positive tests out of 1,283,451 conducted – a low-end outcome by any estimate. Ventilator usage and hospitalizations peaked on April 14th (earlier than projected). Murphy will run for reelection in 2021 insisting that his draconian and ongoing economic lockdown did the trick. We’ve written extensively about how that’s not supported by the actual available evidence.

The goal now, we’re told, is defeating the virus with the vaccine which may-or-may not be here by the end of 2020. Or 2021. If at all? The goal posts moved.

Changing definitions of “VC Day” – Victory Over Coronavirus – also helps explain why the Media is freaking the fig out over upticks of reported COVID-19 cases in certain states, some of which had less-strict lockdown measures in place than New Jersey or New York or which ended their lockdowns earlier in the spring. Some of the recent headlines aren’t just alarming; they’re panic-inducing.

Relax.


When we think of exploring other planets and celestial bodies, we tend to focus on the big questions. How would astronauts live there when they’re not working? What kind of strategies and technology would be needed for people to be there long term? How might the gravity, environment, and radiation effect humans who choose to make places like the Moon, Mars, and other bodies place their home? We tend to overlook the simple stuff…

For example, what will it be like to look up at the sky? How will Earth, the stars, and any moon in orbit appear? And how will it look to watch the sun go down? These are things we take for granted here on Earth and don’t really ponder much. But thanks to NASA, we now have a tool that simulates what sunsets would look like from other bodies in the Solar System – from the hellish surface of Venus to the dense atmosphere of Uranus.

This simulation was created by Geronimo Villanueva, a planetary scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who developed it while working on a computer modeling tool for possible missions to Uranus, which NASA is contemplating sending a probe to in the near future. If and when such a mission takes place, the probe would descend into Uranus’ atmosphere and use this tool to obtain spectra and determine its composition.


There's a small airfield about a two-hour drive north of Los Angeles that sits on the edge of a vast expanse of desert and attracts aerospace mavericks like moths to a flame. The Mojave Air & Space Port is home to companies like Scaled Composites, the first to send a private astronaut to space, and Masten Space Systems, which is in the business of building lunar landers. It’s the proving ground for America’s most audacious space projects, and when Aaron Davis and Scott Stegman arrived at the hallowed tarmac last July, they knew they were in the right place.

The two men arrived at the airfield before dawn to set up the test stand for a prototype of their air-breathing rocket engine, a new kind of propulsion system that is a cross between a rocket motor and a jet engine. They call their unholy creation Fenris, and Davis believes that it’s the only way to make getting to space cheap enough for the rest of us. While a conventional rocket engine must carry giant tanks of fuel and oxidizer on its journey to space, an air-breathing rocket motor pulls most of its oxidizer directly from the atmosphere. This means that an air-breathing rocket can lift more stuff with less propellant and drastically lower the cost of space access—at least in theory.

The idea to combine the efficiency of a jet engine with the power of a rocket motor isn’t new, but historically these systems have only been combined in stages. Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit, for example, use jet aircraft to carry conventional rockets several miles into the atmosphere before releasing them for the final leg of the journey to space. In other cases, the order is reversed. The fastest aircraft ever flown, NASA’s X-43, used a rocket engine to provide an initial boost before an air-breathing hypersonic jet engine—known as a scramjet—took over and accelerated the vehicle to 7,300 mph, nearly 10 times the speed of sound.

But if these staged systems could be rolled up into one engine, the huge efficiency gains would dramatically lower the cost of getting to space. “The holy grail is a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle where you just take off from a runway, fly into space, and come back and reuse the system,” says Christopher Goyne, director of the University of Virginia’s Aerospace Research Laboratory and an expert in hypersonic flight.

The big challenge with a single-stage-to-orbit, or SSTO, rocket is that achieving the speeds necessary for orbit—around 17,000 mph—requires a lot of propellant. But adding more propellant makes a rocket heavier, which makes it harder to reach orbital velocity. This vicious circle is known as the “tyranny of the rocket equation,” and is why it takes a two-stage rocket the size of an office building to launch a satellite the size of a car. Staging a rocket helps because it can shed dead weight once the first stage’s propellant is used up, but it’s still pretty inefficient to have to burn all that propellant in the first place. This is where an SSTO rocket with air-breathing engines would provide a huge efficiency boost.


You'd think that if you found the first evidence that a planet larger than the Earth was lurking unseen in the furthest reaches of our solar system, it would be a big moment. It would make you one of only a small handful of people in all of history to have discovered such a thing.

But for astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, it was a much quieter affair. “It wasn’t like there was a eureka moment,” he says. “The evidence just built up slowly.”

He’s a master of understatement. Ever since he and his collaborator Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University, first published their suspicions about the unseen planet in 2014, the evidence has only continued to grow. Yet when asked how convinced he is that the new world, which he calls Planet X (though many other astronomers call it Planet 9), is really out there, Sheppard will only say: “I think it’s more likely than unlikely to exist.”

As for the rest of the astronomical community, in most quarters there is a palpable excitement about finding this world. Much of this excitement centres on the opening of a giant new survey telescope named after Vera C Rubin, the astronomer who, in the 1970s, discovered some of the first evidence for dark matter.

Scheduled to begin its full survey of the sky in 2022, the Rubin observatory could find the planet outright or provide the clinching circumstantial evidence that it’s there.

Discovery of the planet would be a triumph, but also a disaster for existing theory about how the solar system was created.


The image of George Washington’s statue facing the ground after being toppled and vandalized in Portland fills my heart with immense sadness. The imagery set forth a wave of baleful nostalgia of a similar incident 54 years ago. During China’s Cultural Revolution, a prominent statue of Confucius was dismantled by militant university and high school students who referred to themselves as the “Red Guards.” It seems, in many respects, 2020 may be a repeat of 1966.

What drove Chinese Communist Party dictator Mao Zedong to launch the Cultural Revolution in May 1966 was his unquenchable desire to seize and maintain power. After his disastrous economic policy resulted in a three-year famine (1959-1961) and an estimated 20-30 million deaths, Mao temporarily retreated from the power center and let his relatively moderate colleagues take charge. But, in 1966, he was ready to seize power again in the name of a proletariat revolution in culture.

In an editorial for the People’s Daily, Mao’s propaganda chief, Chen Boda, explained the aims of this proletarian cultural revolution:

…not only at demolishing all the old ideology and culture and all the old customs and habits, which, fostered by the exploiting classes, have poisoned the minds of the people for thousands of years, but also at creating and fostering among the masses an entirely new ideology and culture and entirely new customs and habits — those of the proletariat.

Following this rallying cry, a campaign to get rid of the “four olds” — old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas — was launched across on college campuses in Beijing. Professors and leaders with western educational backgrounds, as well as those who demonstrated any traditional Chinese cultural influence, were quickly denounced and publicly humiliated as “monsters and demons” by their enthusiastic students.

Soon, denouncing college deans and professors was not enough. The Red Guards needed a bigger target to send the shockwave to the rest of the nation.


he U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is a large business enterprise operated by the federal government. It has more than 600,000 employees and more than $70 billion in annual revenues. Revenues are supposed to cover the postal service’s costs, but mail volume is plunging, and the USPS has been losing billions of dollars a year for more than a decade.

The USPS has a legal monopoly over letters and mailboxes. That policy is an anomaly because the federal government’s general economic stance is to encourage open competition in markets, yet the USPS monopoly prevents entrepreneurs from entering postal markets and trying to improve quality and reduce costs for consumers.

While mail volumes have fallen, the USPS has expanded its package business. But it makes no sense for a privileged federal entity to take business from private, taxpaying companies in the package industry. Postal and package markets are evolving rapidly, and the goal of federal policy should be to create a level playing field open for competition and innovation.

Europe is facing the same challenge of declining mail volume, and it has focused on opening postal markets and privatizing postal providers. The U.S. Congress should follow suit by privatizing the USPS and opening postal markets to competition. These reforms would give the USPS the flexibility it needs to cut costs and diversify, while providing equal treatment to businesses across postal and package markets.

USPS’s Predicament

Congress has given the USPS monopoly power over the delivery of first‐​class mail and access to mailboxes, the latter of which is a unique protection among the world’s postal systems.

The USPS also enjoys a range of other benefits (GAO 2017a: 19):

• It can borrow up to $15 billion from the U.S. Treasury at low interest rates.

• It is exempt from state and local sales, income, and property taxes; parking tickets; vehicle fees; and other charges.

• It pays federal corporate income taxes on its earnings from competitive products, but those taxes are circulated back to the USPS.1

• It is not bound by local zoning laws, is immune from a range of civil actions, and has the power of eminent domain.

• It has government regulatory power, which it can use to impede competitors.

On the other hand, Congress ties the hands of the USPS in many ways that prevent it from operating like a private enterprise. Congress restricts the USPS’s pricing flexibility, requires it to provide expansive employee benefits, imposes collective bargaining, and prevents it from cutting costs in various ways, such as by reducing delivery frequency and closing low‐​volume post offices.

The USPS’s financial challenges stem from its high cost structure and falling mail volumes, driven by the rise of email, Facebook, Evite, Internet bill paying, and online advertising. First‐​class mail volume in particular has shrunk by 45 percent since 2001 (USPS 2019). This has been a considerable blow to the USPS since first‐​class mail is its most profitable product (GAO 2017a).