“…U.S. retail sales plunged by 8.7 percent from February to March thanks to COVID-19.”
(https://www.icsc.com/news-and-views/icsc-exchange/a-deeper-look-at-marchs-u.s.-retail-sales)
Category: Current Events
“It’s the fifth straight week that job losses were measured in the millions. From March 15 to April 18, 26.5 million people have probably been laid off or furloughed. The number of jobs lost in that brief span effectively erased all jobs created after the 2008 financial crisis. Jobless figures on this scale haven’t been seen since the Great Depression.”
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/23/economy-coronavirus-unemployment/)
“[HHS chief] Alex Azar, a 52-year-old lawyer and former drug industry executive, assured Americans the U.S. government was prepared.”
“Azar’s initial comments misfired on two fronts. Like many U.S. officials, from President Donald Trump on down, he underestimated the pandemic’s severity. He also overestimated his agency’s preparedness.”
“…Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.”
“The extended school closures mean students will now be out of school for about six months — if classes resume in September. It is believed to be the longest-ever statewide shuttering of schools in Massachusetts, eclipsing what many considered to be a record set more than four decades ago when the Blizzard of ’78 caused widespread school closures for much of February.”
(https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/21/nation/coronavirus-boston-massachusetts-april-21/)
Categories
MA updates COVID reporting
“Deep partisan divisions exist in the news sources Americans trust, distrust and rely on”
“Moreover, evidence suggests that partisan polarization in the use and trust of media sources has widened in the past five years. A comparison to a similar study by the Center of web-using U.S. adults in 2014 finds that Republicans have grown increasingly alienated from most of the more established sources, while Democrats’ confidence in them remains stable, and in some cases, has strengthened.”
(https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/u-s-media-polarization-and-the-2020-election-a-nation-divided/)
Categories
MA coronavirus numbers in context
Total MA population = 6,893,000
Total MA tests = 169,398 (2.5% of population)
Total MA cases tested positive = 39,643 (0.6% of population) (23% of total tests)
Total MA deaths = 1,809 (0.026% of population) (4.6% of total cases)
New deaths in one day = 103 (6% increase of total deaths)
(https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-april-20-2020/download)
“For comparison, on the same Sunday last year — April 21, 2019 — the Globe ran seven pages of death notices…”
danelabonte 