Today I watched church services online (due to Gov. Gavin Newson stay at home order in violation of the Firs Amendment’s separation of church and state) despite Biblical instructions telling me to gather together for corporate worshipping of the Lord. After the service myself and other church members had a time of fellowship using Zoom. I then went and picked up some groceries I did not get on Friday. I also downloaded some past sermons onto a thumb drive for another church member.
Local health officials reported six new confirmed cases of COVID-19 today, increasing the countywide total to 220. According to data from the County Office of Emergency Services, there are 41 people recovering from the virus at home, six patients are in the hospital, two of whom are in an intensive care unit and 172 have fully recovered. One person in the county has died from the virus. The San Luis Obispo County Public Health Department said it has conducted 2,167 COVID-19 tests at its lab, 78 of which came back with a positive result. Private labs have conducted 2,432 coronavirus tests and detected 142 positive cases, according to the public health department. With the help of state officials and OptumServe, the county is now offering free COVID-19 testing to community members at state-sponsored testing sites in Grover Beach and Paso Robles. Appointments are necessary.
The rate of new COVID-19 cases in the county has slowed with only 19 during the past seven days. At the same time, cases in several nearby counties have skyrocketed. Due to more than 800 inmates at the federal complex in Lompoc testing positive, new cases in Santa Barbara County have more than doubled in the past week. More than half the states coronavirus deaths have occurred in Los Angeles County, where infections in the homeless population have helped spread the virus.
Here is a plain and simple response concerning mask by Dr. Wendy Wooten, microbiologist, ” Masks do protect you and others to a certain degree – obviously you are not going to be transmitting as much aerosols (which is where the virus would be spread) from your mouth and nose with a face covering. However, they are not 100% impermeable. That being said, if you wear a face cover AND you practice social distancing you absolutely are decreasing the transmission of virus due to BOTH practices.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom rejected San Luis Obispo’s proposed three step reopening plan, leading local officials to agree to work under state guidelines, despite several counties defying his orders. At the County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, approximately 40 people spoke at public comment, 39 of whom asked the county to defy Newsom and open immediately. County officials explained Newsom has threatened to take state licenses, such as beauty shop and liquor license, away from businesses that violate his order. After determining county officials have little control over reopening the economy, county supervisors announced they do not plan to renew local stay-at-home orders, which are slated to expire on May 16.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk stated he plans to pull much of his company Tesla along with an unspecified number of jobs out of California over coronavirus shutdown rules that have stalled the automaker’s operations. Lawmakers and candidates in Texas and Nevada, where Musk said his company plans to relocate seemed pleased with the news that jobs would be coming to their states instead of leaving. “Texas gets better every day,” U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, wrote on Twitter, retweeting Musk’s announcement of Tesla’s planned California pullout. “Good conservative principles make good governance and attract the best and the brightest. The future is happening in Texas.”
The Flattened Economy
Must be Revived Now
By Washington Examiner
Over the past two months, the public has become familiar with the term “flatten the curve,” used as a shorthand for the goal of slowing the coronavirus infection rate. The idea has been to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed by too great of a number of patients at the same time. With huge national sacrifices unparalleled since World War II, new cases have plateaued but not declined.
But there is a yet more alarming curve, the upward curve of joblessness, that now needs to be flattened and reversed. In February, the unemployment rate was 3.5%, the lowest for 50 years. In April, it shot up to 14.7%, the worst since monthly records began being kept in 1948. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that 20.5 million people lost their jobs, a record by many orders of magnitude. The worst month of the Great Recession, March 2009, saw 800,000 people lose their jobs.
Even these dire numbers understate the economic carnage. They account only for unemployment through mid-April. They are certainly worse already. And if people listed as employed but who were absent from work for “other reasons” are taken into account, the number would have been 5 percentage points higher. As American Enterprise Institute economist Michael Strain noted, “A broader measure of unemployment includes people who are currently neither working nor looking for work but who want and are available for a job, along with people who are employed part-time for economic reasons. By this measure, the unemployment rate is 22.8%.”
The only parallel for this level of misery is the Great Depression, which makes it imperative that policymakers reopen the economy without further delay.
The usual methods of stimulating growth (government spending, if you’re a Democrat; tax cuts, if you’re a Republican) don’t apply, for people have money and want to consume goods and services. It is only by government order that they are prevented from doing so. Economic revival is being thwarted by lockdown orders and by a widespread fear of becoming ill or infecting others.
A strategy for reopening must include measures to make people feel safe to participate in commerce again. Safe practices, protective equipment, sensible but not extreme distancing in workplaces, widespread testing for the virus, isolation of people who are infected — these would allow people to believe, rightly, that they can return to work without grave danger.
In parallel, government, media, and all well-meaning people should foster a more sensible perspective about the huge damage that will be done — is already being done — by not returning to work. The economy is crumbling.
Enormous wealth has already been destroyed. But we will discover painfully that the worst is not behind us if we continue to do nothing. Polls show that most people out of work expect to return to their old jobs. This might happen, but only if it does so very soon. If millions stay out of work much longer, furloughs will become indefinite unemployment. Businesses that shut temporarily will go bust and never open again.
It would help if both the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and the news media yearning to see President Trump defeated were to stop treating expressions of concern about the economy as evidence of an evil willingness to allow mass death to save the riches of the powerful.
The market is not simply a financial mechanism; it is our free society. Its functions are the ways we live. It is free people doing what they wish to do — earning income, paying for what we need or desire, and keeping others employed by buying the goods and services that are the product of their labors. America must be open not simplistically “for business” but for everyone.
Today I am watching our Pastor give his sermon online because Gov. Gavin Newsom chooses to violate our First Amendment Rights of the freedom to gather and worship.
An empty church sanctuary because Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided church worship is not an essential service while he has declared tobacco and liquor stores essential services. This is just another example Newsom’s wacky decisions, such as using taxpayer funds to give illegal aliens a coronavirus stimulus checks that the citizens of this state will end up paying for.
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