Today Penny and I went for a ride and I stopped to give her a run. It appears that we may get a shower or two tonight and early tomorrow morning. I am thinking about renting a space to use for a studio.
Today San Luis Obispo County reported one new case of COVID-19, bringing the county’s total to 269 confirmed cases as of May 29. Four people are hospitalized in the ICU. Nineteen people are recovering at home and 245 people have recovered, which is 91 percent of the confirmed cases. San Luis Obispo County has had one death attributed to COVID-19.
The health department reports that a total of 10,484 coronavirus tests have been conducted so far at both the public health lab and at private labs. Two free coronavirus testing clinics are currently open in San Luis Obispo County — in Grover Beach and Paso Robles. Appointments are required. To make an appointment, visit https://lhi.care/covidtesting or call 1-888-634-1123. The site in Paso Robles will be open until June 5. It will then move to a new location in the city of San Luis Obispo. The county will also hold two pop-up testing clinics next week. The first will be in Cambria on Monday and Tuesday, June 1-2, and the second will be in Los Osos on Wednesday and Thursday, June 3-4. For more information and to schedule an appointment, visit readyslo.org. If you do not have internet access call 1 (805) 543-2444 Monday thru Friday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
During a week in which California topped 100,000 coronavirus cases and the state death toll reached 4,000, Gov. Gavin Newsom is empowering county health officers and elected officials to reopen their local economies.
Newsom said state officials have provided guidance for how to reopen specific sectors of the economy, but the timetable for doing so will be created at a local level.
“The state puts out the guidelines on how to safely reopen, it’s the counties working with their health directors that determine the pace of when,” Newsom said.
Forty-eight of California’s 58 counties have already filed COVID-19 County Variance Attestation forms that permit them to move more quickly through Stage 2 and into Stage 3 of reopening, but some counties including many of the most populous in the Bay Area are working at a slower pace.
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533 “What works in Lassen may not work in other parts of the state,” Newsom said. “What works in Kern may not even work nearby in Tulare County. Each county has its own unique conditions and localism is the foundational principle.”
The governor noted San Mateo County and Marin County are two of the Bay Area counties making modifications to their stay-at-home order that will allow for the loosening of local restrictions. San Mateo County announced today its updated health order will permit in-person retail and in-person church services to resume with restrictions.
San Francisco, which released an update health order yesterday, will move more slowly through Stage 2 and wait until July 13 to allow hair salons and barbershops to reopen. During a Thursday press briefing, Mayor London Breed indicated the city may not move into Stage 3 until August.
Newsom said state officials have provided guidance for the reopening of 17 different sectors of the economy but said no guidance has been created for Stage 4 of a phased approach to reopening which will include concert venues and sports stadiums hosting fans.
“Some will go slowly, some will go a little more quickly, but no one will go forward to concerts, no one will go forward with large conventions and festivals until we are in a much better position than we are today,” Newsom said.
The governor said California has given counties permission to reopen significant portions of local economies after analyzing data at the state and local levels. Newsom pointed to the state’s 4.1% positivity rate for coronavirus tests over the last 14 days as a number that has stabilized and said increased testing capacity around the state has given health officials an opportunity to begin loosening local stay-at-homer orders.
Newsom also cited slight declines in hospitalization and ICU rates as positive signs for the state.
“We bent this curve,” Newsom said. “In fact, we didn’t bend it. We never allowed that curve to take off like other parts in this country. We’ve had stability for weeks and weeks and weeks.”
Newsom said he has “absolute confidence,” California will meet its goal of hiring 10,000 contact tracers by July 1 and enabling them to track 3,600 coronavirus cases per day. Over the last seven days, California has averaged 2,201 new cases per day.
A Napa County winery owner filed suit on Thursday against state officials over what he calls unfair restrictions regarding reopening businesses.
While the state is permitting wineries that serve meals to reopen, wineries that do not serve food cannot open during phase two. In Napa County, wineries are barred from offering any type of food service.
The lawsuit filed by Caymus Vineyards, argues that wineries are being treated differently than restaurants and other businesses. The suit also says that officials have a duty to treat similar businesses fairly.
“As applied to Caymus, and over 400 other wineries with facilities in Napa County, the governor’s and state public health officer’s orders fail to do so,” the lawsuit says. “Run-of-the-mill retailers like toy stores may reopen. Restaurants offering indoor food service may reopen. Wineries that provide “sit-down, dine-in meals” may reopen. But wineries dedicated to wine tasting, like Caymus, may not.”
Throughout the United States, reopening rules have varied, with public officials continually changing the rules as they attempt to control the novel virus. This has led to a barrage of lawsuits from bars, art galleries, restaurants, and factories.
In San Luis Obispo County, there are currently discussion of a possible lawsuit against the county regarding a May 15 executive order barring hotel from having more than 50 percent occupancy, because the order is allegedly deficient in its production and arbitrary.
Governor J.B Pritzker, the draconian Governor who has been imposing unconstitutional restrictions on churches in the state by forbidding them from opening, has folded his hand and removed all restrictions on churches that had been previously implemented.
It is a stunning victory for Elim Romananican Chuch, Pastor Cristian Ionescu, and Logos Baptist Ministries. These two Churches have been fighting alone on behalf of all churches in the state. They have been staying steadfast and have endured resistance and harassment from the local and state government. They’ve been given fines, had their church parking blocked by police, had their building surrounded by No ‘Parking’ signs, were publicly excoriated by governmental officials, and most recently were declared a ‘public nuisance’ by the city and threatened to be locked out of their building, and even having it destroyed.
But hours after the two Romanian churches filed an emergency injunction pending appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the governor backed down and failed to offer a response to the appeal, instead releasing new “guidelines” for churches. The guidelines are not mandatory or legally enforceable requirements whatsoever, but rather strong suggestions. We read:
“Recognizing the centrality of worship in many people’s lives and the spiritual and emotional value of prayer, community, and faith, this guidance provides recommendations for places of worship that choose to resume or expand in-person activities, and for those that do not.”
While it is “very clear” the science pertaining to the novel coronavirus has not been fully understood, left-wing politicians are still claiming that broad lockdowns are justified, an environmental expert argued on “The Ingraham Angle.”
“[The science] is very new. What you hear though is politicians claiming they know very clearly what the science is. You see states doing vastly different things,” said Todd Myers, an author and the director of the Center for the Environment at the Washington Policy Center.
Myers, author of “Eco-Fads: How the Rise of Trendy Environmentalism Is Harming the Environment,” said that Washington state was the only state to ban recreational fishing, and it was done in the “name of science” by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee.
“The problem with using science in that way when people clearly recognize that it is not the science that you’re following is that they become cynical. It’s like crying wolf too many times and they stop trusting science when we really need good science,” Myers said.
Host Laura Ingraham noted that the science behind wearing a mask to stop the spread of coronavirus is still unsettled.
As most states begin to move forward with measures to reopen their economies following strict lockdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus, some governors and big-city mayors are now saying the restrictions will not fully be lifted until a vaccine or treatment for the disease is available — a timeline that could take a year or more.
President Trump has said that the U.S. will reopen “vaccine or no vaccine,” and told governors in a call last week that the federal government “will step in if we see something going wrong, or if we disagree” with how states are lifting their lockdown orders aimed at preventing the virus’ spread.
“You, too, should expect to continue with this for the foreseeable future,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said of the state’s coronavirus restrictions, as he outlined when workers might be able to get back to their offices.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said that crowds would not be able to gather for professional or college sports in her state until a vaccine is available or there’s a rigorous testing regime in place with signs of herd immunity in the population.
“We’re going to be in a new normal for quite a while. And it doesn’t mean that sports is over,” Whitmer said in a press conference Friday, mentioning a plan being pursued by the MLB to play a shortened season with no fans present.
In a new Wall Street Journal column, Myers said that Inslee and other Democrats are falsely asserting that the science about the coronavirus pandemic is settled, as they push to keep businesses closed.
“What is the true mortality rate? What is a safe social distance? How contagious is the virus? What percentage of carriers are asymptomatic? We still don’t know any of these facts with certainty,” Myers wrote, calling it a “bluff designed to imply that their chosen policy is based on more than guesswork and politics.”
Myers argued that Inslee has used the same “rhetorical tool” for years to explain his policies to combat climate change.
“In my area, the environment, the science is most important for farmers, for hunters, for others who care about wildlife, who care about taking care of the planet because if they don’t on their farm, they pay the price,” Myers told Ingraham.
“Politicians, on the other hand, can use the word science to attack a political opponent, but, if they get it wrong, they don’t pay the price. It is very important that when we use science, we locate it based on the people who are going to use it, who it impacts. They can see it for their own eyes and they’re going to make sure to get it right and make sure not to just use it against the people they don’t like.”
When it comes to violating Facebook’s guidelines, it is often anyone’s guess what will fly and what will fall.
As President Trump’s rhetoric against social media companies and censorship gains momentum following Twitter’s decision to red flag some of his posts for containing false information or glorifying violence, troubling questions still plague Facebook’s mixed censorship policies.
“Facebook has a massive set of content guidelines that are so broad and extensive they could ban almost any content,” Dan Gainor, VP of Business and Culture Media Research Center, told Fox News. “In addition, Facebook just announced a new Oversight Board that will handle content appeals. That board is overwhelmingly international and lacks American support for First Amendment ideals.”
Nonetheless, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has sought to distance his platform from the President’s Twitter feud, insisting in an interview on Fox News this week that his company has “a different policy than Twitter,” and that they are “stronger on free expression” than other tech giants.
Earlier this week, Trump announced he would introduce legislation – by executive order – that would diminish a law that ultimately protects Internet companies and social media conglomerates such as Twitter and Facebook from statutory liability protections, and would cut federal funding for tech companies that engage in censorship and political conduct.
While the area has grown new vegetation there still are remnants when the area was struck by fire.
One of the “hidden” fire hydrants near where I take Penny for her runs.
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